Benjamin Moser writes:

You’ll often hear that foreign policy is not a priority of Americans. That may be true of some foreign policy issues, but what most people on every side of this issue understand is that Israel-Palestine is not really foreign policy. We all know that this war is made in America: On Monday, Israel received its 500th shipment of bombs from the United States. We know how many billions of dollars in aid we send Israel, without the slightest restriction. We have all seen the horrifying footage of schools and hospitals and refugee camps blown up, and we all know where the bombs are made. And we have also seen a Democratic administration—the same administration in which Kamala Harris is the vice president—refuse to go through even the rhetorical motions of condemning this unbelievable horror.

We know that Palestine is an American problem. It’s not like Rwanda, say, or Bosnia. You can say that the United States could have stopped those genocides, but not that the United States caused or supported them. We were not actually sending billions of dollars to the Hutus or the Serbs. We were not handing out machetes in Kigali as we are handing out 2000-pound bombs to Israel. Slobodan Milosevic was not, like Benjamin Netanyahu, getting standing ovations in the United States Congress.

We also know that Palestine is a moral problem that goes to the heart of who we are—or who, at the convention, we were pretending to be. It is a problem that asks a harsh question: Do the principles to which the Democrats pay such joyous lip service, the principles that go to what we were always told was our nation’s very reason for existing, actually mean anything? After all, it’s not as if we didn’t hear about those principles at the convention. We heard a lot about freedom. We didn’t hear a lot about what that might look like for the Palestinians, or how many more decades they are expected to wait for it. We heard, ad nauseam, that Trump broke the law. We didn’t hear so much about how Israel’s constant defiance of international law—most recently, of a damning verdict from the International Court of Justice—makes a mockery of the entire idea of law and justice. We heard a lot about feminism, about the “glass ceiling” confronting powerful women like Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton. We didn’t hear too much about the women of Gaza. We heard about “saving democracy.” We didn’t hear so much about bringing democracy to a trapped population that has no citizenship, no vote, and no civil rights.

It’s not that people didn’t want to talk about these things. It’s that they were not allowed to. [Continue reading…]