The Pro-Israel Establishment’s Five Stages of Grief

This week’s Zoom call will be at our regular time: Friday at 1 PM. Our guest will be Chris Van Hollen, Democratic Senator from Maryland. He’s been among the senators most vocal about changing US policy toward Israel. In May, he wrote a New York Times column calling for conditioning US arms sales to the Jewish state and suggested that “Democrats should pursue a last-gasp effort to salvage a two-state solution. If that effort fails, the United States will have to consider other options to secure equal political and legal rights for all.” We’ll talk about how the Democratic Party is changing and about what it will take to transform US policy toward Israel-Palestine. Please join us. Cited in Today’s Video The five stages of grief. Rahm Emanuel’s speech in Tel Aviv. Things to Read (Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.) In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Charlotte Ritz-Jack reports on how Israel’s withholding of tax revenues is undermining education in the West Bank. Ro Khanna gets a taste of Palestinian life in the West Bank. John Judis on what Democrats should learn from the Graham Platner fiasco. On August 23, I’ll be speaking in Sydney, Australia. See you on Friday, Peter VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: I’ve been thinking about the speech that Rahm Emanuel gave in Tel Aviv last week, and I think it could be understood as a form of bargaining. I’m taking that term from these famous five stages of grief from the psychiatrist Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. She says the five stages—I’m sure many of you have heard this before—are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. And I think if you look at the way that supporters of Israel have responded to this huge shift that we’re seeing in the United States, I think you can see it move through these stages. So, it wasn’t that long ago that the standard line from people who wanted to maintain unconditional U.S. support for Israel was denial that the public opinion had changed, that the United States was no longer an overwhelmingly pro-Israel country in the sense that it wanted America to give Israel unconditional military and diplomatic support. And I think more recently, you’ve seen the second stage, which is anger, which is kind of like, you know, fury that there’s this kind of new anti-Israel, even anti-Zionist politics, and of course, generally defined from within the pro-Israel space as a kind of a tsunami of antisemitism. But Rahm Emanuel’s speech, I think, is a third phase, which is bargaining. Now, Rahm Emanuel had always been, you know, a supporter of unconditional U.S. support for Israel, kind of on the liberal side, but certainly he had never supported the kind of sanctions that he’s talking about before. And I think Rahm Emanuel is now trying to essentially bargain with this new politics, which is emerging in the Democratic Party, and also among young Republicans, and trying to say, okay, the US is going to now pressure Israel more than it has, and especially put sanctions on the West Bank, and there can be a new bargain. I think the problem—and I think, by the way, that the fourth stage, depression, is something we may start to see evidence of in the years to come as well. By depression, I mean people kind of bemoaning the fact that they’ve lost the American public, maybe doing a version, a pro-Israel Jewish version, even of what was called the Benedictine option, which was something we saw among Christian conservatives during the Obama years, where they said, we’ve lost the country. It’s becoming irredeemably progressive and woke. We need to retreat from it into our own kind of enclaves where we can maintain our own virtues. But in this case, being pro-Israel, you know, create your own institutions, this kind of thing. But to go back to the nature of the bargain that Rahm Emanuel is suggesting. It is a significant step forward in that it is an end to unconditional U.S. support for