What are we to make of the Netanyahu humiliating smack down, the seeming indifference over the Iranian nuclear program, the nominations and appointments on the Middle East front of a Freeman or Power, the reach out to Syria and Iran, the interview with al Arabiya and the Cairo speech, the bow to a Saudi royal, the ritual trashing of George Bush juxtaposed to the praise of a Saudi king, the strange past outbursts of Obama advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski about hypothetically shooting down Israeli planes on their way to Iran, the ranting about Jews from the former spiritual advisor Wright, etc.
In short, the answer is that Israel is a construct of Western privilege — its democratic, capitalist, and Western customs hinge on the oppression of a vast “other” that is far more egalitarian, socialist, and antithetical to Western consumer-capitalism with all of its pathologies of race, class, and gender exploitation.
In that context, in archaic fashion, we struggle to damn any effort to end such hegemony and empower the voices of the oppressed. We are not, in fact, “allied” to Israel, but properly speaking instead should be to the underprivileged in the Gaza slums, to those without health care on the West Bank, and, yes, to the progressive Israelis of noble spirit who are trying to battle the reactionary Likudniks and instead do something about the tentacles of their own discriminatory state, whose capital is derived from exploited labor and resources of a silenced other.
And that, along with all the bilge he's imbibed over the years from the likes of Wright and Khalidi and Ayers, is why Obama is no friend of Israel, and why no pro-Israel Jew--even ones that really, really like him because he's black and cool and has a JFK-esque vibe--should be willing to trust him.
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