JEWISH QUESTIONS

JOSH RUEBNER—Based on the former vice president’s current campaign pledges, and past statements made during the Obama administration and throughout his lengthy tenure in the Senate, a Biden administration would not be likely to content itself with reverting to Obama era policies of providing lip service toward Palestinian rights while nevertheless reinforcing US diplomatic and military support for Israel.

EDWARD SAID—Sure enough Sartre did have something for us: a prepared text of about two typed pages that – I write entirely on the basis of a twenty-year-old memory of the moment – praised the courage of Anwar Sadat in the most banal platitudes imaginable. I cannot recall that many words were said about the Palestinians, or about territory, or about the tragic past. Certainly no reference was made to Israeli settler-colonialism, similar in many ways to French practice in Algeria. It was about as informative as a Reuters dispatch, obviously written by the egregious Victor to get Sartre, whom he seemed completely to command, off the hook.

It’s hard to effectively express dissent when your very presence at an organization would be portrayed as an endorsement of their positions. The fact is, we’re at a critical moment in the history of the US-Israel relationship. As Israel contemplates full annexation of the West Bank without extending voting rights to the Palestinian people living there, making the apartheid comparisons impossible to ignore, AIPAC continues to blend anodyne calls for “bipartisanship” with support for far-right plans for the region.

During the debate, Bloomberg’s Twitter account attacked Sanders over his AIPAC comments. “To characterize AIPAC as a racist platform is offensive, divisive, and dangerous to Israel – America’s most important ally in the Middle East – and to Jews,” the tweet read, “How can Bernie profess he’s the path to unity when he’s already managed to polarize a people and a party?”

JONATHON COOK—By not echoing the rest of the western media in entirely airbrushing the Palestinians out of Europe’s post-Holocaust history, Guerin stood isolated and exposed. None of her colleagues – supposedly fearless, muckraking journalists – appear willing to come to her aid. She has been made a scapegoat, a sacrificial victim – one that will serve as a future reminder to her colleagues of what they are permitted to mention, which parts of Europe’s history they may examine and which parts must remain forever in the shadows.

Guerin’s comment was denounced as “offensive” by her former boss, Danny Cohen, who was previously the director of BBC television. No one, of course, cares that the Palestinians’ experience of being wiped out of recent European history and its legacy in the Middle East is deeply offensive. The Palestinians are what historian Mark Curtis refers to as “Unpeople”.