'Mr. Netanyahu: Violent ethnic cleansing is fine. But please, do it more discreetly so our constituents won't demand we oppose it'--every U.S. politician
This is what's behind, for example, Senator Elizabeth Warren's recent (sort of) opposition to Israeli genocide in Gaza
Now that the Israeli genocide in Gaza is so undeniable and so widely known due to it being seen by millions of people on T.V. and described in graphic detail on social media, and now that millions of Americans who formerly didn’t think about or talk about Israel much at all are—to their great credit!—expressing horror at what Israel is doing and are discovering that their friends and relatives and co-workers are feeling the same horror, now that this sea-change is happening guess what? U.S. politicians who up till now have all been totally in support of Israel’s violent ethnic cleansing of Palestinians suddenly are expressing criticism of Israel unlike any they ever before uttered.
6 November 2023 Bernie Sanders was all about Israel having a right to defend itself:
But now Sanders’s constituents are thoroughly horrified at the Israeli genocide in Gaza conducted under the specious ‘right to defend itself.’ And so there emerges a new Bernie Sanders:
And the new Senator Elizabeth Warren comes very close to saying Israel’s violence is genocidal (“Israel’s actions in Gaza will be legally ruled genocide”), whereas in the recent past she defended (and still does!) Israel’s ethnic cleansing (i.e., its denial of the Right of Return to the Palestinian refugees) by declaring her support for the “two state solution” (that defends the ethnic cleansing as I explain here) and insisting that “Israel has a right to defend itself.”
Donald Trump, reports CNN, worries that the failure of Netanyahu to be sufficiently discreet is causing Israel (and hence pro-Zionists like himself) to “be losing the PR war” and so Israel must “get it over with fast.”
On October 7, 2023 Joe Biden was all “my Administration’s support for Israel’s security is rock solid and unwavering.”
By April 4, 2024, not so much, at least verbally for public consumption. He still kept sending huge bombs to Israel for the genocide, but we weren’t supposed to notice that little detail.
Politicians are trying to make it look like they’re not supporting Israel as much as before because they know that if they didn’t they would lose all credibility in the eyes of the public. They dare not risk losing this credibility because it is the only way they can control the public and prevent it from rising up against the billionaires who treat the have-nots like dirt. Politicians—on the left and the right—know that their job is to protect the billionaires this way and that this is the only reason the billionaires let them be successful politicians in the first place.
The billionaires also know that politicians need to “bend with the wind” to maintain any credibility with their followers. This is why the billionaires now allow people with billionaire-owned platforms with audiences of hundreds of millions of people to express a degree of criticism of Israel that they would never have been allowed to express before. Changed circumstances require changed methods.
Up to now the standard line of politicians has always been that “Israel has a right to exist” and therefore “Israel has the right to defend itself.” What this meant, of course, was that Israel has a right to exist as a so-called (more on that in a bit) Jewish state that, in order to be a Jewish state, must 1) expel (while stealing their land and other property) almost all of the non-Jews from within it (which it did with violence starting in 1947-8 and continuing today by refusing to let the Palestinian refugees return) and 2) make the few remaining non-Jews humiliated second-class citizens (with laws like these). Israel’s “right to exist” and “right to defend itself” also meant that it has the right to use violence against any and all efforts of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes inside of the part of Palestine now called Israel.
All of this horrible oppression of Palestinians was, according to politicians, just fine and dandy….until recently. Now, however, politicians feel it necessary to make a distinction between unconditional support for Israel (as back in the ‘good ole days’) versus only conditional support for Israel today, meaning support for the ethnic cleansing project but only when it is sufficiently discreet.
A “Jewish state”? Really?
Regarding the “Jewish state” idea, it is 100% bogus. Israel is no more a state of, by and for ordinary Israeli Jews than the United States is a state of, by and for ordinary Americans. Both are dictatorships of the rich where the haves treat the have-nots like dirt. Read about the true nature of Israel and the true purpose of Zionist violence against Palestinians here (hint: it has absolutely nothing to do with making ordinary Israeli Jews safe or better off, any more than—as MLK, Jr. explained here—the racist Jim Crow laws in the U.S. had anything to do with making the lives of poor whites better.) The real reason Zionist leaders during the days of the Holocaust wanted a “state of their own” was to have a working class of their own to get rich off of, and this is why they opposed all efforts to rescue Jews from the Nazis that didn’t entail sending those Jews to Palestine. Read the UGLY truth about this history in detail here.
This real truth about Israel and Zionism still will never be uttered by the politicians despite the fact that today they feel obliged to say no to genocide in Gaza.