Source: Mondoweiss.net
Israel’s inability to solve the Palestinian issue except by apartheid and massacres has fostered a fascistic and racist political culture in the country. But this truth must be kept from Americans.
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….