MJ Rosenberg Must Have A Difficult Time At Passover Seder Every Year

“As for Americans, we learn, as if we didn’t know, that due to the pressure of AIPAC, we simply lie about the whole conflict. We pretend that the Palestinians still need to make concessions for peace when there are none left to make. No matter what the provocation — the brutal attack on the Gaza flotilla, the blockading of Gaza, Israel’s lies about the Goldstone Report, the land grabs in Jerusalem, the shootings of innocent Palestinians, the monstrous behaviour of settlers — we are silent unless we can enthusiastically endorse Israel’s position. We are not an honest broker. We are no broker at all. Worst of all, we know (the Al Jazeera papers confirm this) that we are endorsing Israeli positions that we know not to be true. Why do we do it? The same reason we don’t ban assault weapons. A lobby (only in this case, the lobby of a foreign government) is dictating our policies with no regard for the greater American good. So what’s next? One, the US must now absolutely refuse to veto the UN resolution condemning settlements or demonstrate to the world that, despite the Al Jazeera revelations, we are still utterly in Israel’s pocket (I won’t hold my breath).”
 — Media Matters Action Network senior foreign policy fellow MJ Rosenberg gives his take on Al Jazeera’s Wikileaks-like release of “The Palestine Papers,” a cache of over 1,600 internal documents from the past ten years of negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.