As excessive and gratuitous as Trump's Jerusalem announcement was, there is no question that it is the culmination of American politics. It is the perfect example of how Trump is the symptom not the cause of long-festering political rot, the product not the antithesis of American political culture. His recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel is the fulfillment, exactly as Trump says, of a promise that's been de rigueur for presidential candidates, and of the demand of a law (Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995) passed twenty-two years ago by overwhelming majorities in both Houses of Congress. Just six months ago, the Senate--including Chuck Schumer, Dianne Feinstein, Kamala Harris, and Bernie Sanders--voted 90-0 to demand that Trump "abide by its provisions." Schumer, who believes he's on a mission from God to be the guardian of Israel, had last week criticized Trump for his "indecisiveness" about declaring Jerusalem the "undivided capital of Israel" and moving the embassy.
Who can forget the scene at the 2012 Democratic Convention, when an amendment to the platform declaring Jerusalem the Israeli capital was adopted against the clear opposition of the majority? That was shoved down the party's throat by Obama, who had it shoved down his throat by AIPAC. (It was language Obama had removed from the platform, which AIPAC browbeat him into restoring.) As I discussed in a post at the time, the blithely ignored floor vote was a display of Stalinist party discipline for which Obama was congratulated by an MSNBC roundtable including O'Donnell, Maddow, and Sharpton.
It was Obama, too, who (after becoming first American President to give bunker-buster bombs to Israel. He did that secretly, because he didn't want it to be known that his really brave and progressive and highly-publicized peace-process demand that Israel stop settlement construction in exchange for such gifts, which Israel of course ignored, was another empty American bluff. And it was Obama who, in 2013, became the first American President to demand that "Palestinians must recognize that Israel will be a Jewish state." That was a new, gratuitous and excessive demand at the time, foisted on everyone by Netanyahu and AIPAC because they knew it would be unacceptable to the Palestinians. Obama's adoption of that requirement, which has become locked into American policy, was no less damaging to the ostensible peace-process, with its infinitely-receding goalpost, than Trump's Jerusalem declaration, and perhaps more contemptuous of the Palestinians. It's the equivalent of demanding that "Native Americans must recognize that America is a White Man's state."
Really. Think about it.
So, whatever the problem is with declaring Jerusalem the capital of Israel, it's not Trump's. It's America's. It's a problem the Democrats share responsibility for, and will not get us out of.
Past Prologue
Let's name it clearly: It's America's problem with Zionism.
After the "You must accept the Jewish State" insult and the "You must accept Jerusalem as capital of the Jewish State" insult, can we dispense with the diversions? Can we recognize that the problem isn't how many settlers are in which part of which city, or how long and where exactly the wall should be located, or the Green Line or the Blue Line, or, indeed, the "occupation"? Let's, without any more fear or hesitation, name and critique the fundamental problem: Zionism.
Zionism is a colonialist project. Israel is a colonial-settler state. The fault lies in colonialism--you know, that thing where a group of people, who want the land somebody else is living on, take it. By subjugating, expelling, and/or exterminating the indigenous population. That's what has to be named and opposed. Every other problem in the context is a derivative of that.
Zionism has the particular distinction of being the last major initiation of a blatant settler-colonial project. It was possible at the end of WWII (1945-8) because racism and ethno-supremacist colonialism were still integral parts of the Western worldview. The great world powers could still blithely dismiss the lives, land, and humanity of an Arab population as dispensable--secondary both to the aspirations of the largely European Jews who formed the Zionist vanguard and to the guilty consciences of European gentiles. It was compensatory colonialism, with the compensation paid by an expendable third(world) people.
In the post-WWII, post-holocaust context, Zionism had the further peculiar distinction of being able to conjure about itself an aura of virtue that effectively occluded the blatant injustice of the colonialism it is. Thanks to the consistent and intensive Zionist influence on Euro-American political, media, and cultural institutions, that aura has enshrouded Zionism for Westerners' eyes for 69 years, long past colonialism's sell-by date. That aura of virtue is what makes breaking up with Zionism so hard to do, for so many, to this day.
I've discussed more of the history and arguments about this in a previous essay. At this point, there is so much information available from so many channels, including Israeli scholars, that supporters of Israel who are intellectually-honest have a hard time denying that the Zionist conquest of Palestine was colonialist ethnic cleansing, and Israel a colonial state. Liberal Americans know very well that, if such a project were to be proposed today, they would denounce and reject it--no ifs, ands or buts. Today, any person of a modern, secular, liberal cast of mind recognizes the abolition and rejection of colonialism as one of history's irrefutably progressive milestones, and would see any attempt at colonial conquest as an unacceptable historical crime.
Yet that is exactly what Israel is doing. Israel is exactly that attempt.
"Attempt" is an important word here. Zionists want to think all the nasty work of ethnic cleansing is in the ancent (1948) or at worst early-modern (1967 when liberal Zionists grudgingly acknowledge, colonial aggression was certainly past its sell-by date) past. They present Israel, whatever its nasty origins, as a finished historical product: a liberal democracy filled with juice bars and tech startups--which would be stable and progressive, if only the fanatical Arabs/Muslims would leave it alone.
Indeed, a favorite Zionists argument I've heard delivered as if it's a killing rhetorical blow packed with irrefutable historical realism, is some version of: "So what, you're a colonizer, too. American Indians!" Gotcha!
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