“A Zionist Marie Antoinette”
By 
Unlike, say, Bret Stephens, Michelle Goldberg actually does bring a perspective you almost never see in elite op-ed pages to the Times op-ed page:
This spectacle, geared toward Donald Trump’s Christian American base, coincided with a massacre about 40 miles away. Since March 30, there have been mass protests at the fence separating Gaza and Israel. Gazans, facing an escalating humanitarian crisis due in large part to an Israeli blockade, are demanding the right to return to homes in Israel that their families were forced from at Israeli’s founding. The demonstrators have been mostly but not entirely peaceful; Gazans have thrown rocks at Israeli soldiers and tried to fly flaming kites into Israel. The Israeli military has responded with live gunfire as well as rubber bullets and tear gas. In clashes on Monday, at least 58 Palestinians were killed and thousands wounded, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
The juxtaposition of images of dead and wounded Palestinians and Ivanka Trump smiling in Jerusalem like a Zionist Marie Antoinette tell us a lot about America’s relationship to Israel right now. It has never been closer, but within that closeness there are seeds of potential estrangement.
[…]
The events of Monday may have changed it further, and things could get worse still. Tuesday is Nakba Day, when Palestinians commemorate their dispossession, and the protests at the fence are expected to be even larger. “People don’t feel like they can stay at home after loved ones and neighbors have been killed for peacefully protesting for their rights,” Abdulrahman Abunahel, a Gaza-based activist with the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, told me via email.
Trump has empowered what’s worst in Israel, and as long as he is president, it may be that Israel can kill Palestinians, demolish their homes and appropriate their land with impunity. But some day, Trump will be gone. With hope for a two-state solution nearly dead, current trends suggest that a Jewish minority will come to rule over a largely disenfranchised Muslim majority in all the land under Israel’s control. A rising generation of Americans may see an apartheid state with a Trump Square in its capital and wonder why it’s supposed to be our friend.
This is remarkably powerful writing, particularly in this context.
This is also an important point:
The problem, I think, is that a lot of things liberal American Jews have spent the past 15 years telling ourselves are untenable are in fact all-too-tenable. They’re just wrong and immoral. https://t.co/mWVHV49Wd0
— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) May 15, 2018
There’s no teological force pressing Israel to recognize the rights of Palestinians. The fact that it’s immoral doesn’t make it unsustainable in itself. Either the government will be pressured to change by some combination of external and internal pressure or they won’t.