It's the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fabulous)

Just got up, just heard Steve Inskeep of Morning Edition on NPR angrily asking the Israeli Ambassador Sallai Meridor (whom Horowitz dispatched on this site last night) what the goals were, when it was going to be over, aren't you empowering Hamas, etc. I missed the beginning of the interview, it doesn't matter. Inskeep was short with the ambassador, almost trembling with contained feeling. Inskeep is the son of an English teacher and grew up in Indiana. He's a real American, as my good friend Sarah Palin used to say. And he's at NPR, which administers the IV drip every morning on what Elite Blue Staters Are Allowed to Think. And he's angry.

This would never have happened before.

Inskeep would have checked himself and thought about the mantra, Israel's right to exist, Arabs have never missed an opportunity, what would Daniel Schorr with his Zionist mama say, blah blah blah...

It's over baby. The whole thing is over. I'm telling you. America is waking up at last and realizing that the warm cuddly furball it adopted in 1948 is a monster.

A few weeks ago one of my anti-Zionist friends murmured in an email to me, "I hate that f---ing country." I was shocked; it's not something I feel. But I think that sentiment is now seeping out through my country, and affecting people like Inskeep.

The American street is rising up. And everyone who has taken the wrong side of this easy important choice called the Gaza Slaughter, from Mayor Bloomberg to Jeffrey Goldberg, is suddenly going to find themselves on an ice floe to nowhere. Just ask the neoconservatives. (Jeffrey, get right with the lord, we need you.)

It really is the end of the Israel lobby, or a new phase. What Jack Ross said here yesterday is right. J Street and MJ Rosenberg are in the driver's seat; Obama is going to have room to be tough on Israel. 385 Palestinians have lost their lives for a reason. A horrifying thing to say (but it is what Norman Finkelstein said a month ago).

As Ross said, it might even be the end of the two-state solution, this moment when Americans see ethnic cleansing/genocide/apartheid, give it whatever name you please, and look at their wives or husbands and say, I hate that frakkin country, why have we believed a word they told us. I know, I'm dramatic, my wife always tells me that. But I'm right. And guess what's the next shoe to drop? The Nakba. You heard it here first.

http://www.philipweiss.org/mondoweiss/2008/12/its-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it-i-feel-fabulous.html