I often say that critics of Israel and America’s unconditional support for it are wrong to call the monster that has Congress by the testicles the “Israel lobby”. That description of it implies that it speaks for all Israelis. It does not and in Ha’aretz recently there was a remarkably good analysis of what’s happening in Israel which illustrates, proves, my point. Its author is Ari Shavit, a senior correspondent and member of the newspaper’s editorial board. The headline over his piece is the one above.
Netanyahu for President (of America)
It’s now clear that the Republican frontrunner in the race for the White House is Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.
Officially the two Republican frontrunners are Newt “the Palestinians are an invented people” Gingrich and Mitt “Obama has pushed Israel under a bus” Romney.
An idiot’s overview of why Western capitalism is crashing
The idiot of the headline is me in the sense that I am not an economist and have never had any formal association with study of the theory and practise of economics, but… I began to understand why what is today called Western capitalism was bound to crash way back in the early 1970′s when I was researching and producing an epic documentary on the everyday reality of global poverty and its implications for all.
Obama and Israel’s security
If American election campaign funders who support Israel right or wrong formed a circle and demanded that President Obama stand naked in the middle of it while they sang Hava Nagila (“Let us rejoice”), I am sure he would agree to do so. That thought came into my mind when I read the Reuters’ report, published in Ha’aretz, of what Obama said to a group of fundraisers in the Manhattan home of Jack Rosen, chairman of the American Jewish Congress.
The Arab Spring – hello or goodbye to democracy?
Israeli democracy fades to black (the black of the blank screen at the end of a film). That was the headline over a recent article by Lawrence Davidson, an American professor of Middle East history. He argued that the suppression of the democratic rights of non-Jews in Israel is coming full circle with Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Likudniks and settlers now targeting the rights of Jews as well. Events in Cairo provoked this question: Are we witnessing the fading to black of the prospects for freedom and democracy in Egypt, or, is resurgent people power going to make it impossible for the military to maintain its controlling grip? (Presumably there would be limits to how many Egyptian civilians Egyptian soldiers were prepared to kill even if the generals, desperate to protect their wealth and privileges, ordered the suppression by all means of protests and demands for real democracy).