Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/author/a_zuness/page/2/)
For those of us who hoped that President Barack Obama would usher in a new era supporting international law, the United Nations, and Israeli-Palestinian peace, 2011 proved to be a profoundly disappointing year. In order for his policies to change, he needs to be pressured.
We must challenge both the right-wing obsession with individual morality (which is combined with a failure to address the far more significant moral issues inherent in economic and military policies), and those who seem to believe that societal injustice somehow gives license to personal irresponsibility.
The inspiring triumph of the Egyptian people in the nonviolent overthrow of the hated dictator Hosni Mubarak is a real triumph of the human spirit. It is disappointing, then, that what should be a near-universal celebration has been tempered by the right-wing Netanyahu government in Israel and its supporters in the United States.
The overbearing power and McCarthyite tactics wielded by the American Jewish establishment against critics of Israeli government policies has made critical discourse about U.S. support for the Israeli government extremely difficult. As a result, it is all too easy to buy into the arguments put forward by the book “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” that the ‘Israel Lobby’ is primarily responsible for the tragic course taken in U.S. Middle East policy.