Philip Weiss: Israel is falling apart, and American leaders are in denial

Israel falling apart, by Philip Weiss, an American Jew who is on the left, but unlike most Jewish liberals, he deplores Israel’s conduct toward the Palestinians. I respect his opinions and have commented on his work many times.

Several left-wing voices have said lately that Israel is falling apart. The society is torn over the war, the government is dominated by brutal racists, and the country’s only answer to the fundamental question – half the population is Palestinian – is apartheid and rolling massacres.

Israeli political culture smacks of fascism. The latest slaughters of civilians in Gaza gain immediate approval by centrist politicians while right-wing ministers issue calls for execution of Palestinian prisoners. The whole society denounces the release of an innocent doctor abducted by Israeli forces in Gaza and embarks on (what Gideon Levy calls) “a hysterical campaign of panic, incrimination, hatred, dehumanization, lust for vengeance, thirst for blood.”

There is a sense that Israel has no way out. No wonder there are reports that hundreds of thousands of Israelis have fled the country since last October.

How does the United States deal with these realities? The answer for the last 20 years of anti-Palestinian hatred has been denial. The answer for this political cycle is also utter denial.

The U.S. establishment insists that Israel is a healthy democracy and it is capable of moving towards a two-state solution in which Palestinians live side by side with Israelis.

No expert on the situation believes as much; but these fictions sustain our political class, like Paul Begala saying on CNN last week that Biden has shown great leadership on Gaza. If our pundits had to confront the truth– Israel is a Jewish supremacist state that is only interested in more land with fewer Palestinians on it, and it kills young Palestinians without any hesitation– the U.S. would have to take action along with the rest of the world, to isolate Israel.

This is the lesson of the Jamaal Bowman defeat; the congressman saw the occupation up close in 2021 on a J Street trip to Israel and Palestine and according to excellent reporting by Calder McHugh in Politico, he could not lie about Israel’s dead end and war crimes.

“[The two-state solution] was the thing that you say so that everyone leaves you alone … so that at the very least you could satisfy both sides, Palestinian freedom and the Jewish state,” [Bowman] says. But what he took from five days of meetings and interviews, over boxed lunches and fancy dinners, was that there was no political will at the top of the Israeli government to pursue a two-state solution or engage in any sort of sustainable peace process — and that America’s willingness to send significant aid to Israel without any conditions attached was therefore unwise.

And after Bowman called Gaza a genocide, and said that boycott is legitimate, J Street stripped its endorsement.

Bowman had undercut the great lie of American foreign policy. That Israel is a robust democracy, and it’s moving toward a Palestinian state.

Telling the truth is politically impossible because of the Israel lobby. The Democratic Party is incapable of alienating forces that bring down nearly $20 million on the head of Jamaal Bowman in a few weeks and smear him as an antisemite for telling the truth. As Columbia deans were suspended for texting about pro-Israel donors.

So while Israel is in a freefall to which its only answer is unending massacres and famine that the world sees and hates, the U.S. crisis is simple. Our leaders must deny this reality to keep the lobby happy.

The good news is that some truthtellers in the U.S. mainstream are not afraid to speak out. There is of course the Squad, and a segment of communal Jews who have turned on Israel—IfNotNow [“We are a movement of American Jews organizing our community to end U.S. support for Israel’s apartheid system and demand equality, justice, and a thriving future for all Palestinians and Israelis”] and Peter Beinart [like Weiss, a liberal Jew critical of Israel].

Lately Megan Stack in the New York Times published an excellent report on the overwhelming “darkness” in Israel. Stack characterized Israeli society as one of official “Jewish supremacy,” repeatedly cited the apartheid reports, and said that Netanyahu had demolished the possibility of two states.

The piece quoted a mainstream columnist who responded to pictures of Palestinians on the beach in Gaza by calling for “rivers of blood.”

“We should have seen a lot more revenge there,” Mr. [Yehuda] Shlezinger unrepentantly added. “A lot more rivers of Gazans’ blood.”

Shlezinger is not a “fringe” figure, Stack said. The signs of the hardening are “in plain view.”

Dehumanizing language and promises of annihilation from military and political leaders. Polls that found wide support for the policies that have wreaked devastation and starvation in Gaza. Selfies of Israeli soldiers preening proudly in bomb-crushed Palestinian neighborhoods. A crackdown on even mild forms of dissent among Israelis.

The piece showed that when a society doubles down on apartheid, it becomes fascistic.

But the U.S. mainstream is still incapable of accepting this message. Stack is an outlier at the New York Times. It is verboten to name apartheid in the Democratic Party. The cable stations won’t touch this stuff.

Liberal Zionists play an essential role in the denial. Two years ago I reported that a J Street U leader supported BDS in a post for Americans for Peace Now. The liberal Zionist bloc responded decisively. Peace Now took the piece down and J Street issued a statement saying that the student did not endorse BDS. The student repudiated her own position. A red line had been crossed.

So the essential tool of anti-discrimination movements– from Montgomery bus boycott to the agricultural workers to South African apartheid – is quashed by a liberal organization. In fact, J Street has cast BDS as “antisemitic.”

The antisemitism charge plays a key role in the denial. Bowman was accused of antisemitism and being anti-Israel because he was bearing witness against apartheid. Columbia University has suspended two honorable Palestinian solidarity groups under the same smear– antisemitism– surely because of donor pressure. The direct mail coming to my mother’s house from the leading Jewish organizations says there is a giant surge in antisemitism in the country, and cites all the anti-Israel students and groups. No mention whatsoever of the 10s of thousands of civilian victims in Gaza.

So the witnesses must be destroyed so that the Establishment is allowed to persist in its view that Israel is a democracy pursuing a two state solution – “dreamcastle Israel,” in Max Blumenthal’s stinging phrase. Like this upcoming trip to Israel from a leading New York synagogue that denies anything is wrong.

Seeing Israel for what it really is would expose the failure of Zionism. Its principal goal was to create Jewish safety. But Jews are unsafe in Israel because the society is oppressing an indigenous people, which resists. As my mother’s best friend assured me in Jerusalem 18 years ago, “There will be one war after another till they accept us.”

There are always pragmatic rationalizations for denial. If there is no illusion of a two-state solution to wave at people, then the most powerful country in the Middle East will be destabilized, and there will be a bloody and unending rollercoaster (as someone once put it) toward equal rights for all.

But we are plainly in such a savage reality now, and the U.S. establishment is siding with Jewish supremacists. And Palestinians are paying the terrible price for dishonesty and self-righteousness. Don’t say you didn’t know.