There are probably only about eight basic plots for gangster movies: one of them involves the out-of-control younger brother and friend, for whom the older, more stable gangster covers for so long as he can; it usually does not end well for the chaotic one. Scorsese's Mean Streets is the archetype: Harvey Keitel is the "good" gangster, Robert DeNiro the crazy one. A much older DeNiro plays a similar role in Goodfellas; De Niro gives good crazy. Come to think of it, this probably serves as a subplot in many other gangster films; Al Pacino covering for John Cazale's character, Fredo, in The Godfather, is a variant, though Cazale is merely weak and unreliable, not violent. In an excellent small film I just saw, Fresh Kills, there is a cousin for whoim everyone is always making excuses, who pays them all back by becoming a rat.
Israel is the younger sibling in a gangster film. This has been true my entire lifetime, but is so much more overt since the merciless destruction of Gaza began. In Mean Streets, Keitel continually intervenes with DeNiro, counseling prudence and caution, obtaining promises, which De Niro then breaks in a heartbeat. In this genre, if you get the younger brother to promise respect to another gangster, he either insults him ( Mean Streets), or kills him (Goodfellas). The price for the wiser gangster: he looks weak, loses face when not obeyed; his obvious partiality for the crazy one undermines him both with his own troops and his elders.
By the way, I have discovered over and over the suitability of gangster metaphors for international relations. ("Nice economy you have here. You wouldn't want anything to happen to it, would you?").
The Forgettery has almost completely erased the Israeli air force attack on an American spy ship, Liberty, in international waters during the 1967 war, killing 34 crew. While this was presented by both governments as a "fog of war" error, the crew of the Liberty and some other knowledgeable ex-military commentators have suggested it was a deliberate attack. It is uncontested that the ship was spying on Israeli as well as Egyptian communications, and may have become privy to Israel's then-secret plan to invade the Golan, or the execution of Egyptian prisoners on the nearby coast. Whatever the explanation, American minimization, whitewashing, and eventually oblivion about the event, and the failure of Israel to punish anyone for what it itself admited was an act of gross negligence, symbolize the American-Israeli sibling-gangster relationship.
President Biden's gentle remonstrations today ("Don't bomb schools. Don't strafe aid convoys. Don't bomb places you ordered Gazans to take refuge") are always met with an immediate Israeli repetition of the behavior. I Flash on Harvey Keitel performatively biting his fist to demonstrate his "outrage" at DeNiro's shenanigans, which he completely failed to stop. The Keitel character, too easygoing to succeed as a gangster, seems to suit Biden to a T.
As I have written elsewhere, I have been angry with Israel, distrusted and opposed it, since at age twelve or so I learned that Israel was bulldozing the family homes of terrorists, making innocent people homeless to punish the violent. During the seventies, when every few days one read of a bombed or hijacked airplane or an attack on a Jewish deli, I tremendously resented the idea that, as a Jewish person or as an American, I might die for Israel, for a nation to whom I felt no loyalty or liking. (I used to say that if I was killed for Israel, I would be very angry.)
Thousands of Americans have in fact died for Israel without choosing to: the hundreds of marines and diplomats killed by suicide bombers in our disastrous and egotistical incursion into Lebanon in the Reagan years; the crew of the USS Cole; all of the victims of 9/11; every American who died on an airplane, a ship, in an airport, or other public place as the result of an attack by the PLO, Al Quaeda, or the Islamic State; every soldier who died in Iraq or Afghanistan; and add to this the crew of the Liberty who were directly killed by Israel. What has this huge sacrifice been for? Not for a principle, not to protect another (it would be shameful to ontologize this that way, when the victims never chose to risk death), not for our own nation to whom we feel loyalty-- but for a chaotic gangster brother. This is a shameful, meaningless loss.
One of the sales tropes Zionists use is that Israel has made Jews safer. The opposite has always been true, as I illustrate above; but it was really confirmed on October 7, 2023, by the biggest massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust. The tactical and political ways in which Israel failed to protect its people have been well-elucidated; the concentration of military forces in the north, leaving the Gaza border unguarded; Netanyahu's strange fondness for Hamas over the Palestinian people. All this concentration leads us (as always) to disregard the strategic and even existential considerations: the foundation of a Jewish state in a place where there were already people living (yet regarded, as the old Zionist saw had it, as an empty land); the creation of a walled-in enclave, Gaza, whose people couldn't leave, into which Israel is now pouring two thousand pound bombs. Israel is a constant war in progress, a security risk, and a bad friend.
What is our duty to Israel? For the Jews I grew up with, it was a sentimentality which forestalled thought and misdirected compassion, to the people who needed it less, and to some who don't deserve it at all. For American fundamentalists, pro-Israel antisemites, it is the scene of the required battle against the anti-Christ, after which Christ returns and the Jews are plunged in a punishing lake of fire. Netanyahu's choice of an alliance with these crazy people, and abandonment of liberal and democratic Jews, was a burning act of shame and one more confirmation that Israel is a gangster-"friend". For the administration of universities today, the duty arises from even sleazier considerations: fear of billionaire donors like Mark Rowan and William Ackman, and of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce (a wannabe HUAC).
Which is a segue to the very worst harm Israel is doing to America: it is now actively (and apparently quite knowingly) acting to undermine the Constitution, democracy and free speech. Ynet News, an Israeli news service, reports that Israel's Diaspora Affairs Ministry (home of hasbara-- look it up) has established and funded a taskforce to carry out the following activities on US campuses: "Personal, economic and employment repercussions for the distributors of antisemitism, an action that should not have the signature of the State of Israel on it; Israel will examine options against civil society organizations active in the United States and in general....Naming and Shaming: Publicizing the names of those generating antisemitism on campuses – both students and faculty and impacting the employment of those identified as perpetrators of antisemitism. This means that antisemitic students will struggle to find employment in the U.S. and will pay a significant economic price for their conduct".
t doesn't sound so bad or so undemocratic to go after hatred, right? Here's the context: All anti-zionism is deemed antisemitism, as the House Committee on Education and the Workforce has resolved in those exact words, and the Republican-dominated House itself. Netanyahu agrees: "Netanyahu has accused critics of Israel or his policies of antisemitism, using fiery rhetoric to compare them to the Jewish people’s worst persecutors. But his detractors say he is overusing the label to further his political agenda and try to stifle even legitimate criticism".
I can personally testify that individual students, some faculty, officious intermeddlers from outside the university, right wing groups such as Accuracy in Media and Campus Reform, and billionaire donors are all subjecting the universities to unbearable pressure to suspend or fire pro-Palestinian students and faculty-- I have been defending the latter full time for free, for a year. I will write about all this in more detail, but, alone or in teams of eight or ten lawyers and supportive faculty, I have represented about 600 students,and more than 100 faculty, in more than thirty universities,in disciplinary proceedings and Title VI investigations and other adversarial processes, and brought thirteen law suits so far. Many of my clients feel righteous anger at Israel, but none are antisemites.
The proof is in the Jews at their sides. There are many Jewish members of Students for Justice in Palestine, and Jewish and even Israeli professors in Faculty for Justice in Palestine, and Jews have of course formed their own organizations such as Jewish Voice for Peace. I represent many Jewish students and faculty, and every Palestinian and Arab client-- every nonJewish client-- has Jewish friends and colleagues whom they like and trust. The adversaries, those trying to drive all Palestinan faculty and students from the universities, cannot say the same.
The punch-line-- the ultimate proof of their bad faith-- is that when their victims identify themselves as Jewish, the adversaries perform a sleight-of-hand, to ontologize them as not: they are false Jews, faithless Jews, self-hating Jews, not Jews at all-- and they proceed to file antisemitism complaints against them, which the universities obligingly investigate.
Netanyahu supports Donald Trump; many Zionist American Jewish people support him (such as Rowan); all fundamentalist Christian Zionists do; the right wing orgs such as Campus Reform do; many of the students most prominent in the campaign against the universities are Trumpists, such as Alexander Kestenbaum at Harvard. Since, as I have written in a hundred places, Trump is the most dangerous solvent dissolving democracy and free speech right now, it breaks my heart that Jewish people are on board for totalitarianism and the end of the Constitutional experiment. As I wrote to two Jewish Trump supporters in the letters column of my local paper last week: "I am a proud proponent of the Judaism of Montefiore, Spinoza, Mendelssohn, and Einstein. What do you guys stand for?"
The Korean war proved that we could lose a lot of Americans in a gangsterish adventure without fundamentally changing at home; Vietnam was the exception where our democracy began to crack, trying to sustain it. The numbers of Americans who have died for Israel is so modest by comparison, that (brutal as this statement is for those who lost someone) we could go on losing Americans in this way without being "harmed" in the fashion I mean. Israel, via the hasbara operation, going straight at the throat of democracy, on our own soil, and enlisting American supporters along the way, is the ultimate harm. It establishes that Israel is not merely a chaotic friend, but a sociopathic one, the kind who pushes you off a cliff while taking a picture.