With all due respect, folks, Gilad’s observations about Jewish tribalism provide the only satisfactory explanation as to why otherwise progressive Jews including self-declared anti-Zionists have provided what to this point, has been an insurmountable roadblock in dealing with the two critical domestic issues germane to the Israel-Palestine conflict: the Israel Lobby/organized Jewish community and the question of US aid to Israel.

There is no other reason that I can come up with to explain why, outside of Mondoweiss, AIPAC has only become an issue in the past two years and then apparently only at MoveOver AIPAC last May. Sure, Chomsky and Zunes and later Finkelstein have deep-sixed the subject but that’s giving them Svengali like qualities they don’t possess. There must be something else that welcomes their dismissing of its importance.

And then we have the glaring question of US aid and the fact that there has yet to be a major campaign to educate the public about it and stop it. Instead, we have a choice of “End the Occupation!,” a useless slogan if there ever was one which has been either ignored or not understood by the vast majority of the American public that has no vested interest in either side, or at least didn’t before the rise of the evangelicals, and/or those pushing “two states for two peoples,” which, frankly, is of as little interest to the public as the problems of occupation.

But the public just might be CONCERNED about where its tax money goes and who and what groups are exempted from paying millions in taxes that benefit a foreign government. Why no campaign? Why no attempt to educate the public? (Sorry, BDS, is worthwhile, but it is not a substitute for the real thing.) It is not out of ignorance, I assure you. I have mentioned it before and will do so again. Some of the very same people were involved in a nationwide campaign to block the Contras from getting $15 million and they succeeded, which led to the Iran-Contra scandal. So why not aid to Israel? Looking at the composition of leadership of the pro-Palestinian organizations who I have known over the past 30 or so years, the answer jumps out: Jewish tribalism.