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January 14th, 2021 
Awake Goy 
The following is the latest installment of The Shift, our weekly newsletter looking at U.S. politics and Palestine. Sign up here.
Israel is cited by Trump’s friends and opponents in impeachment debate
It’s been a big week in U.S. politics, of course and Israel policy figures everywhere, let me count the ways.
Israel came up during the second impeachment vote. Two Republicans defended Trump for his Israel policy. Rep. Lee Zeldin said angrily that the House ought to thank the president “for his efforts to move the embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights” and the “historic” Israeli normalization deals too.
While Doug LaMalfa of northern California berated Democrats for their hatred of Trump’s achievements and segued from the planet to Israel. “You hate him for not subscribing and shackling us to the religion of climate change and one-sided Paris accords. You hate him for Israel.”
Not to be outdone on the Israel front, Nancy Pelosi quoted the Israeli poet Ehud Manor, in her own impeachment speech. “I can’t keep silent in light of how much my country’s changed her face.” (“Manor wrote the song in the wake of the First Lebanon War, when the left could mount a mythical 400,000 person demonstration following the Sabra and Shatila massacre,” Yossi Gurvitz tells me.)
Netanyahu’s Trump hangover
More importantly, there are signs in the media that Benjamin Netanyahu’s incredible closeness with Donald Trump will now hurt the Forever Prime Minister of Israel, in his dealings with Joe Biden and/or the March 23 election in Israel. Netanyahu removed a photo of himself with Trump that had long been the banner of his twitter feed this week and the conventional wisdom is that Trump is a liability for Netanyahu.
Biden’s Trump hangover
Of course, Trump gave Israel endless gifts. His right-wing settler-loving ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, exulted in an unseemly manner over these victories for Zionism in an interview with the New York Times.
“There’s no going back on what we’ve been able to do… I’m frankly somewhere between addicted and intoxicated with what I’ve been able to do, and how much joy it gives me.”He said the White House had “injected a tremendously needed dose of realism into the Palestinian psyche about what’s achievable and what’s not.”
Friedman will continue to live in Israel, he says, and maybe get Israeli citizenship. What does this say about the ambassador’s role? Who cares, right? Our last ambassador, under a Democrat, also kept living in Israel, and really ought to register as a foreign agent.
The conventional wisdom on how Biden will handle Trump’s mess in Israel and Palestine is that he will avoid confrontation with Netanyahu, but work against Israeli settlement expansion on the margins. “[T]he Trump administration policies likely to have the shortest shelf life will be the ones related to how the U.S. views the status of the West Bank,” says Michael Koplow of Israel Policy Forum.
Netanyahu seems to want a confrontation, announcing yet more settlements this week. While Ruth Margalit conjectures in the New Yorker that Biden will have more political room to manage Israel than Barack Obama did because all three of Biden’s children are married to Jews. Jeez, is that the standard? Margalit also quotes a great post-election tweet by Martin Indyk about Netanyahu bragging that he’s known Joe Biden for 40 years:
PS Joe Biden has had a lot to swallow in those 40 years from Israeli leaders. I have suggested that it’s payback time.
Sheldon Adelson effected evil policies, and escaped media scrutiny
The other big news this week was of course the death of Sheldon Adelson at 87 on January 11. Formerly a Democrat, and always pro-abortion rights, Adelson and his Israeli-American wife Miriam Adelson gave more to Republicans than anyone else in the last eight years and buoyed Trump again and again. All because of Israel; and they were repaid for their support with a string of destructive policies, from legitimizing settlements to moving the embassy to Jerusalem to cashiering the Iran deal. Miriam acknowledged this in her memorial to her husband Tuesday.
“He crafted the course of nations. Some of the historical achievements he helped effect — in the United States, Israel, and elsewhere, are publicly known. Others are not.“
Adelson’s death surely marks the end of an era, though politicians are already focused on his widow to continue his legacy of giving.
There has been some controversy online over leftists applauding Adelson’s death. That’s not me. In fact, let me say something good about Adelson. As his wife says in her passionate memorial to him, he had kindness, romance and directness. I followed Adelson as closely as I could for years and I could see those qualities in the son of a Boston cabbie who made billions in the casino business. He was salty, entertaining, and larger than life. He directed his love to other Jews, and Zionists.
Out of that passion, Sheldon Adelson did more evil than just about anyone on our political landscape. He regularly derogated Palestinians as a non-people, made bigoted statements about Muslims, issued hateful violent demands about Iran– telling Obama to nuke the country — and objectified young Jews as Barbie and Ken dolls, seeking to manipulate them to make more Jewish babies for the next generation.
The amazing thing about these attitudes is that: 1, Unlike the fulminations of a lot of other 80 year old throwback cranks, Adelson’s ideas were enormously persuasive in Washington and in Jewish life; and 2, For all their power, they went all but unscrutinized by the media.
As for his effectiveness, Adelson was close to the last two Republican presidents, was regularly on the phone to Trump, and appeared to play him like a “puppet,” as Trump once observed of Adelson’s influence. Adelson set out to destroy the peace process under Bush and destroy hopes for peace in the Middle East under Trump. And he succeeded to the point that Biden must now struggle with Adelson’s legacy. When Trump said U.S. troops are only in the Middle East because of Israel, it’s not crazy to speculate that he derived this understanding from Sheldon Adelson.
You really can buy evil policy. Look at the money:
“[Adelsons] contributed over $100 million to Super PACs supporting Trump in 2016 and 2020 and, in the 2020 election cycle alone, wrote about $250 million in checks to support Trump and GOP House and Senate candidates.”
It must be noted that Adelson wasn’t radioactive in Democratic Party ranks. He worked with Democrats to oppose BDS (the only logical response to Israel’s human rights violations) and to push his free Birthright trips to Israel for young-Jews-only.
The great democratic pity of Adelson’s career of destruction is that the media avoided scrutinizing him. He was almost never profiled– surely because Adelson’s mere existence fulfilled an antisemitic stereotype (puppet-master, to quote Donald Trump). The few profiles you will find were mere exceptions to the rule, the biggest one being Connie Bruck’s pathbreaking piece in the New Yorker 12 years ago in which George Bush reportedly bridled at Adelson’s relentless demand that he support Netanyahu, saying he couldn’t be more Catholic than the Pope. When NPR covered Adelson they would always call him a casino magnate and even imply that this was the cause of his political largesse, though Adelson himself said that he was a “one-issue” person and that issue was Israel.
The gauntlet that the Koch brothers have regularly had to run in the liberal media was utterly absent in Adelson’s case. In fact, I got the biggest scoop of my career, revealing that Adelson had called on Obama to nuke Iran in 2013, at a public hall in Manhattan where Adelson had appeared, and there were another half dozen reporters in attendance. Yet somehow I could take the train home, go to sleep, and wait till the following morning to report the line, and still get the scoop.
“We should have known him better, and he wanted to know us better,” James North said to me yesterday. Yes, Adelson preferred talking to a friendly audience. Who doesn’t? But he would have said much more publicly if the media had put even a scintilla of pressure on him. They didn’t. The one brief exchange I had with Sheldon was in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem when he was running a fundraiser for Mitt Romney in 2012. There should have been a crush of reporters, there were just a handful. “Why didn’t reporters go to him when he was alive and ask, What is this love of Israel to you? You’re the biggest single donor to the Republican Party?” North goes on. “It’s covering up the power of the Israel lobby. But he was a kingpin of the lobby and saw no reason to cover up what he felt.”
Indeed if reporters had pressed Adelson to be more public, or sought to reveal his private mutterings, we would inevitably have seen more of the hideous extreme statements he made about Muslims and Palestinians or Iranians. And Adelson might have become a questionable figure in American politics, rather than a loveable irascible redhead.
No, Sheldon sailed under the radar. People didn’t even know how to pronounce his name. Lester Holt got it right on NBC Nightly News, addle-son. Judy Woodruff booted it on PBS. When his name should have been a household word.
Creeping Apartheid… in the media anyway.
Thanks to B’Tselem’s overdue declaration this week, even CNN has reported the charge that Israel practices apartheid from the river to the sea. Let’s remind readers that the US media have long punished such realistic views. In 2006 Jimmy Carter was labeled an antisemite for putting the a-word in the title of his book warning Israel about its annexationist policies. He was virtually barred from the Democratic Party for the indiscretion. And Wolf Blitzer and Terry Gross participated in the redlining of Carter for this heresy.
The Israel lobby divides over the IHRA definition of antisemitism
A major push has begun for Biden to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which of course includes virtually any strong criticism of Israel, such as denying the right of the Jewish people to “self-determination” in a homeland there, or comparing Israelis to Nazis.
But the Israel lobby is divided between its Likudnik and Meretz branches. Jewish Insider reports that a pro-IHRA letter signed by leaders of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations leadership also has the support of the “heads of the Jewish Federations of North America, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, Hadassah and the Orthodox Union.”
Meantime, a group of ten liberal Zionist groups is urging Biden not to adopt the definition. They write:
“[C]ritiques of the legitimacy of Israel’s founding or the nature of its laws and system of government, even when we may disagree — sometimes passionately — with those opinions…. are critical for democracy and accountability.”
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