No matter how powerful or influential, a nation’s government is ultimately just a pack of people – a clique of flawed and fallible human beings. Now I don’t know about you, but in my own wee experience, when a person over-the-top-overreacts over some small matter – this tends to mask a massive insecurity, blind spot, or profound sense of guilt. Which is to say, their outwardly-directed verbal venom is really about them. So too with governments.

Take the latest exhibit in the (should-be) ongoing case against Israel’s criminal repression of Palestinians, and Washington’s toxic codependent relationship with Tel Aviv. On Monday, the Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream company announced that it was ending sales in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. Big whoop and so what, right? Wrong.

When prominent Israeli politicians and their transnational booster-boys heard the news there’d be no more Chunky Monkey in Modi’in Illit, or Half Baked in Beitar Illit, the response was more like: Dear God! Gasp! Treachery! Oh the wretchedness! Nutty as that seems – and it is – there’s much to be gleaned from the ensuing freak out.

Read the full piece here.