Hey there.
It has been a very surprising week in the politics of Israel and Palestine.
I am not going to do a deep dive on the details of the Sheikh Jarrah controversy.
The issues surrounding the evictions from that Palestinian neighborhood are very complicated.
No what I want to talk about is how surprising it is that we are talking about Sheikh Jarrah
at all, and how the state of the conversation indicates just how badly certain members of
Israeli leadership have misjudged their international position.
Three years ago, when Israeli snipers were killing literally dozens of mostly unarmed
protesters at the Gaza border, I was bothered enough to make a video about it.
But I am fundamentally pretty cowardly when it comes to this issue.
So to talk about how angry the killings made me, I made a very careful analogy to my personal
experience of mass protest in Turkey, and spoke in pretty mealy mouthed ways about the
tragic of loss of life.
I don't feel that fear so much anymore.
And apparently nobody else does either.
Over the past few days I have seen clips from MSNBC and CBS talking about these evictions
from Sheikh Jarrah, largely without the AIPAC talking points which is pretty shocking.
If I were a big supporter of Israeli occupation right now I would be suffering whiplash.
Heck I have been predicting this shift for a while now and I am pretty shocked.
It is genuinely surprising that the world is paying this much attention to a Jerusalem
land dispute involving just 6 households.
Even after those Hamas morons threw some rockets into the mix US media remains
focused on a real estate dispute.
Usually Hamas rockets are a get out of US media jail free card for Israeli occupation.
Not this time.
Of course the Israeli side has its own morons as well.
No matter the justification, images of Israeli storm troopers throwing flash bangs at people
praying in the third holiest mosque in Islam are not going to win Israel any friends.
But even with all the escalation on the streets, the real estate dispute in Sheikh Jarrah has
somehow remained central to the coverage.
Which should be super disturbing to Israel super-fans.
You see what's happening in this Jerusalem neighborhood is the sort of thing that's central
to the Israeli occupation in Jerusalem and the West Bank.
Frankly it's boring to learn about, which is key to it's power.
The Palestinians have a legal position, and the Israelis have a legal position.
Because Israel writes all the relevant laws, and controls all the relevant courts, it's
usually easy for Israel to sound like the rational party.
Sure, violence is important too, but settlement moves forward day by day and year by year
through these slow, boring legalistic means.
We have seen this process for years in US media.
Some poor not particularly photogenic Palestinian claims ethnic cleansing is happening.
Maybe an old woman in a head scarf crying in Arabic.
Then some nice Israeli or AIPAC member in a suit, speaking flawless English, explains
how what's happening to this poor woman is a shame, but the law is the law.
Nothing to be done.This has worked for decades.
But now it's not.
Why?
Three years ago a literal mountain of corpses was reported on fairly politely in US media,
but today the nuts and bolts of settlement are an international scandal.
What happened?
Well partially it's this guy and his relationship with Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's perpetual
Prime Minister.
Netanyahu's dismissiveness and blatant disrespect for the US's first black president had already
created problems, but his gross love affair with Donald Trump may have permanently turned
Israel into a partisan issue in the United States.
But this is an issue that's going to take another decade or two to shake out.
Also I think it's exaggerated.
The US is never going to abandon Israel.
Nor will the Democratic party.
The dispute isn't between opponents and supporters of Israel but between blind unthinking supporters
of Israel and those who think the US deserves a little more respect for all the money and
support we give.
Nobody's going to stop the money.
What I think is more immediately important is a basic strategic miscalculation Trump
and Netanyahu made.
All wars are media wars.
Until the US world system falls, Israel's standing in the world will always be more
about public relations than physical security, and under Netanyahu those public relations
have gotten horrendously bad.
Israel is most attractive as the underdog.
It wins sympathy internationally when it is seen as being under attack.
For the first four decades of its existence Israel was in existential danger all the time.
The Middle East was one of the Cold War's biggest flash points, and Israel had multiple
heavily armed neighbors, dedicated to it's destruction, heavily backed by the Soviet
Union.
Sure, Israel did nasty things to Arabs back then, but these were folks who survived the
Nazis and were standing up to the commies, and a few stolen properties were nothing compared
to what the US was doing in Asia and Latin America back then.
And then in a few years as the 1980s turned into the 1990s this story changed dramatically.
The Soviet Union disappeared, and the US crushed Iraq, which had been the most threatening
of the Arab states.
All of a sudden, Israel didn't look like the little guy facing down an evil empire anymore.
The little guys were in Palestine, and with the US turning on all its old monsters, Israel
needed to clean up its act quick.
Which is why we got the Oslo accords.
Israel and Palestine struck a historic peace deal in 1993 and 1995.
A two state solution was proposed, and steps were taken to begin to begin to implement
it.
And who knows, if it wasn't for Osama Bin Laden, maybe it would have worked.
The post 9-11 rage at Muslims in the United States meant that for 20 years Israel didn't
really have to do much other than say the magic word terrorism to make most of the world
ignore Palestine.
It certainly worked for me for most of the 2000s.
But the forever wars are fading.
The war in Syria seems to be mostly over.
Israeli bombings of the winners are the most prominent news coming out of that country
now.
Iran's economy is being crushed , and Israel's bombing and assassination campaigns there
make the mad mullahs look weak not threatening.
Israel doesn't look like a plucky little underdog, fighting the good fight against Goliath.
Israel looks like Goliath.
The last thing Israel has to make it look like the underdog is the undying enmity of
the Arabs.
The 400 million people directly neighboring Israel still care about the Palestinians,
and they are still angry.
So, because of that support for Palestinians, every protest no matter how many kids are
slaughtered looks like a real threat to Israel.
That's forever, that's permanent victory in the media wars, at least in the US I mean
unless Israel were to somehow sign a bunch of peace deals with Arab countries, but that
would never happen right?
Well that's exactly what has happened over the past three years.
I will be honest,I am actually warming up to the Abraham Accords a bit.
I don't like the Israeli or Arab governments involved but I think the principle of Arab
Israeli self defense against Persians and Turks might make sense in a couple decades.
But in the short term the accords are disastrous for Israel.
Jordan and Egypt made peace decades ago.
With four more signing up to abandon the Palestinians in 2020, the idea that Arab governments present
any threat to Israel anymore is now just laughable.
Saudi Arabia, the traditional paymaster of Palestinian nationalism, hasn't signed up
yet, but it seems likely that it will happen as soon as the ancient King Salman falls down
a flight of stairs and MBS takes over.
All wars are media wars.
And with the Abraham Accords Israel has lost the public relations battle with Palestine
almost entirely.
US media wants to help Israel, but there's only so much it can do.
Palestinians aren't the sinister leading edge of commies or Antisemitic Petro states anymore.
They are just a weak people getting beat up on by the regional hegemon.
If Israel wants real deals with Arab peoples, instead of just Arab dictators, it needs to
do something more for Palestine.
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