Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman announced in the Knesset that the Trump administration warned Israel that imposing sovereignty over the West Bank would cause an “immediate crisis” between the U.S. and Israel.
On visit to Israel, NY Gov Andrew Cuomo says Israel has developed response to “lone wolf” attacks to “an art form” — but Amnesty Int’l says Israeli execution policy shows “shocking disregard for human life.”
In eulogizing the late Russian ambassador Vitaly Churkin in the New York Times, Samantha Power may be describing how she sees herself: someone who wants peace but works within the system and covers up or whitewashes the brutal atrocities supported by the government she represents. This piece might be a kind of absolution Power is granting herself. But why is the NYT publishing this propaganda?
Israel’s neverending occupation is not just endangering Palestinians, but changing the nature of what it means to be Jewish, from a justice-loving people to one that supports injustice. Diaspora Jews must demand that Israel end its occupation, lest their own situation in the west become precarious. Tony Klug’s speech at J Street last weekend.
Every Jewish group in the United States is rattled for one reason: Since Donald Trump’s election, 90 bomb threats have been called in to 73 Jewish Community Centers. But while Jewish activists are united in worry over the anti-Semitism, there is is a stark, albeit expected, divide on one question: whether the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement targeting Israel over human rights abuses is helping fuel the uptick in anti-Semitism in the U.S. Right-wing Jewish groups have cast BDS as a threat not only to Israel, but to Jews around the world. Left-wing groups that criticize Israel, though, say that this conflation obscures the roots of anti-Semitism, and is more about shutting up dissent than combatting anti-Jewish hatred.
The battle between donors and progressives inside the Jewish community When Rabbi Shira Stutman told a major donor to the Jewish Federations in Israel that she was going to visit Palestine, the donor said, “Why would you want to talk to them?”
Ilan Goldenberg, Democratic foreign policy hawk, says the US is bombing six countries in the Middle East, and that’s the way our role of guarantor of trade and stability works. And the Iran Deal is “the Obamacare of foreign policy”– Donald Trump won’t be able to rip it up.
The White House plan to expand the Border Patrol and ICE gives Bannon and Trump a growing armed wing that is independent of local police, that can conduct raids anywhere in the United States, and that showed its enthusiasm for Trump by endorsing him well before before the election.
In three months the American Jewish community is going to hit an iceberg called the Jubilee, the 50th anniversary of the occupation/Six Day War. The collision is going to change the Jewish establishment. The fractures that have been developing for years over Israel are going to break out in public agony. The anniversay will change the American Jewish relationship to Israel forever, as the Six Day War did 50 years go.
Forty years ago, Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer warned that Israel was a strategy “liability” to the U.S., and Israel’s dependence on the Jewish lobby’s ‘influence’ threatened to bring “hostility” to Jews from other Americans. Why didn’t people listen?
Donald Trump’s pick for the U.S. ambassador to Israel has turned out to be one of the most controversial appointments in recent years, with five former U.S. ambassadors to Israel condemning the pick, calling David Friedman “unqualified for the position” due to his “extreme, radical positions.” While Friedman’s appointment has also been condemned by Jewish Americans as well as international human rights groups, Palestinian Americans, in particular, feel disenfranchised by the prospect of a Friedman appointment.
After a Jewish cemetery outside of St. Louis, Missouri was vandalized with damage to at least 200 headstones during the weekend, Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour fundraised more than $100,000 in a little more than a day (as of the time of publication) to cover the repairs.
The subject of Israel and Jews came up very early in last night’s debate on CNN of the eight candidates to be Democratic National Committee chairperson. The job is to be voted on by the DNC this weekend in Atlanta. During the debate one candidate after another denounced Trump on one issue after another, and put down the donor class of the Democratic Party too, in favor of the grassroots. But on the issue of Israel conservative bipartisanship is the only way, officially.
The Council on Islamic Affairs (CAIR) has offered a $5,000 award for anyone with knowledge of those threatening Jewish community centers in the United States. Violence has to be condemned unequivocally. If the center of American democracy is to hold under Trump’s assault, all hands against violence must be on deck. But the level of incitement against Muslims and the undocumented, now extending to Jewish institutions, isn’t simply a Trump phenomena. Jews aren’t only victims in this cycle. These same Jewish institutions now under threat contribute to the cycle of violence they are now threatened with.
Liberal Zionism has never been under so much pressure as it is in the Trump era. For two reasons: Trump has rendered the death of the two-state solution a naked reality that is no longer deniable. And liberals who are vocally resisting Trump must affirm values that are inconsistent with Israel as it has turned out. Liberal Zionists and anti-Zionists must form a new coalition for progress, and liberal Zionists will have to give up their illusion of a Jewish, democratic state.
The New York Times sounds like a newspaper opining about the Negro Problem in the 1950s, says Adam Shatz in the London Review of Books, in its pieties about Israeli choices re Palestinians. And Tom Friedman is even worse.
Many have noticed how Donald Trump ignored a question about antisemitism at his press conference on Wednesday. Few have noted how Benjamin Netanyahu supported him.
Albert Einstein, once America’s most famous Jew, saw the disaster unfolding in Palestine; Jared Kushner should heed his warning.
A repentant David Friedman, Donald Trump’s nominee to be the next ambassador to Israel, got an easy ride at the Senate Foreign Relations committee this morning. The most exciting part of the hearing were the first few minutes, as Friedman’s opening statement was interrupted repeatedly by protesters.