You see, in the Never-Never land of the ADL, Muslim hostility toward Jews has nothing to do with actual Jewish behavior toward Muslims in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. It’s a corollary of the general Jewish stance that anti-Semitism never has anything to do with the behavior of Jews but only with various psychopathologies and delusions of non-Jews. Both Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney called on the Obama administration to dismiss Gutman for these remarks, and the ADL was predictably outraged.
Bank on this: If the Israel Lobby doesn’t get its war by pressuring the Obama Administration, it will certainly get it from the Gingrich administration. As Gingrich said, “The only rational long-term policy is regime replacement.”
Philip Weiss sums it up by saying that “American Jews are waking up to the fact that Israeli society is nothing like ours.” Right. It’s the diametric opposite to Western society with its commitment to individualism and its traditional of a relatively elevated position for women. Weiss may be right that American Jews are turning off to Israel, and indeed, there is evidence for increasing discontent about Israel on the left in the US.
But it’s also quite clear that American Jewish supporters of Israel retain a great deal of power, despite its dedication to apartheid, its project of ethnically cleansing the Palestinians. And despite its increasing domination by traditional Middle Eastern culture where democracy and individual rights are absent, and there is complete separation of the sexes and a lowered position of women. And that makes war in the Middle East a quite probable outcome.