Why It Matters That Norman Finkelstein Just Got Arrested Outside the Israeli Consulate
I still consider myself center right, even though I’ve registered Democrat as a renunciation of the current leadership and direction of the GOP, and I’ve also been a pretty firm supporter of Israel’s right to self defense even post partum from the GOP.
Here comes the however.
With each new settlement, each new price tag attack, with each new war, with each civilian death, and with each hard right statement, Israel is beginning to lose the cover of “just war” on the moral scales in my mind. What I used to perceive as a clear blue on red conflict instead is a blue ( with a tinge of purple) on red conflict. As this continues that purple streak grows and shades the blue more towards red.
From Michelle Goldberg:
The action didn’t last long. After issuing a few warnings for the demonstrators to move, the police swooped in, handcuffing people and carrying those who let their bodies go limp. Traffic was stopped for, at most, twenty minutes. Still, it didn’t seem like a futile effort, because this is a moment when it’s particularly important to break through the illusion, which pervades our politics, that American support for Israel and its war in Gaza is unshakable.
Already, there are anecdotal signs that conventional New York opinion, which tends to be liberal on everything except Palestine, is starting to shift. “If Netanyahu is so bothered by how dead Palestinians look on television then he should stop killing so many of them,” wrote Benjamin Wallace-Wells in a piece on New York magazine’s website last week, a sentiment that would have been hard to imagine coming from that publication a few years ago. Today, the magazine’s DC columnist Jonathan Chait, an occasionally hawkish veteran of The New Republic, has a post titled, “Why I Have Become Less Pro-Israel.” According to a recent CNN poll, while a majority of Americans continue to support Israel, 38 percent have an unfavorable opinion of the country, up fourteen points since February.
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