Yesterday I tried to explain why John Kerry’s use of the concept of ‘apartheid’ in connection with Israel was so outrageous.
For a top official of the US, supposedly Israel’s ally, to employ language more usually found in the sewers of Jew-hatred — sorry, I have to be accurate — is shocking, but indicative of the level to which US-Israel relations have fallen in the Age of Obama.
But there is also a practical significance. Kerry’s remarks constitute a threat. If Israel doesn’t roll over on command, suggests Kerry, it will get the South Africa treatment, boycotted and divested from by the so-moral ‘international community’ until its Zionist regime is forced to resign from the human race, like the National Party of apartheid South Africa. This isn’t the first threat from Kerry, who promised (and thus encouraged) a ‘third intifada’ if Israel didn’t hurry up and make a deal.
Kerry continued by blaming Israel for the failure of negotiations, even though the PLO leadership refused to commit to end the conflict, maintained their demand for a right of return to Israel, and never stopped the vicious incitement to murder in their media.
What has happened is that the center of discourse about Israel in the US has shifted. Administration and media people, educated in our ‘great’ universities — universities richly endowed with Arab petrodollars — have consumed a diet of extremist anti-Israel propaganda from teachers like David Klein, Lawrence Davidson, James Petras, Joseph Levine (three out of four Jewish!), and many others. Like the education for hate carried out by the Palestinian Authority, it has been effective. The students, including the President and his Secretary of State, learned their lessons and are applying them in their daily work.
The US Congress has been less affected, because of pressure from pro-Israel constituents — mostly evangelical Protestants and older or more observant Jews. But there is strong pressure on the evangelicals (especially younger ones) to move them away from their support of Israel, and as the older Jews (who tend to be Zionists) die off, the liberal Jewish community becomes less and less committed to defending Israel. Congress will follow the lead of its constituents.
I don’t see any reason for these trends to reverse, and the more that opinions formerly considered extreme become mainstream, the more they will inform policy.
On a personal note, I will be moving back to Israel in a couple of months. The US has been good to me, and I’ll miss my friends and a lot more about this wonderful country. But I can’t help but admit to a feeling of relief that Kerry, Obama and others like them will no longer represent me.
Technorati Tags: John Kerry, US policy, Israel
Unfortunately I think that you are right about these trends, and about the shift in the character of the discourse. It is most painful of course to see the betrayal of Israel on the part of certain American Jews.
There are as I understand it efforts being made within the university world to present the Israeli reality in a more accurate and sympathetic way.
But the situation is certainly extremely worrisome.