From Josh Marshall of TPM
In case you missed it, I want to commend to your attention Jeffrey Goldberg’s article in the Sunday Times: “Israel’s ‘American Problem“. The premise will be a familiar one to anyone who’s thought seriously and sanely about Israel’s future and America’s relationship with Israel. The breadth of acceptable opinion about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is vastly greater in Israel than it is in the United States. Indeed, as Goldberg suggests, if Prime Minister Olmert and Defense Minister Barak were running for president in the US, they might not be deemed sufficiently pro-Israel to be acceptable in the American mainstream.
Much of this is due to the neocon / extreme Zionist alliance as practiced by Bush et al. One quibble: the American mainstream doesn’t really understand the situation there, and gets little if any, actual information about the settlements, the plight of Palestinians, or how they were forced from their land. This is due to the until now quite successful lobbying by extremist Zionists in the US to muddy the waters.
Josh Marshall, who named his son partly after the commander of an elite commando unit of the Haganah and who thus knows the territory well, concludes.
By conflating being pro-Israel with supporting the continued colonization of the West Bank, many of Israel’s ‘friends’ in the US are placing Israel in great danger and doing no favor to the United States either.