I am deeply grateful that it is now becoming common to challenge the influence that Israel has in US politics. In my next breath, I also need to say: there are intelligent ways of criticizing Israel and ones that are not.
It is hard to state how impossible criticizing Israel has been for decades in this country. The Israeli lobby would literally buy off anyone who tried, and if they couldn’t, they would just label you an anti-Semite.
The gifting of universal, unconditional support for Israel has created what are now untenable conditions across the Middle East. Look at how our support has enabled Israel to undermine or simply get rid of more moderate Palestinian voices over the course of decades. (Which inevitably leads us to a place where the only people left to represent Palestinians is Hamas, which is not good!)
Or look at how we have enabled the endless saber rattling towards Iran by Israel, which has made it impossible for actual Iranians to rise up against their atrocious government. (Because that atrocious government of Iran has always been able to point to a real external threat being posed by a very close by, very nuclear powered neighbor, Israel.)
More recently, we have gotten pulled into an ill-conceived war against Iran that has played right back into the hands of the atrocious government of Iran, while Israel takes the opportunity to, once again, steal more land.
All while Benjamin Netanyahu, once again, propagandizes the American people by one week going on American TV to say he believes it’s time to end the frankly insane US subsidies to Israel, and then in the next breath champions the merging of the US and Israeli military.
I don’t use words like “snake” or “demonic” much, because I think they are often used to dodge discussion. But it is really hard to describe him and the governments he creates in words other than those, after having watched what he does closely for twenty years at this point. There is something truly wrong there, with him specifically and with what he represents in general.
At the same time, I think it would be wise to realize that just because it’s always been intelligent to call out the behavior of the Israeli government (it just wasn’t allowed), this does not mean that the governments of Arab countries are doing better.
My specific observation is that as all this universal support for Israel is unraveling, folks in the United States seem to be taking an uncritical eye to the fact that most Arab/Islamic governments engage in extreme human rights abuses. These governments are often controlled by religious influences of the worst variety, who have manipulated Islam into something that is often an affront to human beings. Which, not coincidentally, is a great argument for keeping your religion out of politics, regardless of what your religion is.
For a very long time, we have avoided taking issue with these human rights issues (unless we are talking about Iran) because we have prioritized oil. These governments in the Middle East recognized the addictive tendencies of the American people and have been abusing that for many years. They have also now realized that the next American addiction will be to AI, and are putting all the infrastructure in place to abuse that addiction.
My other observation about the unraveling of universal support for Israel is that it is unleashing a lot of what looks like actual anti-Semitism. Criticizing Israel and anti-Semitism have never been the same thing (contrary to what they would have liked for us to believe for all these years). At the same time, being actually anti-Semitic does not help the cause.
Over the course of having spent a lot of time engaging in advocacy around all of these issues, I have come across more Jewish folks who oppose the bullshit that the Israeli government does than almost any other demographic.
Given this, we really need to wonder: what are the forces that keep allowing Benjamin Netanyahu to win national elections six times since 1996?
I feel like it’s obvious, but I guess it needs to be said: those forces are what we should be targeting, not Jewish people. 🤓