The Israel Lobby: Stepping on the "Third Rail" of American Politics

Anyone who has done international solidarity work knows that to even mention Palestine is to alert a well-funded, aggressive and unscrupulous cadre of Zionist attack dogs... and face their apparently unaccountable fury. I don't mean to use harsh rhetoric, but there is no other way to describe the Dershowitz / Horowitz / ADL  types who defend Israel by tarring any opponent of that settler-state, or even critics of its most flagrant crimes, such as occupation, ethnic cleansing, torture, official state racism, as anti-Semitic.

For those on the left, committed to internationalism, this is enough to scare off a fair amount of people from even engaging an open discussion. My Name Is Rachel Corrie couldn't even play at the New York Theatre Workshop because of the tremendous fear Zionist attacks generate. When Rep. Cynthia McKinney stood up, she saw her right-wing opponent receive massive amounts of funds from Zionists to push her out of Congress. That's real power, from a real sector. What are grassroots organizations to do when they face foundations and a political class that openly suppress principled support for Palestine?

The recent imbroglio around the (decidedly non-radical, not left) Harvard study, which alleges U.S. support for Israel is "almost entirely related to U.S. domestic politics, and especially to the activities of the Israel Lobby,'" alongside the indictment of leading members of AIPAC for passing US intelligence informally to Israel, has brought the issue of why it is that the U.S. "unconditionally supports" Israel.

Read: The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy.pdf | The Lobby: It's Not Either/Or

Or just follow the link below for a few more ramblings...

There is an ugly history of "Jewish advisors" being the fallguy for far greater crimes. The use of "court Jews" in Europe set the standard, as did the tsarist forgeries of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion." Today we can see Justin Raimondo going after the Neocons in ways reminiscent of how gutter socialists historically attacked "Jewish bankers" and tax collectors in central Europe... as if imperialism today is the fault of Israel or capitalism could be historically blamed on middle-man merchants or the Rothschilds.

Then, as now, anti-Semitism ethnicizes class conflict -- and is a tool of the racist right. Even the otherwise on target CounterPunch has published right-wing essays accusing American Zionists of "dual loyalty" and refering to the the U.S. House of Representitives as "Our Vichy Congress." As if "loyalty" in the national sense was even the issue. But that's all just me venting...

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Prof. Norman Finkelstein has written The Lobby: It's Not Either/Or in timely response to the flurry of discussion about whether the Israeli tail wags the American imperial dog... It's worth a read for those who've had to deal with Zionist brownshirts, and even for the Zionist brownshirts sure to be reading this... the full text follows below.

We can see the sharp lines in the antiwar movement, labor and, perhaps most starkly in the way African-American leaders are forced to jump through Zionist hoops to demonstrate their non-"anti-Semitic" legitimacy.

The use of the anti-Semitic tag to attack critics of Israeli policy is one issue. The relative importance of Zionism as enemy philosophy, movement and state is another. When the ruling class fights over its strategies, I'm concerned that anti-imperialists take care to not pick their fetid sides. The notion that Israel "controls" America is absurd at face value. It is a patron-client relationship. The (former) CIA analysts and State Department flaks who reduce U.S. sponsorship of Israel to "Jewish influence" show a lack of understanding of their own role... as if US imperialism would be benign except for those crafty Jews...

Anti-Semitism is real. It is reactionary. And it will confuse and weaken genuinely socialist and anti-imperialist movements. Compare the grotesqueries of the Islamists who campaign against "Jews and Crusaders" to the principled internationalism of the communist movement. One leads to medieval fanatacism and narrow xenophobia... the other to liberation for all oppressed people. Just because Jews are not now an oppressed people does not mean that demogoguery blaming them for a world system is right -- or an effective means of explaining how systems of domination work.

We can see in the infighting between the traditional Arabists of the foreign policy establishment and the neocons a kind of shell game. That's why Finkelstein's intervention is important and worth sharing.

Additional readings:

Stephen Zunes responds to Cynthia McKinney's conflict with Zionists
A counter-point to the myth of Zionist domination

Fact sheet: Israel, a State of Occupation

Finkestein's response to Dershowitz's "The Lobby, Jews and Anti-Semites" 

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The Lobby: It's Not Either / Or
By Norman G. Finkelstein

In the current fractious debate over the role of the Israel Lobby in the formulation and execution of US policies in the Middle East, the "either-or" framework -- giving primacy to either the Israel Lobby or to U.S. strategic interests -- isn't, in my opinion, very useful.

Apart from the Israel-Palestine conflict, fundamental U.S. policy in the Middle East hasn't been affected by the Lobby. For different reasons, both U.S. and Israeli elites have always believed that the Arabs need to be kept subordinate. However, once the U.S. solidified its alliance with Israel after June 1967, it began to look at Israelis, and Israelis projected themselves, as experts on the "Arab mind." Accordingly, the alliance with Israel has abetted the most truculent U.S. policies, Israelis believing that "Arabs only understand the language of force" and every few years this or that Arab country needs to be smashed up. The spectrum of U.S. policy differences might be narrow, but in terms of impact on the real lives of real people in the Arab world these differences are probably meaningful, the Israeli influence making things worse.

The claim that Israel has become a liability for U.S. "national" interests in the Middle East misses the bigger picture. Sometimes what's most obvious escapes the eye. Israel is the only stable and secure base for projecting U.S. power in this region. Every other country the U.S. relies on might, for all anyone knows, fall out of U.S. control tomorrow. The U.S. discovered this to its horror in 1979, after immense investment in the Shah. On the other hand, Israel was a creation of the West; it's in every respect, culturally, politically, economically in thrall to the West, notably the U.S. This is true not just at the level of a corrupt leadership, as elsewhere in the Middle East but, what's most important, at the popular level. Israel's pro-American orientation exists not just among Israeli elites but also among the whole population. Come what may in Israel, it's inconceivable that this fundamental orientation will change. Combined with its overwhelming military power, this makes Israel a unique and irreplaceable American asset in the Middle East.

In this regard, it's useful to recall the rationale behind British support for Zionism. Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann once asked a British official why the British continued to support Zionism despite Arab opposition. Didn't it make more sense for them to keep Palestine but drop support for Zionism? "Although such an attitude may afford a temporary relief and may quiet Arabs for a short time," the official replied, "it will certainly not settle the question as the Arabs don't want the British in Palestine, and after having their way with the Jews, they would attack the British position, as the Moslems are doing in Mesopotamia, Egypt and India." Another British official judged retrospectively that, however much Arab resentment it provoked, British support for Zionism was prudent policy, for it established in the midst of an "uncertain Arab world a... well-to-do educated, modern community, ultimately bound to be dependent on the British Empire." Were it even possible, the British had little interest in promoting real Jewish-Arab cooperation because it would inevitably lessen this dependence. Similarly, the U.S. doesn't want an Israel truly at peace with the Arabs, for such an Israel could loosen its bonds of dependence on the U.S., making it a less reliable proxy. This is one reason why the claim that Jewish elites are "pro"-Israel makes little sense. They are "pro" an Israel that is useful to the U.S. and, therefore, useful to them. What use would a Paul Wolfowitz have of an Israel living peacefully with its Arab neighbors and less willing to do the U.S.'s bidding?

The historical record strongly suggests that neither Jewish neo-conservatives in particular nor mainstream Jewish intellectuals generally have a primary allegiance to Israel, in fact, any allegiance to Israel. Mainstream Jewish intellectuals became "pro"-Israel after the June 1967 war when Israel became the U.S.'s strategic asset in the Middle East, i.e., when it was safe and reaped benefits. To credit them with ideological conviction is, in my opinion, very naive. They're no more committed to Zionism than the neo-conservatives among them were once committed to Trotskyism; their only ism is opportunism. As psychological types, these newly minted Lovers of Zion most resemble the Jewish police in the Warsaw ghetto. "Each day, to save his own skin, every Jewish policeman brought seven sacrificial lives to the extermination altar," a leader of the Resistance ruefully recalled. "There were policemen who offered their own aged parents, with the excuse that they would die soon anyhow." Jewish neo-conservatives watch over the U.S. "national" interest, which is the source of their power and privilege, and in the Middle East it happens that this "national" interest largely coincides with Israel's "national" interest. If ever these interests clashed, who can doubt that, to save their own skins, they'll do exactly what they're ordered to do, with gusto?

Unlike elsewhere in the Middle East, U.S. elite policy in the Israel-Palestine conflict would almost certainly not be the same without the Lobby. What does the U.S. gain from the Israeli settlements and occupation? In terms of alienating the Arab world, it's had something to lose. The Lobby probably can't muster sufficient power to jeopardize a fundamental American interest, but it can significantly raise the threshold before U.S. elites are prepared to act i.e., order Israel out of the Occupied Palestinian Territories, as the U.S. finally pressured the Indonesians out of Occupied East Timor. Whereas Israel doesn't have many options if the U.S. does finally give the order to pack up, the U.S. won't do so until and unless the Israeli occupation becomes a major liability for it: on account of the Lobby the point at which "until and unless" is reached significantly differs. Without the Lobby and in the face of widespread Arab resentment, the U.S. would perhaps have ordered Israel to end the occupation by now, sparing Palestinians much suffering;

In the current "either-or" debate on whether the Lobby affects U.S. Middle East policy at the elite level, it's been lost on many of the interlocutors that a crucial dimension of this debate should be the extent to which the Lobby stifles free and open public discussion on the subject. For in terms of trying to broaden public discussion here on the Israel-Palestine conflict the Lobby makes a huge and baneful difference. Especially since U.S. elites have no entrenched interest in the Israeli occupation, the mobilization of public opinion can have a real impact on policy-making, which is why the Lobby invests so much energy in suppressing discussion.

Comments

[Comandante Gringo]

Nothing for me is more pathetic than being at a pro-palestinian rally, etc., and seeing that the majority of earnest participants are totally oblivious to the DOZENS of zionist agents incessantly circling in and around them... I mean, I could never put my life in the hands of such people.
Yet they demand to be taken seriously as political actors.
/:/

I'm sorry -- but forget _that_ shite. There has to be some minimum modicum of security-consciousness in politix.

[the burningman]

More...

Fadi Kiblawi gave a sober recounting of the slur campaign Hillel organized at George Washington University. He was called a "terrorist" over the campus listserve and a completely ficticious incident was concocted where he "led chants (of) 'Death to the Jews.'"

His crime: discussing divestment and explaining the apartheid nature of the Israeli state.

The response: attempts to criminalize and incite irrational fear among Jewish students on campus.

His response is powerful and smart and decent... the kind of dignified righteousness that wins.

More...

"Officials at a US university have removed artwork depicting injured Palestinian children from an exhibit after complaints, a U.S. newspaper reported.

"The paintings were on display at Brandeis University in Boston, Mass.

"They were painted by Palestinian children at the request of an ISRAELI JEWISH STUDENT at the Jewish-sponsored college who wanted to bring the Palestinian viewpoint to campus.

"However, school officials said the paintings were too one-sided and they were removed on Saturday, four days into a two-week exhibit at a school library."

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/3ACFCB49-C1A3-407F-9D98-946593B2D23B.htm

These battles can be won if they are confronted directly with the intention to WIN OVER those students who don't know the back story.

The point of the attack apparatus is to make rational discussion impossible, not to win each discussion.

Most people will say "oh, you two...." and that's enough.

If paintings are taken down... photocopy them and glue them in every bathroom on campus. Put them all in the school paper with an explination of one child's family history. And what is so heavy at Brandeis is the increasingly common phenom where Israelis are more open to honest discussion than American Jewish institutions.

Jews disproportionately oppose the war. Jewish institutions are disproportionately hawkish and Sharonist. That's what makes debate so dangerous to the Zionist enterprise. That's why we can't stop.

[Comandante Gringo]

I think a big part of the problem is that most people, because they don't have much or any political experience, have very little or no perspective; and so see these malign forces as somehow having boundless, bottomless, infinite resources. Which they don't.

They _can_ be messed-with, as you demonstrate above. All it takes is 'moxy' (or is that 'chutzpah'..?)
And determination, and nerve, and some money, and...

[srogouski]

The pro-Israel lobby is heavily going after Juan Cole and Ray McGovern at the moment.

But the act is getting bit tired. They threw everything they had at Cindy Sheehan and it only made her stronger.

Comandante Gringo is right. There's nothing all powerful about AIPAC. The real issue isn't the media or the activist left. It's the Democratic Party. It's possible to have an open debate about Israel and the pro-Israel lobby just about anywhere in the United States except for the Democratic and Republican parties.

Mainstream politics is where lobbying clout really does have an effect.

[the burningman]

Nicely put, Stan.