Obama: “The best is yet to come.” Really?
“More importantly, many young Jews are compelled by the Palestinian narrative of victimhood. They have internalized the belief that the underdog is always an innocent victim and holds the moral high ground, and they cannot give their allegiance to the ‘oppressor.’ The anti-Israel bias at many schools, particularly in Middle East studies departments, reinforces these negative views, as does the propaganda of anti-Israel campus movements like BDS. There is cause for concern that the American Diaspora’s support for Israel will not be inevitable.”
What all this suggests to me is that a growing number of American Jews are beginning to understand that it’s only by distancing themselves from the Zionist monster that they can best protect their own interests. As I have previously argued (it bears repeating), what we are witnessing in the world today is a rising global tide of anti-Israelism, which is NOT anti-Semitism. The danger is that it could be transformed into classical anti-Semitism if American and European Jews do not distance themselves from the Zionist state and its crimes.
It has never been a secret that the Zionist lobby in all of its manifestations does not speak for most American Jews. In recent years, for example, polls taken by various Jewish institutions and organizations have indicated that AIPAC, the dictator of American policy on all matters to do with the Israel-Palestine conflict, represents the views and wishes of not more than 25 per cent of American Jews.
If the process of American Jews distancing themselves from an arrogant, aggressive, oppressive, racist and unbelievably self-righteous Israel really is underway, a second-term President Obama will be more free than any of his predecessors (though perhaps not until his last year in office) to take on, isolate and see off the Zionist lobby.
As Gideon Levy noted in one of his most recent articles, even Israel itself “needs of a furious and determined American president”. Why? Because such a president would be Israel’s “last chance to save itself from the curse of the occupation.” Levy also expressed cautious optimism on the grounds that “the second Obama is expected to have greater self-confidence and be less concerned with considerations of survival than the first Obama.”
Another indication that events in America may be moving in a direction that would enable a second-term President Obama to put America’s own interests first and use the leverage he has to require Israel to be serious about peace was touched upon by Thomas Friedman in a recent article for the New York Times. His main point was that his president would be so busy with pressing domestic issues that he won’t have time to address Israeli matters. But he, Friedman, had a message for Israelis. It was that they had to understand “that we’re not your grandfather’s America anymore.” His explanation of why included this:
“To begin with, the rising political force in America is not the one with which Bibi has aligned Israel. As the Israeli columnist Ari Shavit noted in the newspaper Ha’aretz last week. ‘In the past, both the Zionist movement and the Jewish state were careful to be identified with the progressive forces in the world. … But in recent decades more and more Israelis took to leaning on the reactionary forces in American society. It was convenient to lean on them. The evangelists didn’t ask difficult questions about the settlements, the Tea Party people didn’t say a word about excluding women and minorities or about Jewish settlers’ attacks and acts of vandalism against Palestinians and peace activists. The Republican Party’s white, religious, conservative wing was not agitated when the Israeli Supreme Court was attacked and the rule of law in Israel was trampled.’ Israel, Shavit added, assumed that ‘under the patronage of a radical, rightist America we can conduct a radical, rightist policy without paying the price.’ No more.” (The last two words were Friedman’s own).
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