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March 4th, 2021 
Awake Goy The New York Times just ran an article in which an Israeli documentary filmmaker asserts that “Evangelicals are the only significant power outside Israel that is openly supporting the settlements. No one else does.”
This is simply not true. The Times reporter, David Halbfinger, accepts the assertion from filmmaker Maya Zinshtein even though he served as Jerusalem bureau chief when two very powerful Jewish supporters of the settlements were all over our politics: Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and Mideast envoy; and David Friedman, Donald Trump’s personal attorney and then-ambassador to Israel. Kushner’s family foundation backed settlements. Friedman embraced settlements fulsomely. Their “vision” was the Trump “peace plan” that called for Israel to annex large portions of the West Bank.
The Times gave a full page to a promotion of Zinshtein’s documentary, “’Til Kingdom Come,” in which the paper repeatedly describes Christian evangelicals as the basis of rightwing American and Israeli policies. “Zinshtein [shows] how the settlers reap enormous political support and raise money from evangelicals, who, she argues, directly and indirectly subsidize the settlers’ steady takeover of the West Bank, which the Palestinians want for a future state.”
Even Israelis are unwitting dupes of the evangelicals. “[N]obody asked, what did this support actually mean?” Zinshtein says. “It’s not ‘support of Israel.’ It’s support of a right-wing agenda that many people here wouldn’t agree with.” Yes and somehow Israelis keep electing rightwing governments that are utterly supportive of the settlements; and rightwing parties get 60 percent of the Israeli Jewish vote. Those Israelis have agency!
Halbfinger goes so far as to say that the film will teach American Jews “how American politics really work.”
This is damage control for the Israel lobby. There is no question that Christian evangelicals have provided political support to settlements, on the Republican side, alongside the Kushners and Friedmans; but most of the last 30 years Democrats have been in the White House, and evangelicals are not in the Democratic base, and both the Clinton and Obama administrations did nothing to stop settlements because they were dependent on Jewish American political support in the form of the Israel lobby. Clinton ran to George H.W. Bush’s right on settlements following Bush’s confrontation with Israel and the lobby in ’91; AIPAC’s president said Bush’s stance was unforgiveable and “we have” a dozen people working in the Clinton campaign, and some (including Tom Friedman) attributed Bush’s one-term status to his opposition to settlements. Obama’s aide Ben Rhodes detailed the Democratic Jewish lobby pressure in his memoir: When Obama said in 2011 that a two-state solution should be based on the ’67 lines, the Israeli prime minister lectured the president about settlements in the Oval Office, and the Israel lobby took Netanyahu’s side, and Rhodes “was given a list of leading Jewish donors to call to reassure them of Obama’s pro-Israel bona fides.” No Christian evangelicals in sight.
And of course the New York Times has never given this sort of coverage to the Jewish organizations in the Israel lobby.
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