IT took almost six months for the UN Security Council to call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, after the US decided against kiboshing yet another call for peace with its customary veto against any challenge to Zionist belligerence.

In any context involving even a mild reprimand to Israel, outright US rejection has invariably been the default. An American abstention therefore supposedly counts as a big deal. That isn’t any more bizarre than the broader US-Israeli relations. Extensive Israeli interference in domestic US politics — generally unchallenged, unlike the less effective Russian or Chinese initiatives, imaginary or otherwise, that are condemned as threats to a depleted democracy — has been the norm since the 1950s.

It has evolved into more monstrous forms, but in recent decades has also faced vociferous resistance from younger American Jews who resent the idea of their identity being linked to a proto-fascist state that lays claim to their souls. This is not an entirely novel phenomenon. Even in what tend to be recalled as its halcyon days, Israel went out of its way to target diaspora critics — especially in the US, as Geoffrey Levin explains in his recent book Our Palestine Question.

The mission was reasonably........

© Dawn