By Emad Omar
Jimmy Carter, the previous American president who received the Nobel Peace Prize and initiated putting human rights on the US agenda during his term, was the first to break the state of hostility between Israel and the Arabs with the first peace treaty in the history of this conflict. In 1978, the famous peace treaty between the Egyptians and the Israelis was a great opportunity for Israel to obtain recognition and end the state of war. Yet in spite of this, the pro-Israel lobby in US raised hell against Carter after publishing his latest book “Palestine: Peace not Apartheid.” In the book, he told of the successive Israeli governments that have routinely undermined the peace process through obstinate aggressive and illegal occupation of the territories seized in 1967. The lobby’s reaction confirmed what Carter mentioned in his book and in a number of his press interviews, that “the Jewish general public is more eager for peace than their political leaders.”
The former American Secretary of the State, James Baker, was the engineer of the second reduction in hostility between Israel and Arab states. Baker sponsored the direct negotiations between Israel and neighboring Arab countries in 1991, giving Israel an historic opportunity to be recognized and accepted in the region. Despite that, a considerable wing of the lobby, during that time, led a campaign against him. They accused him of vilifying the Jews in a private meeting when he claimed that they do not vote for the Republicans. Recently, Baker, with his colleague Lee Hamilton, in the Bi-partisan Iraq study group, found that “the United States will not be able to achieve its goals in the Middle East unless it deals directly with the Arab-Israeli conflict,” he was attacked by this wing that seems careless about American interests in the region and sees only the strategic bi-lateral relation between Israel and US as its only concern.
Carter and Baker are among the most respected American politicians when it comes to American foreign policy. Their careers in diplomacy are behind them now and they can afford to tell the truth and focus on the real and possible solutions.
George Soros, a rich American Jew, experienced suffering in eastern Europe during the fascist reign and the Holocaust, which gave him extreme sensitivity towards the oppressed. As such, he supported black students in South Africa against the Apartheid regime and the dissident movements in Eastern Europe against the communist tolatarian regimes. “I have a great deal of sympathy for my fellow Jews and deep concern for the survival of Israel,” Soros says. Lately, he criticized in an article published in the New York Review of Books, dated April 12, 2007, saying, “Recently, the pro-Israel lobby has gone on the offensive, accusing the so-called progressive critics of Israel’s policies of fomenting anti-Semitism and endangering the very existence of the Jewish state.” He warned that “There is the growing danger of a regional conflagration in which Israel and the US could well be on the losing side.” Supporters of the pro-Israel lobby attacked Soros by comparing his criticisms to the so-called blood libels directed against Jews in medieval Europe.
President of the esteemed Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haas recently noted, “Diplomacy also needs to be revived in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is still the issue that most shapes (and radicalizes) public opinion in the region…The United States should articulate those principles it believes ought to constitute the elements of a final settlement, including the creation of a Palestinian state based on the 1967 lines.” Pro-Israel lobby has publicly disagreed with Haas's conclusions.
One year ago, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, two prominent academics from Chicago and Harvard universities respectively, prepared a joint research paper about the lobby supporting Israel in America. In a documented and scientific way, they criticized the negative role played by the Israeli lobby today in American democratic life and in America’s foreign policy. In a joint essay published in the London Review of Books, they wrote that, “The Lobby’s influence has been bad for Israel. Its ability to persuade Washington to support an expansionist agenda has discouraged Israel from seizing opportunities – including a peace treaty with Syria and a prompt and full implementation of the Oslo Accords – that would have saved Israeli lives and shrunk the ranks of Palestinian extremists.”
As a result of this, they were targeted by a fierce campaign that made it almost impossible for both to publish their research in US.
The pro-Israel lobby in America that has attacked any sort of criticism of Israeli policies is like the father who exaggerates in protecting his children and spoils them, turning them into a troublemakers in the neighborhood and bringing their parents a bad reputation. This lobby’s policy contributes to maintaining the dangerous stagnation and status quo, the very problem King Abdullah II of Jordan warned of in his historical speech to the American Congress last March, when he said, “The status quo is pulling the region and the world towards greater danger... The cycle of crisis is spinning faster.”
The Arabs today are promoting their historic peace initiative, which is an historical opportunity, and the Israeli lobby in the US should push for a positive Israeli response in order to transform it into a regional peace plan instead of indulging in blindly defending the status quo and thus taking Israel, the region, and American interests into an endless hell that it may not recover from for many decades to come.
* Emad Omar is a conflict resolution and media expert based in Amman, Jordan.
Showing posts with label Walt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Walt. Show all posts
Monday, April 30, 2007
Thursday, April 19, 2007
US-Israel ties bad for peace: Soros
George Soros, the billionaire investor, has added his voice to the debate over the role of Israel's lobby in shaping US foreign policy.
In the current issue of the New York Review of Books, Soros takes issue with "the pervasive influence of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee [AIPAC]" in Washington and says the Bush administration's close ties with Israel are obstacles to a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians.
Soros, who is Jewish but not often engaged in Israeli affairs, echoed arguments that have fuelled debate in academia, foreign policy think tanks and parts of the US Jewish community.
"The pro-Israel lobby has been remarkably successful in suppressing criticism," wrote Soros. Politicians challenge it at their peril and dissenters risk personal vilification, he said.
AIPAC has consistently declined comment on such charges, but many of its supporters have been vocal in dismissing them.
Historian Michael Oren, speaking at AIPAC's 2007 conference in March, said the group was not merely a lobby for Israel. "It is the embodiment of a conviction as old as this (American) nation itself that belief in the Jewish state is tantamount to belief in these United States," he said in a keynote speech.
The long-simmering debate bubbled to the surface a year ago, when two prominent academics, Stephen Walt of Harvard and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, published a 12,500-word essay entitled "The Israel Lobby" and featuring the fiercest criticism of AIPAC since it was founded in 1953.
AIPAC now has more than 100,000 members and is rated one of the most influential special interest groups in the United States, its political clout comparable with such lobbies as the National Rifle Association.
The AIPAC members are all US citizens and the group receives no funding from the Israeli government.
Its annual conference in Washington attracts a Who's Who of American politics, both Republicans and Democrats.
Unwavering support
Mearsheimer and Walt said the lobby had persuaded successive administrations to align themselves too closely with Israel.
"The pro-Israel lobby has been remarkably successful in suppressing criticism"
George Soros, the billionaire investor
"The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread 'democracy' has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardised not only US security but much of the rest of the world," they wrote.
No other lobby group has managed to divert US foreign policy so far from the US national interest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that US interests and those of Israel are essentially identical, they wrote.
The two academics said that pressure from Israel and its lobby in Washington played an important role in President George Bush's decision to attack Iraq, an arch-enemy of Israel, in 2003.
Mearsheimer and Walt found no takers for their essay in the US publishing world. When it was eventually published in the London Review of Books, they noted it would be hard to imagine any mainstream media outlet in the United States publishing such a piece.
It has been drawing criticism that ranged from shoddy scholarship to anti-Semitism, chiefly from conservative fellow academics and political supporters of the present relationship between Washington and Israel.
In his contribution to the debate, Soros said: "A much-needed self-examination of American policy in the Middle East has started in this country; but it can't make much headway as long as AIPAC retains powerful influence in both the Democratic and Republican parties."
That influence is reflected by the fact that Israel is the largest recipient of US aid in the world.
Going mainstream
Mearsheimer and Walt are now working on expanding their article into a book - to be published in September by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The company has not commented on online reports that it paid the two authors a $750,000 advance and plans to print one million copies.
Another mainstream publisher, Simon and Schuster, already discovered that not only is it possible to publish criticism of Israel but it can also be good for the bottom line.
Former president Jimmy Carter's book "Palestine Peace Not Apartheid" shot up the bestseller lists after its publication last November; stayed there for more than three months and is still selling well.
It had an initial print run of 300,000 copies and there are now 485,000 copies in print, said Victoria Meyer, a spokeswoman for Simon and Schuster.
Carter's book and its reference to apartheid provoked angry reactions - more in the United States than in Israel, where leftists opposed to the occupation of the West Bank have been accusing the government of apartheid practices for years and where the word has lost its shock value.
In response to charges of bias and anti-Semitism, Carter said he wanted to provoke a discussion of issues debated routinely and freely in Israel but rarely in the United States.
"This reluctance to criticize any policies of the Israeli government is because of the extraordinary lobbying efforts of the American Israel Political Action Committee and the absence of any significant contrary voices," he wrote in the Los Angeles Times during a tour to promote his book. "It would be almost politically suicidal for members of Congress to espouse a balanced position between Israel and Palestine."
According to Oren, the pro-AIPAC historian, the Carter book and the Mearsheimer-Walt paper had the same "insidious thesis" and suffered from the same flaw - ignoring oil as a driving element in US policies on the Middle East.
In the current issue of the New York Review of Books, Soros takes issue with "the pervasive influence of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee [AIPAC]" in Washington and says the Bush administration's close ties with Israel are obstacles to a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians.
Soros, who is Jewish but not often engaged in Israeli affairs, echoed arguments that have fuelled debate in academia, foreign policy think tanks and parts of the US Jewish community.
"The pro-Israel lobby has been remarkably successful in suppressing criticism," wrote Soros. Politicians challenge it at their peril and dissenters risk personal vilification, he said.
AIPAC has consistently declined comment on such charges, but many of its supporters have been vocal in dismissing them.
Historian Michael Oren, speaking at AIPAC's 2007 conference in March, said the group was not merely a lobby for Israel. "It is the embodiment of a conviction as old as this (American) nation itself that belief in the Jewish state is tantamount to belief in these United States," he said in a keynote speech.
The long-simmering debate bubbled to the surface a year ago, when two prominent academics, Stephen Walt of Harvard and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, published a 12,500-word essay entitled "The Israel Lobby" and featuring the fiercest criticism of AIPAC since it was founded in 1953.
AIPAC now has more than 100,000 members and is rated one of the most influential special interest groups in the United States, its political clout comparable with such lobbies as the National Rifle Association.
The AIPAC members are all US citizens and the group receives no funding from the Israeli government.
Its annual conference in Washington attracts a Who's Who of American politics, both Republicans and Democrats.
Unwavering support
Mearsheimer and Walt said the lobby had persuaded successive administrations to align themselves too closely with Israel.
"The pro-Israel lobby has been remarkably successful in suppressing criticism"
George Soros, the billionaire investor
"The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread 'democracy' has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardised not only US security but much of the rest of the world," they wrote.
No other lobby group has managed to divert US foreign policy so far from the US national interest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that US interests and those of Israel are essentially identical, they wrote.
The two academics said that pressure from Israel and its lobby in Washington played an important role in President George Bush's decision to attack Iraq, an arch-enemy of Israel, in 2003.
Mearsheimer and Walt found no takers for their essay in the US publishing world. When it was eventually published in the London Review of Books, they noted it would be hard to imagine any mainstream media outlet in the United States publishing such a piece.
It has been drawing criticism that ranged from shoddy scholarship to anti-Semitism, chiefly from conservative fellow academics and political supporters of the present relationship between Washington and Israel.
In his contribution to the debate, Soros said: "A much-needed self-examination of American policy in the Middle East has started in this country; but it can't make much headway as long as AIPAC retains powerful influence in both the Democratic and Republican parties."
That influence is reflected by the fact that Israel is the largest recipient of US aid in the world.
Going mainstream
Mearsheimer and Walt are now working on expanding their article into a book - to be published in September by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The company has not commented on online reports that it paid the two authors a $750,000 advance and plans to print one million copies.
Another mainstream publisher, Simon and Schuster, already discovered that not only is it possible to publish criticism of Israel but it can also be good for the bottom line.
Former president Jimmy Carter's book "Palestine Peace Not Apartheid" shot up the bestseller lists after its publication last November; stayed there for more than three months and is still selling well.
It had an initial print run of 300,000 copies and there are now 485,000 copies in print, said Victoria Meyer, a spokeswoman for Simon and Schuster.
Carter's book and its reference to apartheid provoked angry reactions - more in the United States than in Israel, where leftists opposed to the occupation of the West Bank have been accusing the government of apartheid practices for years and where the word has lost its shock value.
In response to charges of bias and anti-Semitism, Carter said he wanted to provoke a discussion of issues debated routinely and freely in Israel but rarely in the United States.
"This reluctance to criticize any policies of the Israeli government is because of the extraordinary lobbying efforts of the American Israel Political Action Committee and the absence of any significant contrary voices," he wrote in the Los Angeles Times during a tour to promote his book. "It would be almost politically suicidal for members of Congress to espouse a balanced position between Israel and Palestine."
According to Oren, the pro-AIPAC historian, the Carter book and the Mearsheimer-Walt paper had the same "insidious thesis" and suffered from the same flaw - ignoring oil as a driving element in US policies on the Middle East.
Monday, April 16, 2007
Soros Slams AIPAC
Sunday, April 15, 2007 9:19 p.m. EDT
The billionaire investor George Soros has added his voice to a heated but little-noticed debate over the role of Israel's powerful lobby in shaping Washington policy in a way critics say hurts U.S. national interests and stifles debate.
In the current issue of the New York Review of Books, Soros takes issue with "the pervasive influence of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)" in Washington and says the Bush administration's close ties with Israel are obstacles to a peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians.
Soros, who is Jewish but not often engaged in Israel affairs, echoed arguments that have fueled a passionate debate conducted largely in the rarefied world of academia, foreign policy think tanks and parts of the U.S. Jewish community.
"The pro-Israel lobby has been remarkably successful in suppressing criticism," wrote Soros. Politicians challenge it at their peril and dissenters risk personal vilification, he said.
AIPAC has consistently declined comment on such charges, but many of its supporters have been vocal in dismissing them. Historian Michael Oren, speaking at AIPAC's 2007 conference in March, said the group was not merely a lobby for Israel. "It is the embodiment of a conviction as old as this (American) nation itself that belief in the Jewish state is tantamount to belief in these United States," he said in a keynote speech.
The long-simmering debate bubbled to the surface a year ago, when two prominent academics, Stephen Walt of Harvard and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, published a 12,500-word essay entitled "The Israel Lobby" and featuring the fiercest criticism of AIPAC since it was founded in 1953.
AIPAC now has more than 100,000 members and is rated one of the most influential special interest groups in the United States, its political clout comparable with such lobbies as the National Rifle Association.
Its annual conference in Washington attracts a Who's Who of American politics, both Republicans and Democrats.
UNWAVERING SUPPORT
Mearsheimer and Walt said the lobby had persuaded successive administrations to align themselves too closely with Israel.
"The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread 'democracy' has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardized not only U.S. security but much of the rest of the world," they wrote.
No other lobby group has managed to divert U.S. foreign policy so far from the U.S. national interest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that U.S. interests and those of Israel are essentially identical, they wrote.
Once considered an honest broker in the Middle East, the United States is now seen in much of the Arab world as an unquestioning backer of Israel, according to international opinion polls.
Peace moves have been at a near-standstill since the failure of Israeli-Palestinian talks in 2000 at the end of Bill Clinton's presidency. The Bush administration, accused by the Arab world of relative neglect, has said it hopes to promote peace in its final two years despite the political weakness of Israeli and Palestinian leaders.
The two academics said that pressure from Israel and its lobby in Washington played an important role in President George W. Bush's decision to attack Iraq, an arch-enemy of Israel, in 2003.
Mearsheimer and Walt found no takers for their essay in the U.S. publishing world. When it was eventually published in the London Review of Books, they noted it would be hard to imagine any mainstream media outlet in the United States publishing such a piece.
It has been drawing criticism that ranged from shoddy scholarship to anti-Semitism, chiefly from conservative fellow academics and political supporters of the present relationship between Washington and Israel.
In his contribution to the debate, Soros said: "A much-needed self-examination of American policy in the Middle East has started in this country; but it can't make much headway as long as AIPAC retains powerful influence in both the Democratic and Republican parties."
That influence is reflected by the fact that Israel is the largest recipient of U.S. aid in the world.
GOING MAINSTREAM
Mearsheimer and Walt are now working on expanding their article into a book -- to be published in September by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The company has not commented on online reports that it paid the two authors a $750,000 advance and plans to print one million copies.
Another mainstream publisher, Simon and Schuster, already discovered that it not only is it possible to publish criticism of Israel but it can also be good for the bottom line.
Former President Jimmy Carter's book "Palestine Peace Not Apartheid" shot up the bestseller lists after its publication last November, stayed there for more than three months and is still selling well.
It had an initial print run of 300,000 copies and there are now 485,000 copies in print, said Victoria Meyer, a spokeswoman for Simon and Schuster.
Carter's book and its reference to apartheid provoked angry reactions -- more in the United States than in Israel, where leftists opposed to the occupation of the West Bank have been accusing the government of apartheid practices for years and where the word has lost its shock value.
In response to charges of bias and anti-Semitism, Carter said he wanted to provoke a discussion of issues debated routinely and freely in Israel but rarely in the United States.
"This reluctance to criticize any policies of the Israeli government is because of the extraordinary lobbying efforts of the American Israel Political Action Committee and the absence of any significant contrary voices," he wrote in the Los Angeles Times during a tour to promote his book. "It would be almost politically suicidal for members of Congress to espouse a balanced position between Israel and Palestine."
According to Oren, the pro-AIPAC historian, the Carter book and the Mearsheimer-Walt paper had the same "insidious thesis" and suffered from the same flaw -- ignoring oil as a driving element in U.S. policies on the Middle East.
© Reuters 2007. All rights reserved.
Saturday, April 14, 2007
The Israel Lobby - portrait of a great taboo
The power of the Israel lobby in the United States
Video includes John J. Mearsheimer, Richard Perle, Lawrence Wilkerson, Tony Judt John Hagee, Earl Hilliard, Kenneth Roth, Michael Massing, and Daniel Levy.
Produced by VPRO
April 2, 2007
This 51:12 minute program was broadcast as part of the Tegenlicht documentary stream. Although made for Dutch TV, the soundtrack is in English, because all the interviewees are English-speaking.
See De Israël Lobby Portret van een groot taboe: de macht van de Israël lobby in de Verenigde Staten, the VPRO page for this documentary
Machine translation(Babelfish)
Israel lobby
Portrait of a large taboo: the power of Israel lobby in the United States
Monday 2 April 2007 20.55 Ned 2
Wednesday 4 April 2007 14.30 Ned 2 (recurrence)
Keep the United States does Israel standing? And how long do they continue with that still? Can you make commments in United States, however, on that reality, or are pro-Israël the lobby financially and politically this way strong that the relation to Israel taboo is and with that taboo? And what nevertheless happens there with them that it onzegbare to the jaw dares couples?
In March 2006 the American political economists controversial Article ' The Israel lobby and US foreign policy ' published John Mearsheimer (University or Chicago) and Steve Walt (Harvard). In this they do not demonstrate that it - longer - in the interest of the US is current support and protect Israel. With political shifts in the congress and increasing doubt concerning conducted in the middle of east policy is possible this the spark becomes in a kruitvat. Back-light speaks debate with the people concerned in this ' new realism '.
Both groupings are speaking or to the order: they that the strong link between wants keep the US and Israel in score (neocon Richard Perle, the Lebanese-Christian Brigitte Gabriel and evangelist John Hagee, the lobbyclub AIPAC), and they on this provide that criticism and not seldom ' victim ' became of the lobby. congress member Earl Hilliard Alabama selected alignment to the Arab world and were vervolgens outstripped by a political antagonist who got much Aipac-geld behind itself. Of the historian Tony Judt, who dared claim that Israel ' oorlogszuchtige and intolerant, belief etnostaat floated is become ', a reading at the last moment was called off. And Human Rights Watch director Kenneth Roth became personal getarget after criticism on violence which used Israel in the mini war against Lebanon of last summer.
Finally the question to what extent pro-Israël the lobby eventually stipulates the military and political interest of Israel himself: colonel Lawrence Wilkerson (ex-stafchef of Colin Powell) hoever explain the influence of the lobby stretch in the decision structure on the white house. And to congress member and democratically president candidate Dennis Kucinich the question to what extent contemporary politicians can pro-Israël withdraw themselves in fact to the long arm of the lobby. Lobby, congress, the white house and Israel himself lijken in a choking embrace to have ended up: (how) can that change ever?
Video includes John J. Mearsheimer, Richard Perle, Lawrence Wilkerson, Tony Judt John Hagee, Earl Hilliard, Kenneth Roth, Michael Massing, and Daniel Levy.
Produced by VPRO
April 2, 2007
This 51:12 minute program was broadcast as part of the Tegenlicht documentary stream. Although made for Dutch TV, the soundtrack is in English, because all the interviewees are English-speaking.
See De Israël Lobby Portret van een groot taboe: de macht van de Israël lobby in de Verenigde Staten, the VPRO page for this documentary
Machine translation(Babelfish)
Israel lobby
Portrait of a large taboo: the power of Israel lobby in the United States
Monday 2 April 2007 20.55 Ned 2
Wednesday 4 April 2007 14.30 Ned 2 (recurrence)
Keep the United States does Israel standing? And how long do they continue with that still? Can you make commments in United States, however, on that reality, or are pro-Israël the lobby financially and politically this way strong that the relation to Israel taboo is and with that taboo? And what nevertheless happens there with them that it onzegbare to the jaw dares couples?
In March 2006 the American political economists controversial Article ' The Israel lobby and US foreign policy ' published John Mearsheimer (University or Chicago) and Steve Walt (Harvard). In this they do not demonstrate that it - longer - in the interest of the US is current support and protect Israel. With political shifts in the congress and increasing doubt concerning conducted in the middle of east policy is possible this the spark becomes in a kruitvat. Back-light speaks debate with the people concerned in this ' new realism '.
Both groupings are speaking or to the order: they that the strong link between wants keep the US and Israel in score (neocon Richard Perle, the Lebanese-Christian Brigitte Gabriel and evangelist John Hagee, the lobbyclub AIPAC), and they on this provide that criticism and not seldom ' victim ' became of the lobby. congress member Earl Hilliard Alabama selected alignment to the Arab world and were vervolgens outstripped by a political antagonist who got much Aipac-geld behind itself. Of the historian Tony Judt, who dared claim that Israel ' oorlogszuchtige and intolerant, belief etnostaat floated is become ', a reading at the last moment was called off. And Human Rights Watch director Kenneth Roth became personal getarget after criticism on violence which used Israel in the mini war against Lebanon of last summer.
Finally the question to what extent pro-Israël the lobby eventually stipulates the military and political interest of Israel himself: colonel Lawrence Wilkerson (ex-stafchef of Colin Powell) hoever explain the influence of the lobby stretch in the decision structure on the white house. And to congress member and democratically president candidate Dennis Kucinich the question to what extent contemporary politicians can pro-Israël withdraw themselves in fact to the long arm of the lobby. Lobby, congress, the white house and Israel himself lijken in a choking embrace to have ended up: (how) can that change ever?
Thursday, March 29, 2007
The Jewish owned New York Observer squeezes out Israel Lobby critic
Related
Jared Kushner - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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New Perch For ‘Lobby’ Observer
Jared Kushner - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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New Perch For ‘Lobby’ Observer
After close to a year of authoring a blog hosted by the Web site of The New York Observer, journalist Philip Weiss has decided to pull up stakes and strike out on his own.
The reasons, Weiss said, were part economic, part political.
“I wanted money after a year, and the Observer didn’t want to pay me, and they were uncomfortable with my politics,” he wrote in an e-mail to the Forward.
Over the past year, Weiss has devoted considerable space on his blog — called MondoWeiss (now located at www.philipweiss.org/mondoweiss) — to the question of American Jews and Israel. He has been a champion of the controversial paper published last year by political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, in which they argue that the “Israel Lobby” wields too much power over American foreign policy.
According to Observer editor Peter Kaplan, Weiss’s move was initiated not by the paper but by the writer. Though Kaplan conceded that he and Weiss differed over money, he insisted that he has no trouble with Weiss’s politics.
“I love Philip as a writer and as a human being,” Kaplan said. “As far as I’m concerned, he could have run his blog under the Observer’s auspices forever.” Kaplan said that he hopes to continue to use Weiss as a writer for the paper’s print edition.
In his new blog’s maiden post, Weiss, who considers himself an anti- or non-Zionist, retreated a bit from the charge that the Observer was uncomfortable with his politics. Instead, he said, the paper’s site was perhaps an inappropriate venue for his own personal thoughts on Israel and America, especially ones that draw a hostile response.
“One of the problems with the Observer site was the invective,” he wrote, “which I did a lousy job of policing.” He invited visitors to his new site to be courteous. “If people want to comment, they should keep out obscenity, scatology, etc. You know where the line is.”
The Observer has itself seen some changes of late. Bought in August by Jared Kushner, the 26-year-old son of scandal-plagued New Jersey developer Charles Kushner, the paper switched last month from broadsheet to tabloid format.
Thursday, March 1, 2007
Does the Israeli Tail Wag American Dog?
March/April 2007
By Kathleen and Bill Christison
ADBUSTERS #70 – Journal of the Mental Environment
A quarter century ago, the executive director of AIPAC – the American Israel Public Affairs Committee – established an analytical unit inside the organization to write in-depth advocacy papers for policymakers. The year was 1981, the president was Ronald Reagan, and AIPAC had just lost a hard-fought battle in Congress over the sale of AWACS surveillance aircraft to Saudi Arabia. The AIPAC leader was an energetic former congressional aide named Thomas Dine, who used the setback to build AIPAC into a formidable political force. Over the next few years, Dine quadrupled AIPAC’s grassroots membership as well as its budget and aggressively expanded contacts with Congress and policymakers. He set out to supply politicians with analyses geared toward advancing Israeli interests, in the stated belief that anyone who wrote papers read by policymakers would effectively “own” the policymakers.
This was a seminal moment in the decades-long growth of the lobby’s influence on US Middle East policy, often to the detriment of US national interests. Many have characterized the relationship between what the United States does in the Middle East and what the lobby wants it to do as a case of the Israeli tail wagging the US dog. Israel and its US supporters, although constituting the junior partner in the relationship, are seen as virtually dictating policy to whatever administration and Congress are in power. There are myriad examples of this dynamic, most notably Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which dragged the US into a disastrous intervention, and Israel’s invasion of the West Bank in 2002, during which Prime Minister Ariel Sharon openly and repeatedly defied President George Bush’s demand for a withdrawal. Others maintain that the tail-wagging is the other way around: that the United States, as the superpower, patron of Israel, and its major aid donor, is unmistakably the senior partner and the dog that wags the tail. The question, therefore, is which is the accurate assessment, or is the cynical view of Israeli commentator Michel Warschawski correct, that “there is neither a dog nor a tail, but one global war of re-colonization, and one aggressive monster with two ugly heads”?
Silence Broken
Despite the growing power of the Israel lobby, and the growing convergence of US and Israeli efforts toward global and regional Middle East domination, public debate over the size and substance of the lobby’s role in US policymaking was almost non-existent until two political scientists, John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard University, issued an 81-page report in March 2006 analyzing lobby strength. Mearsheimer, the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science, and Walt, Belfer Professor of International Affairs, are leading proponents of the realist school of foreign policy, which argues that states act to further military and economic power rather than pursue idealism and ethics. Their report sparked widespread interest when it was published in abbreviated form in the London Review of Books. Defining the lobby broadly as “the loose coalition of individuals and organizations who actively work to shape US foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction,” Mearsheimer and Walt conclude that the thrust of US policy in the Middle East is overwhelmingly the result of the lobby’s activities. They observe that, while other lobbies and interest groups have also demonstrated an ability to skew policy, “no lobby has managed to divert US foreign policy as far from what the American national interest would otherwise suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that US and Israeli interests are essentially identical.”
The report aroused instantaneous and vocal opposition from the very individuals whom the authors identify as members of the lobby. Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, a vociferous advocate of Israel, called the authors “liars” engaging in “crass bigotry” and likened their arguments to neo-Nazi propaganda, filled with “thinly veiled charges of Jewish control of American thought” reminiscent of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Abraham Foxman and his Anti-Defamation League (ADL) charged that the report’s main thesis “is the embodiment of classic, anti-Jewish conspiracy theory.”
Most criticism from Israel’s strongest advocates fails, however, to address the principal points of the Mearsheimer-Walt study: that influential elements in the United States – non-Jews as well as Jews – who have as a primary objective the advancement of Israeli interests have gained undue influence over US Middle East policy and use this influence to tilt policy toward Israel in ways that are contrary to US national interests. Instead, critics argue off the point, raising straw men that distract from the report’s main thesis.
The accusation that Mearsheimer and Walt are “anti-Semitic” is the charge most commonly heard from supporters of Israel across the political spectrum. Not coincidentally, it is also a line of attack long used by the lobby to silence and indeed attack anyone who dares question Israeli policies or the United States’ close ties to Israel. The question of anti-Semitism was addressed during a major debate in New York in September that pitted Mearsheimer and two allies against a former Israeli official and two policymakers from the Clinton administration, Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk. These three opponents of Mearsheimer, although clearly supporters of Israel, are generally regarded as centrists, neither particularly hard-core like Dershowitz nor rightwing, but all three echoed Dershowitz in charging that the report “lowers itself to the level of anti-Semitism” or “has connotations of anti-Semitism,” simply because it discusses the role of some Jews in positions of power and influence.
This debate around anti-Semitism is a diversion from the main issue and is undoubtedly intended as such. The New York panel spent fully one-third of its allotted time examining whether Mearsheimer and Walt are anti-Semitic before getting to any substantive analysis of the report’s conclusions and evidence. Criticism of former President Jimmy Carter’s book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid follows the same pattern. Critics charge poor scholarship or hint at anti-Semitism because Carter uses the term “apartheid” to describe Israel’s policies in the occupied Palestinian territories. Many, including the Democratic Party leadership, have criticized the book, but few have provided evidence to support their charges or seriously examined the evidence behind Carter’s thesis.
A member of the New York panel who spoke in support of the Mearsheimer-Walt report, New York University professor Tony Judt, has written about the crippling effect that Americans’ induced fear of being labeled anti-Semitic has had on public discourse about anything relating to Israel and ultimately on policy. During the panel discussion, he highlighted the phenomenon by observing that, although there are “hundreds of distorting lobbies” in the US, the Israel lobby is the only one that not only acts energetically in pursuit of its cause, “but acts constantly and very effectively to silence criticism of its cause.” In a similar vein, Mearsheimer observed in an interview with Mother Jones that the main reason the strong affinity between the US and Israel continues is the absence of open and candid discussion about the relationship. There would be far less sympathy for Israel, he said, if Americans knew what Israelis are doing in the occupied territories. “In essence, America’s present relationship with Israel could not withstand public scrutiny.”
Jimmy Carter’s book makes a major effort to provide more scrutiny, but its success is so far uncertain. Scott Ritter, who worked closely with Israel as a military intelligence officer and as a UN weapons inspector in Iraq, reiterates both Judt’s and Mearsheimer’s observations in his new book Target Iran. While many nations maintain active lobbies in the US, he writes, none has “the scope and clout” of the Israel lobby and none operates in its “brazen manner.” Ritter foresees a potentially catastrophic US-Israeli confrontation with Iran and believes the only way to avoid this will be by bringing the nature of the US-Israeli relationship into the national discourse, fundamentally re-examining why the US operates in “continued national impotence as another nation, Israel, dictates national security policy for all America.”
In a 2003 critique of Israel and the U.S.-Israeli relationship in the New York Review of Books, Judt touched on what Mearsheimer and Walt later laid out as their principal thesis. Judt wrote that Israel continued “to mock its American patron” by building illegal settlements even as the US was pushing the “Roadmap” peace plan calling for a freeze on settlement construction. Israel had reduced the powerful president of the United States, he said, to a “ventriloquist’s dummy, pitifully reciting the Israeli cabinet line.” Its behavior “has been a disaster for American foreign policy.” The United States’ unconditional support for Israel “is the main reason why most of the rest of the world no longer credits our good faith.”
James Abourezk knows the lobby well. A US senator from South Dakota from 1972-1978, Abourezk says, from his experience in Congress, that “the support Israel has in that body is based completely on political fear” – fear that “anyone who does not do what Israel wants done” will be defeated by the lobby. Abourezk reinforces the point about the lobby’s efforts to silence. “Even one voice is attacked,” he writes, “on grounds that if Congress is completely silent on the issue, the press will have no one to quote, which effectively silences the press as well. Any journalists or editors who step out of line are quickly brought under control by well organized economic pressure against the newspaper caught sinning.” Jimmy Carter has described a similar phenomenon in recent commentaries, noting that AIPAC’s “extraordinary lobbying efforts” have silenced all debate in policymaking councils, in Congress, and in the media about Israeli policies.
Abourezk describes pressure tactics that were already in full swing before AIPAC set out to “own” policymakers, and Carter has made it clear that the lobby’s stranglehold on discourse and on decisionmaking has tightened. The pro-Israeli tilt that has, to one degree or another, been characteristic of most administrations and most Congresses since Israel’s creation was clearly not Dine’s invention or a phenomenon that emerged only in the 1980s. But Dine institutionalized the process, strengthening it significantly.
In 1984, in addition to the internal analytical unit, AIPAC spun off another body, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), that remains a pre-eminent think tank – one that has placed its analysts in policymaking jobs in several administrations. Dennis Ross, who was the senior Middle East policymaker in the administrations of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, came from WINEP and returned there after leaving government service. Martin Indyk, an original member of AIPAC’s analytical unit and WINEP’s first director, entered a senior policymaking position in the Clinton administration from there. Mearsheimer and Walt correctly describe both men as situated “at the core of the lobby.”
This assertion addresses a critical aspect of the lobby question by emphasizing the reality that the lobby has in recent decades actually become a part of various administrations. The lobby is also not confined to the formal Jewish-American organizations such as AIPAC and the ADL and think tanks like WINEP and JINSA, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, but also includes numerous individuals who work on Israel’s behalf and encompasses the very large fundamentalist Christian right. The Christian right strongly supports Israel’s continued control over the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem as the essential prerequisite to the so-called Millennium, when they believe Jesus Christ will reappear. During the last several years in particular, the Christian right has used its vast numbers to lobby both the administration and Congress in support of Israel’s policies and in opposition to any proposal that would require Israeli concessions.
The kind of blunt pressure on decisionmakers that Abourezk describes is only one way in which the organized lobby operates. The bond between Israel and the US has always had its grounding as much in soft emotions as in the hard realities of geopolitical strategy. Over the years since Israel’s creation, there has been a pervasive atmosphere in which Israel is simply assumed to be so close to the US, its interests so closely intertwined with American interests, that it is accepted almost as a part of the US.
The lobby reinforces this sentiment, channeling it into institutional ways of involving ordinary Americans in supporting Israel. Jeffrey Blankfort, a northern California radio host and long-time commentator on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and other Middle East issues, points out, for instance, that 1,700 unions in the US own more than $5 billion of Israel bonds. This effectively obliges the unions to support Israel, Blankfort believes, making the American labor movement a part of the lobby. It is one reason that the organized left in the United States has opposed making the Palestine issue part of the anti-war movement. Many states and universities also invest in Israel bonds, as well as in Israeli companies, giving these local governments and institutions an interest in supporting Israel’s policies in order to keep the Israeli economy going.
The pervasiveness of the lobby’s influence makes Tony Judt’s reference to the US president as a “ventriloquist’s dummy” particularly apt. As Walt pointed out in a Mother Jones interview, no matter what Israel does, the United States continues to support it. “They continue to build settlements even though every president since Lyndon Johnson has thought that was a bad idea. They spy on us routinely. They’ve given or sold American military technology to other countries. Alsothey have conducted a wide variety of human rights violations, and yet none of those activities ever slows down American support.” For the last several decades, AIPAC has frequently involved itself directly in the legislative process, writing legislation relating to the Middle East and pushing a series of anti-Arab, pro-Israeli resolutions that state the stance of the Senate and the House on various issues, such as Israel’s construction of the separation wall and Israel’s summer 2006 attack on Lebanon. AIPAC often boasts that it vets and exerts influence over presidential candidates. During the 2004 presidential campaign when Howard Dean issued a mild and seemingly non-controversial call for an “even-handed” US policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict, he was roundly condemned by the lobby and by fellow Democrats, and he quickly dropped the call. Long-serving congressmen who deviate are targeted for electoral defeat. In the 1980s, Representative Paul Findley and Senator Charles Percy, who had each served multiple terms in Illinois, were defeated through the efforts of AIPAC after both spoke out in favor of negotiating with the PLO. More recently, Georgia’s Cynthia McKinney has twice been the target of AIPAC’s electoral interference.
The list goes on. Israel and its lobby have been the policy initiators, the US the follower, in Israel’s 1967 war, its 1982 invasion of Lebanon, its 2002 invasion of the West Bank, its 40-year settlement-construction enterprise in the occupied Palestinian territories, its disproportionate attacks on Palestinians, its assault on Lebanon. The scope of the lobby’s infiltration of government policymaking councils has been unprecedented during the current Bush administration, and there is strong evidence that neo-conservatives inside the administration – whose ties to Israel’s right wing are undeniable – were the architects of the invasion of Iraq and of the administration’s push to “transform” the Middle East and spread “democracy” throughout the region. Mearsheimer and Walt assert that the Iraq war was “at least partly intended to improve Israel’s strategic position” – a reality that would seem to be confirmed by the fact that some of these same neo-cons authored a strategy paper, entitled “A Clean Break,” in the mid-1990s for then Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, laying out a plan for attacking Iraq that was later pushed when the neo-cons entered the Bush administration. The strategy was designed explicitly to assure Israel’s regional dominance, to undermine the Oslo peace process, and to relieve Israel of pressure to make concessions to the Palestinians.
One of the authors, David Wurmser, remains in government as Vice President Richard Cheney’s Middle East adviser; the others, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, were closely involved in Iraq war planning as, respectively, an adviser to the Pentagon and an undersecretary of defense. Almost all the other neo-cons, both Jews and non-Jews, have also compiled long records of advocacy on behalf of Israel. These include Paul Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams, John Bolton, and their cheerleaders on the sidelines such as William Kristol, Robert Kagan, Norman Podhoretz, the late Jeane Kirkpatrick, and numerous rightwing, pro-Israeli think tanks in Washington.
In response to the lobby’s pressure on legislators and policymakers, the US has given Israel massive amounts of military and economic aid over the years. Mearsheimer and Walt cite statistics from the US Agency for International Development indicating that between 1976 and 2003, the US gave Israel a total of $140 billion in aid, in constant 2003 dollars. One economist, Thomas Stauffer, who has long tracked aid to Israel, put the figure much higher in 2002, estimating a total of $240 billion in the preceding 30 years, adjusted to current dollars. Israel now receives an automatic $2-3 billion annually in grant aid, mostly military, in addition to large increments of additional aid to compensate for the cost to Israel of such actions as the Lebanon war and the Gaza withdrawal.
Defining the National Interest
The truly important part of the debate over the lobby’s power swirls around the issue of national interests – what constitutes national interests, who determines them, and whether real national interests are harmed by the lobby. A group of commentators and analysts on the left who are highly critical of Israel’s policies have nonetheless been dismissive of the notion that the lobby has particular influence over policy. Their arguments center on the issue of what actually constitutes the US national interest. Noam Chomsky has frequently indicated that Middle East policy is determined largely by what he calls the “tight state-corporate linkage” where domestic power is concentrated – in other words, the military-industrial complex working in cooperation with the government, whose special interests, Chomsky believes, ultimately define US national interests. The Israel lobby has some impact on determining policy in Chomsky’s estimation, but to a far lesser extent and generally only insofar as the lobby’s interests conform to corporate-government interests.
Chomsky and the other left critics of the lobby study essentially believe that US policy has always been directed at the advancement of US imperial and corporate interests, and that Israel, far from leading the US into harmful policies and foreign adventures, has always done the US bidding. The US would pursue its imperial objectives even without Israel, and it has pursued these in areas outside the Middle East, such as Chile, Indonesia, Central America, and elsewhere, without benefit of any lobby. The Israel lobby, in this view, functions as merely a handy adjunct to US policy, not an agent with any control or particular influence.
One thing this argument ignores, however, is that the lobby and its close ties to US arms makers strengthen the ability of the military-industrial complex to control what are defined as US national interests. The Israel lobby holds unquestionable sway over many individual congressmen and executive branch officials, including in the White House, making it difficult for anyone to influence the alleged national interests of the US in ways that the lobby might feel weakened Israel’s uniquely special relationship with the US. Any debate involving this taboo subject, even indirectly, would almost certainly be quashed before it started, buried under paeans for Israel from both Republicans and Democrats.
Afif Safieh, the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization Mission in Washington, makes another point. He calls the approach of Chomsky and others on the left a “mechanistic” view that does not allow for the fact that each situation has its own specificity, the specificity in this case being that the junior partner can often “hijack” and “monopolize” decisionmaking on Middle East issues. The left’s argument comes from a kind of determinism that assumes US policy has rarely if ever deviated from a clearly laid-out imperial strategy designed to promote corporate interests.
But simply because the US overthrew a government deemed inimical to American business interests in Chile or supported a dictator in Indonesia where the oil industry had interests does not prove that whenever Israel has attacked Arab countries, as with Egypt in 1967 and Lebanon in 1982, it was acting to serve the United States or was, as Chomsky has alleged, performing a “huge service to the US-Saudis-Energy corporations by smashing secular Arab nationalism.” Israel in no way serves to ensure US access to or control over the Middle East’s oil resources, nor does it work in conjunction with the oil industry.
There is no denying the intricate interweaving of the US military-industrial-financial complex with Israel’s military, industrial, and financial interests, as Chomsky and others on the left contend, but rather than a relationship in which Israel does the bidding of the US corporate-government conglomeration, in reality the entanglement is much more one between two independent players. And the lobby essentially functions to sustain and manipulate the entanglement. Blankfort maintains that the influence of the lobby “is actually underestimated. Not only does it keep Congress in thrall to its demands on issues pertaining to Israel and the Middle East in general, it also serves, less conspicuously, as a powerful lobbying force for maintaining America’s high levels of military spending and for integrating the Israeli arms industry with that of the US.” This integration, Blankfort says, “goes a long way to explain why there has been no significant opposition to the annual military budget from any sector of Congress.”
Israel and its lobby work hand in glove with the US arms industry to advance their combined, usually compatible interests. The relatively few powerful, wealthy families that dominate the Israeli arms industry are just as interested in pressing for aggressively militaristic US and Israeli foreign policies as are the CEOs of US arms corporations. As globalization has progressed, so have the ties of joint ownership and close financial and technological cooperation among the arms corporations of the two nations grown ever closer. The relationship is symbiotic, and the lobby cooperates intimately to keep it alive; lobbyists can go to many in Congress and tell them credibly that if aid to Israel is cut off, thousands of arms-industry jobs in their districts will be lost. The lobby does not simply passively support the desires of the military-industrial complex. It actively twists arms in Congress and the administration to perpetuate acceptance of certain “national interests” that many Americans believe is wrong.
A Two-Headed Monster
As Tony Judt noted, much of the rest of the world now “no longer credits our good faith.” Strong US support for Israel has long roiled Arab public opinion, but since the collapse of the peace process and the start of the Palestinian intifada and Israel’s harsh crackdown in September 2000, opinion polls in Arab and Muslim countries have repeatedly shown strong and growing distrust of the United States, linked principally to US support for Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians and more recently to the Iraq war. Hostile attitudes reach into the 70-80 percent range in many Arab countries. Similar, although not as strong or pervasive, distrust of the US emerges in polls in Europe. The growing anti-US sentiment resulting from the close US relationship with Israel is a principal emphasis in the Mearsheimer-Walt report. The authors point out at the opening of their report that Bush administration policies, heavily influenced by the Israel lobby, have helped produce a “resilient insurgency in Iraq, a sharp rise in world oil prices, and terrorist bombings in Madrid, London, and Amman.” The United States’ “unwavering” support for Israel, they write, has “inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardized US security.” They believe the US has actually set aside its own security to advance the interests of another state.
The obvious result has been more terrorism against the US and its allies. Osama bin Laden’s videos and taped statements from the 1990s talk about the Palestinians and his anger with the US because of its alliance with Israel. His anger and that of other radical Islamists is on behalf of Muslims who have been killed and exploited by the US, Israel, and the West for decades, and Palestinians are perhaps the most prominent among these. His anger is shared by millions of the oppressed, and he can attract the radicals among them to his struggle on the basis of his stance as a defender of Palestinians and all oppressed Muslims. This is a danger to the United States, arising directly from the strong US-Israel tie and the lobby’s strenuous efforts to sustain it, that cannot be underestimated.
The tragedy of the present situation is that it has become impossible to separate Israeli from alleged US interests – that is, not what should be real US national interests, but the selfish and self-defined “national interests” of the political-corporate-military complex that, in conjunction with the lobby, dominates the Bush administration, Congress, and both major political parties. The specific groups that now dominate the government are the globalized arms, energy, and financial industries, and the entire military establishments, of the US and of Israel – groups that have quite literally hijacked the government and stripped it of most vestiges of democracy. The “aggressive monster with two ugly heads” that Michel Warschawski speaks of is a reality.
This convergence of manipulated “interests” has a profound effect on US policy choices in the Middle East. If the United States is unable to distinguish the world’s or its own real needs from those of another state and that state’s lobby, then it simply cannot say that it always acts in its own best interests. In the face of the massive human rights violations being committed against Palestinians today, the failure to recognize this reality is where those who belittle the lobby’s power and accept US Middle East policy as simply an unchangeable part of a longstanding strategy are particularly dangerous.
Bill Christison is a former senior official of the CIA. He served as a National Intelligence Officer and as Director of the CIA’s Office of Regional and Political Analysis.
Kathleen Christison is a former CIA political analyst and has worked on Middle East issues for 30 years. She is the author of Perceptions of Palestine and The Wound of Dispossession.
By Kathleen and Bill Christison
ADBUSTERS #70 – Journal of the Mental Environment
A quarter century ago, the executive director of AIPAC – the American Israel Public Affairs Committee – established an analytical unit inside the organization to write in-depth advocacy papers for policymakers. The year was 1981, the president was Ronald Reagan, and AIPAC had just lost a hard-fought battle in Congress over the sale of AWACS surveillance aircraft to Saudi Arabia. The AIPAC leader was an energetic former congressional aide named Thomas Dine, who used the setback to build AIPAC into a formidable political force. Over the next few years, Dine quadrupled AIPAC’s grassroots membership as well as its budget and aggressively expanded contacts with Congress and policymakers. He set out to supply politicians with analyses geared toward advancing Israeli interests, in the stated belief that anyone who wrote papers read by policymakers would effectively “own” the policymakers.
This was a seminal moment in the decades-long growth of the lobby’s influence on US Middle East policy, often to the detriment of US national interests. Many have characterized the relationship between what the United States does in the Middle East and what the lobby wants it to do as a case of the Israeli tail wagging the US dog. Israel and its US supporters, although constituting the junior partner in the relationship, are seen as virtually dictating policy to whatever administration and Congress are in power. There are myriad examples of this dynamic, most notably Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which dragged the US into a disastrous intervention, and Israel’s invasion of the West Bank in 2002, during which Prime Minister Ariel Sharon openly and repeatedly defied President George Bush’s demand for a withdrawal. Others maintain that the tail-wagging is the other way around: that the United States, as the superpower, patron of Israel, and its major aid donor, is unmistakably the senior partner and the dog that wags the tail. The question, therefore, is which is the accurate assessment, or is the cynical view of Israeli commentator Michel Warschawski correct, that “there is neither a dog nor a tail, but one global war of re-colonization, and one aggressive monster with two ugly heads”?
Silence Broken
Despite the growing power of the Israel lobby, and the growing convergence of US and Israeli efforts toward global and regional Middle East domination, public debate over the size and substance of the lobby’s role in US policymaking was almost non-existent until two political scientists, John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard University, issued an 81-page report in March 2006 analyzing lobby strength. Mearsheimer, the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science, and Walt, Belfer Professor of International Affairs, are leading proponents of the realist school of foreign policy, which argues that states act to further military and economic power rather than pursue idealism and ethics. Their report sparked widespread interest when it was published in abbreviated form in the London Review of Books. Defining the lobby broadly as “the loose coalition of individuals and organizations who actively work to shape US foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction,” Mearsheimer and Walt conclude that the thrust of US policy in the Middle East is overwhelmingly the result of the lobby’s activities. They observe that, while other lobbies and interest groups have also demonstrated an ability to skew policy, “no lobby has managed to divert US foreign policy as far from what the American national interest would otherwise suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that US and Israeli interests are essentially identical.”
The report aroused instantaneous and vocal opposition from the very individuals whom the authors identify as members of the lobby. Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, a vociferous advocate of Israel, called the authors “liars” engaging in “crass bigotry” and likened their arguments to neo-Nazi propaganda, filled with “thinly veiled charges of Jewish control of American thought” reminiscent of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Abraham Foxman and his Anti-Defamation League (ADL) charged that the report’s main thesis “is the embodiment of classic, anti-Jewish conspiracy theory.”
Most criticism from Israel’s strongest advocates fails, however, to address the principal points of the Mearsheimer-Walt study: that influential elements in the United States – non-Jews as well as Jews – who have as a primary objective the advancement of Israeli interests have gained undue influence over US Middle East policy and use this influence to tilt policy toward Israel in ways that are contrary to US national interests. Instead, critics argue off the point, raising straw men that distract from the report’s main thesis.
The accusation that Mearsheimer and Walt are “anti-Semitic” is the charge most commonly heard from supporters of Israel across the political spectrum. Not coincidentally, it is also a line of attack long used by the lobby to silence and indeed attack anyone who dares question Israeli policies or the United States’ close ties to Israel. The question of anti-Semitism was addressed during a major debate in New York in September that pitted Mearsheimer and two allies against a former Israeli official and two policymakers from the Clinton administration, Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk. These three opponents of Mearsheimer, although clearly supporters of Israel, are generally regarded as centrists, neither particularly hard-core like Dershowitz nor rightwing, but all three echoed Dershowitz in charging that the report “lowers itself to the level of anti-Semitism” or “has connotations of anti-Semitism,” simply because it discusses the role of some Jews in positions of power and influence.
This debate around anti-Semitism is a diversion from the main issue and is undoubtedly intended as such. The New York panel spent fully one-third of its allotted time examining whether Mearsheimer and Walt are anti-Semitic before getting to any substantive analysis of the report’s conclusions and evidence. Criticism of former President Jimmy Carter’s book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid follows the same pattern. Critics charge poor scholarship or hint at anti-Semitism because Carter uses the term “apartheid” to describe Israel’s policies in the occupied Palestinian territories. Many, including the Democratic Party leadership, have criticized the book, but few have provided evidence to support their charges or seriously examined the evidence behind Carter’s thesis.
A member of the New York panel who spoke in support of the Mearsheimer-Walt report, New York University professor Tony Judt, has written about the crippling effect that Americans’ induced fear of being labeled anti-Semitic has had on public discourse about anything relating to Israel and ultimately on policy. During the panel discussion, he highlighted the phenomenon by observing that, although there are “hundreds of distorting lobbies” in the US, the Israel lobby is the only one that not only acts energetically in pursuit of its cause, “but acts constantly and very effectively to silence criticism of its cause.” In a similar vein, Mearsheimer observed in an interview with Mother Jones that the main reason the strong affinity between the US and Israel continues is the absence of open and candid discussion about the relationship. There would be far less sympathy for Israel, he said, if Americans knew what Israelis are doing in the occupied territories. “In essence, America’s present relationship with Israel could not withstand public scrutiny.”
Jimmy Carter’s book makes a major effort to provide more scrutiny, but its success is so far uncertain. Scott Ritter, who worked closely with Israel as a military intelligence officer and as a UN weapons inspector in Iraq, reiterates both Judt’s and Mearsheimer’s observations in his new book Target Iran. While many nations maintain active lobbies in the US, he writes, none has “the scope and clout” of the Israel lobby and none operates in its “brazen manner.” Ritter foresees a potentially catastrophic US-Israeli confrontation with Iran and believes the only way to avoid this will be by bringing the nature of the US-Israeli relationship into the national discourse, fundamentally re-examining why the US operates in “continued national impotence as another nation, Israel, dictates national security policy for all America.”
In a 2003 critique of Israel and the U.S.-Israeli relationship in the New York Review of Books, Judt touched on what Mearsheimer and Walt later laid out as their principal thesis. Judt wrote that Israel continued “to mock its American patron” by building illegal settlements even as the US was pushing the “Roadmap” peace plan calling for a freeze on settlement construction. Israel had reduced the powerful president of the United States, he said, to a “ventriloquist’s dummy, pitifully reciting the Israeli cabinet line.” Its behavior “has been a disaster for American foreign policy.” The United States’ unconditional support for Israel “is the main reason why most of the rest of the world no longer credits our good faith.”
James Abourezk knows the lobby well. A US senator from South Dakota from 1972-1978, Abourezk says, from his experience in Congress, that “the support Israel has in that body is based completely on political fear” – fear that “anyone who does not do what Israel wants done” will be defeated by the lobby. Abourezk reinforces the point about the lobby’s efforts to silence. “Even one voice is attacked,” he writes, “on grounds that if Congress is completely silent on the issue, the press will have no one to quote, which effectively silences the press as well. Any journalists or editors who step out of line are quickly brought under control by well organized economic pressure against the newspaper caught sinning.” Jimmy Carter has described a similar phenomenon in recent commentaries, noting that AIPAC’s “extraordinary lobbying efforts” have silenced all debate in policymaking councils, in Congress, and in the media about Israeli policies.
Abourezk describes pressure tactics that were already in full swing before AIPAC set out to “own” policymakers, and Carter has made it clear that the lobby’s stranglehold on discourse and on decisionmaking has tightened. The pro-Israeli tilt that has, to one degree or another, been characteristic of most administrations and most Congresses since Israel’s creation was clearly not Dine’s invention or a phenomenon that emerged only in the 1980s. But Dine institutionalized the process, strengthening it significantly.
In 1984, in addition to the internal analytical unit, AIPAC spun off another body, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), that remains a pre-eminent think tank – one that has placed its analysts in policymaking jobs in several administrations. Dennis Ross, who was the senior Middle East policymaker in the administrations of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, came from WINEP and returned there after leaving government service. Martin Indyk, an original member of AIPAC’s analytical unit and WINEP’s first director, entered a senior policymaking position in the Clinton administration from there. Mearsheimer and Walt correctly describe both men as situated “at the core of the lobby.”
This assertion addresses a critical aspect of the lobby question by emphasizing the reality that the lobby has in recent decades actually become a part of various administrations. The lobby is also not confined to the formal Jewish-American organizations such as AIPAC and the ADL and think tanks like WINEP and JINSA, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, but also includes numerous individuals who work on Israel’s behalf and encompasses the very large fundamentalist Christian right. The Christian right strongly supports Israel’s continued control over the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem as the essential prerequisite to the so-called Millennium, when they believe Jesus Christ will reappear. During the last several years in particular, the Christian right has used its vast numbers to lobby both the administration and Congress in support of Israel’s policies and in opposition to any proposal that would require Israeli concessions.
The kind of blunt pressure on decisionmakers that Abourezk describes is only one way in which the organized lobby operates. The bond between Israel and the US has always had its grounding as much in soft emotions as in the hard realities of geopolitical strategy. Over the years since Israel’s creation, there has been a pervasive atmosphere in which Israel is simply assumed to be so close to the US, its interests so closely intertwined with American interests, that it is accepted almost as a part of the US.
The lobby reinforces this sentiment, channeling it into institutional ways of involving ordinary Americans in supporting Israel. Jeffrey Blankfort, a northern California radio host and long-time commentator on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and other Middle East issues, points out, for instance, that 1,700 unions in the US own more than $5 billion of Israel bonds. This effectively obliges the unions to support Israel, Blankfort believes, making the American labor movement a part of the lobby. It is one reason that the organized left in the United States has opposed making the Palestine issue part of the anti-war movement. Many states and universities also invest in Israel bonds, as well as in Israeli companies, giving these local governments and institutions an interest in supporting Israel’s policies in order to keep the Israeli economy going.
The pervasiveness of the lobby’s influence makes Tony Judt’s reference to the US president as a “ventriloquist’s dummy” particularly apt. As Walt pointed out in a Mother Jones interview, no matter what Israel does, the United States continues to support it. “They continue to build settlements even though every president since Lyndon Johnson has thought that was a bad idea. They spy on us routinely. They’ve given or sold American military technology to other countries. Alsothey have conducted a wide variety of human rights violations, and yet none of those activities ever slows down American support.” For the last several decades, AIPAC has frequently involved itself directly in the legislative process, writing legislation relating to the Middle East and pushing a series of anti-Arab, pro-Israeli resolutions that state the stance of the Senate and the House on various issues, such as Israel’s construction of the separation wall and Israel’s summer 2006 attack on Lebanon. AIPAC often boasts that it vets and exerts influence over presidential candidates. During the 2004 presidential campaign when Howard Dean issued a mild and seemingly non-controversial call for an “even-handed” US policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict, he was roundly condemned by the lobby and by fellow Democrats, and he quickly dropped the call. Long-serving congressmen who deviate are targeted for electoral defeat. In the 1980s, Representative Paul Findley and Senator Charles Percy, who had each served multiple terms in Illinois, were defeated through the efforts of AIPAC after both spoke out in favor of negotiating with the PLO. More recently, Georgia’s Cynthia McKinney has twice been the target of AIPAC’s electoral interference.
The list goes on. Israel and its lobby have been the policy initiators, the US the follower, in Israel’s 1967 war, its 1982 invasion of Lebanon, its 2002 invasion of the West Bank, its 40-year settlement-construction enterprise in the occupied Palestinian territories, its disproportionate attacks on Palestinians, its assault on Lebanon. The scope of the lobby’s infiltration of government policymaking councils has been unprecedented during the current Bush administration, and there is strong evidence that neo-conservatives inside the administration – whose ties to Israel’s right wing are undeniable – were the architects of the invasion of Iraq and of the administration’s push to “transform” the Middle East and spread “democracy” throughout the region. Mearsheimer and Walt assert that the Iraq war was “at least partly intended to improve Israel’s strategic position” – a reality that would seem to be confirmed by the fact that some of these same neo-cons authored a strategy paper, entitled “A Clean Break,” in the mid-1990s for then Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, laying out a plan for attacking Iraq that was later pushed when the neo-cons entered the Bush administration. The strategy was designed explicitly to assure Israel’s regional dominance, to undermine the Oslo peace process, and to relieve Israel of pressure to make concessions to the Palestinians.
One of the authors, David Wurmser, remains in government as Vice President Richard Cheney’s Middle East adviser; the others, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, were closely involved in Iraq war planning as, respectively, an adviser to the Pentagon and an undersecretary of defense. Almost all the other neo-cons, both Jews and non-Jews, have also compiled long records of advocacy on behalf of Israel. These include Paul Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams, John Bolton, and their cheerleaders on the sidelines such as William Kristol, Robert Kagan, Norman Podhoretz, the late Jeane Kirkpatrick, and numerous rightwing, pro-Israeli think tanks in Washington.
In response to the lobby’s pressure on legislators and policymakers, the US has given Israel massive amounts of military and economic aid over the years. Mearsheimer and Walt cite statistics from the US Agency for International Development indicating that between 1976 and 2003, the US gave Israel a total of $140 billion in aid, in constant 2003 dollars. One economist, Thomas Stauffer, who has long tracked aid to Israel, put the figure much higher in 2002, estimating a total of $240 billion in the preceding 30 years, adjusted to current dollars. Israel now receives an automatic $2-3 billion annually in grant aid, mostly military, in addition to large increments of additional aid to compensate for the cost to Israel of such actions as the Lebanon war and the Gaza withdrawal.
Defining the National Interest
The truly important part of the debate over the lobby’s power swirls around the issue of national interests – what constitutes national interests, who determines them, and whether real national interests are harmed by the lobby. A group of commentators and analysts on the left who are highly critical of Israel’s policies have nonetheless been dismissive of the notion that the lobby has particular influence over policy. Their arguments center on the issue of what actually constitutes the US national interest. Noam Chomsky has frequently indicated that Middle East policy is determined largely by what he calls the “tight state-corporate linkage” where domestic power is concentrated – in other words, the military-industrial complex working in cooperation with the government, whose special interests, Chomsky believes, ultimately define US national interests. The Israel lobby has some impact on determining policy in Chomsky’s estimation, but to a far lesser extent and generally only insofar as the lobby’s interests conform to corporate-government interests.
Chomsky and the other left critics of the lobby study essentially believe that US policy has always been directed at the advancement of US imperial and corporate interests, and that Israel, far from leading the US into harmful policies and foreign adventures, has always done the US bidding. The US would pursue its imperial objectives even without Israel, and it has pursued these in areas outside the Middle East, such as Chile, Indonesia, Central America, and elsewhere, without benefit of any lobby. The Israel lobby, in this view, functions as merely a handy adjunct to US policy, not an agent with any control or particular influence.
One thing this argument ignores, however, is that the lobby and its close ties to US arms makers strengthen the ability of the military-industrial complex to control what are defined as US national interests. The Israel lobby holds unquestionable sway over many individual congressmen and executive branch officials, including in the White House, making it difficult for anyone to influence the alleged national interests of the US in ways that the lobby might feel weakened Israel’s uniquely special relationship with the US. Any debate involving this taboo subject, even indirectly, would almost certainly be quashed before it started, buried under paeans for Israel from both Republicans and Democrats.
Afif Safieh, the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization Mission in Washington, makes another point. He calls the approach of Chomsky and others on the left a “mechanistic” view that does not allow for the fact that each situation has its own specificity, the specificity in this case being that the junior partner can often “hijack” and “monopolize” decisionmaking on Middle East issues. The left’s argument comes from a kind of determinism that assumes US policy has rarely if ever deviated from a clearly laid-out imperial strategy designed to promote corporate interests.
But simply because the US overthrew a government deemed inimical to American business interests in Chile or supported a dictator in Indonesia where the oil industry had interests does not prove that whenever Israel has attacked Arab countries, as with Egypt in 1967 and Lebanon in 1982, it was acting to serve the United States or was, as Chomsky has alleged, performing a “huge service to the US-Saudis-Energy corporations by smashing secular Arab nationalism.” Israel in no way serves to ensure US access to or control over the Middle East’s oil resources, nor does it work in conjunction with the oil industry.
There is no denying the intricate interweaving of the US military-industrial-financial complex with Israel’s military, industrial, and financial interests, as Chomsky and others on the left contend, but rather than a relationship in which Israel does the bidding of the US corporate-government conglomeration, in reality the entanglement is much more one between two independent players. And the lobby essentially functions to sustain and manipulate the entanglement. Blankfort maintains that the influence of the lobby “is actually underestimated. Not only does it keep Congress in thrall to its demands on issues pertaining to Israel and the Middle East in general, it also serves, less conspicuously, as a powerful lobbying force for maintaining America’s high levels of military spending and for integrating the Israeli arms industry with that of the US.” This integration, Blankfort says, “goes a long way to explain why there has been no significant opposition to the annual military budget from any sector of Congress.”
Israel and its lobby work hand in glove with the US arms industry to advance their combined, usually compatible interests. The relatively few powerful, wealthy families that dominate the Israeli arms industry are just as interested in pressing for aggressively militaristic US and Israeli foreign policies as are the CEOs of US arms corporations. As globalization has progressed, so have the ties of joint ownership and close financial and technological cooperation among the arms corporations of the two nations grown ever closer. The relationship is symbiotic, and the lobby cooperates intimately to keep it alive; lobbyists can go to many in Congress and tell them credibly that if aid to Israel is cut off, thousands of arms-industry jobs in their districts will be lost. The lobby does not simply passively support the desires of the military-industrial complex. It actively twists arms in Congress and the administration to perpetuate acceptance of certain “national interests” that many Americans believe is wrong.
A Two-Headed Monster
As Tony Judt noted, much of the rest of the world now “no longer credits our good faith.” Strong US support for Israel has long roiled Arab public opinion, but since the collapse of the peace process and the start of the Palestinian intifada and Israel’s harsh crackdown in September 2000, opinion polls in Arab and Muslim countries have repeatedly shown strong and growing distrust of the United States, linked principally to US support for Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians and more recently to the Iraq war. Hostile attitudes reach into the 70-80 percent range in many Arab countries. Similar, although not as strong or pervasive, distrust of the US emerges in polls in Europe. The growing anti-US sentiment resulting from the close US relationship with Israel is a principal emphasis in the Mearsheimer-Walt report. The authors point out at the opening of their report that Bush administration policies, heavily influenced by the Israel lobby, have helped produce a “resilient insurgency in Iraq, a sharp rise in world oil prices, and terrorist bombings in Madrid, London, and Amman.” The United States’ “unwavering” support for Israel, they write, has “inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardized US security.” They believe the US has actually set aside its own security to advance the interests of another state.
The obvious result has been more terrorism against the US and its allies. Osama bin Laden’s videos and taped statements from the 1990s talk about the Palestinians and his anger with the US because of its alliance with Israel. His anger and that of other radical Islamists is on behalf of Muslims who have been killed and exploited by the US, Israel, and the West for decades, and Palestinians are perhaps the most prominent among these. His anger is shared by millions of the oppressed, and he can attract the radicals among them to his struggle on the basis of his stance as a defender of Palestinians and all oppressed Muslims. This is a danger to the United States, arising directly from the strong US-Israel tie and the lobby’s strenuous efforts to sustain it, that cannot be underestimated.
The tragedy of the present situation is that it has become impossible to separate Israeli from alleged US interests – that is, not what should be real US national interests, but the selfish and self-defined “national interests” of the political-corporate-military complex that, in conjunction with the lobby, dominates the Bush administration, Congress, and both major political parties. The specific groups that now dominate the government are the globalized arms, energy, and financial industries, and the entire military establishments, of the US and of Israel – groups that have quite literally hijacked the government and stripped it of most vestiges of democracy. The “aggressive monster with two ugly heads” that Michel Warschawski speaks of is a reality.
This convergence of manipulated “interests” has a profound effect on US policy choices in the Middle East. If the United States is unable to distinguish the world’s or its own real needs from those of another state and that state’s lobby, then it simply cannot say that it always acts in its own best interests. In the face of the massive human rights violations being committed against Palestinians today, the failure to recognize this reality is where those who belittle the lobby’s power and accept US Middle East policy as simply an unchangeable part of a longstanding strategy are particularly dangerous.
Bill Christison is a former senior official of the CIA. He served as a National Intelligence Officer and as Director of the CIA’s Office of Regional and Political Analysis.
Kathleen Christison is a former CIA political analyst and has worked on Middle East issues for 30 years. She is the author of Perceptions of Palestine and The Wound of Dispossession.
Saturday, February 10, 2007
The American Jewish community's pretence of consensus on Israel is crumbling
Cracks in the wall
February 10, 2007 11:00 AM
Richard Silverstein
Richard Silverstein
Reading the Independent Jewish Voices manifesto and other posts written by signatories, I've been struck by the similarity in themes and similarity of political developments within the American and British Jewish communities.
Over the past six months, two notable developments have set Israel and diaspora Jewry adrift. The first was Israel's war in Lebanon, whose failure caused grave paralysis both in the military and within the government. The second was publication of the Walt-Mearsheimer essay about the Israel lobby's influence on US Mideast policy.
This has become a multi-front war now, with new fronts emerging in seemingly spontaneous fashion. One of the new fronts is Jimmy Carter's new book, which Old Guard Jewish organisations seem to have in their shorthairs. Another is an essay, sponsored by the American-Jewish Committee, purporting to analyse the phenomenon of the "new" anti-semitism professed by liberal Jews who criticise Israeli policies. On yet a third front, three American Jewish peace groups, Peace Now, Israel Policy Forum, and Brit Tzedek, fought an epic battle against an AIPAC-sponsored Congressional bill to criminalise contact with Hamas - the Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Bill.
Perhaps realising the importance of this victory, George Soros and other wealthy liberal Jews have been meeting for months to plan for the establishment of an independent Jewish lobby that will counter AIPAC's strident nationalist advocacy.
AIPAC, the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee have enjoyed virtual hegemony as the voice of American Jewry on Israel. It is why presidents, senators and Congress members have voted AIPAC's way (until recently) on virtually all legislation of interest to the group.
But now, if you put your finger to the wind, you can sense a change. Jimmy Carter's book is a sensation, having sold 200,000 copies as of January 14. The more Jewish greybeards attack it, the more it sells. The book seems to have struck a chord.
The old Israel "consensus" and leadership approaches are ineffective. When AIPAC speaks, politicians no longer salute quite as crisply as they once did.
Enter a relatively obscure recent internal political battle within a group called the Israel Campus Coalition. The group is composed of American Jewish groups active on college campuses. The liberal Union of Progressive Zionists hosted a national tour by the Israeli refusenik group, Break the Silence. At its speaking engagements, the refuseniks criticised the occupation.
The hard-right Zionist Organisation of America took special offence that Israeli soldiers who supposedly had shirked their responsibility to serve their country were telling Jewish college students that Israel behaved badly. The group moved to have UPZ expelled from the ICC. Last week, after wide coverage in the Jewish media, ICC voted not to expel UPZ.
On the heels of this, Israel's consul general in Los Angeles, Ehud Danoch wrote a foreign ministry report attacking not only Break the Silence, but another refusenik group currently touring the US, Combatants for Peace. Announcing the report, Yediot Ahronot claimed (only in the original Hebrew version of the story) that the refusenik tours were "funded by US Palestinian organisations." Further, the report stated that such tours "damaged Israel" and "must be stopped". The most incendiary language was eliminated from the English version of the story published at Ynetnews.
Both UPZ and Brit Tzedek affirm they have neither sought nor accepted funding from Arab organisations for their tours.
The consul general's report also takes the unusual step of criticising Hillel by name for hosting events on the Break the Silence tour because "the willingness by Jewish communities to host these groups and even fund them is painful". It is highly unusual, and some might say inappropriate, for Israeli diplomats to single out American Jewish organisations by name for criticism.
The report reserves its harshest judgment for Israelis:
These refuseniks are cynically using their reserve soldier status and causing damage to the state of Israel. It's possible that these organizations aren't aware that they have turned, over time, into tools in the hands of North American Muslim campus organizations and that they have crossed the line between their aspiration to be an influential force within Israel to becoming a clearly anti-Israel force causing Israel great damage in the world.
One wonders what political purpose was fulfilled by the internal Israeli publication of these spurious charges. I think it's an issue of the political powers that be losing their footing and no longer being able to place their political priorities in proper perspective. They are deeply afraid of the potential moral power of the refusenik message of saying "No" to the current policy of endless conflict. They ascribe more power to this movement than it has and more danger than it represents.
Recently, Joel Beinin, a Stanford University Mideast specialist, was to speak at a San Jose school. The Silicon Valley Jewish Community Relations Council got wind of the program and enlisted school parents and students to protest. Beinin's invitation was rescinded the day before he was to speak.
The JCRC director explained her opposition to Beinin's presentation by saying that the professor "opposed Israel's existence". Any presentation he gave must be balanced, on the same programme, by a countering perspective. The Israeli-Arab conflict, she contended, is too complicated to allow such an "extreme" perspective to go unanswered.
This is an impoverished view of the Israeli-Arab debate. I call it the "balance syndrome": people are allegedly so prone to the blandishments of the anti-Israel crowd that its every public utterance must be monitored and countered by someone representing the "right" perspective.
The Beinin incident mirrors Tony Judt's cancelled speaking engagement at the New York Polish consulate where he was due to talk about the Israeli-Arab conflict.
Such strong-arming makes Jewish pressure groups look weak and frightened. They do a great disservice because the ideas espoused by Judt, Beinin, Carter or Israeli refuseniks are debated freely within Israel itself.
Why must we here be treated as if we are invalids in need of spoonfeeding when it comes to policy debates about Israel?
What are we afraid of? Do we not do Israel an injustice by viewing her as so delicate that entertaining a few "unpopular" ideas will lead to her extinction? The Israel I know and love can withstand such debate. In fact, I believe that Israel is only strengthened by the free exchange of ideas.
A new weapon in the battle for that free exchange of ideas has been a burgeoning culture of American Jewish blogs devoted to Israeli-Arab peace. Tikun Olam (my own blog) and Muzzlewatch broke several of the stories mentioned above.
These blogs and a score of others - because they are independent of communal consensus or pressure - have proven to be a useful tool in questioning the established order of American Jewish leadership and its priorities.
Click here for a full list of articles in the Independent Jewish Voices debate.
Thursday, February 8, 2007
U.S./Israel: The dual-loyalty question is being mainstreamed
the new york observer
Another Achievement of the AJC: 'The New Republic' Joins Me on Dual Loyalty Issue
A few weeks back I brought up the charge of dual loyalty with respect to the neocons who claim that Israel's interests and the U.S.'s interests are identical. A very sensitive question, yes, and a lot of people got upset with me, including friends.
Posted by Phil Weiss on February 8, 2007 12:42 PM | Permalink
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Editor's note: Going after the dual-loyalty thing is gutsy. Recall Herr Chertoff is an Israeli.
Here's an excerpt of a thread from one of my postings today which is relevant to the "anti-semitism" construct used to bludgeon critics:
"I see some people are still playing the enemies game by acknowledging the political term "anti-semitism".
Once again:
Another Achievement of the AJC: 'The New Republic' Joins Me on Dual Loyalty Issue
A few weeks back I brought up the charge of dual loyalty with respect to the neocons who claim that Israel's interests and the U.S.'s interests are identical. A very sensitive question, yes, and a lot of people got upset with me, including friends.
Well now in The New Republic, John Judis has joined me in legitimizing this question. Here is the money quote:
On the one hand, Rosenfeld, Harris, and others want to deny that American Jews and American Jewish organizations like AIPAC suffer from dual loyalty in trying to influence U.S. foreign policy. It's anti-Semitic or contributes to anti-Semitism, they say, to make that charge. On the other hand, they want to demand of American Jewish intellectuals a certain loyalty to Israel, Israeli policies, and to Zionism as part of their being Jewish. They make dual loyalty an inescapable part of being Jewish in a world in which a Jewish state exists. And that's probably the case. Many Jews now suffer from dual loyalty--the same way that Cuban-Americans or Mexican-Americans do. By ignoring this dilemma--and, worse still, by charging those who acknowledge its existence with anti-Semitism-- the critics of the new anti-Semitism are engaged in a flight from their own political selves. They are guilty of a certain kind of bad faith.
This is intellectually valiant work, Judis should be applauded; and TNR praised for running the piece. As for the demand made on Jewish intellectuals to be loyal to Israel, it is one that anyone who has worked for the New Republic (I did it once, and carried Marty Peretz's anti-U.N. water for him) has experienced.
Wow, I'm just stunned by this. It's another achievement of the AJC report, which Judis's piece addresses (and of Walt-Mearsheimer, who broke the whole thing open). Don't you see what is happening? The dual-loyalty question is being mainstreamed. The degree to which neocons and neolibs and American Jewish journalists generally have been recruited in passive/unconscious identification with Israel is, as I've said here before, a legitimate issue. The suppression in the American Jewish community of any alternative discourse to Zionism—well, thanks to the AJC, the bridges are being dynamited...
FILE UNDER: Neocons, Politics, Culture, Religion, U.S. Policy in the MideastPosted by Phil Weiss on February 8, 2007 12:42 PM | Permalink
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Editor's note: Going after the dual-loyalty thing is gutsy. Recall Herr Chertoff is an Israeli.
Here's an excerpt of a thread from one of my postings today which is relevant to the "anti-semitism" construct used to bludgeon critics:
"I see some people are still playing the enemies game by acknowledging the political term "anti-semitism".
Once again:
Antisemitic is a word that the zionists carefully chose to accomplish several goals: It denigrates their opposition, it implies a unified philosophy between Hebrews, jews, zionists, and sabbateans, and most importantly, it usurps the Semitic bloodline for exclusive use by european ashkinazics and sephardics with the implied usurpation of the land and biblical blessings promised to the Semitic children of Abraham.
I completely reject that word because it is a political tool, not a verb, noun, or adjective. I refuse to use it or acknowledge it."
Friday, February 2, 2007
Some prominent Americans are courageously speaking up against Zionism and deserve the thanks of Arabs
Arabs must listen
Ibrahim Nafie
Former US president Jimmy Carter is locked in fierce battle with the Jewish lobby. Since his recent book, Palestine: Peace not Apartheid, Carter has become the whipping boy of the Israel lobby and the neo-cons. He appeared in several debates with pro-Israel lobbyists and lectured at Jewish institutions to explain his point of view, but his calm composure failed to bring him anything but slander and abuse. Israel's supporters have accused Carter of lying, of stealing maps and documents, of hunger for publicity, and -- guess what -- racism and anti-Semitism.
Despite the vilification, Carter has stayed the course. A few days ago, he lectured at Brandeis University, a dominantly Jewish institution. Carter talked about his book, saying that his choice of the term "apartheid" was meant to be thought-provoking, for he wanted people to think carefully about Israel's treatment of the Palestinians. He added that he used the term "just" 28 times in his book because a peace settlement has to be just in order to last. Israel's policy towards the Palestinians was undermining peace in the region, he stated.
In his talk to Brandeis University students, Carter recalled his earlier political career, noting that when he ran for senate, governor of Georgia, and president of the United States, his rivals would take the occasional personal jibe at him. But not once, he said, was he ever called a liar, a bigot and a coward, or accused of plagiarism and anti-Semitism. "It hurts," he admitted.
The campaign against Carter shows how powerful the Zionist lobby is. It also shows that prominent figures are not afraid to speak up anymore. Two political scientists, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, have spoken about the control of the media and think tanks by the Israeli lobby. Their remarks made them the target of attacks, but they didn't retract their views.
I believe that people such as Carter, Walt and Mearsheimer are giving valuable support to Arab rights. They work from inside the system, offering calm arguments and sober views. This is something we miss in the Arab world, where opinions are often tainted with emotion.
Those Americans who tell it as it is, despite Zionist pressures, deserve our thanks and appreciation. Arab civil groups and study centres need to invite those people to give lectures here. We need to learn from them and thank them. Would an Arab organisation invite Jimmy Carter so that we may discuss his views and listen to his advice?
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Wednesday, January 24, 2007
Delegitimization of Israel rising among US elite
Hoenlein: Delegitimization of Israel rising among US elite
In the coming years American Jewry will face the most significant delegitimization of Israel it has ever encountered, Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice-chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, told The Jerusalem Post on Monday.
This will occur, he believes, as the blueprint developed at the Durban Conference on Racism in 2001 is implemented by anti-Israel activists in America.
Hoenlein is expected to deliver this message on Tuesday to the Herzliya Conference run by the Institute for Policy and Strategy of the IDC Herzliya, in a speech titled "The Poisoning of America," along with recommendations for action on the part of American Jews and Israel to help fight what he sees as a growing threat to support for Israel in America.
"Right now we enjoy the broadest support for Israel than perhaps at any time since the creation of the state, about 70 percent of the American people," he asserted.
Nevertheless, he insisted, "at the next Herzliya Conference we're going to be discussing how this could happen, how this cancer was allowed to spread to the United States."
The process Hoenlein sees happening in America is similar to what occurred in Britain, he said, "where the elite in society were turned against Israel. The fact that [Harvard and University of Chicago professors] Walt and Mearsheimer couldn't publish [their study claiming overwhelming influence of the 'Israel lobby' in Washington] in the United States, but had to go to the London Review of Books," was telling, he believes.
Now however, Walt and Mearsheimer "have a major contract, and are anticipating sales of one million copies."
In addition, "sales of [former US President Jimmy] Carter's book [Peace Not Apartheid] have been topping best seller lists."
"What was once acceptable on the fringes is now acceptable in the mainstream," he said, concluding that "at times, the American Jewish community has to [exercise] greater assertiveness."
Friday, January 12, 2007
Wes Clark, Are You Ever in Hot Water With the Israel Lobby!
January 10, 2007 at 1:09 am aipac supports attacking iran
haaretz huffington post netanyahu lobbies u.s. leaders for iran attack shmuel rosner
Shmuel Rosner, one of the U.S. Israel Lobby's best friends in the Israeli media, is on the warpath against Wes Clark. Why? Because he had the temerity to "out" the Lobby (particularly Aipac) for beating the drums for war against Iran.
Arianna Huffington got a call from Clark after he'd read a Bibi Netanyahu interview with Arnaud de Borchgrave in which the old 'peacenik' detailed his efforts to lobby the Bush regime to take out the Iranian nuke facilities. Bibi asserts in the interview that American military intervention is all but a done deal. I don't know about you, but I'm with Wes on this one. This sort of stuff is Netanyahu's metier. It's what he's made for as a politician. Manipulating public opinion in favor of harsh nationalist Israeli policies using hysteria and paranoia. I, for one am glad Clark called Netanyahu out on this one. If Netanyahu wants to be Slim Pickens ridin' that H-bomb down to the ground to nuke some "Russkies" in Dr. Strangelove, I'd prefer that the bomb not have U.S. markings on it. Let Bibi find someone else to do Israel's dirty work for it (not that I'm advocating that Israel bomb Iran either).
This was Wes' statement to Huffington:
"How can you talk about bombing a country when you won't even talk to them?" said Clark. "It's outrageous. We're the United States of America; we don't do that. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the military option is off the table — but diplomacy is not what Jim Baker says it is. It's not, What will it take for you boys to support us on Iraq? It's sitting down for a couple of days and talking about our families and our hopes, and building relationships."
When we asked him what made him so sure the Bush administration was headed in this direction, he replied: "You just have to read what's in the Israeli press. The Jewish community is divided but there is so much pressure being channeled from the New York money people to the office seekers."
Boy oh boy is Wes in hot water with the Israel Lobby. He just yanked their chain and are they going to roar like a lion. This guy's gonna be called an anti-Semite and far worse things. Actually, it's already started. Rosner wrote this:
Gee, what can he possibly mean by "pressure being channeled from the New York money people"?…How and why has it become so easy to speak in this way about the Jews? Second: What does it mean politically?
It is, actually, rather troubling, even scary. People in elite circles somehow came to the conclusion that denouncing the Jewish community and its support for Israel is now becoming acceptable. Walt and Mersheimer came first, than former president Carter, now Clark - and we already have a new trend on our hands. A Jewish leader with whom I spoke yesterday asked me this most disquieting question: Is the ice thinner than one might have thought?
Politically, it is voices coming from the Democratic party, again, a nuance that the Republican Jewish Coalition could hardly miss. Yesterday, it released a statement [sic] "strongly condemned 'blatantly anti-semitic' remarks made by Retired General Wesley Clark in an interview with Arianna Huffington and urged the Democrat presidential aspirant to apologize… This is yet another sign that the veiled and not-so-veiled anti-Semitic sentiments that are rampant in the left-wing blogosphere are seeping into the 'mainstream' of Democrats' political discourse."
Gimme a break. When asked about U.S. military action against Iran, Clark correctly notes that the mainstream American Jewish community is "divided," but that the Israel Lobby's leaders ("New York money people") are united in favor. What is factually inaccurate about that statement?? Nothing. Everyone knows that Aipac has been promoting war with Iran for a terribly long time. If you don't believe me go look at the media coverage of their last national gathering. And do you really believe that Aipac is NOT trying to influence the White House & Congress on the issue of bombing Iran?
I wouldn't have said "NY money people" because Aipac's leadership is spread all over the country. It's an unfortunate and imprecise choice of words. But calling them "pro-Israel donors" would've worked just as well.
The Republican Jewish Coalition is a bunch of neocon hacks trawling for an issue. Clark's interview seems just as good a way to take it to the Dems as any. So they went on the warpath. And Rosner is their willing handmaiden. A non-issue, boys. As Bill Clinton used to say: "This dog won't hunt." But hey, you can't fault 'em for trying. They spent $1-million plus trying to dent Jewish support for Dems in the last election. What happened? Jewish support went UP.
Wes, DO NOT apologize. Hold your ground. You're precisely right. Much of the national Jewish leadership is sounding the trumpet for us to blow Iran's nukes to smithereens. But American Jews are by no means united behind such a position. Democrats need to oppose U.S. military action against Iran. If that means tangling with Aipac then so be it. Aipac should get out of the way on this issue and let the U.S. decide what is in its national interests. It should not be trying to tell U.S. leaders that what is in Israel's interest (and it is highly debatable whether such adventurism would be in Israel's interest) is also in the U.S. national interest.
Haaretz, known for its progressive analysis of the Israeli-Arab conflict, has some of the most acute, passionate, and profound columnists writing on this subject. It has had tremendous correspondents like Amos Elon covering the U.S. beat. Now it has Shmuel Rosner. It's as if CBS passed the national news anchor baton directly from Walter Cronkite to Charles Johnson. What an embarrassment.
Filed under Mideast Peace, Politics & Society
haaretz huffington post netanyahu lobbies u.s. leaders for iran attack shmuel rosner Wednesday, January 10, 2007
Walt and Mearsheimer Rebut (and Humble) Their Critics
Editor's note: Both blogs are acting up. I may have to move to the other one shortly.
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the new york observer
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the new york observer
I've just gotten a copy of a 79-page paper called "Setting the Record Straight: A Response to Critics of 'The Israel Lobby'" by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. The scholars began circulating the rebuttal privately in December but have not published it on-line, I gather, because they are working on a book about the lobby and are trying to keep some of their powder dry till publication. Nonetheless, the paper is getting around. I find it exciting, and will be referring to it in days to come.
On first reading, my chief response is (surprise) positive: the paper humanizes Walt and Mearsheimer, the voice is warmer and more intimate than their stunning original of last March. You have the feeling here of two minds struggling through a difficult subject. For instance, the authors say that it was former Harvard Dean Walt's decision—not Harvard's—to remove the Harvard logo from the on-line Kennedy School version of the original after newspapers began referring to the paper as "the Harvard study," but that given the great symbolism attached to this gesture, it was a mistake, and illustrates the saying, no good deed goes unpunished.
The sense of intellectual engagement here is thrilling. The tone is, Here is what our critics have said, here's our response. W&M itemize a wide range of critical arguments, and detail them, including the Forward's assertion, "In Dark Times, Blame the Jews." And while they don't give an inch, really, the respectful debate they are pursuing ennobles them and honors the contributions of Benny Morris and even Alan Dershowitz—far more than Dershowitz, who slimed these guys, deserves. For instance, there is a shocking quote in here from Dershowitz on MS/NBC, saying that W&M "copied" their words from neo-Nazi websites. Thus vilified, some people would threaten to sue. These scholars take the argument on calmly. God bless America.
Something else that humanizes the document is the section at the end titled, "Our Mistakes." O.K., a number of these are penny-ante, still the tone is humbling. "...there are places where our choice of words could have been clearer or more nuanced... although we went to some lengths to demonstrate that we harbor no animus towards Israel or its more ardent defenders in America, it is possible that some of our discussion did not make this point as forcefully as would have liked. First and foremost, we regret having capitalized the word 'Lobby' in our original article..." Etc.
The paper concludes with a moving statement about the controversy. The ferocity of the attacks "offers additional evidence of he lobby's efforts to create a climate that discourages questioning of its actions, Israeli policies, or the U.S.-Israeli relationship. This situation is not healthy for American democracy." Hear, hear.
But now the anger over their publication seems to be dissipating, and what they had hoped for is coming to pass: a discussion of the ideas on their merits. Myself, the March day that a friend first emailed me W&M's paper and I read it through at my desk with my eyelids glued open was a great day. I had long felt constrained by the lobby, it had limited my work and freedom. W&M had a liberating effect.
FILE UNDER: Journalism, Politics, Culture, U.S. Policy in the Mideast
Saturday, December 23, 2006
Pressuring Israel May Prevent a 'Generational' Mideast War
Related
Jimmy Carter Speaks A Simple Truth About Palestinian Apartheid
---By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Israel may well find itself at war with Syria and Hezbollah in the coming months, and the American foreign policy establishment needs to let go of its long-standing biases to prevent these conflicts.Posted on December 23, 2006
The Middle East stands at the edge of an abyss, and the most powerful country in the world has become institutionally incapable of pulling it back.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports that there "will be a war next summer. Only the sector has not been chosen yet." According to Israeli defense officials, "the IDF's operative assumption is that during the coming summer months, a war will break out against Hezbollah and perhaps against Syria as well."
America's best hope of containing the escalating tensions in the region would be to address the festering wound that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has represented for decades. Common sense dictates that the time has come for the United States to apply pressure on Israel to restart negotiations with the Palestinians equal to that already put on the Palestinians to recognize Israel and contain their violent factions.
That would mark a dramatic shift in policy, and would potentially transform Bush's smoldering wreckage of a Middle East agenda. It could also represent a turnaround in the larger struggle against Islamic extremism, pulling the world back from the brink of the real "Clash of Civilizations" that ideologues from both East and West apparently covet.
It would go a long way towards mending fences with our European allies -- Tony Blair said recently that "resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is at the core of bringing peace to the Middle East" -- and it would give the United States a golden bargaining chip to entice Iraq's neighbors to help clean up the mess we've made there. The Iraq Study Group -- the bipartisan, blue-ribbon bunch of Wise Old Men and Women -- concluded that we have little hope of stabilizing Iraq "unless the United States deals directly with the Arab-Israeli conflict" and urged "renewed and sustained commitment by the United States on all fronts," including an aggressive push for "a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine."
Yet, it won't happen. Israeli PM Ehud Olmert, who explicitly linked Israel's conflict with Lebanon during the summer to George Bush's "War on Terror," quickly shot down the ISG's recommendations, rejecting "the attempt to create a linkage between the Iraqi issue and the Mideast issue."
And so it will be. Despite the fact that we've been very, very good to Israel for a very long time, it has become politically impossible to demand that our closest ally drop the almost impossible preconditions they've put on the Palestinians for rejoining the peace process. That's because key constituencies in both major parties -- traditional Jewish "Israel voters" for the Dems and evangelical "Christian Zionists" for the Republicans -- have pushed the debate in DC to such a degree that a balanced approach to the region is now impossible for the United States.
This spring, political scientists Stephen Walt of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago created a firestorm with their study of the impact of the "Israel lobby" on U.S. foreign policy. Critics lambasted the two respected scholars, accusing them, as has become the norm, of perpetrating conspiracy theories and being closeted anti-Semites. But their point was simple. The Israel lobby, which they defined as a loosely allied group of advocacy organizations, have effectively created a rigid political orthodoxy in Washington, the result of which is that our government is now effectively incapable of pursuing U.S. interests in the Middle East if they conflict in any way with the policies of Israel's center-right governing coalition.
It would be hard to find a clearer validation of their argument than the knee-jerk rejection of the Iraq Study Group's recommendation that the United States adopt a regional strategy towards stabilizing Iraq.
The Bush administration has gone further in giving Israel carte blanche in its handling of the situation in the Occupied Territories than his predecessors (including Reagan) ever did, authoring a dramatic shift in U.S. policy towards the region. The administration offered its "Roadmap" with much fanfare in 2002. But while the Bushies have condemned the Palestinians for straying from that plan, they've been silent as the Israelis have repeatedly and quite openly violated its tenets.
In April 2004, George W. Bush made a statement that sent shockwaves through the diplomatic community:
In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949, and all previous efforts to negotiate a two-state solution have reached the same conclusion.
This was the moment when the United States gave up the pretense of being an honest broker in the conflict -- that pretense long being a hallmark of U.S. policy.
In 1978, Israeli Prime Minister Menachim Begin signed the Camp David Accords, in which he promised that Israel would halt the construction of settlements -- illegal according to U.N. Security Council resolutions 446, 452, 465 and 471. At the time, the Israeli settler population in East Jerusalem and the West Bank was less than 100,000 (in 1972, it was about 10,000). But as of 2000, there were 400,000 Israeli settlers living in territories captured in 1967, according to Israeli government statistics. Since the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993, the Israeli settler population in the West Bank (excluding Jerusalem) has doubled.
Three years ago, Israel promised the United States, in writing, that it would halt the construction of new settlements. But in October of this year, Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz released a report that Haaretz called "political dynamite." The government study found that "a secret two-year investigation by the defense establishment shows that there has been rampant illegal construction in dozens of settlements and in many cases involving privately owned Palestinian properties." The New York Times (in its "travel section" of all places), reported that while "Israel has long asserted that it fully respects Palestinian private property in the West Bank and only takes land there legally" Israeli occupation watchers have found that "39 percent of the land held by Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank is privately owned by Palestinians."
While the administration has given an unprecedented green light to the Israelis, it has brought intense pressure on the Palestinians. After much-touted Palestinian elections resulted in Hamas coming to power, the administration advocated a complete cessation of aid to the Palestinian authority and approved of Israel withholding Palestinian taxes that it collects. That led to an underreported but very severe humanitarian crisis in the occupied territories.
The rationale was that elements within Hamas refused to recognize Israel and call a halt to the Intifada, which is certainly justifiable on its face. But at the same time, both Ariel Sharon and his successor Ehud Olmert flagrantly violated the provision of the Road Map that requires that any and all moves in the occupied territories be negotiated with the Palestinians. The Bush administration had no problem with Olmert campaigning on a promise to unilaterally move about 20 percent of the Israeli settlers in the West Bank from recent settlements to older ones, while annexing about 10 percent of the Palestinian territory (a plan since abandoned, at least for the moment)
Simply put, if we extend the question of recognizing the other side's "right to exist" to the "right to self-governance within the boundaries long established by international law," then it becomes clear that Palestinians must acknowledge Israel's right to exist while powerful factions within the Israeli government refuse to acknowledge the same rights for the Palestinians, and can do so with impunity, according to the Bush White house.
And Israeli unilateralism is directly contrary to U.S. interests. As the New York Times' Steven Erlanger wrote ($$), "Israeli unilateralism can be bad for America as well as for Palestinian leaders who favor talking rather than shooting."
When the United States is seen to be an active participant, pushing its ally Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians, Israeli leaders can deflect domestic criticism by blaming Washington, the United States can earn credit with the Arab world for pushing Israel, and the Palestinians will be seen as an active player at the table, boosting negotiators like Mr. Abbas over the rejectionists of Hamas.
Since the Israelis pulled out of the peace process five years ago, there has been absolutely no incentive for them to return (while the Palestinians have been literally starved for voting Hamas to power).
Washington's lock-step embrace of Israeli policies goes beyond its dispute with Palestine; while Israel's massive destruction of Lebanon was viewed as a textbook example of a disproportionate response almost universally -- outside of DC and Tel Aviv -- there's evidence that the United States encouraged the attack. The United States also vetoed two Security Council resolutions condemning Israel for excessive violence in Gaza, which led Arab countries allied to the United States to break the economic embargo on the Palestinians.
We've dug a deep hole in the Middle East, and we just can't stop digging.
This isn't about Iraq -- nothing can salvage the U.S. project there at this point. And it's not even about defeating extremism in the short-term -- nobody seriously believes that militants will give up their violence overnight. But the American strategic class is talking about a "generational war" like the Cold War, and if that's the case, then we have got to take the Arab world's legitimate grievances seriously. Pressuring Israel to pursue a final settlement with the Palestinians would boost our frayed credibility (not only in the Middle East), deepen the rift in radical Islam between those who believe the West is their ultimate enemy -- call them the bin Ladenists -- and those who target their own, often corrupt, governments and, over the long-term, it would separate the Arab extreme from the Arab Main street. That's how you win a "war" on terror.
Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer.
© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
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