America should not interfere in Israel's democratic process, and America will not interfere in Israeli elections when I'm the president. Let's make the principle of nonintervention a two-way street. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter, without adequate inducement or justification. A more succinct and picture-perfect description of America's relationship with Israel would be a hard assignment for any writer. And a shocking story it is.
Nobody really cares anymore.
Turkey's militant secularists unhesitatingly repress all Islamic parties, forbid the wearing of the chafor, and have for years carried out a pogrom against the Kurds rivaled in scope and murderousness only by their earlier slaughter of the Armenians. The longstanding repression of the Palestinians, and the Israeli Arabs, is inherent in the very concept of Zionism as the political extension of a religious-messianic faith. Palestinians are persecuted not only for their ethnicity and political affiliations by the Israeli government, but also on account of their religion. According to the Clinton Doctrine, this is a no-no. The argument that Israel is an island of democracy in a sea of authoritarianism, and that, furthermore, the bond between our two countries is indissoluble, held up for as long as the cold war lasted.