Bernie Sanders of course offered an alternative approach. He said that U.S. policy in the region had to have more than carrots. Without the threat of the stick of withholding military aid, Sanders declared Israel had no motivation to change its Blood and Soil policies. Sanders could advance such views because his campaign relied on hundreds of thousands of small contributions; and eschewed the type of check-bundling which is a hallmark of pro-Israel political fundraising.
In a conventional campaign, up to 40% of cash flowing to Democratic presidential campaigns originates from Jewish pocketbooks. Biden’s is the most conventional of such campaigns and desperately needs these fatcats. Sanders was most definitely not.
The upshot is that Biden can’t afford, even if he wanted to, an independent approach to U.S. policy toward Israel. He must do what the Israel Lobby dictates. And we must assume that his presidency would follow the same tack.
Barack Obama did offer a Middle East policy during his presidency that was slightly more independent. But he had more leeway than Biden because his support came from a more diversified political base. He knew that if he alienated the Israel Lobby he had strong support among enough other critical constituencies that he could withstand the loss of the pro-Israel vote.
Biden recently released a white paper outlining his approach to the interests of American Jews. Unfortunately, as you might expect, he conflated the interests of Jews here with those of Israel; most of the paper is devoted to Israel, as if American Jews had no other interests.
But aside from this criticism, the actual substance of the document, The Jewish Community: a Record and a Plan of Friendship, Support, and Action is disheartening. I outlined some of the most troubling in this recent post. Here are a few more distressing passages:
He begins with the pro forma reference to Israel as a Jewish state (interesting omitting the accompanying “democratic,” perhaps because he no longer feels he can say Israel is democratic, with a straight face):
As President, Joe Biden will continue to ensure that the Jewish State…ha[s] the unbreakable support of the United States.
But even calling Israel a “Jewish state” is problematic. Not only because nearly two-million Israelis are not Jewish, but Palestinian (Christian and Muslim); but because whatever makes Israel “Jewish” is based not on traditional moral or ethical values, but on pure political power. Judaism as practiced in Israel is divorced from ways it is practiced in the Diaspora. Religion in Israel advocates that the state becomes a theocracy. It merges religion and politics in ways that deform both.
I no longer call Israel a “Jewish state.” I prefer to call it, using Yeshaya Leibowitz’s terminology, a Judeo-state. A state which privileges Jews over non-Jews. A state based in apartheid. A state which worships land and ruins over ideas and values. I call it a “stones and bones” approach. It is not a Mosaic religion, but pagan idolatry.
A Biden administration will work with the Israeli and Palestinian leadership, and support peacebuilding efforts in the region. Biden will urge Israel and the Palestinian Authority to take steps to keep the prospect of a negotiated two-state outcome alive and take no actions to undercut future direct negotiations between the parties.
Ahem, there are no “peacebuilding efforts” between Israel and the Palestinians. There were none even before Trump came into office. There will be none after he leaves office and Biden replaces him. On what basis would a Pres. Biden resume such negotiations? On what basis would he get Israel’s far-right leaders to come to the table on the basis of a two-state solution, which they publicly and repeatedly revile? What levers would he use? Would he use more leverage than Barack Obama did when he failed to secure Israel’s agreement to freezing settlements in the first year of his presidency? How would he achieve what Obama couldn’t? Especially since he’s abjured using the stick of tying U.S. aid to bring Israeli policy into line with stated U.S. policy and international law.
Here’s some more delicious gobbledygook:
[Biden would] reverse the Trump Administration’s destructive cutoff of diplomatic ties with the Palestinian Authority (PA) and cancellation of assistance programs that support Israeli-Palestinian security cooperation, economic development, and humanitarian aid for the Palestinian people in the West Bank and Gaza, consistent with the requirements of the Taylor Force Act to withhold certain assistance to the PA unless it is taking measures to end acts of violence against Israeli and U.S. citizens, including terminating payments to individuals engaged in acts of terrorism.
Ah, so Biden would resume U.S. aid for the PA. That’s good, right? Not so fast. It adds that the PA would be deprived of aid if it refused to end welfare payments to survivors of shahids who died at Israel’s hands while performing acts of resistance against the Occupation. Now that’s odd–because no U.S. law punished Israel for the support it offered to Judeo-terrorists. No U.S. law punished Israel when it voted for former terrorists like Yitzhak Shamir and Menachem Begin to become the leaders of their country. So I guess I’ll have to say “excuse me,” but this bit isn’t terribly persuasive. It’s a bit of hypocritical puffery.
Even the rhetoric in the passages which are non-controversial, dealing with Biden’s purported commitment to the values of social justice and combatting racism comes across as pablum. He has similar boilerplate statements concerning a number of U.S. ethnic groups and many of the paragraphs could be lifted directly from one and pasted into another. Biden is clearly going through the paces. Either his heart is not in this, or he’s been at it so long he’s lost the thread.
Folks, Joe Biden’s campaign is intellectually and politically bankrupt. It is bereft of ideas. It is anchored in the distant past when two-states was a viable plan. What’s more–Biden has yoked himself to an Israel Lobby that itself has lost its way. The Lobby at one time represented liberal Zionism. Now it cheerleads the Judeo-supremacism of an apartheid settler regime.
It was at a forum of the American Zionists for Israel that this week that Biden said that as president he will continue giving military aid to Israel. This gathering must have taken place on a platform like Zoom, because os social distancing requirements. It is very apparent that Biden’s strategy is to spend his campaign appealing to old white conservatives including old white Jews who support Israel. My father referred to these people as alta kakas(in Yiddish, old shits for anyone who doesn’t know). My family came to America to escape Nazi Germany. In any case, this will be a losing strategy for Biden because there are not enough votes for Biden to get from those old white conservative alta kakas, as he will lose far more votes than he will gain. I am afraid that Trump will get another term by default which is how he got his current term. Too many people will simply not be enthused to turn out to vote at all, with this strategy of Biden’s.
You have a lot of goddam nerve smearing Israel with the Nazi and White Supremacist slogan, ‘Blood and Soil’.
‘Blood and soil’: Protesters chant Nazi slogan in Charlottesville
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/nazis-racism-charlottesville/536928/
Who, besides you and that avowed, failed, Marxist, Lenni Brenner, would even say such a thing?
https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/mideast/agedict/ch02.htm
Simply put, you and Brenner are dead wrong about Zionism and ‘Blood and Soil’.
” According to Brenner, ‘the German Zionists agreed with two fundamental elements in Nazi ideology,’ namely ‘that the Jews would never be part of the German volk and, therefore, they did not belong on German soil’. This being the case, ‘it was inevitable that some Zionists would believe an accommodation possible.’ (Brenner 1983: 35)
To substantiate these assertions, he invoked the historian Stephen Poppel, who in fact wrote the exact opposite on the very page he cited. In Poppel’s words, even though there was a split in German Zionist opinion between those who believed in the existence of ‘moderate elements’ in the Nazi Party and those who did not, ‘Zionists were unanimous in condemning Nazi brutality and racism.’ (Poppel 1976: 161)
https://fathom journal.org/an-antisemitic-hoax-lenni-brenner-on-zionist-collaboration-with-the-nazis/
@ Lemonade: As always, delightful both to provoke your fake rage and correct your errors:
So you don’t like Zionism as practiced by the current Judeo-fascists running Israel? Strikes a bit too close to home to have American neo-Nazis compared to Judeo-Nazis? Too bad. I didn’t invent the use of the term to apply to Israel.
Here’s who besides me said such a thing (and more):
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/settler-anti-zionism (Prof. Gadi Taub, Dissent Magazine)
https://www.tcdailyplanet.net/blood-and-soil-price-zionism/
https://watermark.silverchair.com/2536249.pdf (Prof. Hilton Obenzinger, Stanford Univ.)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03064220408537421 (Prof. Zeev Sternhell, Hebrew Univ.)
https://outline.com/qZwjJt (Jewish Forward)
https://pulsemedia.org/2009/02/07/a-challenge-to-blood-and-soil/ (PULSE Media)
https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/birds-feather-white-supremacy-and-zionism (Prof. Nada Elia)
A particularly relevant passage from her essay:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/an-ethical-tradition-betr_b_438660?guccounter=1 (Prof. Hajo Mayer, Holocaust survivor)
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/op-ed-contributors/right-of-reply-blood-soil-and-michael-freund (Jerusalem Post)
I stopped counting how many references there were linking Zionism to Blood & Soil in a Google search after I reached this many citations. So instead of getting in high dudgeon why don’t you try to grapple with the fact that distinguished professors, Israel and American Jews, along with a Dutch professor and Holocuast survivor, have used the term well before me.
You’re once again using suspect sources which have no credibility. Fathom is a publication of the Board of Deputies & BICOM. Sorry, not here.
As for trying to link me to Lenni Brenner: I’ve never read a word of Lenni Brenner and my ideas do not derive from him. But if you want to read a review of Brenner’s book which isn’t biased and tendentious, I recommend Obenzinger. Oh and Lenni Brenner did not rely on a single historian as you imply. His work rests of multiple sources and is quite powerful and credible.
“Without the threat of the stick of withholding military aid, Sanders declared Israel had no motivation to change its Blood and Soil policies.”
Contrary to what Lenni, and the Marxists in their echo chamber say, the early Zionists had no ‘blood and soil’ ideology.
Sternhell himself says as much.
“Like all European nationalisms, Zionism gave a place of honor to historical rights. It saw the Bible as the Jews’ title deed to historical Palestine. However, unlike the radical European nationalisms, until recently Zionism never developed a sense of ethnic superiority to the Arabs. From the Zionist right of Zeev Jabotinsky to the left of Berl Katznelson and the Labor movement, the founders of the State of Israel, all of whom came from Eastern Europe, were aware of the dangers of radical nationalism. ”
Sternhell, and the political commentators you linked, are quick to point out that only the Israeli settler movement has a political creed comparable with ‘blood and soil’.
And since most Israelis don’t identify with the’ settler movement’, Israel does not have ‘Blood and Soil policies’
Heck. Israel isn’t even the Rightist State you make it out to be.
https://www.ynetnews.com/article/SkqPV11WsI
@ Lemonade: You poor sod. You continue to harp on Lenni Brenner as if he has any relevance to me or the argument you make. Lenni may be a good straw man for focus groups you guys have tested. But I’m afraid it won’t work here. We don’t demonize people who’ve made a useful contribution to the study of Zionist history, as he has. Instead of hurling insults you might try to address the many cogent arguments and historical events he’s exposed which tie the Zionist movement to the Nazis. But that would actually involve research and hard work, of which you guys are not capable.
As for your attempt to minimize the connection of Blood and Soil to the Zionist movement by claiming it “only” relates to the settler movement:
1. It’s interesting you implicitly concede that the settler movement may legitimately be characterized by Blood and Soil.
2. Where your argument falls flat is that the settler movement IS Zionism as practiced in contemporary Israel. So the notion that there is a distinction between the two, thereby innoculating the greater Zionist movement from the Blood & Soil analogy falls flat.
Further, how can you say that most Israelis reject the settler movement when every major political party (left, right and center) endorse settlements and out-pander each other to do so. Did Blue and White (the so-called moderate party) distance itself from settlements or reject the Jordan Valley annexation during the last campaign? No, just the opposite. It embraced it fully.
As for early Zionists having no Blood and Soil ideology: again, not so. Jabotinsky was an ardent admirer of Mussolini. Were it not for the tiny problem of Hitler’s Jewphobia, Jabotinsky would’ve become an ardent Hitlerite. And even if you omit Jabotinsky, Ben Gurion himself argued that if the “Arabs” didn’t acquiesce in the Zionist takeover of Palestine that they would have to go. This we may call Blood and Soil Lite.
Thanks for giving me this opportunity to poke holes in your arguments. But I think we’ve both exhausted the issue. No more comments in this thread.