In my latest piece for Mondoweiss, I look at the confluence of recent events at the United Nations and in the discourse around Israel and Palestine on Capitol Hill.
Specifically, the speech of Yair Lapid at the UN General Assembly, supported explicitly by US President Joe Biden, and the horrific pile-on of Rashida Tlaib by members of her own Democratic Party. I argue that these were related events, and that they are both connected to the panic over growing support for Palestinian rights among Democrats and other progressives in the United States.
Rashida, who made the self-evident statement that one cannot simultaneously claim to be a progressive and support apartheid in Palestine, was savaged by her own party, falsely accused of antisemitism, and attacked with every tool of disingenuity at the disposal of pro-apartheid forces. Lapid, meanwhile, is trying desperately–with the help of Biden and the Democrats–to revive the illusion that a two-state solution is still possible, because only that possibility allows people who want to live the contradiction of supporting apartheid and claiming progressive values to find a bogus reconciliation to salve their conscience. Check it out at Mondoweiss.