Israel First A-Holes

Commentary By Ron Beasley

I discussed the changing relationship of the US and Israel below.  It's not really a surprise that this flux has brought the Israel first crowd to the surface.  One of those is former New York mayor Ed Koch.  In an oped at Huffington Post he bemoans Obama's lack of respect for Netanyahu.

President Obama's abysmal attitude toward the State of Israel and his
humiliating treatment of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is shocking.

Of course he fails to even mention what Netanyahu and Israel did to Vice President Biden recently and the rest of the post is nothing but lies and half truths and of course includes the obligatory reference to the Holocaust.  At last count there were already over 400 comments nearly all of which were taking Koch to task.  This alone should be a concern to Israel and it's supporters.  The comments are worth a read and I will give a few examples here.

Sorry, Mr. Koch. It is the Netanyahu regime that has been acting
"blatantly hostile" to their own interests as well as those of the
United States. Your Holocaust reference it's totally out of place. In
the case of the Palestinians, Mr. Netanyahu's government has done little
but throw gasoline on the fire. Mr. Obama's response, in my opinion,
was overly restrained if anything.

.......

As a born & raised Jew who had a Bar-Mitzvah & Confirmation, I
am personally very offended by your off-base remarks regarding Pres.
Obama & VP Biden's treatment of PM Netanyahu, Mr. Koch. While I
admit I had respect for your leadership as NYC Mayor in the distant
past, you have long since taken a sharp turn to the right into the
neo-con zone, to paraphrase Ed Schulz. Your claim that Obama & Biden
were "disrespectful" of the Israeli PM is completely inside-out &
distorted, when the empirical truth was precisely the opposite. When Mr.
Biden diplomatically met with Netanyahu to discuss the settlement
controversy, the latter decided to pompously declare that settlements
would continue, regardless of the consequences. I'm further offended
that you dared to conflate Pastor Niemoller's eloquent quotation from
the Holocaust with Obama's policy toward Israel, as if peaceful
coexistence between Israelis & Palestinians is inherently
incompatible with respect for the Jewish people. Your references reflect
gravely insulting leaps of logic that are intolerable in any
intellectually honest context. While I'm disappointed with a number of
Obama's decisions thus far, I give him credit where due & his policy
toward the Arab-Israeli crisis is certainly not one of them. I'm
equally disgusted with right-wing Jews who label Israeli government
critics either "anti-Semites" or "self-hating Jews" if Jewish. If the
U.S. & Israel are such strong allies, it behooves us to reasonably
criticize them when their actions fly in the face of respect for civil
living standards.

......

You've got it all backwards. Here's your re-write: "President
Netanahu's abysmal attitude toward the United States and his humiliating
treatment of Vice President Biden is shocking." Israel has been taking
money from this country for decades now -- billions of dollars every
year -- which they continue to receive because they funnel enormous cash
donations to U.S. politicians to buy their loyalty. Who's left out of
this little arrangement? The American public, that's who.



The U.S. public does not care one bit about Israel. Why should they?
It's 5 million mostly Europeans in the last colony, living on stolen
land and killing all the natives. It's an old story and a tired one.
Nobody cares about Israel anymore because it has shown itself to be
completely selfish in all dealings with this country. The politicians
in our country actually take our tax dollars and send them to Israel to
buy apartments, pay for education and healthcare for the people of that
country. While our own people are homeless, cannot afford college, and
have no healthcare. I've never seen such a corrupt system as the con
that Israel has going on with the U.S. My vote is to cut off Israel and
leave them to solve their own problems, which after all are of their
own making.



Mayor Koch: if you want to support Israel, do it with your own money,
not mine.

........

As a Jew, I am so incredibly tired of Israel being portrayed as a Jewish
state and a bastion of democracy in the Middle East. In fact, Israel
is about as far ethically from the principles of Judaism as one could
get. It is militarism posing as Judaism, period. And it is most
certainly not a democracy for anyone who isn't Jewish. This idea that
Israel represent Jews in any way is fostering more and more
anti-semitism around the world because people mistake the nation of
Israel for some stand-in of Jewish ethics. It is not. And people like
Koch who want to continue to use the tired Holocaust reference as some
kind of a defense for truly indefensible behavior are only kidding
themselves as well as spitting on the graves of all of our ancestors.
If we wanted some kind of pay back for the Holocaust, then we should
have set up a nation in Germany. But if we want to build a real
nation, then we must learn how to behave with grace, dignity and a sense
of creating a better world for all, not just for the 6 million Jews
living on a tiny strip of land called Israel.

Israel would not exist without the United States and it's actions have not been in the best interest of the US for decades.  The only thing that has changed is that people are no longer afraid to say so.  If Israel wants to continue to survive it should start listening.  Antisemitism is the world is on the rise and the reason is Israeli policy.