The Likudnik Lobby, Revisited
it was refreshing to read Josh Marshall's take on an article on the New York Times on the Israel problem.
[I]f Prime Minister Olmert and Defense Minister Barak were running for president in the US, they might not be deemed sufficiently pro-Israel to be acceptable in the American mainstream....
I won't take the time to recapitulate the whole article. But you should read it because it covers a basic reality—by conflating being pro-Israel with supporting the continued colonization of the West Bank, many of Israel's 'friends' in the US are placing Israel in great danger and doing no favor to the United States either.
What Marshall writes what I and others have said for years: discussion of Israeli policies in the United States too often resembles internal discussions in the right-wing parties of the Likudnik coalitions in Israel. It is bad for Israel and bad for Palestine, bad for Israelis and bad for Palestinians, for a country like the United States to be so willfully ignorant of both history and politics in the Middle East. Israeli policies ought to be dubbed colonial when they involve setting up colonies in East Jerusalem or Gaza or the West Bank.
The problem extends even progressive institutions in the United States. I get emails from a lot of groups, and one is Tikkun, which publishes a progressive magazine on Judaism and politics. And even they sent out an email decrying a mention of a one-state solution to Israel and Palestine, even though such a thing is normal enough to hear in many circles in Israel. (Whether it could practically happen is a different story, but the objection was to the idea itself.)
Labels: chattering classes, Israel, Likudniks, Palestine
