Bari Weiss, an opinion editor at the New York Times and longtime pro-Israel advocate, smears Linda Sarsour as a purveyor of “hate” because she is anti-Zionist. Weiss is in a rich tradition of pro-Zionist advocacy at America’s leading newspaper, but Sarsour’s prominence is endangering that entitlement.
The Israeli Supreme Court backed the state in only permitting Gazan music students to take part in the Jordanian part of a workshop and concerts – not the part in Ramallah. And it piously intoned, “[M]usical development…is not necessarily bound by location”.
The head of the Zionist Organization of America, Morton Klein, bemoaned the firing of White House communications director Anthony “the Mooch” Scaramucci on Monday in an interview with Haaretz. “We lost a very strong friend and supporter of Israel,” Klein told the Israeli daily, referring to Scaramucci by his nickname.
In remarks to congressional interns leaked to the press, Middle East envoy Jared Kushner is pessimistic about any peace deal. “Not a whole lot has been accomplished over the last 40 or 50 years we’ve been doing this… There may be no solution,” he says.
Yuval Steinitz, a minister in the Netanyahu government, says that David Harris, of the American Jewish Committee, serves “a little bit as the foreign minister of the Jewish state.” Thus Harris defends everything Israel does and tried to stop the Iran deal, alongside Netanyahu. But don’t call him a foreign agent!
On the Jewish holiday of Tisha B’av, a former Israeli combat officer says that world Jewry united behind Israel during the Gaza war of 2014: “We saw the beauty in each other, we understood: we are a family.” But that war was a massacre of Palestinian civilians, including 500 children. Religious nationalism is a dangerous belief system.
In John Lyons’s new memoir, Balcony Over Jerusalem, ex-New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief Jodi Rudoren tells Lyons that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians looks “a lot like apartheid.” The book describes the aggressive attacks Lyons and others suffered at the hands of the Israel lobby, and the Rudoren interview raises the obvious question: why are we learning about Rudoren’s surprising views about Israel and apartheid in an interview with Lyons rather than prominently in the pages of the New York Times, the world’s most influential newspaper? The answer indicates that the lobby’s strategy has been paying handsome dividends.