All signs indicate that the new Lapid-Bennett government is constitutionally incapable of contending with the problem of Jew hatred in America.
By Caroline B. Glick, ISRAEL HAYOM
This week, a food truck in Philadelphia was barred from participating in an ethnic street food festival in Philadelphia because it sells Israeli street food and is owned by an Israeli Jew.
The lesbian parade in Chicago published an advertisement of the event that showed a woman standing on a car burning the American and Israeli flags.
According to community data, during last month’s mini-war, Operation Guardian of the Walls, American Jews suffered 193 violent attacks. Another 17,000 verbal online assaults were tallied by the Anti-Defamation League. The violent attacks didn’t end when Israel and Hamas reached a ceasefire.
Normally, the government of Israel would have something useful to say or do about these devastating developments. But tragically, all signs indicate that the new Lapid-Bennett government is constitutionally incapable of contending with the problem of Jew hatred in America.
On the surface, the opposite should be the case. Foreign Minister and Alternate Prime Minister Yair Lapid holds practical control over all aspects of the government due to his leadership of the leftist bloc which constitutes 75 percent of the coalition. And Lapid should be a natural partner for US Jewry. Like most American Jews, Lapid has long identified with the Democrats and liberal streams of Judaism. On his first day in office, Lapid said that rebuilding Israel’s ties with the Democrats and American Jews were his top goals. With those priorities, Lapid ostensibly ought to be well positioned for the fight.
But there are two immovable obstacles that will prevent him from achieving anything useful. The first obstacle is the Democrat Party, and the second is Lapid’s coalition.
The way to understand the problem with the Democrat Party is to look at the organization that was founded two years ago to stem the rise of the Red-Green alliance of progressives within the party. That organization, the Democratic Majority for Israel was founded by Lapid’s pollster and political guru Mark Melman. Melman founded the DMFI in response to the election of the so-called “squad” of hard leftists to Congress in 2018 and in the face of the rise of Senator Bernie Sanders position as the frontrunner in the Democrat presidential primaries ahead of the 2020 elections. The DMFI’s first political effort was an ad campaign against Sanders during the Iowa presidential caucuses.
Given his intimate ties to Melman, unsurprisingly, Lapid’s first meeting with American Jews as Foreign Minister was a was a video conference with the DMFI on Monday. And on the face of things, given his goals, Lapid’s choice was reasonable.
The problem is that the DMFI is incapable of delivering the goods.
Melman claims rightly that the majority of Democrats still support Israel. Unfortunately, the minority of Israel haters – and barely disguised Jew haters – are the dominant force in the party. And the majority that opposes them are unwilling to confront them in any significant way. Melman and the DMFI for their part, while willing to fight a little, are also unwilling to take the gloves off in their efforts to rein in the anti-Israel, (and increasingly anti-Jewish) forces in their party.
This bleak state of affairs was driven home earlier this month when Cong. Ilhan Omar compared Israel and the US to Hamas and the Taliban. Despite the outcry her outrageous statement provoked, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi refused to condemn or censure Omar. Instead, Pelosi praised Omar for issuing a clarification – not an apology – for her remarks.
The storm of protest against Omar’s obscene remarks included a letter of condemnation signed by twelve Jewish Democrat lawmakers. Rather than side with their Jewish colleagues, Omar’s supporters and fellow Israel haters led by Alexandria Ocasio Cortez attacked the Jewish lawmakers and their supporters as racists for criticizing Omar, a “Muslim woman of color.”
And big boss Pelosi sided with Omar and her comrades in the Red-Green alliance against the Jews.
As Politico summarized the responses to the latest Omar outrage, “Democrats are showing they’re increasingly comfortable backing her up, particularly as she hammers the Israeli government in ways that buck long-held bipartisan traditions in Washington. That friendlier posture toward Omar indicates that her party’s shift on America’s role in the Middle East was more than just a short-term fixture of the recent 11-day conflict between Israel and Palestinian militants in Gaza.”
In other words, Melman is right that the problem is the rise of the Red-Green alliance in the Democrat Party. But he doesn’t have the power – or frankly the means – to defeat them. Lapid is right that it is important for Israel to have good ties to the Democrats and the American Jews. But Israel doesn’t have the ability to change political reality.
Lapid’s strategy for securing and strengthening Israel-US ties cannot work because it is predicated on an untrue assumption – that the problems with the Democrats owe to former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s identification with the Republicans. Netanyahu was castigated as a “Republican” because the Democrats wanted a justification for their unwillingness to stand up to the likes of Omar and Ocasio Cortez – and Barack Obama before them.
Now that Netanyahu is out of office and Lapid the “Democrat” is in charge, the Democrats are still unwilling to stand up to them. And so, as Politico noted, their power continues to grow.
Netanyahu found that the best way to secure and expand US support for Israel was to work with people who are actually capable of achieving the goal. The man who has done the most in this area is Pastor John Hagee. Hagee founded and leads Christians United For Israel, the largest, and most politically powerful pro-Israel organization in the US But in the same speech where Lapid made rebuilding ties with Democrats and the liberal Jewish establishment in the US his top goals in office, he also made outreach to the Evangelicals a second-tier priority. In his words, “The fact that we are supported by Evangelical groups and others in the US is important and a heartwarming. But world Jewry are more than our allies. They are our family.”
And this brings us to the second obstacle that will block the Lapid-Bennett government from acting effectively against the growing anti-Semitism in the US emanating from the Red-Green alliance. While 12 Jewish Democrat lawmakers were willing to sign a letter condemning Omar, other Jewish Democrat lawmakers supported Omar against their Jewish colleagues. Just as former British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn had Jewish groups that were dedicated to acting as fig leaves to cover his anti-Semitism, so progressive Jewish groups and leaders serve as fig leaves for Omar, Sanders and their comrades. Some, like Bending the Arc and IfNotNow do so by joining them in their delegitimization of Israel’s right to exist. Others, like Anti-Defamation League leader Jonathan Greenblatt, do so by refusing to call them out by name for their anti-Semitism and by going to great lengths to underreport and hide the breadth and depth and danger of leftist anti-Semitism and its direct relation to the demonization of Israel.
The Lapid-Bennett government has a bare majority in the Knesset of just 61 seats. If any of its coalition members jump ship, the government falls. As a consequence, the anti-Zionist, Islamist Ra’am Party exercises effective veto power over all government activities. Likewise, the post-Zionist Meretz Party that does not support maintaining Israel’s Jewish identity can undermine any effort that Lapid seeks to undertake to fight leftist anti-Semitism in the US.
Tuesday, Meretz MK Mossi Raz co-sponsored a conference at the Knesset with Joint Arab List MK Aida Toma Sliman. The conference ran under the headline, “Between Occupation and Apartheid.”
Among the harsh condemnations that members of Knesset from various parties issued against the conference, one lawmaker noted that holding a conference of this sort at the Knesset gives aid and comfort to the anti-Semitic BDS operatives in the US who work to silence Jewish American Israel supporters on college campuses and throughout the public life.
The allegation that Israel is an apartheid state is a deliberate anti-Semitic blood libel. Its purpose is to deny the moral justification for Jewish self-determination by castigating the very concept of Jewish nationhood as a form of racist oppression and Jews as racist oppressors. It was invented by the Soviets and made its first appearance at a UN conference in 1965. The high-water mark for the allegation in its first iteration came in 1975 with the passage of UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 which defined Zionism as a form of racism. Then US ambassador, former Democrat senator Daniel Moynihan gave an extraordinary speech attacking the resolution and so set the stage for its bipartisan rejection and eventual abrogation 15 years later through the efforts of the Bush administration. Israel’s UN ambassador Chaim Herzog famously tore up the resolution in a dramatic speech that entered the pantheon of great moments in Israeli diplomatic history.
For nine years, the concept of Zionism as racism wasted away in the dustbin of history. It was exhumed by members of the Red-Green alliance in 2000. Since then, it made a slow but steady comeback and today it is far more powerful than it was in 1975.
During last month’s war, Democrat lawmakers took to the podium in the House gallery and one by one castigated Israel as an Apartheid state. And no Jewish lawmakers dared to condemn any of the slanderers by name. Pelosi certainly didn’t.
And this week, a member of the Lapid-Bennett coalition co-sponsored a conference at the Knesset that supported the anti-Semitic slander. Lapid, (and of course, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett) is completely powerless before this affront to the country and the Jewish people. As is the case with Ra’am, if either takes action against Raz their government will fall.
Many Jewish Americans report living in a state of shell shock. For the four years of Donald Trump’s presidency, their organizational and intellectual leaders fed them a steady diet of Trump hate. They were told that all of the anti-Semitism emanated from Trump’s supporters and that Trump – the greatest friend Israel ever had in the White House, and the grandfather of Jewish grandchildren was a Jew hater.
Even though the vast majority of anti-Semitic activity on campuses emanated from the left and a large portion of anti-Semitic violence was carried out by black and Arab Americans, the Jewish leaders told American Jews that the danger emanated from the political right and would dissipate once the Democrats were back in power.
And here, Trump is gone, the “good guys” are back in power and the good guys are backing anti-Semites in Congress and doing nothing against the anti-Semites on the streets attacking Jews because the anti-Semites are Democrats.
And now, rather than stand with these Jews, under the Lapid-Bennett Democrat-friendly government, Israel is just as incapable of helping as Melman is. Then again, at least Melman doesn’t need to J-Street or Jewish Voice for Peace to support him. Lapid and Bennett cannot rule without Mossi Raz.
Liberal Jews of today are no different from the liberal Jews of rabbi Stephen Wise!
You forgot to include the fact that the Democratic Party platform first passed in the 2008 platform excluded God and Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/democrats-rapidly-revise-platform-include-god/story?id=17164108
For me that was a sign of things to come.. Previous to that the Demo0crats did their level best to have to discredit God and religion and keep it out of the public square. This battle went on for decades and culminated in 2008 Platform. At the last moment the platform was amended to include it.
Obama was a lifelong Communist and enemy of Israel. He came to power through the efforts of Soros with a view to “transforming America” from a constitutional republic to a Communist state. He was a strong follower of the Rules for Radicals and even described himself as a “community organizer”. You might say he was a specialist in rabble rousing with a view to revolution.
(3 of 3)
The election of the Squad in 2018 took this brash tone of their rhetoric to nuclear levels. Adding to this, the Democrats took on the unbelievable role of fully sponsoring and endorsing BLM, whose charter describes Israel as an apartheid state and decries the “genocide” of the Pals. This was but further shading of their support of Israel.
So, as Obama first placed daylight between Israel and the Democratic US policy leadership, the Democrats congressional support drifted further and further from Israel, and not the other way around. In other words, the movement that Lapid describes of Netanyahu moving towards the Republicans and away from the Democrats was actually Bibi standing fast to the his Israel first policy as should any Israeli leader.
And while Bibi stood fast, it was Obama and the Democrats who skirted away from Israel as Trump moved closer to her. The bipartisan support of Israel has always been an enormously important topic, but it is not a question that any Israeli leader would lightly abandon, as I said previously, why would they?
Some suggestion has been made of Bibi’s use of Trump in his reelection , and it is true that Trump’s image and association was touted by Bibi in his campaigns. This was, however, nothing by comparison to the inclusion of Obama into the Israeli election of 2015 or of Bill Clinton into the Israeli election of 1996 when these two Democrats each moved with unsubtle leaps in their vain attempts to unseat Netanyahu.
With all that has been discussed here it should be noted that Lapid’s slander against Bibi is actually an impeachment against the State. Indeed, to suggest that any member of the Israeli gov’t should bare the responsibility for the distance between Israel and the Democrats is to prefer a fiction over the fact that it was a combination of both Obama’s Israel policy and the Congressional domestic policy struggles in which they have embraced the most vile of antisemitic tropes from both their members and their allies.
Of course, anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the history of antisemitism will be aware of the use of twisted logic that the Jews are hated by their detractors for some reason that is always the fault of the Jews. Given the intolerance that Lapid shows our European allies for acceptance of Jew-Haters, I find his sloppy double-standards revealing.
Lapid is not just any Jew. He is an MK in the Knessett, Foreign Minister of the Gov’t and Alternate Prime Minister of the State, holding the authority to veto any measure put forward. With all of this in mind, I would call on Lapid to be honest with his people, honest with his friends and honest with the nation he leads. He should acknowledge his slander and apologize to each in turn.
He should apologize to his people because we Jews know the unkind cost associated with sheltering antisemitism. He should apologize to the Americans for considering them as less worthy of his tirades than Hungary or Poland. And he should apologize for placing the interests of the state of Israel beneath the interests of his antisemitic allies in the US.
/3
(2 of 3)
In 2008, just prior to the election, Obama himself openly described Israel as “this constant wound, that this constant sore, does infect all of our foreign policy”(not to speak of his close association with the infamous Rev. Wright). And the sinister irony can not be lost when considering the fact that Obama ran for president claiming to be the most pro-Israel candidate in history.
As disturbing as all of this was, however, none of it could prepare the pro-Israel community for the tragedy that was Obama’s eight year assault upon Israel, her supporters and her legitimacy. Obama aptly described his Israel policy during his Cairo speech in which he depicted Israel’s legitimacy was only due to European guilt following WWII, and then, almost in the same moment, drew a direct comparison between Israel’s treatment of the Pals to the horrors that the Jews suffered in the Holocaust – it was a shocking moment, even for those who expected the worst from him.
Shortly afterward, he told a group of Jewish leaders that “when there is no daylight[between the US & Israel] Israel just sits on the sidelines and that erodes our credibility with the Arabs”. Of course, this ignored the ill-advised attempts of Leftist leaders to make enormous territorial concessions on no less than three occasions to the Pals, not to mention the Disengagement of 2005 that brought the current nightmare of Gaza into being.
In that same moment Obama unilaterally cancelled the assurances that were stipulated in writing by George W. Bush that the major settlement blocks would be included within the Israeli borders in any final land negotiations. These were among the opening salvos between Obama and Bibi shortly after each of their elections – of course, I say between them but in reality the shots were fired from Obama at Bibi.
And still, Bibi sought out his Democratic congressional allies for their support. Why would he not? He worked thru them to reach some level of accord with this ever increasingly public hostility emitted from the White House. Following this, Bibi was libeled and attacked by the Obama White House with mounting intensity as the Iran Deal soon became the center of Obama’s Israel policy.
Bibi moved in coordination with his allies towards building bipartisan opposition to the deal. Unfortunately, this bipartisan support ultimately cracked as two Democratic members moved to support the measure. Yet, this movement of the Democrats was not due to Bibi moving away from the Democrats, but the Democrats, with the support of Lapid and other Israelis, moving away from Israel.
A filibuster-proof, bipartisan opposition to the Iran-deal had been arranged. Unfortunately, following the statements of Lapid and the Chief of Staff Gantz opposing and belittling Netanyahu’s opposition to the Democratic measure, the Democrats lost 2 votes opposing the Iran Deal and the firewall broke. This is how the Iran-deal was passed. Netanyahu did not move from the Democrats even then, but, again why would he?
/2
(1 of 3)
So, Lapid. Lapid would like the world to understand that the movement of the Democratic party towards openly accepting Jew-hatred is actually a response to the Israeli gov’t’s move towards the Republican party. No fair or honest analysis of the facts could support the absolutely libelous twist of logic that is needed to support this fantasy.
The move of the American Liberals to cast Israel aside began many years ago and even prior to Bibi’s election in 2009. Following any arson, it is a hard thing to analyze the exact origin or first spark that lit the fire. But a fair investigation of the path that led to the divergence of Israel’s US Liberal support will easily lead to the Obama presidency.
Obama’s presidency was a dismal point in US-Israeli relations, and it was not by chance and not a response to any Israeli action or statement. Obama came to change many things and the US alliance with Israel was high on that list. And it should be noted that Obama’s disgust with Israel predated Netanyahu’s election victory. Indeed, it predated Obama’s own election victory. Prior to his election, he surrounded himself with openly described antisemitism such as Rachid Khalidi and Zbigniew Brzezinski.
Following Trump’s victory in the US 2016 election, the Democrats became incensed against every move he made. Trump became the measure of True North on the Democrats compass of opposition relating to every topic. Unavoidably, Israel became encumbered in this domestic squabble due to the fact that Trump had any Israel policy at all. And yet, the fact that Trump’s Israel policy was specifically opposed to the daylight policy of Obama made the Democrats even more embittered.
Again, this was not due to any actions or movements of Israel, but rather a domestic political move by the Democrats in opposition to Trump. Trump’s Mid-East policy began in Riyadh with a warning to all sides that he would not support the previous policy of tolerance of any organized terrorist group or actions – another stark distinction to Obama’s policies.
Following a grace period where parties were allowed to reform and act responsibly, he acted. He de-funded the PA, UNWRA, and Hamas, moved the US Embassy and recognized the Golan Heights, proposed the Deal of the Century, and imposed crippling sanctions on Iran, just to name the most obvious measures specific to Israel.
Additionally, he spoke out repeatedly against US antisemitism, moved to include antisemitism under the protective measures afforded by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and specifically directed the DOJ towards this and other directives meant to limit the spread of a growing wave of antisemitism throughout the US. With growing intensity, the Democrats remarkably opposed each of these policy measures. Over time, the rhetoric adopted by the Democrats regarding Israel became more impassioned and less careful in their tone.
/1
Time to hit back with an aggressive idea instead of just explaining ourselves which our enemies do NOT believe anyway.
The expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 is quite well known. The expulsion of the [Moslem] Moriscoes is not widely known but it took place a century later under three decrees culminating in 1608.
We should publicise this history with the innuendo that the deliberate stirriing up of Western Antisemitism by the Palestine lobby these forty years will backfire on Moslems in the West. When a society unravels enough to pick on one minority it is like rope fraying strand by strand and other minorities follow. Since 1945 12 to 14 million Germans have been dumped in their all German Germany and in 1947 as the Indian Raj split similar numbers of Moslems, and Hindus also had to run for it. Don’t forget the exchange of Ionian Greeks for Thracian Turks in 1920-22 either and the Palestine Arabs pushed the Palestine Jews a bit to hard before too.
Genocide in Canada? Don’t believe it:
https://www.bitchute.com/video/bXnBFZgZAxpK/
Another very enlightening piece by Caroline which serves as a well described investigation into the impossible restrictions this gov’t has built into its membership.
Such membership has, as a consequence, left it constrained from a necessary level of flexibility to be able to pursue such basic steps as opposing the antisemitic natures and actions of J Street and their many antisemitic allies.
It should be noted that Caroline did fail to not that this could and would change should Bennett gain additional allies from the Right or Heredi camps to whatever degree these reinforcements would free him from these Anti-Zionist elements.
But failing to achieve such changes in his company, there is a great deal of stricture within this gov’t that prevents such necessary mobility that would be requisite of any gov’t.