America, Palestine and Israel: is there hope?

This is nothing to do with Irish politics, but I thought it was interesting anyway.

I'm in America at the moment, and I spent a couple days this week in NYC. I lived there for a year and a half in the early 90s, and in upstate New York for a couple years after that, so my reflections in the following paragraph are based entirely upon experience.

As most people will be aware, there is a huge Jewish population in New York - such that Rosh Hashanah is a state holiday. This population is, by and large, fiercely Zionist, and its political influence is strong enough to have effectively cut off any debate on the subject - at least that was the case when I was living there. Outside of the (extremely marginalised) far left, and the unfortunately slightly less marginalised Nation of Islam, there was simply nobody arguing the Palestinian cause; to do so was to be labelled an 'anti-Semite' and, most likely, a sympathiser of those towelheads that had bombed the World Trade Centre shortly after my move to the city (merely a coincidence, I assure you).

So I was pleasantly stunned at a couple things I saw there this week. Things like Palestinian scarves on display for sale by the city's ubiquitous street vendors, and young, distinctively non-Arab people wearing them; and at every bookstore I visited, former President Jimmy Carter's extraordinary new book about the conflict, Peace not Apartheid (extraordinary in the fact that it exists, I mean; I haven't read it yet), was in the 'best sellers' section. These may seem fairly minor, and maybe they are, but they would have been absolutely unheard of a decade or so ago. Let's hope they're an indication of a loosening of the stranglehold the Israel lobby has had on American politics for decades - because as long as it persists, there can never be hope for peace in the Middle East and, increasingly, the world.

I've been back from holidays for most of the past week, but I've really been struggling to find things to write about. What's going in Lebanon just seems to overshadow everything happening here. It's horrifying and I think it's going to get worse before it gets better.

There's been enough posted elsewhere about the situation, and I don't feel I have anything particularly new to offer to the discussion, so I'm just going to register my utter revulsion at Israel's brutality and arrogance, and leave it at that. Hezbollah's tactics are wrong, but the Israeli response has been so exorbitantly out of proportion that one can only conclude they're enjoying themselves.

Death toll as of right now:
Israel - 51 deaths, 18 civilians
Lebanon - 523 deaths, mostly civilians

It's a sick joke for the Israelis to describe what they're doing as "self defence". It's gratuitous slaughter, nothing less.