The House of Representatives left DC for the year yesterday, and with it they left behind a terrible bill. The US-Israel Strategic Partnership Act included admission for Israel into the US Visa Waiver Program, which would have codified in US law the right for Israel to discriminate against US citizens on the basis of religion or ethnicity. And now that bill is dead!
Arab and Muslim Americans are systematically targeted for harassment, detention, searches, delays, and deportation when trying to enter Israel. Including Israel in the Visa Waiver program with 37 other countries would have tacitly approved and rewarded Israel’s discriminatory practices.
The influential Israel lobby group AIPAC made the bill one of its top priorities for 2013, but it didn’t even get out of committee. AIPAC lost this fight. They lost their fight against diplomacy with Iran. And they lost the fight on bombing Syria. (Jewish Voice for Peace)
How do you allow, indeed encourage, a foreign country to discriminate against your own citizens on the basis of religion or ethnicity? Epicurus might suggest, were he able to, that if the United States insists on supporting a colonial regime, at the very least it should insist on civilized treatment of its own citizens. But what great news it is that the bill died.
Get money out of politics and Israel becomes just another foreign country , to be dealt with on a grown- up, normal basis.