Former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee is in Israel this week. He's making a point of touring many of Israel's (illegal) settlements in East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank. (Richard Silverstein has one version of Huck's settlement-focused itinerary in this very informative blog post.)
While visiting with Jewish settlers in occupied east Jerusalem today, he said the U.S. should not "be telling Jewish people in Israel where they should and should not live."
At the same time that Huckabee is hanging out with people in the Israelis settlements, so is another figure from the US rightwing, Orly Taitz, known as the "Queen Bee of the birther movement"-- that is, the movement of those rightwing Americans who are obsessed with the idea that Barack Obama was not born in the US and is therefore ineligible to be president.
Like Huckabee, Taitz has strongly criticized Pres. Obama's campaign to persuade Israel to halt its settlement-building program.
The participation of these two figures from US politics in the orbit of Israel's settler extremists is part of a deeper shift in US politics. It used to be that just about all of the US Democratic Party was staunchly pro-Israel and would line up like clockwork to defend Israel's perceived interests, including against any policies of the US administration that might seek to curb Israeli expansionism and militarism.
Back then-- oh, let's say through the end of the 1990s-- if you'd hear much open criticism of the Israeli government's policies from participants in US national politics, it would nearly always come from Republicans.
But over the years things have been slowly changing. (Though still incompletely, as for example here.)
Now, almost no-one in the Democratic Party is prepared to side with this government of Israel against Obama's extremely reasonable campaign on the settlements issue. And it is the right wing in the country-- including not only such seeming nutters as the Israeli-American Orly Taitz but also someone much nearer the GOP mainstream like Mike Huckabee-- who are at the forefront of the campaign to "defend" the Israeli government against the policies of the US president.
There are a number of reasons for this shift, which in my view is long overdue. Speaking as someone who is both an upholder of Palestinian (as well as Israeli) rights and generally on the left of the US political spectrum, I can say that for many, many years it felt pretty darn lonely in the camp of "PIPs"-- Americans who are Progressive, Including on Palestine. The camp of Americans who were PEPs-- Progressive, Except on Palestine-- always seemed so much larger. Until the past few years.
(I think this PIP/PEP nomenclature was developed by the estimable Phil Weiss, who is definitely at the forefront of today's PIPs.)