© John Minchillo/APMahmoud Ahmed gives a tour of his apartment, which was severely damaged by an Israeli airstrike on a neighboring building, May 24, 2021, in Magazzi, the Gaza Strip.
The Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin once said of history that there are decades that go by where nothing happens,
and there are weeks where entire decades happen. In the past week,
it seems as if the U.S. attitude towards Israel and Palestine has changed more than in the previous 50 years. Everybody seems to be acknowledging it, from progressive media to pillars of the establishment like
The New York Times and
The Washington Post. "The dam is cracking,"
wrote Abier Khatib of the Open Society Foundation.
Objectively, the violence during
Operation Protective Edge — the 2014 Israeli assault on Gaza —
was far worse. Even as Israeli forces broke the newly adopted ceasefire just hours after they signed it, storming the Al-Aqsa Mosque again on Friday,
the casualties are nothing like those of seven years ago, when well
over two thousand Palestinians were killed. Yet in 2014, the reaction from the American political elite was one of
total support for Israel.As Ryan Grim from The Intercept
noted, at the peak of the 2014 onslaught, Jessica Ramos, a progressive Democratic Party district leader in Queens, New York, took to Facebook simply to post the message
"Palestine <3," a statement that elicited a storm of condemnation and near hysteria from the political and media classes.
But seven years later, Ramos' innocuous statement is nothing to the strong denunciations of Israel seen in the highest halls of power.
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