My latest New Matilda column is about the recent Annapolis conference and the Zionist lobby’s failure to understand how the political realities are changing:
Despite the rhetoric wafting from the Zionist camp that most West Bank settlements would be abandoned in a peace deal, a recent poll found that the vast majority of these settlers would not leave voluntarily if offered cash incentives. After decades of supporting these fundamentalists, Israel has created for itself a situation — if they are ever forced to evacuate the settlements — that is likely to end in a civil war between secularists and religionists. Young settlers continue to flout the rarely enforced laws.
But perhaps the most interesting development of the Annapolis conference, little discussed in the mainstream, was the reaction of US Jewish groups to even the idea of negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. Remarkably, a major donor of the country’s leading Zionist lobby, AIPAC, chastised the group for supporting a letter in the Congress that would have increased aid for the Palestinians. This is what being pro-Israel truly means for many in the Zionist community.