How Come Israelis Can Criticize Israel, But Americans Can’t?

There has been scathing criticism of Israel’s attack on Gaza in the Israeli press. For example, one of Israel’s leading newspapers, Haaretz, has run the following stories about the attacks:

The neighborhood bully strikes again
Trying to ‘teach Hamas a lesson’ is fundamentally wrong
‘Gaza strike is not against Hamas, it’s against all Palestinians’

Whether or not you agree with these opinions, the point is that they can be expressed in Israel.

In America, people are lambasted for even raising the issue of whether Israel could possibly do anything wrong.

As Glenn Greenwald writes:

Scathing criticism of Israel’s behavior can — and does — appear in one of Israel’s leading newspapers, but not a paragraph of it could ever be uttered by any American politician, in either party, of any national prominence.

George Washington’s Blog