Why are all three presidential candidates spouting radical right-wing views about Israel?
Radical right-wing pro-Israel advocates have achieved a decades-long lock on policy in Israel and the US. How did this happen?
The mainstream media and President Biden present views on Israel and that nation’s actions that are as radical right-wing as the views espoused by Bibi Netanyahu and his furthest-to-the-right-in-history administration.
The radical right has taken over Israel’s politics and US politics in a really dangerous way.
I’ve done a deep dive over the years and particularly in the last few months into how we got to this point. I have a number of book recommendations that give a more fair and historically accurate version of history and of the U.S. and Israel’s current behavior than we will ever read or hear in the mainstream media.
The short summary is that the Israel lobby has been extremely effective at what it does and that lobby was itself taken over by radical right-wing interests many decades ago.
As Mearsheimer and Walt describe in their book, The Israel Lobby, wealthy donors with a specific political viewpoint, which is well out of line with most American Jews, rose to the top decades ago and has had a lock on “allowed discourse” in the U.S. ever since. This has happened through a combination of large and sustained political donations, and extremely adept political organization from the local to the national to the international levels.
Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Ezra Klein, Simone Zimmerman (co-founder of IfNotNow), Peter Beinart, Amy Goodman, Naomi Wolf, Gabor Mate, Max Blumenthal, Aaron Mate, Jeffrey Sachs, and many other Jewish-American writers, activists, and scholars have pointed out just how out of step with history, international law, ethics and basic strategy, Israel has been in its actions with respect to Palestinians and the territory of Palestine itself.
Unless things change substantially I fear that this current war waged in the Middle East may lead to regional and even global conflagration like we’ve never seen.
Here is a short list of books to learn about this situation in a way that is fair, non-polemical (ok, Chomsky can veer toward the polemical at times), and historically accurate:
1. Fateful Triangle by Noam Chomsky, originally written in the 80s but updated in the late 90s and reads like it could have been written today, tells of the history and politics of Israel and the U.S. over the last 70 years.
2. The Israel Lobby by Mearsheimer and Walt focuses on just how Israel became so powerful politically in the U.S. such that e.g. all three presidential candidates espouse radical rightwing views on Israel even though two of them are ostensibly liberal progressives on most other issues.
3. The Hundred Year War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi presents a history of Jewish colonization and occupation of Palestine from a Palestinian perspective.
