jcunanan

I recently attended the annual lunch of the UK Labour Friends of Israel, whose assembled throng was made up largely of those Jews indefatigable, courageous, or plain masochistic enough to have stuck with the party of the British left[1] through the Corbyn interregnum (or who have returned since the unquiet fall of the ancien régime) and those outlier non-Jews whose leftism incorporates Zionism – foundationally so, for some of us.

This time it’s different.

I can recall how, in 1977, when Menachem Begin and the Likud came to power after three decades of Labor Party rule, there was alarm verging on panic in some circles.

I woke up on Saturday morning, read the news from Israel that at least 50,000 Israelis had just demonstrated once more against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plans to strip the Israeli Supreme Court of its independence and put it instead under Netanyahu’s thumb — at a time when Netanyahu himself is facing corruption charges — and I asked myself a simple question: “What does President Biden think of this?”