Here's a juicy (not to say Jewcy) little irony that all the Cassandras of AIPAC routinely miss: Support for Israeli statehood, if not Israeli policy, axiomatically means support for Arab minority parties like Balad, which now holds only two seats in the Knesset. But they're two seats democratically awarded to anti-Israeli politicians like Azmi Bishara, who resigned yesterday under murky circumstances, but who used to enjoy traveling to foreign cities (and I don't mean D.C.) to denounce his own government and applaud the armed Palestinian "resistance." Nancy Pelosi, thou art bested. From the BBC:
Israeli Arab MP Azmi Bishara has resigned, weeks after leaving the country amid a police investigation into unspecified criminal allegations.
He tendered his resignation at the Israeli embassy in the Egyptian capital, Cairo, and said he would stay abroad for a while.
One veteran commentator, Yaron London, saw in Bishara a sort of latter-day version of the Diaspora's old political mavericks — the revolutionaries and utopianists. "I once said to Azmi Bishara that he is more Jewish than I," London said. "The heart of a Jew, even one who lives among Jews in their state, is the heart of a minority figure, but a Christian Arab who is a citizen of the Jewish state is an island within an island, a minority within a minority."
Funny, Bishara was just the other day telling Mubarak, "Hosni, you know, I am a Jew, an island within an island, a minority within a minority. Can I crash?"