The pro-genocide Zionist movement suffered a pair of setbacks today. The first was in the UN, where a non-binding resolution called for an immediate ceasefire in Palestine and a release of “hostages”. That might seem like rather a yawner, except for the fact that the US declined to veto the resolution—which looks very much like the US was attempting to send a message to the ruling clique of the Zionist entity. And, above all, to try to find some way to distance itself from Zionist genocide. It’s hardly a secret that Dems are nearing the full-blown panic stage over their alienation from much of their base, which is turned off by genocide.
Predictably, the reaction from Israel featured the heretofore tried and true anti-Semite card:
Megatron @Megatron_ron
The US owner is angry why the US officials did not veto the UN proposal for a 'ceasefire'. Expect mass resignations and firings of officials in Washington.
Quote
AIPAC @AIPAC
We are disappointed that the Administration failed to veto a resolution adopted today by the UN Security Council that fails to acknowledge that Hamas is to blame for ongoing hostilities and could stop the fighting by surrendering and releasing all the hostages.
Moreover, any pause or temporary ceasefire must be directly contingent upon the release of the hostages. Peace is only possible when Hamas is either defeated or surrenders and releases all the hostages.
12:37 PM · Mar 25, 2024
Mega Geopolitics @MegaGeopolitics
Israeli Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir: "The Security Council decision proves that the United Nations is anti-Semitic, and its Secretary General is anti-Semitic and encourages Hamas."
But it was the second setback that could prove far more consequential in the longer run. Trump, who has been feeling his way around several issues—including how to split the difference between genocide and Boomer philo-semitism—found his voice today, in typical, Trumpian, head spinning fashion:
I think Israel made a very big mistake. I wanted to call [Israel] and say don’t do it. These photos and shots. I mean, moving shots of bombs being dropped into buildings in Gaza. And I said, Oh, that’s a terrible portrait. It’s a very bad picture for the world. The world is seeing this…every night, I would watch buildings pour down on people. It would say it was given by the Defense Ministry, and said whoever's providing that that's a bad image. … And I think that's one of the reasons that there has been a lot of kickback. If people didn't see that, every single night, I've watched every single one of those. And I think Israel wanted to show that it's tough, but sometimes you shouldn't be doing that. … They're being hurt very badly. I think in a public relations sense."
That’s not very satisfying from an ideological standpoint, perhaps, but Trump is positioning himself for the campaign ahead. This was clearly a green light to GOPers that it’s OK to express a minimum of human decency with regard to the starving victims of genocide in Gaza. At the same time, Trump cleverly tried to split the difference between his Jewish supporters who are typically Zionist—he said that Israel had “made a very big mistake,” not that it is evil—and the disaffected Dem base—he portrayed himself to that demographic in a sympathetic light, as someone who every night watches Israeli atrocities on TV and is deeply moved by what he sees. (Full disclosure: I don’t do that.) That’s a subtle, non-pandering, form of outreach. Unlike the typical GOPer knuckleheads, Trump sees an opportunity to make an electoral deal with disaffected Dems, while still retaining what Jewish support he may have. Kudos go to Netanyahu, who has now created a rift between himself and the heads of both US political parties. Israeli genocide has emboldened even craven politicians to brave the charge of anti-Semitism. This is starting to look transformative.
Speaking of Zionism and anti-Semitism, last Friday the NYT ran a long op-ed piece by former The Atlantic editor Peter Beinart that bears directly on these issues, presaging them, as it were:
The Great Rupture in American Jewish Life
By Peter Beinart
Mr. Beinart is the editor at large of Jewish Currents and a journalist and writer who has written extensively on the Middle East, Jewish life and American foreign policy.
Which is to say that, although Beinart is American, he isn’t fundamentally terribly interested in America as such.
Anyway, Beinart sees American Jews facing a choice between the two ideological poles that have defined their identity: liberalism and Zionism. The fundamental difficulty is that the current genocide in Palestine has brought face to face with the fundamental reality of Israel. They are, increasingly, facing the choice of either embracing the abhorrent reality of apartheid Israel and renouncing their standing as liberals or progs, or renouncing their support of anything goes Jewish supremacy in Palestine and remaining liberals in good standing.
Beinart’s great fear is actually that even those liberal Jews who are most committed to Zionism may respond to America’s shifting social realities by forging a common cause with the American right. Those are the Jews who are willing to accept the first alternative. Well, they may have to rethink that in light of Trump’s latest repositioning—I would not take Beinart’s belief in Trump’s “unconditional support for Israel” as gospel, nor would I bet that the support of older Americans for Israel is immutable. Still, Beinart recognizes that the numbers of Jews who are willing to jettison Zionism for the sake of human decency are “larger than many recognize.”
My understanding is that much of Beinart’s confliction stems from his own residual desire to support some form of Zionism. From that standpoint, I’ll quote what I considered to be the most striking passage in the long article:
“American Jews,” writes Marc Dollinger in his book “Quest for Inclusion: Jews and Liberalism in Modern America,” have long depicted themselves as “guardians of liberal America.” ...
The American Jewish love affair with Zionism dates from the early 20th century as well. But it came to dominate communal life only after Israel’s dramatic victory in the 1967 war exhilarated American Jews eager for an antidote to Jewish powerlessness during the Holocaust. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which was nearly bankrupt on the eve of the 1967 war, had become American Jewry’s most powerful institution by the 1980s. American Jews, wrote Albert Vorspan, a leader of Reform Judaism, in 1988, “have made of Israel an icon — a surrogate faith, surrogate synagogue, surrogate God.”
Wasn’t it Osama bin Laden who famously said that everyone wants to back the strong horse? And Vorspan, in a way, seems to be channeling the critique found in Chapter 2 of the Letter to the Colossians.
Given the depth of these twin commitments, it’s no surprise that American Jews have long sought to fuse them by describing Zionism as a liberal cause. It has always been a strange pairing. American liberals generally consider themselves advocates of equal citizenship irrespective of ethnicity, religion and race. Zionism — or at the least the version that has guided Israel since its founding — requires Jewish dominance. From 1948 to 1966, Israel held most of its Palestinian citizens under military law; since 1967 it has ruled millions of Palestinians who hold no citizenship at all. Even so, American Jews could until recently assert their Zionism without having their liberal credentials challenged.
The primary reason was the absence from American public discourse of Palestinians, the people whose testimony would cast those credentials into greatest doubt. ...
But in recent years, Palestinian voices, while still embattled and even censored, have begun to carry. Palestinians have turned to social media to combat their exclusion from the press. ...
Beinart doesn’t bother to explain why Palestinians were excluded from the press. I assume he realizes that that exclusion was not at the hands of “the Trumpist right” or a product of “Trumpian indecency.” However, Beinart goes on to make a disturbing—for Zionists—discovery. Citing polling and social science data, Beinart reveals that large numbers of younger Jews—he’s cagey about the actual percentages—no long equate anti-Zionism and antisemitism. That’s the death knell for the type of reflexive, no questions asked, support for anything Israel does that the Zionist entity requires for its survival as a Jewish supremacist state.
In what may be a bow to the NYT’s typical readership, Beinart seeks to cast “conservatives” as those responsible for prolonging the Zionist narrative:
While some Democrats also equate anti-Zionism and antisemitism, the politicians and business leaders most eager to suppress pro-Palestinian speech are conservatives who link such speech to the diversity, equity and inclusion agenda they despise.
Beinart’s only mentions of AIPAC are references to that organization’s support for Republican candidates, which he strongly deprecates. He makes no mention at all of the Israel Lobby or of the role of campaign contributions in all this—the elephant in the room must not be acknowledged, all discussion of these issues must remain on the level of conceptual manipulation.
More interestingly, while Beinart does refer obliquely in his closing paragraphs to Black disaffection over the issue of genocide, he doesn’t explore the more explosive political ramifications of the “ideological tremors” he describes. Here’s what I mean.
In terms of the overall political landscape in America, the new anti-Zionist Jews—who are by and large progs—face the choice of voting either for the Dem candidate or wasting their vote on some minor party candidate on the Left. They are not going to vote for an anti-abortion, anti-climatista party like the GOP. Those Jews with conservative sympathies made the trek across the Great Divide years ago. I very much doubt that Trump is expecting to attract the current breed of anti-Zionist Jews to his camp with his verbal posturing. Thus, anti-Zionist Jewish disaffection is unlikely to play much, if any, role in the upcoming elections.
On the other hand, the other—far larger—demographics that are disaffected from Dem kowtowing to Zionist genocide are groups that, while traditionally Dem voters, are basically socially conservative. Black evangelicals, Middle Easterners (both Christian and Muslim), Asians. These are groups that, like the Reagan Dems of yore, vote Dem because of certain perceptions of Republicans—usually some notion of Republicans as the party of the rich and xenophobic. Poll after poll show that those perceptions are changing, with the GOP emerging as the new party of the working class and the Dems as the party of the super wealthy and of woke young white women. What could happen is that, once those disaffected demographics make the jump, they may never look back—having found in the GOP a party more to their liking on important social issues that are popping up insistently in the polling. This could happen in spite of the GOP establishment. Trump, as usual, is showing himself to be a keener observer of social realities than the party elders.
In closing, Beinart descends to a truly indecent level of hoax mongering and pandering to the intellectual knuckledraggers in the NYT readership, but he is clear that change is coming:
But the American Jews who insist that Zionism and liberalism remain compatible should ask themselves why … [Israel] is more likely to retain unconditional American support if Mr. Trump succeeds in turning the United States into a white Christian supremacist state than if he fails.
For many decades, American Jews have built our political identity on a contradiction: Pursue equal citizenship here; defend group supremacy there. Now here and there are converging. In the years to come, we will have to choose.
One way or another, the days in which Zionists could get away with simply telling other Americans to just shut up are ending. Indeed, those days may already be over.
I agree with Mark that Israel's actions in the Gaza have both had the effect of uncovering for the previously unaware the largely hidden history of Zionist wrong-doing in 'Palestine' and diminishing for the time being the impact of accusations of antisemitism reflexively hurled at critics of the Israeli regime.
However, I am a bit pessimistic that any real change in the hold of the Jewish Lobby (including not only the lobby's hold over Congress, but also in a broader sense its hold over the Deep State, Wall Street, the Ivy League, Big Law, Hollywood, the MSM, and Big Tech) is going to diminish in any material way anytime soon. They have accumulated too much wealth and power and they do not ever voluntarily relinquish wealth and power. Plus, in their view, their control is existential. I see some dodging and weaving, especially in the run up to the 2024 elections, but only that. I will be surprised if there is real change.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/03/draft-un-report-finds-israel-has-met-threshold-for-genocide.html