Barbarism Begins at Home...or Abroad...

With Israel inching away from the two state solution proposed by #43 and Dr. Condee Rice in late 2007, what options remain for the moderates both within Israel and their supporters in the United States?

With Likud and the third place Ultra Nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu likely to hook up and form a far right governing coalition, it seems less and less likely that Israel will be willing to compromise Ysreal Eretz (biblical Israel) for the sake of peace. Conservative Christians in the United States understand very little about Israeli politics, even less about the Palestinian question, and consequently adhere to a very radically pro Israel position. Israel can do nothing wrong, so long as it does not compromise its own existence.

With the recent elections, it becomes more apparent to moderates on both sides of the Atlantic that this unquestioning relationship between American evangelicals and any pro Israel lobby is counter productive in the context of America's War on Terror, or any intentions by the Obama administration to coax the Israeli government toward a peaceful solution, which maintains basic human civil rights for Palestinians.

The Ultra Nationalists of Avigdor Lieberman's Yisreal Beiteinu are not to be confuesed with the Ultra Orthodox, or even religious Jewish conservatives. They may be practicing Jews or non-practicing, but they are not the Zionist Ashkenazim whose identity politics were shaped by the European Holocaust, and whose motives were largely secular and influenced by European socialism. They are akin to the United Russia party of Vladimir Putin, who many of these same evangelicals revile as a godless totalitarian. It was easy for Christians to hate the Soviet Union: after all they practiced and enforced state atheism. Those same Russians, many of whom have one Jewish Grandparent granting htem right of return to the motherland, have relocated to Israel. This new coalition is not what the evangelicals think it is. They should educate themselves, lest they be used as pawns by the conservative politicians in Israel much as they have been used by the Republican party in the US.