So this happened:
The US congressman Ro Khanna says armed Israeli settlers detained him during a visit to the Israel-occupied West Bank recently, describing the experience as a first-hand view of the realities faced by Palestinians living under occupation.
In an interview with Reuters on Thursday from a Palestinian village, the progressive US House Democrat from California said his detention happened the previous day while his delegation visited an area of the southern West Bank that has experienced repeated attacks by Israeli settlers.
Khanna recounted how settlers carrying US-made M4 rifles surrounded the group’s van.
“We were at a village that Israeli settlers had destroyed – they had destroyed the school, they had destroyed that village, and we were just looking at it,” Khanna said.
Referring to the Israel Defense Forces, which are funded in part by US military aid, Khanna continued: “And these hoodlums … detain us. They block off the road. And then they call the IDF and the IDF is on their side, not on the side of the Americans.”
Khanna also told Reuters: “I saw the arrogance in the eyes of those settlers, 21- and 22-year-olds with guns, laughing that they had detained us, the arrogance of those young IDF soldiers that my tax dollars are funding – having no respect for the fact that they were detaining Americans, no respect that there was an American congressperson in that bus, and laughing when our translator told them that there are Americans there and the American embassy is concerned.”
This is just another example, if we needed one more, of how Americans, especially Democrats, are completely taken for granted by Israel.
I read a piece the other day that said that Democrats began to wonder if our relationship with Israel is one-sided around when Netanyahu addressed a joint session of Congress with the aim of torpedoing the JCPOA, which was 2015. If that’s right — and I think it is — then the Gaza genocide was the last straw for a lot of Democrats rather than something that radically altered their thinking on Israel. In other words, the thinking of a lot of members of Congress, including Schumer, is a decade behind the thinking of the party rank-and-file
Even Rahm Emmanuel knows that he needs to do something to change the way that Democrats deal with Israel. He’s proposed a “23-state solution” involving every Arab nation, Israel and the Palestinians. That’s another nonsense, never-gonna-happen diversion that will kick the peace can so far down the road that it’s in another time zone. Still, Rahm at least knows that there’s a problem, even though his solution is terrible.
Back to Ro Khanna: the fact that this happened to him makes it, well, a little suspect. Khanna strikes me as mainly an opportunist. He’s supported Bernie Sanders for President, but he also supports the abundance agenda. I have yet to hear him go after social media, AI or any other societal afflictions that are headquartered in his district in Silicon Valley. His Wikipedia entry names him as a Presidential contender for 2028 (LOL) — it’s clear that he’s put his finger in the wind and felt the gale force of the anti-Israel sentiment in his party. If only the other “contenders” would understand how toxic support of Israel is to their political futures.
