While most eyes have been on Joe Biden’s upcoming trip to Israel and Saudi Arabia, the US Special Envoy for Antisemitism, Deborah Lipstadt, made her own sojourn to those lands. She claims that the two trips are not connected, but that claim is obviously either a lie or the result of massive naivete on her part.
Reminiscent of the public relations campaign, led by Tom Friedman, to sanitize and elevate Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS) as a reformer, Lipstadt is now portraying Saudi Arabia as a land trying to deal with its legacy of antisemitism. It’s horribly cynical and a doomed attempt to enlist the struggle against real antisemitism in the effort to bury the question of Palestine and to short circuit diplomacy in favor of a “Mideast NATO” with Israel at its center to set up a war posture against Iran.
I explain in my latest piece for The New Arab.