Israel Lobby

As Usual, Jews Vote Democrat

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In the 2008 election, an overwhelming 83% of Jews voted for Obama. Since then, the Obama administration has not been sufficiently pro-Israel to satisfy the the pro-ethnic cleansing/apartheid crowd at AIPAC and the Weekly Standard. The empire struck back, organizing “The Emergency Committee for Israel” to try to panic Jewish voters into voting for Republicans.

It didn’t work. As Eric Alterman notes, Jews split 66 to 31 in favor of Democrats. This is down from the 83% for for Obama, but more in line with traditional patterns. Alterman points to a gap between the leadership and rank and file Jews. To some extent this is true, but explicitly Jewish organizations like the ADL and the Simon Wiesenthal Center and de facto Jewish organizations like the $PLC remain bastions of a multicultural America, closely associated with the political left. And, as Norman Podhoretz points out, citing an academic study, Jews “back Republicans only so long as they adopted the liberal position on ‘such bellwether issues … as immigration, abortion, gay rights and the separation of church and state.'” Read more

Jewish Liberals and Israel: Managing the Enemy

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Philip Weiss expressed his surprise that “liberal” rabbis would support buying products produced at a West Bank settlement. Of course, this is not too surprising, and one of his readers called him on it.  In the reader’s experience, there are plenty of rabbis who are

progressive on issues such as labor, immigration, environment, capital punishment, etc. …  They say they feel for the plight of the Palestinians, but when it comes to any real challenge to the status quo, such as BDS in any form, they are not to be found. Their voices during the Lebanon and Gaza invasions were there in mild, but very mild, criticism. They spend most of their time on the Middle East “reaching out to our Muslim brothers.” I must say they are very supportive of Muslim groups and Islamic mosques when it comes to anti-Muslim discrimination. But, there is an unstated and sometimes stated price for these folks to pay, which is “be gentle on Israel, be critical of certain measures, such as house demolitions, but be understanding in general.”

Since I work with the same Muslim groups, going back several years ago I found their deference to their “liberal Jewish friends who are so supportive of us” to be very frustrating. But, fortunately, these are not foolish people and they have now seen the ploy. As a result, while interfaith dialogue between liberal Jewish clergy and Muslims still exists, it is pretty much window dressing and Muslim groups are much more outspoken on Palestinian issues. But, in conclusion, liberal/progressive Jewish clergy in the LA area set back support for Palestinian rights like Wiesenthal Center, ADL and AIPAC never could; and I believe that was their role.

In my experience, it’s the same with secular Jewish academics: constantly reaching out to all non-White groups, including Muslims, and advocating all things multi-cultural. Paragons of tolerance and moral uplift, they are quick to make minor criticisms of Israel but never suggest that the US government or American Jews abandon their support for Israel or seriously question the settlement project. Their goal is to seek Muslim cooperation in the assault on White America while channeling Muslim outrage at Israel to manageable levels. In faculty email debates, the Jewish professors do all the talking, while their Muslim colleagues defer to them. So there were no peeps of protest by the Muslims when the Jewish activist professors ignored my suggestion that they channel all that moral outrage at intolerance, violations of human rights, and ethnic cleansing by directing their activism at changing policy in Israel. Read more

Benjamin Netanyahu: Like Father, Like Son

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The War Party is beating the drums again, and much of the media is obediently falling into line. Jeffrey Goldberg, whose article for the New Yorkerwas an important part of the disinformation campaign that was so central to the successful neocon push for the Iraq war, is leading the charge once again. His recent Atlantic article, “The Point of No Return,” is a brief for another war, this time with Iran. Rather than present his own doubtless  warmongering views, he slants his article as objective reportage on the mindset of Israel’s leaders, particularly Benjamin Netanayahu’s “belief … that Iran is not Israel’s problem alone; it is the world’s problem, and the world, led by the United States, is duty-bound to grapple with it.

“Duty-bound”? That’s quite a sense of duty. The world has a duty to deal with a regime whose overt animus is directed at Israel, and if it doesn’t, Israel will do it itself. Goldberg claims that a military strike is also favored by Arab states, a point cogently disputed by Marc Lynch writing in Atlantic. In any case it’s a bit difficult to believe that “Several Arab leaders have suggested that America’s standing in the Middle East depends on its willingness to confront Iran.” How about America’s standing in the region depending on its ability to pressure Israel from its expansionist aims and end Israeli oppression of the Palestinians?Nah, the Arabs could care less about that.

In any case, one still wonders how attacking Iran is in the interests of the US or the rest of the world. But of course, interest is irrelevant. That’s the  thing about duties. When one has a duty, self-interest and personal desire are irrelevant. You have a duty. Be a good soldier. Do it and don’t ask questions. End of story.

Goldberg never tells us why the US has a duty to initiate a military strike against Iran (although one can infer it has something to do with the Holocaust). So his main thrust is to show that Netanyahu would do it unilaterally if the US won’t. And why is Netanyahu so gung-ho on war? It’s because of the influence of his father, Ben-Zion Netanyahu: “To understand why Netanyahu possesses this deep sense—and why his understanding of Jewish history might lead him to attack Iran, even over Obama’s objections—it is necessary to understand Ben-Zion Netanyahu, his 100-year-old father.”

The senior Netanyahu is a premier example of a Jewish academic ethnic activist. Goldberg informs us that he was Vladimir Jabotinsky’s secretary. Jabotinsky was the father of racial Zionism and the inspiration of the terrorist wing of Zionism prior to 1948. Since that time, Jabotinsky has been the inspiration for the pro-expansion, pro-settler Likud Party—racial Zionism in all but name.  As Geoffrey Wheatcroft recently pointed out, at the present time Israel “is governed by [Jabotinsky’s] conscious heirs.”

Goldberg describes Ben-Zion Netanyahu’s most important work, The Origins of the Inquisition in 15th-Century Spain (1995), as follows: “He argued that Spanish hatred of Jews was spurred by the principle of limpieza de sangre, or the purity of blood; it was proto-Nazi thought, in other words, not mere theology, that motivated the Inquisition. Ben-Zion also argued that the Inquisition corresponds to the axiom that anti-Semitic persecution is preceded, in all cases, by carefully scripted and lengthy dehumanization campaigns meant to ensure the efficient eventual elimination of Jews. To him, the lessons of Jewish history are plain and insistent.”

Netanyahu’s apologetic account of the Spanish Inquisition is a major topic of Chapter 7 of Separation and Its Discontents (“Rationalization and Apologia: The Intellectual Construction of Judaism”), including especially a long appendix.I remember when I first read his work that I was struck at how baldly apologetic it was—up front and in your face. One reviewer referred to his “almost mystical jeremiads against the Inquisitors” — not exactly the mark of an objective historian.

Basically, it’s the same old story: the behavior of Jews is irrelevant to the hostility people have against them. In this case, he tried to show that the Jews who converted to Christianity were sincere in their beliefs so that the Inquisition was at bottom racialist. I accept that some of the New Christians may have been sincere (and even Netanyahu admits that some were not). But I point out that, whatever their beliefs, there is a lot of evidence that the New Christians continued to intermarry and retain all the other ingroup connections that have always characterized Jews. The result was that an ethnically alien group came to dominate Spanish society even though it had adopted a surface of Christianity. In other words, Jewish racialism came first, followed by the Inquisition as a reaction. In the absence of surface religious differences, the only clue the Inquisition had was suspicion based on their ethnic ties—limpieze de sangre. Ethnicity matters as a point of conflict, even when people have the same surface beliefs.

One of Netanyahu’s comments made an indelible impression because it depicted Jews as willing and self-conscious agents of princely “massive exploitation”—a major theme of anti-Jewish attitudes in traditional societies.

It was primarily because of the functions of the Jews as the king’s revenue gatherers in the urban areas that the cities saw the Jews as the monarch’s agents, who treated them as objects of massive exploitation. By serving as they did the interests of the kings, the Jews seemed to be working against the interests of the cities; and thus we touch again on the phenomenon we have referred to: the fundamental conflict between the kings and their people—a conflict not limited to financial matters, but one that embraced all spheres of government that had a bearing on the people’s life. It was in part thanks to this conflict of interests that the Jews could survive the harsh climate of the Middle Ages, and it is hard to believe that they did not discern it when they came to resettle in Christian Europe. Indeed, their requests, since the days of the Carolingians, for assurances of protection before they settled in a place show (a) that they realized that the kings’ positions on many issues differed from those of the common people and (b) that the kings were prepared, for the sake of their interests, to make common cause with the “alien” Jews against the clear wishes of their Christian subjects. In a sense, therefore, the Jews’ agreements with the kings in the Middle Ages resembled the understandings they had reached with foreign conquerors in the ancient world. (Netanyahu 1995, 71–72)

One would think on the basis of his portrayal of Jews as willing and self-conscious agents of massive exploitation in alliance with corrupt elites that Netanyahu would realize the rationality of traditional anti-Jewish attitudes. However, there is little evidence of that, and certainly his treatment of the motives behind the Inquisition strongly suggest that he thinks Jews are blameless.  (I can’t resist pointing out the parallel to our current situation—that our new American elite is substantially composed of ethnically conscious Jews with a heavy sprinkling of corrupt White people with no allegiance or loyalty to their own people—exactly the Jewish formula for success in traditional societies.)

Indeed, the above passage can be read as saying that the Jews had to be exploiters in order to survive the Middle Ages. Survival comes first before any compunction about exploiting non-Jews.(Jewish exploitation of non-Jews was greatly facilitated by Jewish religious attitudes that non-Jews are exploitable outgroups—an ideology that is enshrined in all the founding Jewish religious documents, from the Old Testament to the Talmud.) It’s an argument that can easily be applied to issues like West Bank settlements — needed to make Israel into a viable entity. George Will’s recent column pointed once again to the pre-1967 borders of Israel as dangerously indefensible.

It’s interesting that this survival-first argument is the key to the current attitudes emanating from the Netanyahu camp. Goldberg never once mentions the reality that Jewish behavior has poisoned the atmosphere in the Middle East. It’s simply about survival. As Netanyahu the elder stated: “The Jewish people are making their position clear and putting faith in their military power. The nation of Israel is showing the world today how a state should behave when it stands before an existential threat: by looking danger in the eye and calmly considering what should be done and what can be done. And to be ready to enter the fray at the moment there is a reasonable chance of success.”

This view that the behavior of Jews is irrelevant to hatred directed against them is an incredibly important part of the Jewish self-concept. A recent review of a book on the history of British attitudes on Jews begins, “What is important about anti-Semitism—a fairly modern term for an ancient clutch of ideas—is that it has less to tell us about the Jews themselves than about their enemies” (“Inverted targets,” David Vital’s review of Anthony Julius’s Trials of the Diaspora, TLS, July 23, 2010).

One can always understand the appeal of an existential argument, but it would be much more compelling for non-Jews if Israel’s behavior since 1967 had not appalled pretty much everyone who is paying attention. The problem is that Jews have a long history of not acknowledging the role of their own behavior in fomenting anti-Jewish attitudes. Then, when it blows up, it’s all about survival. Survival trumps everything else, certainly including any need to alter their behavior. As Tallyrand saidof the Bourbon kings, “They learned nothing, they forgot nothing.”

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The Jews turn on Turkey

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Well, that didn’t take long. Turkey’s involvement in the flotilla and its support for the Palestinians has now made it an enemy of the Israel Lobby, with all that that entails. All in all, it’s a good example of Jewish power and moral particularism. After long opposing any resolution on Turkey’s genocide of Armenians, Rep. Howard Berman, a major force for Israel in the US Congress,  suddenly supports a Congressional resolution, stating, “nothing justifies Turkey’s turning a blind eye to the reality of the Armenian genocide.” He and “a host of other members of the House’s unofficial Jewish caucus have signed on as co-sponsors.”

Berman suddenly found his moral bearings, along with the organized Jewish community. The neocons are naturally leading the charge, summarized byJim Lobe who quotes from a report by the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs:

“If Turkey finds its best friends to be Iran, Hamas, Syria and Brazil (look for Venezuela in the future) the security of that information (and Western technology in weapons in Turkey’s arsenal) is suspect. The United States should seriously consider suspending military cooperation with Turkey as a prelude to removing it from [NATO],” suggested the group.

[JINSA’s]  board of advisers includes many prominent champions of the 2003 Iraq invasion, including former Defence Policy Board chairman Richard Perle, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director James Woolsey, and former U.N. Amb. John Bolton.

What’s interesting here is the proposal to eject Turkey from NATO. It wasn’t long ago that Turkey was being assured that it could become a member of the EU. Turkey’s exclusion from Europe is widely seen as a big factor in its change of foreign policy.Thomas Friedman: “After a decade of telling the Turks that if they wanted E.U. membership they had to reform their laws, economy, minority rights and civilian-military relations — which the Erdogan government systematically did — the E.U. leadership has now said to Turkey: ‘Oh, you mean nobody told you? We’re a Christian club. No Muslims allowed.’ The E.U.’s rejection of Turkey, a hugely bad move, has been a key factor prompting Turkey to move closer to Iran and the Arab world.”

And that’s the good news. The neocons and the organized Jewish community were big supporters of Turkey’s bid to join the EU–which would have meant that  71 million Turks would havethe right to move anywhere in Europe. This would mean the end of Europe as having any defining culture or biological coherence — obviously not a concern to Jewish activists like Friedman.

It’s worth remembering that Jewish activist organizations regarded the admission of Turkey to the EU as a way of civilizing Europe and ensuring cultural, religious, and ethnic pluralism — precisely the policy proposals that the Jewish community has advanced in all Western societies, particularly since the end of World War II. In 2002, at the height of the push for Turkey’s admission to the EU, the Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC) had this to say in response to former French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s argument that Muslim Turkey has no place in the European Union:

Ironically, in the fifteenth century, when European monarchs expelled the Jews, it was Moslem Turkey that provided them a welcome…. During the Holocaust, when Europe was slaughtering its Jews, it was Turkish consuls who extended protection to fugitives from Vichy France and other Nazi allies…. Today’s European neo-Nazis and skinheads focus upon Turkish victims while, Mr. President [d’Estaing], you are reported to be considering the Pope’s plea that your Convention emphasize Europe’s Christian heritage. [The Center suggested that Giscard’s new Constitution] underline the pluralism of a multi-faith and multi-ethnic Europe, in which the participation of Moslem Turkey might bolster the continent’s Moslem communities—and, indeed, Turkey itself—against the menaces of extremism, hate and fundamentalism. A European Turkey can only be beneficial for stability in Europe and the Middle East. (Seehere; the statement has presumably been removed from the SWC website.)

Turkey in the EU was obviously a win-win situation for Jews: The end of Europe as a Christian civilization with an ethnic core combined with a moderating influence on the Muslims that would benefit Israel. I rather doubt that we’ll be seeing this sort of thing anymore. The chances of Turkey being admitted to the EU now are less than zero.

Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s argument that Turkey has no place in Europe is just as valid against admitting any Muslims to Europe. Although the rejection of Turkey doesn’t change the present suicidal dynamic in Europe, it will certainly slow down the process compared to what would have happened had Turkey been admitted, perhaps allowing enough time for Europe to waken from its slumbers.


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Charles Krauthammer’s "Those Troublesome Jews"

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Charles Krauthammer has always been extreme even by neocon standards. He was among the first to recommend that America seize the opportunity created by the fall of the Soviet Union to remake the entire Arab world in the interests of “democratic globalism.”

Beyond power. Beyond interest. Beyond interest defined as power. That is the credo of democratic globalism. Which explains its political appeal: America is a nation uniquely built not on blood, race or consanguinity, but on a proposition—to which its sacred honor has been pledged for two centuries.

America as a country with no biological identity should go to war so that Israel can achieve its ethnic interests. Americans are wonderfully principled people who have no ethnic identity. So he pitches eternal war as a moral crusade for righteousness that America must be committed to because that’s just how Americans are: Principled people who must be reminded once in a while that they need to wage holy war to uphold their lofty principles.

America is committed not to blood but to supporting democracy and freedom. America must defeat “the new global threat to freedom, the new existential enemy, the Arab-Islamic totalitarianism that has threatened us in both its secular and religious forms for the quarter-century since the Khomeini revolution of 1979.”

He’s probably had to rethink the rationale for war against the Arab and Islamic world since Hamas won the largest number of votes and parliamentary seats in democratic elections held in 2006.

Moral posturing is absolutely central to Krauthammer’s modus operandi.  While the rest of the world remains horrified at the behavior of the Israeli military, his column on the 2009 Gaza invasion was titled “Moral clarity in Gaza“:  “Some geopolitical conflicts are morally complicated. The Israel-Gaza war is not. It possesses a moral clarity not only rare but excruciating.”

Krauthammer always knows who the good guys are and he knows Americans are suckers for arguments framed as moral imperatives.

So it’s not surprising that he sees Israel as the hapless victim in the flotilla incident, condemned for simply “defending” itself. Andrew Sullivan is correct that to read Krauthammer is to enter into an alternate universe where aggressors are victims and where “forward defense” means invasion and murder of civilians. Krauthammer is the foremost exponent of the Israeli Derangement Syndrome: “This is a form of derangement, or of such a passionate commitment to a foreign country that any and all normal moral rules or even basic fairness are jettisoned.”

What’s different about Krauthammer is his willingness to play the anti-Semitism card — combined with the usual trademarked dose of moral posturing. His column on the flotilla is titled “Those Troublesome Jews” — troublesome in his view because Jews insist on defending themselves:

The world is tired of these troublesome Jews, 6 million — that number again — hard by the Mediterranean, refusing every invitation to national suicide. For which they are relentlessly demonized, ghettoized and constrained from defending themselves, even as the more committed anti-Zionists — Iranian in particular — openly prepare a more final solution.

Israel’s problems don’t stem from push back resulting from its aggressive ethnonationalism. They stem from the fact that the world–the entire world–wants another Holocaust, including “the supine Europeans who’ve had quite enough of the Jewish problem.” While the rest of the world hates Jews because of Third Worldism, the Europeans hate Jews just as they have for the last millennium. They’re all basically Nazis at heart.

This is not an exaggeration. His 2002 article “Please excuse the Jews for living” had the same logic. He recited the many sins of France, including the fact that Jean Marie LePen — “the modern incarnation of European fascism” — had enough votes to be a run-off candidate for president.

I don’t recall Krauthammer condemning the many signs of fascism in Israel — particularly the present Israeli government and, most famously, its foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman. It’s clear that Krauthammer thinks that European countries are proposition countries too. For Europeans, nationalism is a morally reprehensible reminder of National Socialism; for Israelis, it’s simply Jews being assertive.

And what accounts for the fact that European governments join in the chorus of condemnation of Israel? Plain old-fashioned anti-Semitism. Europeans just don’t like assertive Jews.

The explanation is not that difficult to find. What we are seeing is pent-up anti-Semitism, the release – with Israel as the trigger – of a millennium-old urge that powerfully infected and shaped European history.

What is odd is not the anti-Semitism of today, but its relative absence during the last half-century. That was the historical anomaly. Holocaust shame kept the demon corked for that half-century. But now the atonement is passed. The genie is out again.

This time, however, it is more sophisticated. It is not a blanket hatred of Jews. Jews can be tolerated, even accepted, but they must know their place. Jews are fine so long as they are powerless, passive and picturesque.

What is intolerable is Jewish assertiveness, the Jewish refusal to accept victimhood. And nothing so embodies that as the Jewish state. What so offends Europeans is the armed Jew, the Jew who refuses to sustain seven suicide bombings in the seven days of Passover and strikes back. That Jew has been demonized in the European press as never before since, well … since the ’30s. …

Just when Europe had reconciled itself to tolerance for the passive Jew – the Holocaust survivor who could be pitied, lionized, perhaps awarded the occasional literary prize – along comes the Jewish state, crude and vital and above all unwilling to apologize for its own existence.

It’s a clever argument of the sort that appeals to those morally principled Westerners. Israeli nationalism and aggressiveness are good, and if you don’t think so, you’re an anti-Semite. Europeans have always hated Jews. In another column, Krauthammer writes of “a history of centuries of relentless, and at times savage, persecution of Jews in Christian lands.”

One wonders if there are any examples of Israeli aggression that he would see as morally reprehensible. Probably not. He has rationalized every example of Israeli aggression to date and has denounced the Oslo Accords as  “the most catastrophic and self- inflicted wound by any state in modern history.”

The existence of fanatical Jews like Krauthammer isn’t a surprise given what we know about the massive ethnocentrism at the heart of Jewish identity. What is truly depressing is that he is published in the Washington Post and syndicated in over 200 other newspapers and websites, such as Townhall. He is a regular commentator on Fox News and Inside Washington.

The result is that Americans are continually subjected to pro-Israel chauvinism, towering Jewish ethnocentrism, and anti-European hatred in the most prestigious and popular media outlets. We internalize the double standard in which Krauthammer rationalizes Israeli racialism and apartheid but promotes and exploits the idea that America and European countries exist for the purpose of defending abstractions like “freedom” and “democracy”; any signs of White identity and sense of White interests are morally repugnant.

We come to take these ideas for granted–to the point that Krauthammer is eminently respectable, especially among conservatives. Other commentators, like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh, seem to have internalized this mindset as well. Accepting people like Krauthammer is what it means to be a mainstream conservative.

It’s a major part of the sickness we face.

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The burden of Israel

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The Obama administration continues to insist that Israel is not a burden to the US, but even the LA Times came out with an article showing describing the problems that Israel presents to the US. (Print version headline: “Raid throws a wrench in U.S. agenda“). The article  lists several current foreign policy problems exacerbated by the raid:

  • US-sponsored peace talks in the region (despite the fact that Israel has no interest in peace);
  • US drive for new U.N. Security Council sanctions against Iran (in other words, Israel has made it more difficult for the US to advance Israel’s agenda);
  • Complications with the US relationship with Turkey which is “a NATO member and has been important to U.S. military efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan” (several Turkish nationals were killed in the raid, and the ships sailed under Turkish flags);
  • Difficulties in the US push for nuclear non-proliferation given that Israel is well-known to have nuclear weapons: “other countries demanded that Israel take a more active role in the effort to reduce nuclear arms, a reference to the atomic arsenal Israel has never acknowledged possessing.”

The article also highlights comments from a prominent foreign policy expert and from General David Petraeus:

“The costs of alignment with Israel are becoming ever more apparent, and the benefits are becoming harder to identify,” said James Dobbins, who was an envoy for both the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations and now heads Rand Corp.’s International Security and Defense Policy Center. …

This week’s raid underscored concern expressed in recent congressional testimony by Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, head of U.S. forces in the Middle East, who said perceived U.S. bias toward the Jewish state was a negative factor in the Muslim world.

What’s remarkable about this article is that it doesn’t quote the usual well-placed Zionist fanatics in the media who claim that Israel is a great asset to the US. Glib talk about the benefits of Israel to the US will be more difficult to maintain with a straight face. But of course those concerned about their political future will continue to do so:

U.S. officials say they do not view their relationship with Israel as a burden, regardless of criticism from the Middle East, Europe or elsewhere.

“Let me be clear here,” White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Tuesday. “We have a trusted relationship. They’re an important ally. And we are greatly supportive of their security. That’s not going to change.”

 


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Flotilla fallout

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Jake Tapper,  a reporter for ABC News writes that “there won’t be any daylight between the US and Israel.” The rationale? A senior administration official says “The president has always said that it will be much easier for Israel to make peace if it feels secure.”

Of course, that’s nonsense. Israeli security has nothing to do with it. The reality is that Israeli aggression is possible only because Israel understands that the US is its poodle and that the US will work on its behalf in the UN and elsewhere, no matter what Israel does. The Israel Lobby is ultimately to blame, meaning ultimately the influence of Jewish money on the political process.

AIPAC’s spin on this is an amazing piece of propaganda. AIPAC’s article is headlined, “Radical Hamas Supporters Beat, Stab Israeli Soldiers“–a breathtaking lack of context. The ADL said pretty much the same thing, calling the flotilla “a deliberate provocation against Israel.”

From Israel’s point of view, “the government appeared anxious to make an example of this six-ship flotilla — the largest effort to date to break the blockade of Gaza — to show the world that it would not tolerate efforts to break the blockage, international condemnation notwithstanding.” The main Israeli talking point, apparent in the AIPAC press release and the ADL statement, is that they had offered to unload the cargo at the Israeli port of Ashdod where it would be shipped overland to Gaza.

But that doesn’t square with the common understanding that Israel has erected a barrier of red tape for getting supplies into Gaza. A 2009 Christian Science Monitor report pointed to delays and arbitrary exclusions and stated that around 25% of the pre-blockade supplies were getting into Gaza. Another CSM article from June 2009 pointed to growth stunting in Palestinian children.

Despite Israel’s claims, there is a humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

Israel’s actions will likely make it far more difficult to develop a consensus against Iran, and that’s all to the good. It will also greatly increase the cost of the Israeli-American alliance, as the US attempts to shore up support for Israel in the teeth of moral outrage around the  world. That may well result in some push back here, as happened recently with the statement by General David Petraeus that Israeli policies oppose vital US interests in the Middle East. (He later denied it, doubtless under pressure.) Even Meir Dagan, the head of the Mossad, acknowledges that Israel is becoming more and more of a burden to the US.

Israel’s supporters in the US never tire of playing the role of innocent victim. They will continue to do so, as indicated by the statements of AIPAC and the ADL. But such rhetoric is so far out of touch with reality that at some point politically aware Americans must realize that US support for Israel is based on nothing more than Jewish power with no moral justification at all. That doesn’t mean that the lobby will lose its power, but at least we will all know that it’s about power, and can’t be intellectually justified.

In turn, that may well help Americans to see Jews in a more realistic light–not as morally blameless victims, but as cynical and ruthlessly self-interested ethnic actors . The egregious double standard in which Jews profess to be dedicated to democracy, ethnic tolerance and human rights in the US while supporting a vicious ethnonationalism in Israel will be more and more difficult to hide.

And that should give us hope, because the collapse of the Jewish position commanding the moral high ground is a critical support for the multicultural left in America and throughout the West.

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