On the Israel-Palestine issue our political culture and our view of the world diverged from reality decades ago, and we are only now beginning to recover.
One of the reasons this is happening now is almost certainly due to the internet allowing access to a wider range of news and opinion than was possible before-- and because of that, we can expect increasing attempts at undermining the net. The FCC vote coming up on net neutrality is genuinely important, and could turn out to be a turning point in history...
In some respects, the Israel-Palestine issue is a worse failure of our collective intelligence than even the Iraq war, which similarly infected both major political parties, but which at least left much of the left relatively untouched. With Israel-Palestine, there's been a faction of the left that has always seen, but they were effectively marginalized for many years.
So: how did this all happen? Just to pick one account, let's look at this Seth Ackerman piece, "Israel and the Media: An Acquired Taste", published in Wrestling with Zion, ed. Kushner & Solomon (2003, Grove):
Today it's often forgotten that in Israel's early years conventional wisdom was not so favorably disposed to the Jewish State. Elite opinion in the 1940s and early 1950s, although sympathetic to the plight of Jewish refugees, viewed fervent support for Israel as the clamoring of an unruly ethnic special-interest minority-- one with a suspiciously leftist tinge.
American Jews in those Cold War years were seen as liberals and leftists. Israel was a "socialist democracy" and the Soviet Union had backed its creation in 1948. ...
In such a climate, it is not surprising that the country's leading newspaper, the New York Times, owned by an old respectable Jewish family, was decidedly cool to Zionism. Like Adolph Ochs, the family patriarch, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the publisher of the Times in those years, was opposed to a Jewish state. ...
In the 1960s, conventional wisdom changed. A new view of Israel had quietly been evolving in Washington officialdom in the years since the 1956 Suez crisis. Radical Arab nationalism was gathering strength in the Middle East and Israel was increasingly seen as a vital counterweight. ...
... as the influence of Egypt's Nasser spread-- menacingly, in Washington's eyes-- a new type of thinking emerged: "If we choose to combat radical Arab nationalism and to hold Persian Gulf oil by force if necessary, a logical corollary would be to support Israel as the only strong pro-West power left in the Near East." Eisenhower asserted at a 1958 National Security Council meeting. ...
The changing view of Israel filtered into the perceptions of the news media. As Vietnam dragged on and Third World liberation movements challenged American power on every continent, editors, opinion makers, columnists, and pundits absorbed a new found admiring regard for the Jewish State: It was now a bulwark of Western values and interests, a battering ram against Third World radicalism, a strategic asset. In the media, the Six-Day War of 1967 was the turning point.
So that's the scenario: the left-wing Israel of old turned to the right, and the American right embraced it at a time when the US was too busy with Vietnam to watch out for its "interests" in the Middle East, which no one would suggest are "all about oil" except for some crazy conspiracy theorists and Dwight Eisenhower-- and out of that confluence of left, right and Zionism the New York Times was brought on board promoting a pro-Israel consensus reality. And once the NYT-wits are on your side, it's game over.
Seth Ackerman-- who at the time was a media analyst for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR)-- also discusses some research that nicely proves the existence of media bias: e.g. the phrase "occupied territories" was once common, but has dwindled to downplay the fact that Israel is an invading, aggressor nation.
So, why is everyone (except for our political candidates) suddenly catching on? What's different now? Two things:
- The Iraq war debacle has created widespread cynicism about US foreign policy even inside the US. It's gotten a lot harder to trust the Very Serious people in New York and DC as the voices of wisdom.
- The Internet has created a situation where it's now very easy to get news from non-mainstream sources, such as Aljazeera, and Ha'aretz; the Guardian UK and Independent UK; Democracy Now and the Nation
Both points might be summed up with Norman Finklestein's phrase: it's a matter of "Knowing Too Much".
It's the second point that concerns me at present: During the Vietnam war, the official narrative of the war ended up being challenged by the then still new medium of television news-- the powers-that-be have learned much from that experience, and have made it a point to neutralize that news source. The American people are not allowed to see the blood and bodies on television, the embedded media reporters are carefully kept away from screaming, terrorized children, we're not even allowed to see the flag-draped coffins of fallen soldiers returning to the US.
Given this history, the question that should be on your minds is: "what are they going to try to do to the internet?".
The issue at hand is net neutrality, on which you can: