American media has barely budged on covering Palestine, but popular sentiment has moved A LOT. Yesterday at the Refuse Fascism march in Washington, DC one of the speakers -- a pastor whose name I do not recall, but he was a throat cancer survivor whose voice showed it (EDIT: apparently Reverend Graylan Scott Hagler) -- had as the theme of his talk unity in the opposition to the Trump regime. He called out various groups and religions -- straights, homosexuals, Blacks, whites, Latinos, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Jews -- as needing to drop whatever differences they had until after the fascist threat had been defeated.
And at the end of his list, he said, "We'll leave the Zionists out."
It was shocking to me.
Jewish Americans have always been at the forefront of progressive movements, but only very recently have I seen the dissonance between promoting racial justice, for example, in America but also apartheid in the State of Israel prominently called out. Previously it was almost as if problems in the State of Israel were a family matter for American Jews, and bad manners to bring them up.
Now I think the notion that you can be progressive but support the State of Israel is on life support. The immediate fallback position is opposing what Netanyahu is doing but otherwise supporting the State of Israel ... but that runs pretty thin: the Gazan Genocide is supported by an overwhelming majority of Jewish Israelis; there might be opposition to Netanyahu because he's a crook, but not very much over him committing crimes against humanity.
Estimated cost of replenishing the US military's missile defense systems as used to defend the State of Israel against counter-attack from Iran is $2 billion. This on top of their annual $3.8 billion in aid and around $14 billion after the October 7 attack.
We don't have the manufacturing capacity to replenish our own, the State of Israel's, and Ukraine's missile defenses in less than a few years.
American media has barely budged on covering Palestine, but popular sentiment has moved A LOT. Yesterday at the Refuse Fascism march in Washington, DC one of the speakers -- a pastor whose name I do not recall, but he was a throat cancer survivor whose voice showed it (EDIT: apparently Reverend Graylan Scott Hagler) -- had as the theme of his talk unity in the opposition to the Trump regime. He called out various groups and religions -- straights, homosexuals, Blacks, whites, Latinos, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Jews -- as needing to drop whatever differences they had until after the fascist threat had been defeated.
And at the end of his list, he said, "We'll leave the Zionists out."
It was shocking to me.
Jewish Americans have always been at the forefront of progressive movements, but only very recently have I seen the dissonance between promoting racial justice, for example, in America but also apartheid in the State of Israel prominently called out. Previously it was almost as if problems in the State of Israel were a family matter for American Jews, and bad manners to bring them up.
Now I think the notion that you can be progressive but support the State of Israel is on life support. The immediate fallback position is opposing what Netanyahu is doing but otherwise supporting the State of Israel ... but that runs pretty thin: the Gazan Genocide is supported by an overwhelming majority of Jewish Israelis; there might be opposition to Netanyahu because he's a crook, but not very much over him committing crimes against humanity.
Estimated cost of replenishing the US military's missile defense systems as used to defend the State of Israel against counter-attack from Iran is $2 billion. This on top of their annual $3.8 billion in aid and around $14 billion after the October 7 attack.
We don't have the manufacturing capacity to replenish our own, the State of Israel's, and Ukraine's missile defenses in less than a few years.