Protesters hold a “Queers for Palestine” sign in New York City on Nov. 12, 2023. Credit: Syndi Pilar/Shutterstock.
Jewish men in Galicia, Ukraine, circa 1912. (Photo by FPG/Getty Images)
HUEY P. NEWTON, CO-FOUNDER OF THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY, AT AN UNKNOWN PALESTINIAN REFUGEE CAMP IN LEBANON, 1980. (PHOTO: DR. HUEY P. NEWTON FOUNDATION INC./DEPARTMENT OF SPEICAL COLLECTIONS AND UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES, STANFORD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES)
BLACK POWER AND PALESTINE
Transnational Countries of Color
by Michael Fischbach
Did I hear the director of ‘Oppenheimer’ say “and thanks to the peacemakers?” Why hasn’t Israel condemned Putin for threatening to use nuclear weapons? Does Netanyahu know there might be 400,000 Jews living in Ukraine? How many Jews live in Gaza, that a member of his cabinet said needs to be nuked? The population of Ukraine is 40 million. The population of Israel is 7 million. How many devout Christians believe Israel will be the flashpoint for the War of Armageddon? How many Jewish Scholars go after thirty million evangelical voters who pray for the destruction of most of the world – and all of the Jews of the world – unless they convert? Don’t Christian leaders have long history of targeting Jews for acts of EXTREME VIOILENCE. How many Jews did The Peaceniks kill?
Pope Francis just blew up the World of Religion by suggestion Zelenzki and Ukraine raise the white flag of surrender. I know the Czech Republic flew into a rage – without even looking
I found another alleged scholar that goes after the so called Leftist Peace Movement, that included millions of regular Anglo-Saxon folk – who were concerned about GETTING NUKED most of their lives. The Cuban Missile Crisis could not have happened without Oppenheimer. When the Big Trouble in the Middleast began in 1967, we The Young White Kids were terrified the Jewish Problem was going to GET US ALL NUKED! Israeli Think Tanks had to counter this, and came up with a cookie-cutter plan to depict hippies and the left as the enemy within – and they should raise the white flag and stop protesting against the war, and…..STOP BEING FOR PEACE!
This morning I found several articles by Michael Fischbach who Demonizes 20 million Americans for taking part in the Hippie Peace Plan – and they had a “groovy” time at the expense of the 7 million foreign Jews in Israel. WTF? If a nuclear war breaks out – a million humans are going to die – especially in Europe. How many Jews live in European countries?
Above is a photograph of three Jewish men in Ukraine. Do they look like – Dirty Hippies? The guy in the middle looks like he lives in the street – and has not washed his hands. Jonathan Tobin goes after “Queers For Palestine” as a prime example of Immoral Neo-Nazis – aching to kill Jews! How come Pope Francis has not condemned Israel, for doing to the Gaza – what Putin is doing to Ukraine?
On October 6th. I was at the UofO Library looking for evidence Jesus was Pro-Israel, and all for ministering – TO FELLOW JEWS – thus the long murderous persecution of Jews led by Christian Leaders, can come to an end! In my book – all of Christianity is dead – including the cult of 30million voters that put Trump in office – and may do so again! Is this what Netanyahu wants – and his cabinet member that might have said…”Nuke em! Kill them all!” I heard a lot of that growing up, nd when I marched against the War in Vietnam!
Two thousand Americans were killed at Pearl Harbor. The Democrat President declared war on Japan. Many War-Jews admonish elected Americans for wanting a cease-fire BEFORE HAMAS IS DEFEATED. This means, some Jews want revenge and every Hamas member – KILLED IN GAZA – even if all of Gaza is bombed into rubble and a million people are made homeless. How many of my readers think that Gaza looks like it was – NUKED?
In March of 1945, U.S. bombers fire-bombed Tokyo killing a hundred thousand citizens, and rendering a million citizen – homeless! This was done to hasten the end of the war. It did not work. The Japanese military was still putting up a good fight with their navy, their air force, their land forces. Hamas has no bombers, navy, or tanks. Write your elected officials, and demand Israel declare war against Gaza, or, get the hell out!
I will now launch an investigation to see how long Jews have been targeting THE UNARMED HIPPIES lest they bid their Congressman to – STOP FUNDING THE ISRAELI ARMED FORCES!
I challenge Jonathan Tobin, and Mark Gall – to a debate! Tobin is a HATER! Hitler makes his day – every day! He does not want the holocaust to end!
Come to Oregon – HIPPIE HATER – and we will have a debate on the University of Oregon campus. I will” cut your war funding off – Mr. Hater Man!
John ‘The Nazarite;
EXTRA! Bernie Sanders just suggested Biden withhold arms from Israel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_population_by_country
As of 2023, the world’s core Jewish population (those identifying as Jews above all else) was estimated at 15.7 million, ~0.2% of the 8 billion worldwide population. Israel hosts the largest core Jewish population in the world with 7.2 million, followed by the United States with 6.3 million. Other countries with core Jewish populations above 100,000 include France (440,000), Canada (398,000), the United Kingdom (312,000), Argentina (171,000), Russia (132,000), Germany (125,000), and Australia (117,200). The number of Jews worldwide rises to 18 million with the addition of the “connected” Jewish population, including those who say they are partly Jewish or that have Jewish backgrounds from at least one Jewish parent, and rises again to 21 million with the addition of the “enlarged” Jewish population, including those who say they have Jewish backgrounds but no Jewish parents and all non-Jewish household members who live with Jews. Counting all those who are eligible for Israeli citizenship under Israel’s Law of Return, in addition to Israeli Jews, raised the total to 25.5 million.[1]
https://www.jns.org/anyone-who-wants-a-ceasefire-before-hamas-is-destroyed-is-pro-hamas/[2]
(February 29, 2024 / JNS)
U.S. President Joe Biden’s growing tilt against Israel is not just a matter of troubling rhetoric. According to JNS editor-in-chief Jonathan Tobin, it’s now a push for a ceasefire in the war against Hamas that will grant a victory to the terrorists. He’s joined by columnist and author David Harsanyi of The Federalist, who argues that Biden has never had a consistent view of foreign policy, and is surrounded by people who are antagonistic to Israel and wish to appease Iran and its allies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo
The Bombing of Tokyo (東京大空襲, Tōkyōdaikūshū) was a series of bombing air raids launched by the United States Army Air Forces during World War II. Known as Operation Meetinghouse, the raids were conducted by the U.S. military on the night of 9-10 March 1945, and was the single most destructive bombing raid in human history.[1] 16 square miles (41 km2; 10,000 acres) of central Tokyo was destroyed, leaving an estimated 100,000 civilians dead and over one million homeless.[1] The atomic bombing of Hiroshima in August 1945, by comparison, resulted in the immediate death of an estimated 70,000 to 150,000 people.
Sanders: U.S. putting conditions on aid for Israel would be “the right thing to do”
https://cdn.jwplayer.com/previews/Xc2QCiTh-AeXnLRNE
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) called on the Biden administration to suspend or condition aid to Israel during an appearance on CBS’ “Face the Nation” Sunday.
Why it matters: Sanders’ remarks come amid a growing rift between President Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over Israel’s strategy in Gaza.
The big picture: “We are looking at the possibility of hundreds of thousands of children starving to death. The United States of America cannot be complicit in this mass slaughter of children,” Sanders said.
- The U.S. has continuously provided billions of dollars of aid to Israel over the years and there are plans to keep providing aid to the country.
- Asked by “Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan if it’s likely that the U.S. would halt or condition aid to one of its closest allies in the Middle East in an election year, Sanders replied that it would be the “right thing to do.”
- “You can’t beg Netanyahu. You have to tell him ‘if you want any money, you have to change your policy. Allow the trucks to come in to feed the children,’” he said.
- “Stopping American humanitarian aid is in violation of the law. That should be clear. No more money to Netanyahu’s war machine to kill Palestinian children,” Sanders said, referencing the Foreign Assistance Act, which restricts additional humanitarian aid if a country is found to restrict delivery.
State of play: Biden was caught on a hot mic on Thursday night promising to get tough with Netanyahu, telling a Democratic senator after his State of the Union address that he was going to have “a come-to-Jesus meeting” with Israel’s prime minister about the situation in Gaza.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_war_apology_statements_issued_by_Japan
President Biden was standing in an Upper East Side townhouse owned by the businessman James Murdoch, the rebellious scion of the media empire, surrounded by liberal New York Democrats who had paid handsomely to come hear optimistic talk about the Biden agenda for the next few years.
It was Oct. 6, 2022, but what they heard instead that evening was a disturbing message that — though Mr. Biden didn’t say so — came straight from highly classified intercepted communications he had recently been briefed about, suggesting that President Vladimir V. Putin’s threats to use a nuclear weapon in Ukraine might be turning into an operational plan.
For the “first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis,” he told the group, as they gathered amid Mr. Murdoch’s art collection, “we have a direct threat of the use of a nuclear weapon if in fact things continue down the path they’ve been going.” The gravity of his tone began to sink in: The president was talking about the prospect of the first wartime use of a nuclear weapon since Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
https://apnews.com/article/israel-nuclear-weapons-gaza-iran-china-1e18f34dcec40582166796b0ade65768
BY EDITH M. LEDERERUpdated 12:10 AM PDT, November 14, 2023Share
UNITED NATIONS (AP) — China, Iran and a multitude of Arab nations condemned an Israeli minister’s statement that a nuclear bomb on the Gaza Strip was an option in the Israel-Hamas war, calling it a threat to the world.
At Monday’s long-planned opening of a United Nations conference whose goal is to establish a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East, many ambassadors expressed condemnations and criticisms of comments by Israel’s Heritage Minister Amihai Eliyahu, who later called his remarks in a radio interview Sunday “metaphorical.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu quickly disavowed the comments and suspended him from cabinet meetings.
Israel has neither confirmed nor denied its nuclear capability. It is widely believed to possess nuclear weapons, and a former employee at its nuclear reactor served 18 years in Israeli prison for leaking details and pictures of Israel’s alleged nuclear arsenal program to a British newspaper in 1986.
“I Have Come For The Sinner, Not The Righteous!”
Posted on April 16, 2017 by Royal Rosamond Press
Jesus made a strange statement that took me fifteen years to solve the riddle in it.
“I have come, not to get the upright, but sinners, so that they may be turned from their sins. ”
When I began to study the Bible at fifty years of age I had no problem with looking at the teaching of the Jews. When I read the Sanhedrin made a law stating no Rabbi need minster to a man or woman premarked a sinner by God while inside their mother’s womb, I had found the key to Jesus’s miracles and Christianity. Jesus came to get rid of this law, and as a Go’El Redeemer put an end to INHERENT SIN FROM THE PARENTS. Jesus declared there were no longer any BORN SINNERS!
This is why Rabbi Jesus died on the cross. This transference of evil from adults to the unborn, was over. This is very key, because Paul Weyrich and the false Pro-Life movement he invented in order to undermine the Civil Rights Movement, put Trump in office and is dictating to him. These demons are going after women who have had, and want, abortions. Last night, on SNL, Steve Bannon is hauled out of the Oval Office by an every greater Demon. This is Paul Weyrich.
Leaders of the Liberal Left will not even read this blog. They are vain creatures like Paul. They have to believe they have all the answers, thus they put us in the prison of Dumb Dulity. I will show you how to break the chains of your political vanity.
Look at how Paul is dressed in the video below. This is exactly how Satan would dress.
Jon ‘The Nazarite’
How many Jews live in Ukraine?
Today, it’s hard to calculate Ukraine’s Jewish population accurately and estimates range from 49,000 to 400,000.
Hebrew University demographer Sergio Della Pergola put the number at 49,000 in his “World Jewish Population, 2019,” while The European Jewish Congress estimates the number of Jews to be between 360,000 and 400,000.
Who are the Jews of Ukraine?
Ukraine is home to one of the world’s largest Jewish communities and its historical roots run deep.
Ukraine is home to one of the world’s largest Jewish communities and its historical roots run deep. It is the birthplace of some of Judaism’s most distinctive ideologies and traditions – the Hasidic movement emerged out of Ukraine and the country has a rich legacy of Yiddish culture.
Ukraine has also been the site of extreme antisemitism. At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, the Jewish community faced pogroms (an organized massacre or riot against Jewish people), policies which tightened restrictions on where Jews could live and restrictions on the occupations that Jews could attain. During the Holocaust, more than one million Jews were killed by the Nazis and local Ukrainian supporters. In fact, the country is home to the most horrific violence ever committed against the Jewish people during the Holocaust.
Russia-Ukraine war at a glanceUkraine
Prelude to The World Holy Word War
Posted on October 7, 2023 by Royal Rosamond Press
Ukraine war briefing: backlash continues over the pope’s ‘white flag’ gaffe
Ukraine speeds up construction of defences, UK intelligence says; Europe weapons imports double – what we know on day 747
Warren Murray and agenciesSun 10 Mar 2024 20.29 EDTShare
- The Ukrainian film 20 Days in Mariupol, which was shot inside the besieged port city during the assault by Russian forces, has won the best documentary Oscar at the Academy Awards in Los Angeles.
- Odesa came under a barrage of Russian drone attacks over Monday night and Tuesday morning, Ukraine’s military said on Telegram. It reported 10 Shahed-type drones were shot down. “Unfortunately, it was not possible to avoid the hits. In the Odesa district, an infrastructure facility was damaged, administrative buildings were damaged, and the fire was quickly extinguished.” Private houses had their windows smashed by the shock wave and debris damaged commercial buildings, the southern operational command said. No deaths or injuries were reported.
- Volodymyr Zelenskiy has dismissed as “virtual mediation” from a distance Pope Francis’s call for talks under a “white flag” with Russia. Ukraine’s president made no direct reference to Francis or his comments but mentioned religious figures helping inside Ukraine. “They support us with prayer, with their discussion and with deeds. This is indeed what a church with the people is,” Zelenskiy said. “Not 2,500km away, somewhere, virtual mediation between someone who wants to live and someone who wants to destroy you.”
- Francis was criticised after saying Ukraine should have the courage of the “white flag” and negotiate an end to the war with Russia. Some politicians and commentators in Europe reacted with anger after the pontiff appeared to stay silent on Russia’s crimes as aggressor in the invasion, which has killed tens of thousands, and placed the onus on Ukraine to make peace. Ukraine’s minister for foreign affairs, Dmytro Kuleba, wrote: “Our flag is a yellow and blue one. This is the flag by which we live, die and prevail. We shall never raise any other flags.”
- Ukraine has “almost certainly” accelerated the construction of defensive positions on several areas of the frontline, according to a UK defence intelligence update. This includes anti-tank dragon’s teeth and ditches, infantry trenches, minefields and fortified defensive positions. The update adds this is indicative of the “attritional character” of the conflict, and attempts to breach “will highly likely be accompanied with high losses”.
Solidarity is no accident: a review of Michael Fischbach’s Black Power and Palestine
BY BILL V. MULLEN 0
HUEY P. NEWTON, CO-FOUNDER OF THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY, AT AN UNKNOWN PALESTINIAN REFUGEE CAMP IN LEBANON, 1980. (PHOTO: DR. HUEY P. NEWTON FOUNDATION INC./DEPARTMENT OF SPEICAL COLLECTIONS AND UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES, STANFORD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES)
BLACK POWER AND PALESTINE
Transnational Countries of Color
by Michael Fischbach
278 pp. Stanford University Press $25.95
Michael Fischbach’s Black Power and Palestine is the best book yet written on the contemporary history of Afro-Palestinian solidarity. The book is invaluable as a scholarly record of Black efforts to organize with and in support of Palestinian liberation, but also as a political argument about the centrality of Palestinian solidarity work to building internationalist, anti-imperialist solidarity in our time. Indeed Fischbach demonstrates that, since the Vietnam War, Palestinian freedom struggle has been the most important gateway into radicalism for several generations of African-Americans.
TRANSNATIONAL COUNTRIES OF COLOR” BY MICHAEL R. FISCHBACH, STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, NOVEMBER 2018.
Stokely Carmichael coined the term “Black Power” in 1966 while appealing to members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to march militantly in Mississippi. Yet Fischbach makes the term elastic, encompassing Black efforts before and after that moment to theorize and practice a politics of self-determination in support of Palestinian national liberation struggle. Thus his study moves from 1959—the year Martin Luther King, Jr. visited the West Bank and East Jerusalem to assess the plight of Palestinians there—to 2015, when activists Kristian Davis Bailey and Khury Petersen-Smith gathered more than 1,000 signatures to a “Black for Palestine” solidarity statement.
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Fischbach’s durable thesis is that African-American radicals have generally perceived Palestine as a “country of color” ruled by the same white, western imperial interests that have subordinated Africans, Asians and other “Third World” subalterns. This was the argument that made both the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (or SNCC) and the Black Panther Party turn hard for support of Palestinians, especially after the so-called 1967 “Six-Day War” which made explicit for many Israel’s imperial role in the Middle East. The “country of color” argument was also the source of Black radicalism’s assertion that African-Americans were an oppressed national minority, as internally colonized in Oakland as were Palestinians under settler-colonial Occupation in Ramallah.
Fischbach carefully demonstrates how this most radical of positions in the 1960s became the key pole of attraction and repulsion for Black Americans—and Jews—seeking to stake out their own positions on Zionism, Jewish statehood, Palestinian liberation, and Black freedom struggle. His nuanced treatment of Martin Luther King in the book is exemplary of this. King’s 1959 visit to the West Bank included an unscheduled meeting with Vicken Kalbian, a physician whose family was forced to flee Palestine in 1948. King learned from Kalbian for the first time about the Nakba. After returning to the U.S., King was invited several times by officials of the Israeli state to visit Israel, but never acted on the invitations. In 1967, the Six-Day War and the militant responses of SNCC and the Black Panther Party forced King to walk what Fischbach calls a “tight rope.” Before the war, King had planned to lead a peace delegation to Israel. Now he cancelled, in part, Fischbach speculates, because of his publically outspoken criticism of the U.S. war against Vietnam. Yet to appease Israel supporters, King lent his name to a New York Times paid advertisement purchased by supporters of Israel, and a short time later, spoke of Israel’s “right to exist as a state in security” (85). Fischbach makes clear that King was both hypersensitive to Jewish pressure and profoundly challenged by Palestinian oppression.
Two other spellbinding figures in the book are Bayard Rustin and Andrew Young, symbolic bookends of Black political polarization around Palestine. Rustin, a pacifist, openly gay lieutenant of King, and one of the organizers of the March on Washington, moved increasingly to the right after 1963. Alarmed by the rise of the PLO in Palestine, and seeking to pressure the Gerald Ford Administration to ramp up support for Israel, Rustin formed the group BASIC (Black Americans to Support Israel Committee). Rustin convinced dozens of Black American notables—among them novelist Ralph Ellison, former Congress of Racial Equality leader James Farmer, musician Lionel Hampton, Civil rights legend Rosa Parks, baseball star Henry Aaron, musician Count Basie, and others, to sign a “Statement of Principles” in the November 23, 1975 edition of the New York Times. The statement affirmed U.S. support for Israel.
Also a signatory to BASIC was Andrew Young, another former King lieutenant, and by 1975 a member of Congress. In 1977, Young was appointed U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations by President Jimmy Carter. In 1979, Young resigned his position after meeting with Zehdi Labib Terzi, the PLO’s U.N. observer. The meeting broke with an official U.S. state position not to meet directly with the PLO. Novelist and activist James Baldwin, himself a stalwart defender of Palestinian human rights, defended Young and excoriated Carter in “An Open Letter to the Born Again,” accusing Carter and the U.S. of support for Israel as a means to consolidate Western imperialism and Christian Zionism in the Middle East. Baldwin’s own support for Palestinians had been nurtured by SNCC and the Black Panther Party.
Fischbach misses one major opportunity in the book, namely to narrate in depth the intertwining of African-American support for the end of South African apartheid and Palestinian liberation. Mainstream Black support for the Boycott, Divestment Sanctions movement against South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s was a major progenitor of Black support for the Palestinian BDS campaign launched in 2004 by Palestinian civil society and directly inspired by the South African example. Since 2004, Black support for BDS—from singer/songwriter Chuck D. of Public Enemy, to South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu—is the most compelling and enduring legacy of the Black Power narrative Fischbach otherwise expertly describes.
Fischbach’s book is an essential text for our times. The conjoined support for Palestinian human rights and BDS by Somali congresswoman Ilhan Omar and Palestinian congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, his book helps us understand, is no historical accident. Nor is Donald Trump’s racist and racialized use of Israeli Zionism to attack them. This dialectic of resistance is embedded in the deep muck of American imperialism, Christian Zionism, and Israeli setter-colonialism. That it will not stay not buried is a hopeful legacy Fischbach’s book can help a new generation of activists build upon.
Let me begin my talk today with a story. I mean, I’m a historian and we like stories. In November of 1966, Daniel Rubin, who was a member of the central committee of the Communist Party USA decried what he called the “up-side-down approach” to Israel exhibited by American Jews. By accepting this picture, he said, Jews in the U.S. usually unwittingly find themselves on the side of US imperialism in opposition to national liberation movements. Rubin was upholding the party line – the CP [Communist Party] party line in the sixties: that what best served American Jews was not to support Israel blindly, but see that the real question in the Middle East was one of the struggle to overthrow imperialism, which was the common enemy of both Jews and Arabs.
So clearly, the youthful new left was split over the war in the Middle East, even as they could agree on the need to end the war in Southeast Asia. And outside the new left, at the so-called old left, these issues emerged again with great force and divisiveness. Old left groups like the Workers World Party, which was the only organization led by Americans actually to protest against Israel while the 67 war was going on, were solidly supportive of the Palestinians. So too was the Socialist Workers Party, which developed fairly sophisticated theoretical understandings of the conflict. But on the other hand, some in so-called old left political parties were quite uncertain. And as I alluded to in my opening remarks, nowhere was this more evident than within the Communist Party USA. The party leaders, as I mentioned, had condemned Israel for starting the war in 67, and party bosses tried to enforce party unity. But many Jewish comrades in particular, and there were a large number of Jews within the Communist Party as in other left-wing groups, rebelled against this hostile attitude towards Israel. They claimed that they were “pro-Israel” but “non-Zionist.” And one such party member noted, “But on one issue, left non-Zionists unreservedly agree with Zionists, that Israel now has an inalienable right to exist.” Indeed, the ever-watchful FBI, which had dozens, in fact hundreds of informers, gleefully wrote in 1970 that disputes over the Middle East were “a crisis of first order of magnitude within the CP, and one from which it never really recovered.”
Outside the MOBE, anti-war figures like Martin Luther King Jr. similarly faced a dilemma of how to remain morally consistent in their denunciation of war and military action across the board, yet not offend important domestic constituents. King eventually tried to have it both ways, and noted in September of 67, several months after the [1967 Six Day] war, that, “Neither military measures,” which was talking to Israel, “nor a stubborn effort to reverse history,” he was talking to the Arab world, “can provide a permanent solution for people who need and deserve both development and security.”
But King also later admitted—and we know this because the FBI was bugging the telephone, we now have the records—that this was “the darkest days of his life”: trying to figure out what to do about being a Nobel peace prize winner who was about to lead a pilgrimage to the Middle East (which he had to cancel), how to address, if to address, this particular example of war and conflict when attacking American policy. Vietnam had been anguishing him enough as it was.
Other left-wing Jews denounced pro-Palestinian Jews as self-hating, who suffered from various Jewish pathologies. Among these were scholars like Seymour Martin Lipset, who argued that the new left “privileged emotion and irrationality over reason. The Arabs represent the former, Israel the latter.”
But on the other hand, other left-wing Jews bravely called upon their fellow Jews to honestly examine their own strident pro-Zionist feelings. Just days after the 67 war, for instance, the noted writer I. F. Stone wrote, “It is a moral tragedy to which no Jew worthy of our best prophetic tradition could be insensitive, that a kindred people was left homeless in the task of making new homes for the remnants of the Hitler Holocaust.” Other left-wing Jews like Paul Jacob, Noam Chomsky, and Arthur Waskow similarly argued that their fellow Jews on the left adopted a more dispassionate analysis of the conflict.
And indeed, within just three days after those three women were seated in the house, a new group called the Democrats for Majority for Israel was established to try to shore up traditional pro-Israeli stances within the party. These divisions are also seen more recently, where the Democratic Party hopeful Bernie Sanders has called for conditioning U.S. foreign aid to Israel upon Israel’s need to “fundamentally change its policy toward Palestinians.”
Clearly, liberals in the Democratic Party are quite worried about these kinds of voices arising within the Democratic Party. And traditional party bosses, you know the Nancy Pelosis, the Chuck Schumers, are clearly worried. And they have reason to be.
According to a 2018 poll carried out by the PEW research center, the number of self-described liberal democrats who sympathize with the Palestinians was nearly double the number of those sympathetic with Israel. Another poll from the PEW research center from April of last year, 2019, showed that just 27 percent of Americans under the age of 30 held a favorable view of the Israeli government. Traditional pro-Israeli members of the Democratic Party, as I’ve said, have been quite concerned about these developments. Presidential hopeful Joe Biden has noted, “The idea”, referencing Bernie Sanders, “The idea that we would withdraw military aid from Israel on the condition that they change a specific policy, I find to be absolutely outrageous.”
There are certainly other things going on, great divisions within the democratic party, but that’s one that doesn’t get talked about much. And given the experience of what happened to liberal left-wing Americans five decades ago I think, therefore, it’s a cautionary tale for progressive politicians today.
Worsening this is the immensely close relationship between president Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which further puts liberal Americans, particularly American Jews, not only in the Democratic Party in a difficult position- between standing with Israel and Trump, who has arguably adopted some of the most pro-Israeli policies in recent years of any president in decades. With their otherwise disdain of president Trump as members of the Democratic Party, it’s putting them in a very strange position.
So, to end my talk, certainly the research that I did on this question showed a lot about the left’s conflicted attitudes towards the Arab-Israeli conflict back in the sixties and early seventies. Then as I said, I believe it also illustrates some of the ongoing problems that progressive Americans today, whether in the Democratic Party or further to the left, still have. Situating themselves into a discourse where practically the rest of the world, the liberal, the what’s called progressive left-wing forces in the rest of the world, are firmly unified behind one point of view.
Rosamond Press 
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