| Author | Message | | Alpha | |  | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Sep 12, 2007 11:17 pm Post subject: America's Campaign to Smear Israel's Critics |
| From: "Ron Corvus"
Subject: America's Campaign to Smear Israel's Critics
Date: Wed, 12 Sep 2007 17:08:20 -0500
America's Campaign to Smear Israel's Critics
Our young people are dying in a war in the Middle East that does not serve America's best interests while neocons and Zionists wage on war against anyone who tries to tell the truth.
America's Campaign to Smear Israel's Critics
By Salim Muwakkil, In These Times. Posted September 11, 2007.
http://www.alternet.org/rights/62324/
In the U.S., scholars who contest the conventional wisdom about Israel all too often lose their reputations -- and their jobs.
DePaul University canceled courses taught by Norman Finkelstein, the controversial political science professor known for his forthright criticism of Israel, just a week before classes resumed in June. Finkelstein, who taught at DePaul for six years, was denied tenure at the Chicago school but permitted to teach for the one year remaining on his contract.
In late August, however, the university decided to axe him and pulled his required books from the schools' bookstore. This was a break from the academic tradition that grants a faculty member who is denied tenure one last year (the "terminal year") in the classroom. Finkelstein initially vowed to protest his suspension, but later reached an agreement (including a monetary settlement) with DePaul to end his fight. However, even as he announced the agreement, Finkelstein charged his tenure denial was due "to external pressure resulting in a national hysteria."
Finkelstein's rough treatment followed a vigorous national campaign initiated by right-wing supporters of Israel to taint his name. They attacked Finkelstein for his scholarship, which has consistently excoriated the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and the deceitful arguments of the Jewish state's uncritical supporters. And Finkelstein is just one of many public figures currently under attack for contesting the conventional wisdom about Israel.
Harvard law professor and avid Zionist Alan Dershowitz mounted a relentless public campaign to have Finkelstein dismissed. Surely it is no coincidence that Finkelstein's recent book, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History, is a sustained, well-researched attack on Dershowitz and his ilk for their lurid distortions of history on behalf of Israel.
DePaul's political science department and a college-wide faculty committee overwhelmingly backed Finkelstein's tenure bid. Yet that was not enough to shield him from the national campaign to punish him for his acerbic criticism of Israel. An influential dean persuaded the tenure panel to reject him for the style and tone of his scholarship rather than its content.
Finkelstein's boosters argue that right-wing supporters of Israel are persecuting him for his strident opposition to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and for his criticism that they are unscrupulously exploiting the horror of the Holocaust to justify Israeli excesses. Finkelstein's previous book, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, makes the case that many Holocaust scholars use the tragedy to justify Israel's existence and continue to utilize it to extort guilt money from various sources.
Finkelstein also provokes ire from Jewish groups because he is the son of two Holocaust survivors, which gives his critiques more credence. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has repeatedly accused Finkelstein of being a Holocaust denier, a baseless charge.
The former DePaul professor's supporters claim his tenure denial is completely unjustified and that his suspension violates academic ethics. The Chicago Tribune reported that the American Association of University Professors would soon launch a protest of Finkelstein's treatment as a violation of normal academic procedure.
Finkelstein thus joins former president Jimmy Carter, NYU historian Tony Judt, Harvard University professor Stephen Walt and University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer (the latter two are co-authors of a new book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy) whose forthright criticism of Israel have earned them accusations of anti-Semitism.
Jimmy Carter is facing a firestorm of criticism from right-wing American Jewish organizations for his book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, which mildly condemned the Jewish state's occupation policies in the Palestinian territories.
Judt, a descendant of Holocaust victims who argues that power in Israel has tragically shifted to religious fundamentalists and territorial zealots, is another victim of this pressure. The history professor, who also speaks out against American Jewish groups' attempts to stifle honest discussion on Israel's policies, has been forced to cancel many speaking engagements because of pressure from Jewish organizations.
Similar reactions have greeted Professors Walt and Mearsheimer, who have co-authored a book arguing that the American-Israel lobby has pushed policies that are not in the United States' best interests and encourage Israel to engage in self-destructive behavior. The two respected scholars have been denounced as anti-Semites by ADL Director Abraham Foxman, among others.
These scholars are victims of a national campaign to punish scholarship that challenges media-made myths about Israel. This grave threat to academic freedom should concern American progressives, who often remain eerily silent.
See more stories tagged with: academic freedom, palestine, israel
Salim Muwakkil is a senior editor of In These Times and an op-ed columnist for the Chicago Tribune. He is currently a Crime and Communities Media Fellow of the Open Society Institute, examining the impact of ex-inmates and gang leaders in leadership positions in the black community. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Sep 13, 2007 8:18 pm Post subject: The Israel Lobby and the "National Interest"[/ |
| Forwarded:
"If the public is going to start discussing the pros and cons of America's pro-Israel foreign policy, then what better framework to do it in, our elite must be thinking, than one which asks them not to notice that Israel is based on ethnic cleansing, and instead to debate whether Israel is 'detrimental to our national interest'."
The Israel Lobby and the "National Interest"
via Turn the World Upside Down by John Spritzler on 9/12/07
http://spritzlerj.blogspot.com/2007/09/israel-lobby-and-national-interest.html | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Sep 15, 2007 10:28 am Post subject: |
| Tells the Facts and Names the Names
Sept. 1-15, 2007 A Alexander Cockburn and Jeffffrey StSt. Clair vol. 14, no. 15
Special Issue
The Battle Over the Israel Lobby
As Meersheimer and Walt’s long awaited book “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” draw hysterical abuse, Kathy and Bill Christison define the lobby’s real nature, trace its history, and measure its actual power.
By Kathleen and Bill Christisoncritics’ failure to understand what exactly “the lobby” constitutes. Mearsheimer and Walt define it as “the loose coalition of individuals and organizations who actively
work to shape U.S. foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction”. It is made up of American Jews and others who “make a significant effort in their daily lives to bend U.S. foreign policy so that it advances
Israel’s interests”. One can further define the lobby as those influential elements
in the U.S. – individuals as well as organizations, non-Jews as well as Jews – who have as a primary objective the advancement
of Israeli interests.
The critical elements here in understanding
the definition and clearly recognizing
what constitutes the lobby are that it includes individuals as well as organizations
who actively work to advance Israel’s interests, as part of their daily lives and as one of their primary objectives. The lobby, in other words, is not merely AIPAC and not merely any one, or even all, of the other major Jewish American organizations, but it includes influential
individuals, often U.S. policymakers themselves, for whom advancing Israel’s interests is one of their major objectives. This is a key aspect of lobby power that a great many analysts fail to understand.
A recent analysis of the Mearsheimer-Walt lobby study co-authored by Mitchell Plitnick, of Jewish Voice for Peace, and Chris Toensing, editor of Middle East Report, evidenced this common misunderstanding
of what the lobby comprises.
Although giving the two scholars’ 2006 study high marks on many counts, Plitnick and Toensing label as an “essential
flaw” the Mearsheimer-Walt conclusion
that U.S. Middle East policy would be “more temperate” if the lobby were not so influential. This conclusion, Plitnick and Toensing believe, is disproved by what they call “the remarkable continuities in U.S. Middle East policy since the Truman administration, including in times when the pro-Israel lobby was weak”.
Throughout their article, Plitnick and Toensing assume that, from the beginning
of Israel’s existence in 1948, U.S. presidents and policymakers always felt a natural affinity for Israel, an automatic bond forged without benefit of any political
encouragement and, as the Cold War evolved, were increasingly impelled toward a close relationship with Israel for strategic reasons, again, without benefit
of any political encouragement. The general public, they say, also has a strong “positive disposition toward Israel” that, in turn, has an impact on policymakers’ decisions. Plitnick and Toensing seem to assume that an organized lobby did not really exist until well after a U.S.-Israeli alliance of friendship and strategic ties had been cemented. As if the lobby was some kind of Johnny-come-lately to the alliance, they contend that the “major institutions of the Israel lobby arose during
the Reagan years to defend the U.S.-Israeli strategic alliance forged in the wake of the 1967 war”.
In other words, according to this assessment,
love for Israel came first, for
One of the principal arguments of those on both the left and the right who dismiss the lobby as of only minimal importance is that the U.S.A. has been so consistently pro-Israeli through six decades, through both Republican and Democratic administrations, through periods
when the lobby was weak and periods
of great organized lobby strength, that it is impossible to posit the lobby as the principal driver behind, or a detrimental
influence on, U.S. Middle East policy.
According to this argument, U.S. ties to and general affection for Israel represent
more of a natural attraction than a matter, as one analysis puts it, of “mere promotion and advocacy”. But the critical
question that few analysts seem to address is how this affection arose in the first place: was it solely an automatic reflex,
the appeal of a persecuted people in desperate need of a haven and thought to be so “like us” socially and culturally that it has always been deemed right and proper for us to bend our interests and our policy to theirs, spending billions of dollars and inestimable international political capital on them, or did the relationship
and the very affection itself grow out of the efforts of a skillful and very influential lobby of powerful individuals and groups that existed for decades before
the establishment of Israel?
A definitional misunderstanding enters
in here. One of the major problems
with the left critics’ argument with Mearsheimer and Walt appears to be the
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Franklin Roosevelt had his own small group of close Zionist advisers. His views were shaped and his policy defined under the scrutiny and influence of Zionist leaders such as Rabbi Stephen Wise and Judge Felix Frankfurter.
policymakers as well as for the general public, and only much later did an organized
lobby emerge to formalize and sustain the ties of affection. Many others on the left who minimize the substance of Mearsheimer and Walt’s message put forth the same argument that a close U.S.-Israeli relationship arose in the natural
order of things and the lobby emerged only later as a mere adjunct to existing policy.
But the thesis that there have been “remarkable
continuities in U.S. Middle East policy since the Truman administration” ignores a great deal of history. Although there have indeed been “continuities” in policy, these are not actually so “remarkable”
if one recognizes that a very influential
Zionist, and later Israeli, lobby has existed in one form or another since at least the days of Woodrow Wilson and the start of the Zionist push for a Jewish national home in Palestine and that this lobby had been at work influencing policy
for 30 years before Truman recognized the new Israeli state in 1948. An organized
lobby, in the form of several Jewish American organizations, has existed since the end of World War I, waxing and waning through the years but always able to influence policymaking and legislation at critical moments in Zionist/Israeli history.
More importantly, in the early days before Israel’s establishment, the major lobbyists very often consisted of influential
individuals who were close to a series of U.S. presidents and were able to bend their ears and bend their policy toward support for the Zionist enterprise.
The Historical Background
Woodrow Wilson played a pivotal part in institutionalizing U.S.-Zionist ties. Although he was a student of the Bible and believed that a Jewish “return” to the Holy Land was in the natural order of things, he was not particularly interested in Zionism when first approached to endorse
Britain’s 1917 Balfour Declaration, which promised support for the establishment
of a Jewish “national home” in Palestine. He did, however, formally endorse
this document and several subsequent
pro-Zionist congressional resolutions
at the urging of his good friend and political ally Justice Louis Brandeis and other influential Zionist supporters.
Brandeis, whom Wilson appointed to the Supreme Court in 1916, was one of the founders of the Zionist Organization of America and at the time of his appointment
to the Court was serving as its president. Knowing of Brandeis’ close friendship with Wilson, Zionist leaders
abroad, such as Chaim Weizmann, and prominent U.S. Jews like Rabbi Stephen Wise used Brandeis as a conduit
to Wilson on matters relating to Palestine. Through this channel, Zionists frequently sought, and always received, Wilson’s public and private reassurances of continuing U.S. support for Zionism. The occasional objections to the Zionist project from officials in Wilson’s administration
were ignored and their opinions bypassed. Through their interventions with Wilson, Brandeis and his colleagues essentially committed the United States to firm, and ultimately lasting, support for the Zionist project and made Wilson a strong Zionist.
In an era when world affairs and the fate of nations were very often determined
by a handful of powerful men, the notion of one strong Zionist manipulating the thinking and the actions of a president
was not particularly remarkable, and Brandeis managed to wield considerable influence over British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour as well and often served as liaison between Wilson and Balfour. Brandeis influenced Balfour’s thinking on such weighty issues as self-determination
for colonized peoples – a critical issue in Palestine at the time – and by the time the British Mandate over Palestine was confirmed in 1922, allied support for Zionism was cast in concrete, a harbinger of relationships to come, and a harbinger too of the influence that other powerful
Zionist individuals would enjoy with many future presidents and world leaders.
A large nascent organized lobby also exerted considerable influence in these early years. Brandeis’ Zionist Organization of America grew tenfold during World War I, to a remarkable 200,000. Although membership dropped in later years, lobbyists worked closely with Congress in 1922 to pass a joint resolution supporting the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine and were strong enough to make it evident
to legislators in many key districts that support for Zionism was a critical election issue. In 1929, when Palestinian rioters launched anti-Zionist protests, Zionist activists were strong and numerous
enough to be able to mobilize several demonstrations of up to 20,000 in New York City. Zionist activists also played a role in shaping media coverage of the situation in Palestine. Throughout the 1920s, the New York Times devoted an average of one or two articles a week to the issue, and more during crisis periods – a remarkable total given the relative unimportance
of the Palestine issue to the U.S.A. in these years. The Times relied for much of its Palestine coverage on material
from Zionist press agents and on the Jewish Telegraphic Agency wire service.
september 1-15, 2007
The easy recruitment of two-thirds of the Senate and half the House to a non-Jewish Zionist organization
in 1941 is one indication of considerable
lobby strength.
A study of these early years thus shows clearly that, far from being weak or even non-existent, the pro-Zionist lobby was quite powerful from its inception. Zionist activists, from Louis Brandeis working in the halls of government, to the lobbyists pressuring Congress, to the grassroots organizers who brought supporters out onto the streets, were the prime movers both in formulating the view the general public gained of the Palestine issue and in shaping the official policy that emerged.
Franklin Roosevelt had his own small group of close Zionist advisers. His views were shaped and his policy defined under the scrutiny and influence of Zionist leaders such as Rabbi Stephen Wise and Judge Felix Frankfurter, who had ready access to the White House. Wise, a protégé
of Louis Brandeis who took over the leadership of the Zionist Organization of America in the mid-1930s, was a longtime
Democratic political colleague of Roosevelt. Frankfurter, another Brandeis’ protégé whom Roosevelt appointed to the Supreme Court, and Wise used their easy access to Roosevelt to bring Zionist issues to his attention and urge his intercession
on behalf of the Zionist cause, even during the height of World War II when Roosevelt avoided public comment on Zionism for fear of arousing anti-allied
protest among the Arabs. Just a few months before his death, even immediately
after promising Saudi King Abdul Aziz in 1945 that he would “do nothing
to assist the Jews against the Arabs”, Roosevelt authorized Wise to issue a rare public statement in his name, supporting
unlimited Jewish immigration to Palestine and establishment of a Jewish state.
Political colleagues in Congress and elsewhere in Democratic politics, themselves
influenced by Zionist activists, also had an impact on Roosevelt’s thinking.
Again, as in earlier years, a strong, well-organized lobby was active with Congress and at the grassroots level. In 1941, Zionist activists organized a group of prominent non-Jews who were pro-Zionist, to keep the issue of Palestine as a Jewish homeland alive and before the public. The group initially recruited 68 senators, 200 representatives, several governors, and two cabinet secretaries as members and within a year had a membership
of 800 “distinguished citizens”.
In 1943, Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, an aggressive Zionist leader, organized a broad grassroots campaign to win congressional
and popular support for the Zionist cause. Under the American Zionist Emergency Council (AZEC), he organized local chapters in virtually every community in the country with a Jewish population and in the hometown of every influential member of Congress. Working with local non-Jewish communities,
AZEC also organized public rallies supporting Jewish statehood and generated
pro-Zionist resolutions and telegrams to Congress from 3,000 organizations, including labor unions, Rotary clubs, and church groups.
By the early 1940s, the assumption that Palestine should be a Jewish national
home was pervasive in U.S. political circles. Although congressional support for Zionism never reached the near-unanimous levels of today, the Zionist lobby was quite successful even in these early days in garnering wide support in Congress. The easy recruitment of two-thirds of the Senate and half the House to a non-Jewish Zionist organization in 1941 is one indication of considerable lobby strength. A year later, a similar number of congressmen signed on to a resolution pushed by the lobby, noting the urgent need to establish a Jewish national home in Palestine. In the presidential election year of 1944, both party platforms called in nearly identical language for establishment
of “a free and democratic Jewish commonwealth” and urged the British to open Palestine to unrestricted Jewish immigration.
By the time Harry Truman came to office
after Roosevelt’s death, U.S. support for the formation of a Jewish homeland in all or part of Palestine was so much a given that it had become an integral part of policy. Despite the near reverence he has enjoyed in many pro-Israel circles for 60 years because of his recognition of the new Israeli state in 1948, Truman was ambivalent
for various reasons until late in the game about the wisdom of establishing
a Jewish state. On the surface, in fact, the deck appeared to be stacked against Truman supporting Zionism to the end. He was skeptical of the appropriateness of establishing any state on racial or religious
lines; every agency and official in the government, save his own White House advisers, opposed establishing a Jewish state for strategic reasons; partition
of Palestine to give the Jews a state was thought to risk giving the Soviets entrée to the Middle East, or to endanger
Western access to Arab oil, or both; and finally, Truman was angered by the importuning of Zionist spokesmen and refused to allow visits after Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver actually shouted at Truman and pounded on his desk.
But despite all this, the pressures on Truman toward support for a Jewish state were so heavy as to be irresistible. His three closest White House aides, all strong Zionists, had a profound impact on Truman’s thinking and his decision making, doing more than anyone else to shape his viewpoint on Palestine. The three were Clark Clifford, a non-Jewish Missouri lawyer who was a key domestic
adviser; David Niles, a Roosevelt administration’s holdover who served as Truman’s adviser on minority affairs; and Max Lowenthal, a longtime political ally of Truman who served as Clifford’s legal adviser on the Palestine issue. Clifford was a vocal Zionist, possibly influenced by Niles and Lowenthal, and both of these Jewish men were so emotional about the Zionist cause that Truman once said he found it disconcerting that they burst into tears whenever he tried to talk to them about the issue.
All three of these men had constant easy access to Truman, particularly during
the height of the partition debate over Palestine in 1947 and 1948, and including
during those periods when Truman banned all other Zionist spokesmen from the White House, and they fed Truman a steady diet of material designed to influence
his own emotions and his personal perceptions of the issue. Both Niles and Lowenthal worked closely with Zionist organizations, serving as principal entrées
to the White House for Zionist activists and not infrequently passing information on White House and administration
thinking to the Zionist groups. Niles was a member of several so-called
S
eptember 1-15, 2007
The lobby took off in the 1950s, its growth and molding taking place largely under the aegis of Abba Eban, Israel’s first ambassador
to the U.S.A.
“brain trusts” established to advise Truman, one of which set out specifically to neutralize State Department opposition
to the Zionist project by enlisting prominent individuals as advocates for Zionism and, more bluntly, by impressing
on congressional leaders of both parties
the electoral danger of not supporting
the partition of Palestine.
Although Truman was always basically
Zionist-oriented in his thinking and never entertained Arab concerns at all, pure politics and an acute awareness of the importance of the Jewish vote clearly played a large part in his thinking on the Palestine issue. A Time magazine article from October 1946, recently unearthed by lobby-watcher Jeff Blankfort, indicated
that thoughts of accommodating the Jewish vote in New York were uppermost
in Truman’s mind in advance of the 1946 off-year election – a time when his own popularity ratings had dropped to around 40 per cent. A Zionist organization
ran an ad in the New York Times harshly criticizing the Democrats for allegedly
failing to fulfill their commitment to support “the aspirations of the Jewish people” in Palestine. Noting that Truman “knew as well as any Republican that the Democrats did not have a prayer to win in New York State unless they could pile up a huge majority in heavily Jewish New York City”, Time reported that David Niles sprang into action after the ad appeared
and pushed Truman to “do something
at once for the Jews”. And he did. Although his action brought heavy criticism
from Britain and obviously angered the Arabs, Truman released a letter on Yom Kippur eve demanding that Britain allow 100,000 Jews, then in Displaced Person camps in Europe, into Palestine – a move that would give Jews a considerable
demographic boost in Palestine.
The organized lobby was highly active in this period, as is evident from the Time article. Although AIPAC was not formed until 1951, multiple Zionist organizations made a massive effort to garner support for Jewish statehood between 1945 and 1948 and unquestionably played a critical
and decisive part in creating a body of opinion throughout the United States – among the public, in the press, in Congress, and at the White House – that assumed the rightness of the Zionist program
in Palestine and ignored any contrary
reasoning, whether from Arabs or from serious analysts concerned about the geostrategic implications of planting
a largely European settler colonialist project in the heart of an Arab region. Despite the lobby’s considerable success at earlier periods, historians of this era have observed that it performed a critical function by successfully “set[ting] a tone for public discussion” during the Truman presidency.
This is the critical point: the setting of a tone for public discussion. In those few years between the end of the war and the establishment of Israel, the Zionist story of Jews rising above the horrors of the Holocaust was so compelling and was portrayed as so romantic that its success
was all but inevitable. Abba Eban once wrote that Zionism was destined to be embraced by anyone with “a historic imagination and at least a modest ounce of romantic eccentricity”. Americans were eager to demonstrate that they could be romantic eccentrics in a good cause, but without the lobby to direct their energies
the moment would clearly not have lasted. Rabbi Silver’s AZEC mobilized national and local politicians – down to mayors and town council members, along with newspaper editors, radio broadcasters,
business leaders, labor leaders, and movie stars – to the Zionist cause. The word went out that every American “with a sense of fair play” should “side with justice” and support partition by writing to Truman. The result was a barrage of 135,000 telegrams, postcards, and letters to the White House during the second half of 1947, when partition was being debated
at the U.N.
The pressure extended to the political arena: in 1945, at the instigation of Zionist activists, 33 state legislatures, representing
fully 85 per cent of the U.S. population,
passed resolutions favoring a Jewish state in Palestine, and 37 governors signed a pro-Zionist cable to Truman.
The Lobby’s Many Manifestations
The lobby took off in the 1950s, its growth and molding taking place largely under the aegis of Abba Eban, Israel’s first ambassador to the U.S.A. He believed, as he stated in a memoir, that the key to Israel’s strength lay with U.S. public opinion,
and he saw his principal task as making
Israel “so acceptable to the American public” that if a disagreement ever arose between the two countries, any administration
would be reluctant to carry the issue to the point of confrontation.
AIPAC, then newly established, and the several popular Jewish American organizations formed the core of Eban’s public relations efforts. The Jewish leadership
served as his ambassadors to the U.S. public, and Eban himself, engaged for years in a constant round of lectures to bring Israel’s message to a broad audience.
This network gave Eban and all future Israeli ambassadors a clear advantage
in their dealings with succeeding
U.S. administrations. The fact that an Israeli ambassador was known to have substantial backing behind him, when he appeared at the White House or the State Department, gave heft to Israel’s representations
and, as Eban himself wrote, “elevated the level at which American-Israeli affairs were transacted".
With the organized lobby entrenched as a fixture in U.S. politics and policymaking,
the importance of individuals in a position to influence presidential decisions
diminished. Nonetheless, many later presidents had their own pro-Israel friends and advisers who in their individual
capacity served as lobbyists in every sense of the word. Lyndon Johnson had an entire coterie of powerful advocates fo Israel among his closest friends.
Bill Clinton’s principal policymakers on Palestinian-Israeli issues – Dennis Ross, Martin Indyk, and Aaron David Miller – were all so close to Israel that Miller once acknowledged that he did not know where the line lay between his professional and his personal involvement
in the issue. In Bush Jr.’s administration,
the phenomenon of individuals who have long been active promoters of Israeli interests serving as policymakers in the administration has grown by several
orders of magnitude. Elliott Abrams, Bush’s senior Middle East adviser, and David Wurmser, Cheney’s Middle East adviser, both still serving after many other neocons have left office, are longseptember
1-15, 2007
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Right now, today, perhaps the single most important result of the Israel lobby’s activities in the U.S. arises from its policy of deliberately
seeking to kill off public debate on the influence of the lobby itself.
time advocates who advance Israel’s interests
as their primary function in the U.S. government.
With the impressive array of individual lobbyists who have worked in some administrations,
Israel has hardly needed an AIPAC. But AIPAC does carry out a vital role in keeping Congress in line, maintaining grassroots support for Israel, and coordinating the activities of the massive numbers of Jewish American and Christian fundamentalist supporters of Israel. The lobby, in all its manifestations,
is unquestionably a vital entity in determining U.S. policy and in setting the U.S. on a course that serves the interests of Israel’s leadership but often does harm to true U.S. interests.
Those like Plitnick and Toensing who maintain that affection is the primary driver of the U.S. relationship with Israel cannot be entirely gainsaid. Nor can those, also on the left, who say that, as a policy driver, the lobby has only minimal significance opposite the huge military-industrial complex. Obviously, affection and a sense of U.S. affinity for Israel and its culture and society play a large part in sustaining the unique closeness of the relationship. Obviously also the interests of the oil industry, and of arms manufacturers,
and of global corporations have a large impact on the formulation of policy. But in the face of the historical record, it is surely impossible to sustain the notion that the intense lobbying just described, on behalf first of Zionism and later of Israel, over nearly a century, was secondary
to or was transcended by the interests of arms manufacturers or the oil industry, and that the lobby is simply incidental to policies determined by the military-industrial
complex.
The arms industry did not talk Woodrow Wilson into ignoring the objections
of some of his policymakers who believed that accommodating Zionist goals ran against U.S. interests. The lobby did. The oil industry did not talk Harry Truman into supporting the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine over the objections
of every agency and department in his administration, which all saw the creation
of a Jewish state at the expense of an entire native Arab population as dangerously
inimical to U.S. interests. The lobby essentially made Truman’s decision for him. (In fact, the oil industry generally
did not favor Israel’s creation for fear of the anger and the possible disruption of oil supplies that this would lead to in the Arab world. The oil industry, ever invested in geopolitical stability, also did not welcome Israel’s victory in 1967 and its defeat of Egypt’s Gamal Abdul Nasser, as many on the left contend.)
Neither, demonstrably, has the military-
industrial complex played any role in determining the course of Israel’s occupation
of the West Bank and Gaza, its oppression of nearly four million Palestinians living there, and the total U.S. acquiescence in and enablement of virtually every Israeli act of oppression. The United States’ unquestioning support
for the occupation is engineered and brought about by the lobby and is without doubt the U.S. policy that is most damaging
to U.S. interests in the Middle East.
This issue of U.S. interests is at the heart of arguments over the power of the lobby. Anyone who supports a particular policy in Washington will always seek to demonstrate that what he wants is “in the national interest”, and anyone opposed
will argue the contrary. Whenever a supporter of the Israel lobby suggests that the lobby only advocates policies that advance the “true interests” of both the U.S. and Israel, or that the interests of both countries are identical, this statement
is nothing but an opinion. The opposite
is also true. When the authors of this article, or perhaps Mearsheimer and Walt, argue that a particular policy advocated
by the Israel lobby does not reflect “true U.S. interests”, that position is also an opinion that no one can convert into a fact by pointing to an official U.S. government
document that defines approved national interests.
In practice, every year the executive or other branch of the U.S. government, assisted
or steered by the dominant lobbies and special interests in the country, has a fairly free hand in manipulating what become
the nation’s interests and national policies for that particular year or session
of Congress. The national interests themselves will not, at least publicly, be written down at all. The policies allegedly implementing them will be debated, but often only in the context of “how much” or “how little”. All sides that participate in this game may agree, for instance, that one national interest of the U.S. is possession
of a strong military force, and the arguments
are only over how strong. In the main, the only democratic input comes from the Congress’s fairly limited powers
to accept, reject, modify in minimal ways and/or delay detailed acts of legislation
that have already been worked out by the dominant lobbies, special interest groups, senior White House and executive
branch staffers, and a few senior congressional
committee chairmen and staff people. In the following year or session of Congress, the procedure repeats itself.
In this system, lobbies and lobbyists play a major role in decision making on all types of national interests and policies.
On anything to do with Israel and the Middle East, the role of the Israel
September 1-15, 2007 | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Tue Sep 18, 2007 6:05 pm Post subject: |
| Why They Won’t Debate U.S. Mideast Policy
A FELLOW IN UPSTATE NEWYORK is mailing journalists in America asking us to pressure the powers that be to hold a presidential debate on the subject of America’s Middle East policy.
The debate is an excellent idea. After all, we are fighting a war there, and the bulk of our problem with Middle East terrorism derives from our foreign policy, which can be summarized as supporting Israel’s terrible treatment of the Palestinians while pretending to be interested in peace.
That is no longer the entire source of hostility, since the Bush administration has invaded two Muslim countries and is threatening war with a third, but the topic of our Middle East policy certainly deserves an airing and a full debate.
Alas, it will never happen. This might surprise you, but the reluctance of American politicians to hold an open debate on America’s foreign policy in the Middle East is not the fault of the Israeli lobby. Oh, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee prefers to avoid any debate, but AIPAC couldn’t stop one if the presidential candidates insisted on having it.
Support for Israel in this country is more complicated than just AIPAC. There is the real AIPAC and there is the exaggerated belief in AIPAC’s influence by most American politicians and not a few media people. Then there is the Israeli government itself. Next, there are American neo-conservatives, many but not all of whom are Jewish and who have an unhealthy personal attachment to Israel. Finally, there is the cult of the Christian Zionists, who believe the Messiah can return only when all the world’s Jews have gathered in Israel.
One would think a Messiah could return anytime he darn well felt like returning, but don’t worry about it, all the world’s Jews don’t want to move to Israel.
As for the presidential debate, I think many of the candidates would develop scheduling conflicts, and those who didn’t would simply engage in a contest of who loves Israel the most. That’s what happens when American politicians visit AIPAC’s annual meeting. It’s “I love Israel,” and the next candidate says, “I love Israel even more.” There is such a frenzy of loving Israel, it’s a wonder that members of the Israeli consular staff don’t get swept up and kissed.
Jewish political influence stems from two factors. One, Jews tend to put their money where their mouth is. In contradiction to the stereotypes, Jews who can afford it are unusually generous givers, not only to politicians but to causes, charities and organizations they believe in. They set an example of generosity all Americans would do well to follow.
The second factor is just an accident of geography. America’s Jews are largely concentrated in a few states with a lot of votes in the Electoral College—NewYork, Illinois, Ohio, California and Florida. In very close races, the Jewish vote could tip a state toward one candidate or another. Since most states have a winner-take all system, Jewish voters are courted by the politicians. The same thing applies to black voters, of course.
© 2007
BY KING FEATURES SYNDICATE
Charley Reese
is a nationally syndicated columnist. Long associated with
The Orlando Sentinel
, Reese was formerly active in a variety of political endeavors. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Mon Oct 08, 2007 10:10 pm Post subject: |
| Israeli Columnist Akiva Eldar on Nuclear Weapons in the Middle East, Iran, Military Censorship in Israel and the Influence of the Israel Lobby in the United States
Monday, October 8th, 2007
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/08/1341205
Akiva Eldar, chief political columnist and a senior analyst for the Israeli daily “Ha’aretz,” calls for a nuclear-free Middle East and questions whether the Israeli lobby in Washington is contributing to the security of Israel. [includes rush transcript]
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The University of St. Thomas in Minnesota has canceled Nobel Peace Prize-winning South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu's scheduled appearance next year. School officials say they are barring Tutu because of previous statements he's made “against Israeli policy.” Tutu has compared Israel's treatment of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories to South Africa under apartheid.
Being able to voice criticism of Israeli government policy is becoming a major issue on university campuses across the United States. It’s also an issue in Congress. We now turn to a well-known Israeli journalist for a sense of what this and other debates look like inside Israel.
Akiva Eldar is the chief political columnist and a senior analyst for the Israeli daily “Ha’aretz.” He is the co-author of a new book critical of Israel's settlement policy. It’s called “Lords of the Land: The Settlers and the State of Israel.” I interviewed Akiva Eldar last month and asked him how the so-called “Israel lobby" in the United States is perceived in Israel.
Akiva Eldar, chief political columnist and a senior analyst for the Israeli daily “Ha’aretz.” He is the co-author of "Lords of the Land: The Settlers and the State of Israel," a new book critical of Israel's settlement policy.
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RUSH TRANSCRIPT
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AMY GOODMAN: The University of St. Thomas in Minnesota has canceled Nobel Peace Prize-winning South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu's scheduled appearance next year. School officials say they’re barring Tutu because of previous statements he's made “against Israeli policy.” Tutu has compared Israel's treatment of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories to South Africa under Apartheid.
Being able to voice criticism of Israeli government policy is becoming a major issue on university campuses across the United States. It’s also an issue in Congress. We now turn to a well-known Israeli journalist for a sense of what this and other debates look like inside Israel.
Akiva Eldar is the chief political columnist and senior analyst for the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, and he is co-author of a new book; it’s critical of Israeli settlement policy. It’s called Lords of the Land: The Settlers and the State of Israel. I interviewed Akiva Eldar last month and asked him how the so-called “Israel lobby" in the United States is perceived in Israel.
AKIVA ELDAR: They are a very important instrument in order to pursue Israel’s policy, but I’m afraid that they're a little bit behind the Israeli government and the Israeli people. We are in a different mode, which I think takes time for the American Jewish organizations to digest, the fact that we don't want to keep those territories. And probably the Israeli propaganda was so efficient that it's very hard now to change the mode and to convince them that it's a different era now. It's a different government. We have seventy out of 120 members of the Knesset who support a two-state solution based on the ’67 lines.
And, you know, if for forty years, you tell the Jewish community that Israel cannot afford to give up the territories, they are important for Israel’s security, just overnight to tell, “Sorry, we were wrong. Now, we don't need those territories,” it's probably -- I remember, you know, those groups that were taken to the Golan Heights, for instance, we didn’t mention Syria, but the Golan Heights, we told them we can't live without it, because look at the geography or topography, with us sitting there, and they were shelling the Kibbutzim down there, and now, after all this time that they spend going to Capitol Hill and using their leverage to convince the American people not to put any pressure on Israel to give up the Golan Heights, now all of a sudden the Syrians are the good guys and we can get down to business with them? It's very difficult. I think that we are paying the price of having our PR doing a very good job for many years.
AMY GOODMAN: Would you say then the American Jewish organizations are presenting an obstacle to peace?
AKIVA ELDAR: They are, I think, behind the Israeli people, and I think that the bottom line, if you measure this by their results, I don't think that the mainstream Jewish organizations -- there are others like Americans for Peace Now, IPF in America, the Israel Policy Forum, Brit Tzedek v’Shalom and other organizations who are doing a good job, and I think that they are getting more and more listeners.
AMY GOODMAN: How -- what kind of effect did President Carter’s book have in Israel?
AKIVA ELDAR: You know, this is a kind of over-killing. I think that it's like Mearsheimer and Walt’s -- the book --
AMY GOODMAN: On the Israel lobby.
AKIVA ELDAR: On the Israeli lobby. Just to say that Israel and the Jewish lobby controls the United States is overdoing it. They are very powerful, and I think that we, Israel and the Jewish lobby, are playing according to the American rules. You know, when I moved to Washington to be bureau chief of Ha’aretz, I got a tip from a colleague who said, “If you want to succeed, if you want to understand America, follow the money.” And the Jewish lobby has the money and has the motivation and has the power. And they use this, and Washington, as you know better than me, is a city of power. And if you have the power, nobody is disturbing the Arab lobby to use the same kind of power. There are six million Jews who live in the United States and more or less six million Muslims who live here. And it's a free country.
AMY GOODMAN: Why do you think the -- would you say that the Israel lobby is more powerful?
AKIVA ELDAR: Because they're more committed. I think that they are very committed to the -- Israel’s security and well-being of the Israelis, and they are motivated to work and to invest.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you think they're making Israel more secure?
AKIVA ELDAR: No. I think that they have good intentions, but you know sometimes where good intentions are taking people.
AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask you about former UN Ambassador John Bolton's comments, declaring the Bush administration would support an Israeli attack on Iran. In an interview with an Israeli newspaper, Bolton said, "We're talking about a clear message to Iran. Israel has the right to self-defense, and that includes offensive operations against WMD facilities that pose a threat to Israel. The United States would justify such attacks,” he said.
AKIVA ELDAR: I’m not sure if an attack on Iran is in the cards, simply because I don't think that the United States and Israel know exactly where they're hiding the facilities. Iran is a huge country. They have a big desert, and, as far as I understand, both the Israeli and the American intelligence don't know where they're hiding this. You can do this -- what we did in --
AMY GOODMAN: That didn't stop an attack on Iraq.
AKIVA ELDAR: Exactly, but this was different. You can do this only once. What we did -- you mean Israel in ’81 attacking the unit, the Iraqi nuclear facilities in Osirak. The Iranians are not going to repeat the same mistake. They are not putting all their eggs in one basket. They have too many baskets all around. And as far as I know, from my sources, a military attack is not possible.
What is possible is to reach an agreement with Iran and with other Arab countries, because it's not going stop with Iran. I interviewed King Abdullah of Jordan six months ago, and he said, “In no time, you will see every Arab country with nuclear power, including Jordan.” Now, it starts, of course, with nuclear power for civil use. But you don't know where it ends and what will happen if there will be a coup d’etat in one of those Arab countries in a few years. So the Middle East is going to be nuclearized in no time.
And I think that the solution should be a regional agreement. I wonder why the Arab League didn't offer to add another paragraph to the initiative from -- that started in 2002 and was ratified recently, that the Middle East should be nuclear-free, including Israel. I think this has to be part of a regional agreement.
From talking to Iranians, the message that is coming out of the most liberal Iranians, not only from Ahmadinejad, is that “Why shouldn't we have what we think the Israelis have, Pakistan and India?” If Iran will agree to stop their nuclear program, that means that they admit that they are pariah, that they are worse than other countries. So I think we need to offer them a ladder, where they can climb down, and this ladder, I believe, is a regional agreement. And, of course, that means that Iran will have to stop putting out clear threats to the very existence of Israel.
AMY GOODMAN: So you're saying that Israel should give up its nuclear weapons. You have people like Mordechai Vanunu, the nuclear whistleblower who's been re-sentenced again, after serving, oh, many years in jail.
AKIVA ELDAR: As part of a regional peace process, a regional peace agreement. As long as Israel's existence is under threat, I don't believe that you can find any Israeli government that will agree to that. But -- actually this has been the Israeli position when Shimon Peres was prime minister. The official Israeli position was that we will join the NPT and any kind of --
AMY GOODMAN: Nuclear [Non-]Proliferation Treaty.
AKIVA ELDAR: -- Nuclear [Non-]Proliferation Treaty, once the Arab-Israeli conflict, or the Middle East conflict, including the threat from Iran, will be over, not a minute before that, because of the deed of Israel to keep whatever people believe that it keeps in Dimona to deter a war.
AMY GOODMAN: How many nuclear bombs does Israel have?
AKIVA ELDAR: I don't know.
AMY GOODMAN: But you know it does have them?
AKIVA ELDAR: That’s according to our policy, I -- when I write about this, and this is what I have to do now, is to quote the foreign media. But according to foreign media, Israel has got nuclear power.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain that policy.
AKIVA ELDAR: The policy is that we have an Israel military censorship, and there is an agreement between the military censor and the editors of the Israeli papers that when it comes to sensitive issues, we have to submit every story to the censor, such as the last occasion of when the Syrians claimed that the Israelis, the Israeli airplanes, penetrated and attacked some units in Syria, we had to quote the Washington Post, CNN and the Syrian papers.
AMY GOODMAN: And your understanding of what happened there?
AKIVA ELDAR: Yes, I do.
AMY GOODMAN: What happened?
AKIVA ELDAR: According to foreign sources --
AMY GOODMAN: You're in the United States now. Do you still have to abide by --
AKIVA ELDAR: I’m afraid so.
AMY GOODMAN: Why?
AKIVA ELDAR: You don't to want put me into trouble, right? I have to go back to Israel. Well, if you offer me asylum, then I will consider it. But my children are waiting for me at home, so I -- you’ll have to forgive me.
AMY GOODMAN: So can you explain what happened according to these sources?
AKIVA ELDAR: According to these sources, Israel got information from good sources that Syria is hiding nuclear facilities that were transferred from North Korea. I understand that this happened before the agreement between the United States and North Korea. And since Israel had a clear proof that Syria is hiding this and Israel had the opportunity to send Syria a message, that this is just the beginning, that they can't do this, that Israel cannot come to terms with the idea that such cooperation will take place, Israeli -- the Israeli Air Force attacked those units.
AMY GOODMAN: What would happen if you defied the censor?
AKIVA ELDAR: My editor on my newspaper will be fined. I don't think that I will go to jail, but there will be a big fine.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you make of the criticism, when people in the United States criticize the Israeli government or the Israeli military, that they are being anti-Semitic?
AKIVA ELDAR: Look, some people may -- if this book Lords of the Land was written by an American journalist, two American journalists, I’m sure that they would be blamed of anti-Semitism, like President Carter was blamed on being anti-Semite. I think that we are doing great damage to anti-Semitism when we use it in the wrong -- in the wrong time and in the wrong context, because there is anti-Semitism, and it's going to be, you know, the cry -- the wolf’s cry, once there will be anti-Semitism. And I’m afraid it's not -- you know, at the end, nobody will listen to us. So I would be very much careful not to inflate the use of anti-Semitism whenever there is criticism.
For instance, you know, for many years, people were talking about a Palestinian state and negotiations with the PLO. When I was writing articles in the ’80s, in the beginning of the ’80s, in favor of negotiations with the PLO and a two-state solution, some people called me a collaborator with the Palestinians. And if I was not Jewish, they -- I’m sure I would be titled anti-Semite.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you make of the Arab League renewing their peace offer, full peace for full withdrawal? Israel rejected it the first time. What about now?
AKIVA ELDAR: You know, in November, we are going to celebrate ninety years of the Balfour Declaration, which was the first most important document offering a Jewish state to the Jewish people, a state in Israel. I think that the Arab League declaration ninety years later is closing the circle that started, because the Balfour war -- the Balfour Declaration started actually another round of violence, because the Arabs didn’t -- were not willing to accept the idea of a Jewish state. Ninety years later, the Arabs are completing what Balfour started. And I think that this is the best news that we had in ninety years. And I think it is not only stupid, I think it is criminal to miss this opportunity. And I hope that the generations who will come will not regret this.
AMY GOODMAN: Akiva Eldar, the chief diplomatic columnist and senior analyst for the Israeli daily newspaper Ha’aretz. He is co-author of a new book published on the fortieth anniversary of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. It's called Lords of the Land: The Settlers and the State of Israel. We interviewed Akiva Eldar when he came into our studio.
www.democracynow.org | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Oct 11, 2007 8:07 am Post subject: 'US support for Israel spurred 9/11' |
| 'US support for Israel spurred 9/11'
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MATT RAND, Jerusalem Post Correspondent , THE JERUSALEM POST Oct. 10, 2007
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US support for Israel was a "major cause" of the 9-11 attacks, according to University of Chicago Professor John Mearsheimer and Harvard Professor Stephen Walt, who appeared at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology last week to promote their book The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy.
"A critically important issue when talking about America's terrorism problem is the matter of how US support for Israel's brutal treatment of the Palestinians relates to what happened on September 11," said Mearsheimer, who played the role of attack dog, while Walt set the stage.
Mearsheimer suggested that the notion of payback for injustices suffered by the Palestinians is perhaps the "most powerfully recurrent in [Osama] Bin Laden's speeches," who, he said, had been deeply concerned about the plight of the Palestinians since he was a young man. He said that Bin Laden's concern had been reflected in his public statements throughout the 1990's - "well before 9-11." Citing the 9-11 Commission report, Mearsheimer and Walt argued that Bin Laden wanted to make sure the attackers struck Congress because it is "the most important source of support for Israel in the United States," adding that Bin Laden twice tried to move up the dates of the attacks because of events involving Israel. Mearsheimer and Walt went on to argue that 9-11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's animus toward the United States stemmed not from his experiences in the United States as a student, but rather from his violent disagreement with US foreign policy favoring Israel. "Its hard to imagine more compelling evidence of the role US support for Israel played in the 9-11 attacks," said Mearsheimer.
"In short, the present relationship between Washington and Jerusalem is helping to fuel America's terrorism problem," he went on to say.
They said that US support for Israel motivates some individuals to attack the United States and "...serves as an important recruitment tool for terrorist organizations," according to Mearsheimer. He said that US support for Israel generates huge support for terrorists in the Arab and Islamic world.
Suggesting that Israel had outlived its usefulness to the United States, Walt added that "Israel may well have been a strategic asset during the Cold War," but that "...the Cold War is now over." He said that America's unconditional support for Israel in the Middle East is "one" of the reasons "we have a terrorism problem, and it makes it harder to address a variety of problems in the Middle East."
At the same time, Walt admitted the US's problems in the Middle East would not disappear if it had a different relationship with Israel, and that the US "does benefit from various forms of strategic cooperation." Walt also noted that Israel's human rights record was not "significantly better than that of the Palestinians," adding that any reasonably fair-minded look at the history of the conflict shows that "neither side owns the moral high ground."
Mearsheimer and Walt argued that Israel and the pro-Israel lobby in the United States were two of the main driving forces behind the decision to invade Iraq. "It is hard to imagine that war happening in their absence," said Mearsheimer, who added that Israel was the only country besides Kuwait where both "the government and the majority of the population favored the war." He said that the Israeli government pushed the Bush administration hard to make sure that it did not lose its nerve in the months before the invasion.
Mearsheimer said there was "no question" that the "neo-conservatives were the main driving force behind the war, but they where supported by the main constituents in the [Israel] lobby, such as AIPAC."
Citing a 2004 editorial, Mearsheimer said that as President Bush attempted to sell the war in Iraq "America's most important Jewish organizations rallied as one to his defense. In statement after statement, [Jewish] community leaders stressed the need to rid the world of Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction. Concern for Israel's safety rightfully factored into the deliberations of the main Jewish groups."
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