Who Is My Neighbor? or, I Don't Really Care, Do U

The notorious liberal pundit Matt Yglesias posted on Twitter that he could understand why Palestinians would care about Palestine, but not why American college students cared, or thought they should care, or pretended to care about Palestinians.

The thing about Rashida Tlaib is she's Palestinian, it makes perfect sense for her to be mad at Israel and fired-up about it ... what's sus is all the people who aren't Palestinian and seem to care 1000x more about this than any other humanitarian issue. I once met a Syriac Christian who told me with passion and detail about how his people had been wronged [by] American policy and I took it very seriously, but it would be weird if some average college student was obsessed with this.

This was in November 2023, not quite a month after the October 7 attack.  I should have written about it at the time, but I procrastinated - and then this month Yglesias repeated himself.  As far as I can tell, that post has been deleted, but someone saved a screenshot.

I see where he's coming from, but doesn't that mean it's "sus" for American Gentiles like me to care about Israel?  A commenter asked Yglesias about that.  He replied that it's a "fair question" but didn't answer it.

One obvious riposte, made by most US critics of Israel I see, is that we are paying for Israel's crimes, with money, armament, and intelligence.  This isn't some obscure little conflict in some unknown corner of the world; the US government is obsessed with Israel.  

But I've always rationalized these matters in transactional terms: If I, as a gay man, want non-gay people to sympathize with and support my situation and movement, then I must do the same in return.  But my concern for other groups began before I thought of homosexuality as something to be supported. I read an account of a Nazi massacre of Jews when I was in sixth grade, which marked me forever after, and I grew up with the ascendance of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.  To me that's ordinary humanity, something that Yglesias seems to lack.

A feature of the Civil Rights Movement was the involvement of white people, including students and clergy, who traveled South and put their own lives on the line, hoping that their presence would deter white racists somewhat.  As anyone who knows about the period knows, it didn't always succeed. Similar involvement occurred with targets of US violence such as Cuba, Central America, and Vietnam.  I remember people like Yglesias in those days, who dismissed those activists as childlike, neurotic idealists.  Whole books were written by sober clinicians, explaining that they were just working through father issues.  I suppose that was kinder than frothing that they were Communists, a fifth column of useful idiots trying to undermine the American way, but both approaches represented a determination to ignore the issues at stake, a refusal to think.

I began losing sympathy with Israel during its 1982 invasion of Lebanon, and my sympathy has been dwindling with each successive wave of their atrocities.  Even now, when it has dwindled to zero, I don't call for the destruction of Israel, except in the metaphorical way that a one-state solution would mean its end as a ethnonationalist state.  The only way to stop the cycle of violence is to stop it.  I don't know how that can be done, but I know that bombing Israel into the stone age wouldn't work.  The fantasy that you can terrorize your enemies into submission is a vain one; that approach never works for long.  One obstacle to a constructive solution is people like Matthew Yglesias, who's not the only supporter of Israel who shares his indifference to the suffering of others.  As Nathan Robinson's essay at Current Affairs shows in detail, his insular vision isn't even limited to Palestians: Yglesias casually dismisses the poor and weak of every variety, every class with the same smug callousness.  

As you'll see if you click through to the threads that set me off on this post, he and his supporters and friends take the same bemused view of his critics that most of Israel's apologists take: Why, they ask, do you guys only criticize Israel and Matty?  Why are you so obsessed?  Why don't you attack someone else?  The answer, which I've given many times, is that I attack other countries and pundits too.  So do other left writers.  Of course that just shows our immaturity and hypocrisy: we don't really care about black Americans, Vietnamese, refugees, or Palestinians - any more than Karl Marx really cared about children working in factories.  Yglesias and his ilk, they'd have us believe, really do care, which they show by opposing any ameliorative action at all.

The Middle East, an Issue That Has Plagued the Region for Centuries

There's been justified hilarity on the Intertoobz over POTUS's clumsy, clueless remarks on Israel-Palestine the other day.  (Plus, of course, predictable scrambling by The Commander-in-Chief's lackeys and apologists to make it seem that his remarks were competent and statesmanlike.)  Quoth POTUS:

So, I’m looking at two-state and one-state and I like the one that both parties like. I’m very happy with the one that both parties like. I can live with either one. I thought for a while the two-state looked like it may be the easier of the two but honestly, if Bibi and if the Palestinians — if Israel and the Palestinians are happy, I’m happy with the one they like the best.

Sad.  But being cursed with an undisciplined and out-of-control memory, I couldn't help thinking of remarks made in answer to a college student's question by another POTUS in January 2010.  I know, I know, it was a long time ago, another lifetime, practically another century, who could possibly remember that far back?

The Middle East is obviously an issue that has plagued the region for centuries, and it's an issue that elicits a lot of passions as you have heard. Here's my view. Israel is one of our strongest allies, it has...[applause] let me play this out. It is a vibrant democracy. It shares links with us in all sorts of ways. It...it is critical...for us...and I will never waver from ensuring Israel's security, and helping them secure themselves in what is a really hostile region. So...so...so I make no apologies for that.

Note especially that first sentence: Trump couldn't have bettered it.  By 2013, Obama had his act down.  Asked a hostile but not unreasonable question (which he didn't understand, since it was in Hebrew), Obama mocked the questioner, an Arab-Israeli student from Haifa University, joking, "I have to say we actually arranged for that because it made me feel at home ... I wouldn't feel comfortable if I didn't have at least one heckler."

I hold no brief for Trump.  But isn't it nice to know that, far from the upheavals that Democrats warned we would face, we have so much continuity between POTUS Barack Obama and his POTUS successor on this and other vital issues?  The issue here isn't their lack of eloquence in response to questions, but that there's not a lot of daylight between Obama and Trump on Israel-Palestine.  Obama talked prettier, but he still let Netanyahu have more or less whatever he wanted.  The outcome for Palestinians was terrible, as it will probably be under Trump.

Sit Back, Relax, and Leave the Foreign Policy to Us

I've been reading Ben Ehrenreich's new book The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine (Penguin, 2016).  It's a long, grim slog, but worth it, and every now and then there's a touch of comic relief.  Describing the 2014 collapse of talks between Israel and Palestine, mediated by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, Ehrenreich writes:

Another month would pass before a frank American narrative of what had occurred in Jerusalem and Ramallah hit the press.  In May, the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth's Nahum Barnea published an interview with anonymous senior U.S. officials who, he wrote, had been closely involved in the talks. The story that emerged from what Barnea called "the closest thing to an official American version of what happened" was one of Israeli cynicism and an almost astonishing American naivete.  "We didn't realize," said one of Barnea's sources, that "Netanyahu was using the announcements of tenders for settlement construction as a way to ensure the survival of his own government.  We didn't realize continuing construction allowed ministers in his government to very effectively sabotage the success of the talks."  If true, this is a shocking admission: the Americans, with all their vast data-collecting capabilities, did not know what even the least observant reader of Israeli newspapers had for months understood to be self-evident [262].

The theme of American naivete unto gullibility when faced with conniving Oriental slick dealing is well-worn by now, and makes me suspicious.  American elites have always tried to excuse their short-sightedness and (let's not mince words) incompetence and/or collusion with authoritarian regimes by claiming that they were babes in the woods, outclassed by the ancient wiles of their opposite numbers.  It's echoed by the Vatican apologists' claim that, confronted with sexually predatory priests, they were so unprepared to deal with such Evil that they could do nothing but send them to new parishes to prey some more.  In either case the defense is unconvincing, and could only be supported by immediate resignation, confessions of incompetence, and departure from public life, except perhaps as garbage collectors.

On the next page Ehrenreich continues:

In the end, the officials pinned the blame for the negotiations' failure squarely on Israel, and on Netanyahu's insistence on continuing settlement expansion throughout the talks: "The Palestinians don't believe that Israel really intends to let them found a state when at the same time it is building settlements on the territory meant for that state.  We're talking about the announcement of 14,000 housing units, no less.  Only now, after the talks blew up, did we learn that this is also about expropriating land on a large scale." 

When I first read that line, I nearly coughed up a small piece of my kidney. "Only now," the unnamed official said [263].

And, of course, six weeks "after the talks collapsed ... Obama sent his secretary of defense, Chuck Hagel," to Israel to pledge eternal U.S. fealty, along with "$3.1 billion per year in foreign military financing, which is not only more than we provide to any other nation, but the most we have provided to any nation in American history" (264).

Which brings me to another bit of comedy.  After the end of the talks, Hagel's opposite number, Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon, complained to the same newspaper about Kerry's "naive and meddlesome 'messianic fervor' ...'The only thing that can save us ... is for John Kerry to win a Nobel Peace Prize and leave us alone" (234-5).

Of course, Ya'alon doesn't really want Kerry or the U.S. to leave Israel alone, any more than corporate CEOs want meddlesome big government to leave them alone.  Leave them alone -- but continue to send vast amounts of money, stand by them in the United Nations, and make it illegal for any Americans to organize boycotts against them.

The other examples I gave show that this is not a new problem in American foreign policy or diplomacy.  But once again, combined with Obama's (and his fans') feckless responses to domestic opposition, it makes it impossible for me to believe that he or his advisors know what they're doing.

All The Other Rogue States Are Doing It!

As Israel continues to make itself a shame unto the nations, Democracy Now! reported briefly on the Palestinian Authority's protest against a new wave of Israeli settlements in the West Bank.  At least five European countries have "summoned their Israeli ambassadors."  The Obama administration has responded with the speed and force of a closing steel trap, calling the new settlements "counterproductive."  Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman mounted a revealing defense:

Now I want to remind you that building (settlements) in Jerusalem is with accordance to Israeli law. If anyone wants to investigate further, they can go to the Bush letter and see all those settlements blocks and the changes in the territory which the U.S. president spoke of.

In very much the same way, the mistreatment of German Jewry in the 1930s was "with accordance to" German law.  Slavery and the destruction of the American Indian peoples were "with accordance to" American law.  Lots of terrible state crimes have conformed fully to the laws of their respective nations, because by an amazing coincidence, those nations wrote their laws to enable them to do what they wanted to do.  And citing George W. Bush as authority for your actions is unlikely to persuade anybody.

My Brother's Keeper III

In view of the current Israeli attack on Gaza, it has become increasingly untenable to try to cast Israel's conduct as self-defense.  (Which doesn't keep the Only President We've Got from trying, of course.)  Once again Israeli broke a ceasefire to kill a few people in Gaza, which led to retaliatory missiles aimed at Israel, which led to the Israeli assassination of a Hamas official and then to the Israeli blitzkrieg.  It needs to be stressed again that it is usually Israel that breaks the ceasefires, and that if Israeli leaders really wanted to stop missiles from Gaza, they need only to stop their own attacks.  If any further evidence were needed, it is clear that contrary to its protestations, it is Israel that doesn't want peace, except the peace of the conqueror.

I was quite surprised to see that the Washington Post had put on their front page a picture of a Palestinian father grieving for his 11-month-old baby killed by Israeli violence.  Ordinarily only Israeli suffering gets this treatment in corporate US media.  But of course, most other US coverage of the attacks on Gaza has followed the Israeli/US line.  That means lying, but what else is new?

An interesting trope emerged in comments to Glenn Greenwald's post on the subject today:

Missing is some good literature about what would happen to the Israelis if the Arabs won. What would happen to the Jewish and Christian Arab children, women and older men if the IDF is defeated? How would the Arabs treat the Israelis that are left alive? How would they divide up the country among the victorious parties? A good thought piece for a novel, and one that many people don't ever think about.

But what would happen if the people of Gaza won, and were able to rush out of Gaza and take over Israel. Would they be nicer to the Jews than the Israeils were to them?

This is a rather daring move, comparable to Obama apologists who admit that their POTUS has been something of a disappointment.  This commenter admits, at least rhetorically, that the Israelis have not been "nice" to the people of Gaza, which is pretty bold since all decent people know that the Arabs have only gotten what they deserved for wanting to drive the Jews into the sea.  We are constantly dunned with celebrations of the moral superiority of Israel not only to the Arabs but to all other nations. (The commenter also makes an interesting flipflop from "Jews" to "Israelis.")  Given what the commenter admitted, could Israelis and their American apologists really complain if a defeated Israel suffered the same treatment it has inflicted on its enemies?  If the conquering "Arabs" were no "nicer" to the defeated Israelis than the Israelis have been to the Palestinians and Lebanese, consistency would require the world (or at least the US) to marvel at the conquerors' very great indulgence and mercy, and to hail them as a moral example to the rest of the world.

But as with Obamabots, the concession is in the service of a greater lie.  It's a breathtaking diversion, but one I've seen before, sometimes tacit, sometimes explicit.  No doubt many people in the Middle East would like to see Israel vanish into thin air, but Hamas has declared that it accepts a two-state solution on the 1967 borders.  Perhaps this declaration is as disingenuous as Israel's own claims to want peace, but it should be tested.  It won't, of course, because both the US and Israel reject it, in defiance of the international consensus. And it would not mean that the Palestinians had won and were ready to take over Israel.  (The commenter's echo of traditional anti-Semitic rhetoric is, I presume, unconscious.)  It's unlikely that Palestine would ever have the military might that Israel has, which includes a nuclear arsenal of dubious legality, nor would it receive military aid on the scale Israel receives.  Maybe what the commenter is proposing is a worthwhile thought experiment, but I don't see why.  It's really irrelevant, but I think it lurks beneath the surface of a lot of Israeli and pro-Israeli propaganda, so it's worth noticing.

What I and probably most thoughtful critics of Israel favor is not an Israeli defeat. What we favor is that Israel should stop its terrorist violence against the Palestinians and others. (A good parallel would be the US "defeat" in Vietnam, which only meant that the US had to withdraw its forces; it did not mean US surrender to the Vietnamese people, who did not then occupy Washington and take over the US government.)  The Israelis need not surrender, contrary to what the commenter and others assume. All they need to do is stop their abuse of human rights, their violation of every humane concern that arose after the obscenity of World War II and the Nazi crimes. There are more alternatives than the status quo and the obliteration of Israel.

As the political philosopher Michael Neumann wrote in his 2005 book The Case Against Israel (Counterpunch/AK Press), no one is morally required to compromise with an invasion, and "having renounced all of pre-1967 Israel, the Palestinians have already compromised enormously when they demand total withdrawal from the Occupied Territories" (146). What comparable compromise can the Israelis offer?

And the Beat Goes On

Though they perpetrate more than their share of outright falsehood, a lot of what is wrong with corporate media is distortion, tone, and viewpoint.

A good example of what I'm talking about is this AOL.com post, "Commando Raid May Be Strategic Blow to Israel Itself." Joseph Schuman, Senior Correspondent, writes that the attack "may have played right into the hands of Hamas and the Islamist Palestinian group's principal sponsor, Iran." It would be nice if Israel's malfeasance were to backfire, but what about the people Israel just killed, and for that matter what about the Palestinians? No, it's all about Israel, and a little later it's all about Obama too. This writer makes it clear right off the bat which side he's on.

He laments that "even the most moderate Palestinian leaders [are] unwilling to talk to Israel," and that Obama's "international effort to impose tough new United Nations sanctions on Iran over its suspect nuclear program is now likely to be overshadowed by a Middle East agenda dominated by the Israeli raid for weeks or months to come." Considering Israeli rejectionism and the manifest falsehood of Obama's charges against Iran, these are not necessarily bad outcomes.

Israel has enforced the blockade of Gaza partly in response to the rockets regularly fired from there into Israel since 2007, when the militant group Hamas gained control of the territory.

First, rockets were not "regularly fired into Israel" -- the assaults were sporadic at most -- and Hamas has stopped them from being fired into Israel at all for the past couple of years, even after Israel's vicious attack on Gaza at the end of 2008. If that were the rationale for the blockade, it no longer exists. (If violence against civilians justified a blockade, by the way, Israel should have been blockaded decades ago.) And Hamas actually "gained control of the territory" by winning the 2006 elections, for which the Palestinians were harshly punished by the US and Israel. The US and Israel then encouraged the other Palestinian faction, Fatah, to attempt a coup against Hamas. The coup failed. But all this, as Noam Chomsky would say, cannot be acknowledged in the official media.

Once the passengers resisted with force, Netanyahu said, "our soldiers had to defend themselves."

As I have said before, aggressors and murderers have no right of self-defense. The legal situation, as John Caruso writes, is clear enough.

But the footage of slingshots and the marbles they launched are just as likely to be used as propaganda by Hamas to argue the passengers faced a David-vs.-Goliath fight against the heavily armed Israelis.

It isn't just Hamas who will use that footage as "propaganda"; after all, the video was intended to be Israeli propaganda, but it may have backfired. The world just doesn't understand that a civilian with a slingshot is Goliath, and an Israeli soldier with an automatic weapon is David.

Other details of the flotilla may point to what seems to be a clear mission of provocation, such as the inclusion among passengers on the Mavi Marmara of "women, children, and the elderly, all of whom are organizers," as a correspondent for Al Jazeera reported before communication from the ship was cut.

But the consensus of international opinion was overwhelmingly against Israel.

It couldn't possibly be, could it, that Israel was in the wrong and that the consensus of international opinion (often appealed to by US propaganda against Iran and North Korea) might just be right for once? And I'm not entirely clear as to how including "women, children, and the elderly, all of whom are organizers," constitutes a "mission of provocation." By this logic, establishing a Jewish state in the Middle East, including women, children, and the elderly, would have to be seen as a mission of provocation.

Aside from the misrepresentations about Hamas, then, there are few outright lies in this article. It's the way that the writer takes for granted that gallant little Israel and her ally Barack are the good guys, beset by "propaganda" and "missions of provocation" as they engage in "self-defense" and try to bring peace to the Middle East.

P.S. This post at FAIR.org details more distortions elsewhere in the corporate media's coverage of the attack, and quotes Glenn Greenwald: ""Just ponder what we'd be hearing if Iran had raided a humanitarian ship in international waters and killed 15 or so civilians aboard."

Incidentally, at the United Nations (via) the US has blocked a strong condemnation of the attack by Turkey:

The Obama administration refused to endorse a statement that singled out Israel, and proposed a broader condemnation of the violence that would include the assault of the Israeli commandos as they landed on the deck of the ship.

It's only to be expected, of course, given Obama's enthusiastic support for Israeli crimes, but that doesn't make it less appalling.