That is: cut funding for Palestinian refugees in Gaza and the West Bank (including Palestinian East Jerusalem), Lebanon, Jordan and Syria unless the Palestinians are prepared to give up Jerusalem and whatever else the US feels like giving away. So we'll starve tens of thousands of people unless you agree to Apartheid.
Let me introduce Daniel Pipes and the Middle East Forum into the discussion. I have no idea if he's as influential as he claims to be, but I have been following him for a while now and his shit is frightening and, in the context of Trump's Whitehouse, worryingly ascendent.
On Friday, The Guardian published a pledge of support for Lorde, which was signed by dozens of public figures, including Mark Ruffalo, Peter Gabriel, Roger Waters, Viggo Mortensen, Tom Morello, John Cusack, Julie Christie, Shepard Fairey, Eve Ensler, Angela Davis, Talib Kweli, and James Schamus.
"We write in support of Lorde, who made public her decision not to perform in Israel and has now been branded a 'bigot’ in a full page advertisement in the Washington Post," the letter said.
"We deplore the bullying tactics being used to defend injustice against Palestinians and to suppress an artist's freedom of conscience. We support Lorde's right to take a stand," it added.
Rock is known for criticizing police brutality and racism in the U.S. In fact, during his Tel Aviv show he joked about the issue saying: "You would think occasionally the cops would shoot a white kid, just to make it look good."
This particular joke resonates as Palestinian children are not only shot, but also detained and impisioned by Israeli occupation forces. Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem estimates that over 300 Palestinian children are held in Israeli prison, where they sustain physical and verbal abuse that amounts to torture. In many cases they are held without being charged.
Not just that but US police department get Israeli training which explains why they treat people like an occupied population.
The PLO is examining whether "you can rescind recognition," said Hanan Ashrawi, a prominent lawyer on the group's executive committee. "You can suspend or cease relations, but we are examining if revocation can be done."
Palestinian Solidarity Committee organizers said one of their demands, in the wake of President Donald Trump’s executive orders on immigration last year, included a human rights screening for all the city’s contracts and investments to avoid doing business with companies complicit in abuses.
Interviewer: “But she’s a minor. How can she be dangerous?”
Kasher: “Dangerous in the sense that she can slap the… slap another officer, and another… ‘Dangerous’ doesn’t need to mean jeopardizing life. It means breaking law and order. I mean, not acting properly, to the extent that disturbs the people from accomplishing their missions.”
Johansson’s unapologetic support for Israel’s abuses of Palestinians confirms that she fully deserves the praise Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu heaped on her in his speech to the Israel lobby group AIPAC in Washington, several years ago. Netanyahu said Johansson should be “applauded” for opposing the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign for Palestinian rights. Regardless of her claims to not be “political,” Johansson is now seen by Palestinians and their supporters as a defender of apartheid Israel.
While there are a host of OTHER examples that can be cited, here we want to focus on the impact on those of us who actively support the indigenous rights of the Palestinian people, especially in light of the recent international attention on women and child political prisoners, including 16-year-old Ahed Tamimi, the young Palestinian Rosa Parks.
Once again, grassroot feminists who promote Palestinian human rights are concerned that a hostile environment is promoted by the organizers of WMLA -- whether inadvertently, or not -- by the choice of featured speakers, major donors, and major partners.
Specifically, what the new data shows is that Democrats more than Republicans are sacrificing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to partisan politics.
Now, it seems to me that Democrats have been relatively stable from 1978 through 2016 or thereabouts, while support for Israel was becoming significantly more partisan due to Republicans shifting strongly in favor over that period. And even after the shift of the past couple years, Republicans are more unified on the issue than Democrats. But obviously the conclusion is that it's the Democrats who are partisan on this issue
Quote:
In other words, while there is a partisan divide, it is driven more by an explosion in Republican support than in a cratering in Democratic support.
They even note this themselves. Kinda weird to include such contradictory statements.
I also don't know why they attribute Israel's popularity with Republicans to Bibi's popularity, rather than the other way around. It does not strike me that he has much personal popularity in the US. They support him because they support Israel, not because he's a charisma machine or something...
Quote:
This is not to suggest that partisanship surrounding Israel is new. Israel became a deeply partisan issue under the Obama administration for too many reasons to recount in this space, from President Obama’s relationship with Netanyahu to friction over settlements to the Iran deal and Netanyahu’s address to Congress.
Strange again that they say this, despite the graph showing relative stability in Democratic opinion over the Obama years.
I think some of the shift will be durable but I wouldn't expect all of it to stick. Democrats' general ideological orientation doesn't really make sense to be as pro-Israel as it has been, and Trump causing a reevaluation of US support for Israel will cause some to realize they were on the wrong side all along. (And also conditions in Israel haven't been static either - you can conclude that Israel used to be more worthy of support, which would reduce cognitive dissonance.) Sudden shifts can happen like this and be relatively sticky. For example, both California and Vermont voted for George Bush in 1988, yet have never voted for a Democrat by less than a 10 pt margin ever since.
I don't see much reason to make a comparison to war under Bush. Democrats never adopted an anti-war stance en masse. Democrats opposing the Iraq War wasn't about becoming pacifists. And I expect most Democrats still think the initial decision to invade Iraq was a mistake.
Laith was unarmed. His family says an Israeli soldier shot the boy at a distance of two metres during clashes in their village of Mughayer, northeast of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank.
He was pronounced dead upon arrival at the hospital in Ramallah.
“The soldiers killed him from a short range. They could have arrested him; they could have injured him; they could have shot his leg,” Laith’s uncle Marzouq Abu Naim told Palestinian media. “But the soldier meant to kill him. The bullet went through his eye and through the back of his head.”
They do this all the time now: shooting demonstrators with live ammo from up close. And why the fuck not when they get away with it...