A Newsletter With An Eye On Political Media from The American Prospect
 ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌

View this email in your browser

A NEWSLETTER WITH AN EYE ON POLITICAL MEDIA

Israel and Palestine and the Absence of a Solution

Israel relentlessly escalates its repression, and the BDS campaign has
completely failed to deter it.

I am writing this in COVID exile in Jaffa, Israel, on the edge of Tel
Aviv, while waiting for a negative test in order to be allowed to fly
back to the U.S. I am sure that below the surface of the everyday life I
see here, the Israelis are dominating and discriminating against the
Israeli Palestinian population here. But on a moment-to-moment basis,
this wonderfully multicultural city is among the most inviting and
enjoyable I've ever spent any time in. It is filled with art
galleries, museums, ethnic restaurants, funky flea and food markets,
antique shops, furniture stores (vintage and designer), gelato on every
block, and even a world-famous experimental theater; all of it ensconced
inside a city bounded by a beautiful beachfront on the warm
Mediterranean, and boasting centuries of history as a key trading port
for many countries and civilizations. As with Tel Aviv, ultrareligious
Jews who seek to shut down secular life in Jerusalem and elsewhere in
the country are here, somewhere, but almost invisible.

There are only two downsides I can discern as a visitor; the first is
the price of real estate. As with Tel Aviv, Jaffa is at least as
expensive as Manhattan and worse than hipster Brooklyn. The second is
the "invisible" one: There is a brutal, dehumanizing occupation
going on not far from here, being carried out by a country that-for
the most part-either pretends not to notice, or believes it is
literally its God-given right to carry out.

Every day, the news from that occupation-as well as of the treatment
of the more than 20 percent of Israelis who are not Jews (and are often
ignored in the American discourse)-seems, somehow, to get worse. Just
in the past few days, I've come across stories describing:
* The horrifically racist "Jerusalem Day" march through Arab
neighborhoods
, in
which fascist, pro-terrorism Israelis threatened and harassed Israeli
Palestinians with the approval and protection of the country's
authorities.

* Israel's refusal to cooperate with any credible investigation into
the murder of a beloved Palestinian American journalist who was likely
killed by Israeli forces
,
possibly even intentionally-at least, this is what the Palestinians
claim-which led to one of the most upsetting images I have ever seen
coming out of Israel in my entire life: the police attack on
casket-carrying mourners
.
(I've not seen anyone even try to explain that.) And this lunatic
"every country kills journalists; it's antisemitic to care when
Israel does it
"
defense offered up by the idiotic soap opera actress Israel has hired as
its "Special Envoy for Combating Antisemitism and the Delegitimization
of Israel" would be funny for being so stupid were the topic not so
serious and so damn depressing.

* There has also been an ongoing epidemic of settler violence against
the Palestinians
in the
occupied territories. As if in preparation for President Biden's
visit, Israelis are uprooting Palestinian villages

and expanding their illegal settlements
.
And all this is being done with the explicit cooperation of the Israeli
army, whose commander recently explained that "the army and the
settlements are one and the same
."

While in Tel Aviv, I met with members of the American embassy and
consular staffs (at their invitation), as well as many people from the
Israeli peace movement. And while my admiration for the courage and
tenacity of the latter group is boundless, I didn't hear anything
while I was here that would lead me to question my overall pessimism
that this situation can only get worse. Israel's tenuously balanced
government has less than no interest in any sort of concessions that
could lead to serious peace negotiations, and the hard-line Islamicist
Hamas is growing more and more popular among Palestinians
,
especially its young future leaders. Joe Biden is not about to invest
any political capital in forcing Israel to change its ways, and it's
far from clear to me that it would help even if he did. The Israelis
have always been able to outlast the Americans whenever a president has
disapproved of anything their government has done.

[link removed]

The BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement, which dominates
discussion on the American left on this topic, only makes matters worse.
It is complete failure in every respect save for its (entirely)
rhetorical victories. Yes, it helps perhaps in making the Palestinians
feel they have not been entirely forgotten by the rest of the world, but
beyond that, it amounts to little more than virtue signaling. As I keep
saying, in the 18 years of its campaign, no major labor union, no
government body, no major global corporation, not even any significant
local government has endorsed BDS. Using a "boycott" against Jews
was always a stupid idea, given the association that so many have of the
tactic when it was used by the Nazis.

But there are costs as well. BDS has provided a ready-made excuse for
the many conservative "pro-Israel" politicians and organizations who
would like to shut down free speech about Israel to pass laws that do
so. It has also made it even more difficult to discuss the issue on
college campuses (to say nothing of social media). This is, of course,
in addition to the problems it raises for those of us who believe in the
importance of the free exchange of ideas, regardless of their origin.
Yes, I've said all that before, but this week, an important piece of
new evidence arose: a brand-new Pew Research study

that finds 5 percent of Americans say they support the BDS movement
against Israel, and just 2 percent say they support it strongly, while
84 percent have no opinion or have never heard of it. The support figure
is actually kind of high compared to its support in Congress by the way,
where, according to my count, it has three supporters among 535 senators
and representatives. People who support the right of Palestinians to
live in peace and dignity, with the same rights as you or me (or Israeli
Jews), need to face up to the undeniable failure of this strategy and
think anew. The support of The Harvard Crimson, the Middle East Studies
Association, and this or that student government does not a successful
movement make.

One of the great strengths of the Zionist movement of the 1940s that led
to the creation of the state of Israel was its ability to
withstand-even encourage-intense internal debate. There are good
reasons why Palestinians feel they do not have this luxury. But
notwithstanding those reasons, when Palestinians and their supporters
demand fealty to a failed strategy, it does nothing for the people
living under oppression.

One can sympathize with the fact that for the past hundred years, the
Palestinians have only been offered unfair deals and asked to help solve
a problem-that of approximately 250,000 Jewish refugees of Hitler's
Holocaust-that they did nothing to cause. The 1947 U.N. "Partition
Plan" that the
Zionists (reluctantly) accepted, and the Palestinians refused even to
discuss, choosing war instead, was markedly unfair to them, as has every
offer been since that one. (The earlier ones were not so hot, either.)
In 1947, the U.N. Special Committee on Palestine calculated its Jewish
population to be 608,000, or slightly less than a third of its
population. Under the U.N.'s plan, however, the Jews were to be
accorded 55 percent of the land, including the crucial seaport of Jaffa
(where your loyal correspondent is writing this), with its Arab
population of 70,000 as against just 10,000 Jews. Forty percent of
Palestine was given to its Arabs, with the remaining 5 percent, which
included Jerusalem and parts of the Negev desert, to remain under U.N.
sovereignty until such time as everyone could agree on how it might be
divided. (All this remained academic, however, once Israel declared
itself a state on May 14, 1948, and five Arab armies immediately
invaded.) Things have only gotten worse for the Palestinians over time,
both in terms of the lives they've been forced to live and the offers
they've received, leading up to the ridiculous "Jared Kushner peace
plan
,"
which no one took seriously even as a propaganda exercise. In classic
Trumpian style, the entire thrust of Kushner's Middle East policy
appears to have been to further line his own pockets

with corrupt deals with his Saudi and Israeli co-conspirators.

To the question of "What is to be done?" I have no answer save a
rethinking of the problem from the bottom up. My good optimistic friend
Jill Jacobs, who heads up my favorite organization, T'ruah
, thinks that the two-state
solution lives on because the only problem is politics. Another
optimistic friend, the scholar/activist Hillel Schenker, co-editor of
the excellent Palestine-Israel Journal ,
reminds me of how close Israeli and Palestinian negotiators got to
outlining a final peace agreement under the prime ministership of Ehud
Olmert

in 2008, before Olmert decided he preferred to go to war in Lebanon
.
(Olmert later ended up in jail, convicted for corruption
.) But "political
problems" are real problems and can be more difficult to solve than
scientific or even existential ones. And with great regret to the people
who consistently put themselves on the line trying to do so, as the
"liberal realist" I have no idea how to solve this one. That said, I
found this JPost editorial
full of good sense and
maybe even (the slightest) cause for optimism.

Sorry, both for this pessimistic report and for the lack of music this
week. You can, if you've not had enough, however, listen to my Tel
Aviv University talk, with comments from the estimable scholar and
activist Yael Sternhell. It can be found here
. (We
begin at 6:30.) And the (really long) book that I am basing all of this
on may be pre-ordered from Amazon here

and lots of places, here
.

See you next week.

~ ERIC ALTERMAN

Become A Member of The American Prospect Today!

Eric Alterman is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn
College, an award-winning journalist, and the author of 11 books, most
recently Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie-and Why Trump Is Worse
(Basic, 2020). Previously, he wrote The Nation's "Liberal Media"
column for 25 years. Follow him on Twitter @eric_alterman

[link removed]

CLICK TO SHARE THIS NEWSLETTER:

[link removed]

 

[link removed]

 

[link removed]

 

[link removed]

To receive this newsletter directly in your inbox, click here to
subscribe.

 

YOUR TAX DEDUCTIBLE DONATION SUPPORTS INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM

The American Prospect, Inc.
1225 I Street NW, Suite 600
Washington, DC xxxxxx
United States
To opt out of American Prospect membership messaging, click here.

To manage your newsletter preferences, click here.

To unsubscribe from all American Prospect emails, including newsletters,
click here.

Copyright (C) 2021 The American Prospect. All rights reserved.
_________________

Sent to [email protected]

Unsubscribe:
[link removed]

The American Prospect, Inc., 1225 I Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC xxxxxx, United States