New heights of pandering to Israel in liberal America

This week an influential think tank in the US invited the leader of Israel to address it in Washington DC. Nothing unusual in that you may think. True; except the group was the Center for American Progress, an organisation with close ties to the Democratic party.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, of course, is head of the right-wing Likud party and can in no way be described as a “progressive”. CAP, under pressure from some liberal critics, justified the move claiming that they would ask Netanyahu tough questions and that they have a policy of engaging with people they may disagree with.

In the event, neither of these things was true. The “moderated conversation” totally pandered to Netanyahu. The host was CAP’s president, Neera Tandem (a Hilary Clinton loyalist). She let him lie though his teeth about all sorts of important issues while he was free to launch his charm offensive to win back liberals in the US, some of whom have been growing increasingly critical of Israel in recent years.

The recent spat with Obama over the Iran deal may well have been a tale full of sound and fury, signifying nothing (or in any event very little – just another way to get even more military aid out of the US). But it did have a certain effect on the liberal base, with more and more of the grassroots of Democratic party becoming sceptical of Israel. And with the fuss over Netanyahu being invited by the Republican party to address Congress earlier this year (a perceived snub of Obama) they had more reasons to be critical.

But these are narrow differences. No concern is shown there about the real issues: continuous and unrelenting Israeli colonisation of Palestinian land, denial of basic human rights to Palestinians and the most egregious of war crimes (551 Palestinian children were killed by Israel during the last war against Gaza alone).

But even those narrow differences were considered by CAP to be too much. Netanyahu – who politically speaking is a right-wing extremist by any reasonable standard – must be fully embraced by the supposedly-liberal organisation. Anything for Israel.

This phenomenon is what is often dubbed the “Progressive Except for Palestine” syndrome in the US. In other words, left-wingers or liberals who support progressive caused like gay marriage, civil rights and free speech issues; even anti-war causes – but not basic Palestinian human rights.

CAP is an organisation that is so dominated by this stifling pro-Israel status quo that it even in the past censored its own journalists, some of whom had dared write some very mildly critical things of Israel on its in-house blog, Think Progress. At some point, CAP even instituted a special editor past through whom all Israel-related articles had to be passed. This is an unprecedented level of censorship.

Ali Gharib and Eli Clifton did not submit one particular article to this special Editor For the Protection of Israel, because the article was about Islamophobia, and was not directly about Israel. But it did mention in passing that an Islamophobic hate film had been partly funded by individual Israeli donors. Even that was too much for CAP – all references to Israelis were disappeared from the article shortly after it was published.

Emails leaked to Glenn Greenwald‘s news site The Intercept recently show that this happened after long-time Democratic party operative Howard Wolfson (formerly a top aide to Hillary Clinton) wrote to CAP’s Neera Tanden complaining about the blog post.

The whole affair was instructive, if rather dismaying.

But I found one particular comment by one player in this drama most illuminating for its frankness. Ann Lewis, another Clinton advisor, once said that “The role of the president of the United States is to support the decisions that are made by the people of Israel. It is not up to us to pick and choose from among the political parties.”

This was back in 2008, when Barack Obama was still campaigning to be president. He had reportedly held the view that to be pro-Israel he need not necessarily be pro-Likud. Lewis (supposedly a liberal, recall) was hitting back that the president should support Israel, right-or-wrong.

But what a give away that comment is! “The role of the president of the United States is to support the decisions that are made by the people of Israel.” Astonishing if you think about it. Support Israelis no matter what?

Does that include the Israelis who in July burnt to death the Dawabshi family, including 18-month-old baby Ali? Does that include the crowds of Israelis who flock to the hills surrounding Gaza whenever their latest war against the Palestinians population is launched, in order to watch and (literally) to dance with joy?

Does that include the more than 90 percent of Israelis who supported that war (which resulted in the deaths of more than 2,200 (mostly civilian) Palestinians, including 551 children)? Does that include the majority of Israelis that polls consistently show openly support state-enforced racism and are proud of their hatred for Arabs?

Apparently so.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.