What is going around now is another cover up, another denial of what a lot of people on both sides call “the second Nakba,” the sin atop the original sin.
Headline in the Sunday editions of The New York Times: “A New Test for Israel: Can It Repair Its Ties to Americans?”
What a question. Let us set aside our indignation and think about this.
The piece below this head is by David Halbfinger, whose trade over the years has been to appear balanced when covering the Zionist state while glossing its past, which is wall-to-wall condemnable, and faithfully apologizing for its present, which — need this be said — is also wall-to-wall condemnable.
David Halbfinger, who has just begun his second tour as the Times’ Jerusalem bureau chief, in action:
“The war in Gaza may finally be ending, after two years of bloodshed and destruction. But among the damage that has been done is a series of devastating blows to Israel’s relationship with the citizens of its most important and most stalwart ally, the United States.
Israel’s reputation in the United States is in tatters, and not only on college campuses or among progressives….
The question is whether those younger Americans will be lost to Israel long- term — and what Israel’s advocates will do to try to reverse that.”
Halbfinger proceeds to quote none of “those younger Americans,” or anyone else of any age who stands forthrightly against “the Jewish state” in response to the campaign of terror, murder and starvation it has conducted against the civilian population of Gaza these past two years.
No, his sources are professors, think-tank inhabitants and, of course, Israeli Zionists, American Zionists and in two cases Israeli–American Zionists — the good old divided-loyalties crowd.
Halbfinger quotes Shibley Telhami, an Arab–Israeli scholar with safe harbors at The Brookings Institution and the University of Maryland, to this effect:
“We now have a paradigmatic Gaza generation like we had a Vietnam generation and a Pearl Harbor generation. There’s this growing sense among people that what they’re witnessing is genocide in real time, amplified by new media, which we didn’t have in Vietnam. It’s a new generation where Israel is seen as a villain. And I don’t think that’s likely to go away.”
This is an astute bit of historical context, I find — worthy of further exploration. And I am with Telhami: There is no persuading Americans — a majority, to go by recent polls — that the atrocities of the past two years are to be forgiven and forgotten. The thought is ridiculous.
But Halbfinger takes Telhami’s interesting observation no further. It stands only as what we can call “the problem.” He, Halbfinger, devotes the rest of his report to the thoughts of those trying to figure out how to make the Zionist regime look good again — or rid it of “a bad odor,” as one of these people puts it.
One of Halbfinger’s sources — Halie Soifer, chief exec at the Jewish Democratic Council of America, which supports Democratic political candidates “who share our core values” — is looking for “a bit of a reset in the way Israel is viewed.” Dahlia Scheindlin, an Israeli–American scholar, thinks “there is room for a bounce-back.”
Professor Scheindlin elaborates:
“People tend to overestimate how bad the damage has been. Just stopping the slaughter will allow some people to go back to their comfort zone of being supportive.”
Jeez, if I may invoke one of history’s most famous Jews. Bouncing back to the comfort zone, is it?
You see what is going on here, I trust.
I have anticipated for many months — no great insight in this — that when something like the end of Israel’s terror in Gaza comes there will be no thought among its allies in the West, and certainly none among its Zionist supporters, of any kind of reckoning in the name of justice.
No, a “war” will be over, not a racist campaign of annihilation, and certainly not a genocide. The highly honorable Cost of War Project at Brown University put out a paper on Oct. 7 reckoning total casualties in Gaza (killed and injured) at 236,505, “more than 10% of the pre-war population.” These are responsibly researched facts.
We know these facts. “It doesn’t take rocket science to grasp the picture,” Norman Finkelstein said in a lecture delivered at the University of Massachusetts five days before the Netanyahu–Trump “peace plan” was announced.
He said: “Everyone at this point knows the picture — unless you have a material stake in lying to yourself and lying to others.”
