Old Socialist comments.

Note that ‘Liberal Zionism’ is not just moribund, but dead! While Tom Friedman was the ‘middle ground’ of Israeli Loyalists/Apologists, at The Paper of Record. His latest 1,819 word essay is anguished in its way, yet still hewing to the received wisdom that he helped to construct.

Headline: The U.S. Reassessment of Netanyahu’s Government Has Begun

Whenever people ask me what I do for a living, I tell them that I’m a translator from English to English. I try to take complex subjects and make them understandable, first to myself and then to readers — and that is what I want to do here regarding three interrelated questions: Why is Israel’s cabinet trying to crush the country’s Supreme Court? Why did President Biden tell CNN that “this is one of the most extreme” Israeli cabinets he’d ever seen? And why did the U.S. ambassador to Israel just say that America is working to prevent Israel from “going off the rails”?

The short answer to all three questions is that the Biden team sees the far-right Israeli government, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, engaged in unprecedented radical behavior — under the cloak of judicial “reform” — that is undermining our shared interests with Israel, our shared values and the vitally important shared fiction about the status of the West Bank that has kept peace hopes there just barely alive.

If you want to get just a whiff of the tension between the U.S. and this Israeli cabinet, spearheaded by extremists, consider that hours after Biden mentioned to CNN’s Fareed Zakaria just how “extreme” some of Netanyahu’s cabinet members were, one of the most extreme of them all, the national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, told Biden to butt out — that “Israel is no longer another star in the American flag.”

Nice, eh? According to a 2020 Congressional Research Service report, Israel has received the most U.S. foreign assistance of any country in the world since World War II, at $146 billion, not adjusted for inflation. That’s quite an allowance and one that might have merited a little more respect for the U.S. president from Ben-Gvir, who in his youth was convicted of inciting racism against Arabs.

…

The Reader need only look to Friedman’s final anguised paragraphs to understand …

Israel’s very decent, moderate president, Isaac Herzog, who has been pleading with Netanyahu’s coalition to step back from forcing any changes in the judiciary and to do so only by national consensus, will be meeting with Biden in Washington next week. It is Biden’s way of signaling that his problem is not with the Israeli people but with Bibi’s extremist cabinet.

But I have no doubt that the U.S. president will arm the Israeli president with the message — out of sorrow, not anger — that when the interests and values of a U.S. government and an Israeli government diverge this much, a reassessment of the relationship is inevitable.

I am not talking about a reassessment of our military and intelligence cooperation with Israel, which remains strong and vital. I am talking about our basic diplomatic approach to an Israel that is unabashedly locking in a one-state solution: a Jewish state only, with the fate and rights of the Palestinians T.B.D.

Such a reassessment based on U.S. interests and values would be some tough love for Israel but a real necessity before it truly does go off the rails. That Biden is prepared to get in Netanyahu’s face before America’s 2024 election suggests that our president believes he has the support not only of most Americans for this but of most American Jews and even most Israeli Jews.

He is right on all three counts.

I’ve highlighted the sentence: ‘I am not talking about a reassessment of our military and intelligence cooperation with Israel, which remains strong and vital.’ Friedman is, as always, a political conformist. In sum ‘tough love’ is the answer to the arrival of The Zionist Faschist State, and it’s toxic actors Netanyahu and his thugs Smotrich and Ben-Gvir ? The Genocide On The Installment Plan against the indigenous Palestinians does not merit mention, Friedman is a Loyalist …

Old Socialist