U.S. Ambassador to Israel: Stop Screwing Things Up in the West Bank

by Jonas E. Alexis

U.S. ambassador Daniel B. Shapiro, who happens to be Jewish, is trying to be bad to the bone. He went to Israel last Monday just to tell the regime to get with the moral program.

“Too much Israeli vigilantism in the West Bank goes on unchecked,” he said.[1] Benjamin Netanyahu was obviously squealing when he heard the bad news. Shapiro wasn’t finished. He moved on to drop the political bomb on Israeli soil:

“There is a lack of thorough investigations. . . At times, it seems Israel has two standards of adherence to rule of law in the West Bank — one for Jews and one for Palestinians.”[2]

The Washington Post declares:

“Shapiro’s comments would strike many as a statement of fact: Palestinians in the West Bank live under military occupation, face Israeli military tribunals and can be held for months, even years, without charges; the Jewish settlers in the territory, however, are subject to Israeli civilian courts.”[3]

Of course, the madman in Tel Aviv has gone berserk and declared that Shapiro’s statement is “unacceptable and wrong.”[4]

We can ignore Netanyahu here, for he still believes that owns the entire universe and that no one can tell him that he has to abide by the rule of law and practical reason.

But we should welcome Mr. Shapiro to the rational world. We have been saying that Israel has played double standards in the moral and political firmament from time immemorial. In fact, the historical record shows that Israel has been treading on double standards with respect to the Iran nuclear deal.[5]

Moreover, Israel is a land where vicious racism is actually legal. Segregated schools and segregated buses in Israel have been going on since 1967,[6] and not a single Jewish organization in America complain about these issues.

But how do these Jewish organizations operate in America? They completely turned the public school system and indeed much of the culture into a mess of pottage during the 1960s.[7] Over time, “Intellectuals such as David Riesman and Daniel Bell replaced religious leaders as ‘the most authoritative public moralists’ for the nation.”[8]

One of the key figures during that time was none other than Leo Pfeffer, “the son of an immigrant Orthodox rabbi,” who, at the age of 15, “was deeply troubled by the daily Bible reading by Miss Knox, ‘probably a Protestant lady.’”[9] It was Pfeffer who hubristically declared in 1976 that the triumph of secularism was indeed good for the Jews.[10]

Jewish organizations, Jewish scholar Murray Friedman writes, “have successfully challenged Bible reading in the public schools and any form of state aid to parochial schools.”[11]

So, we are living in a world in which the Israeli regime and organized Jewry want to impose a standard on everyone and then a completely different standard on themselves. One needn’t be an intellectual to realize that something weird is going on here.

Even flaming Zionist Thomas Friedman of the New York Times writes that fifty-five segregated buses were in operation in Israel in 2009. He also reaffirmed the fact that the Israel Lobby largely dominates foreign policy in America.[12]

This double standard has been witnessed by many. For example, when Condoleezza Rice met former Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, Livni told her that Israel could not accept “a large number of Palestinian refugees to fulfill the Arab insistence of ‘right of return,’ as embodied in UN Resolution 194.” Why?

According to Rice, Livni admitted that Israel’s Jewishness—or “racial” purity for a better term—would be placed in danger. Listen to Rice very carefully here:

“I must admit that though I understood the argument intellectually, it struck me as a harsh defense of the ethnic purity of the Israeli state when Tzipi said it. It was one of those conversations that shocked my sensibilities as an American…there were Arab citizens of Israel. Where did they fit in? I took a deep breath and tried to understand, and slowly I came to see what she meant.”[13]

Rice tried to rationalize Livni’s admission by saying that “

for most Israelis, their country’s birth had been the fulfillment of a long historical and religious journey to reestablish ‘the Jewish state.’ The right of return for Palestinians was inconsistent with the conclusion of that thousands-year-old process.

“Despite the dissonance that it stirred in me, I suggested that the President include the line that made it clear that Palestinian refugees would be expected to live in Palestine. That would allow the democratic state of Israel to be ‘Jewish.’”[14]

What we are seeing here is the influence of a powerful ideology over truth, reason, and conscience. The practical reason was to tell Rice that Livni’s ideology was morally repugnant and intellectually worthless, but Livni’s ideology won because Rice chose a wicked ideology over truth.

The only way that Rice could rationalize the issue was because it was Israel. If any other country declared the same thing, Rice would have argued that it was a violation of human rights. So, was Rice a Zionist whore and a political prostitute?

You bet.

Citations

• [1] Quoted in Danika Fears, “US ambassador blasts Israel on West Bank settlements,” NY Post, January 19, 2016.
• [2] Ibid.
• [3] William Booth, “U.S. ambassador’s comments ignite diplomatic row with Israel,” Washington Post, January 19, 2016.
• [4] Ibid.
• [5] See for example Trita Parsi, Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); A Single Roll of the Dice: Obama’s Diplomacy with Iran (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012).
• [6] See Illan Pappe, The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), chapter 3.
• [7] For an introductory study on this, see Murray Friedman, The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); see also E. Michael Jones, “Ethnic Cleansing, Philadelphia-Style,” Culture Wars, November 1997; “The Apology In Context: Fifty Years of Catholic-Jewish Kulturkampf,” Culture Wars, May 2000; “Rabbi Dresner’s Dilemma: Torah v. Ethnos,” Culture Wars, May 2003.
• [8] Friedman, The Neoconservative Revolution, 13.
• [9] Ibid., 14.
• [10] See E. Michael Jones, The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History (South Bend: Fidelity Press, 2008), 1000-1001.
• [11] Friedman, The Neoconservative Revolution, 43.
• [12] Thomas L. Friedman, “Newt, Mitt, Bibi and Vladimir,” NY Times, Dec. 13, 2011.
• [13] Condoleezza Rice, No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington (New York: Crown, 2011), 182.
• [14] Ibid., 282.

Jonas E. Alexis, Senior Editor

Jonas E. Alexis has degrees in mathematics and philosophy. He studied education at the graduate level. His main interests include U.S. foreign policy, the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the book, Kevin MacDonald’s Metaphysical Failure: A Philosophical, Historical, and Moral Critique of Evolutionary Psychology, Sociobiology, and Identity Politics. He teaches mathematics in South Korea.

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