It’s often pointed out that CNN’s Wolf Blitzer used to work for AIPAC. In a highly-favorable review of Walt and Mearsheimer’s book on the Israel lobby, former Senator James Abourezk relates the following anecdote:
My real Middle East education began during a trip I took through the
Middle East in 1973… In early 1974, I
held a press conference at the Federal Press Club in Washington, D.C. I
related to those gathered there that every single Arab leader I met
with, including Yasir Arafat, told me that each was ready to make peace
with Israel, to begin commercial trade with it, on the condition that
Israel withdraw to the pre-1967 borders, and allow a Palestinian state
in the West Bank and Gaza. Amazingly, the Arab leaders I talked to… were
willing to concede the land that Israel had already taken by force in
1947 and 1948. That was the same offer King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia
made to Israel last year—an offer that was scoffed at by Israel and
ignored by the United States.When I related what I had heard in the Arab countries… at the Press
Club, a short reporter rose to ask me a few hostile questions, after
which he left. His name was Wolf Blitzer, at that time a writer for the
AIPAC newsletter, The Near East Report. The headline of his story was, “Abourezk Sells Out to the Arabs.”
I have a couple questions about Abourezk’s story. Like, what is the Federal Press Club? Just the same, the tale speaks to something many of us in the press know intimately and that Walt and Mearsheimer spoke of more detachedly: a love for Israel is part of American Jewish culture that is rarely openly acknowledged by the press. Back when I was at the Observer, former publisher Brian Kempner used to tell me I didn’t know what I was talking about re Israel, and said I shouldn’t write about Israel without going there (I am grateful to him for that push). In these exchanges, Kempner smiled acknowledging that he had once worked for AIPAC. And once he said to me, "Of course the Palestinians have reason to be angry; we took their land and houses…" A statement I found shocking at the time because I had so little knowledge of Israeli history; and I remember walking away confused that someone could accept this truth and still be a giant booster for Israel.
My point is that a love of Israel runs through American Jewish culture, and the best journalistic response to a book as important as Walt/Mearsheimer is for Jews in public life to talk openly about Israel. To have a forum where Jews–and yes, a gentile Zionist, and a Jewish critic of Israel–speak of their feelings about Israel and say what effect those attitudes have had on their professional lives. I remember Roger Hertog, the neocon backer of the New York Sun and the Manhattan Institute, speaking at a Manhattan Institute gala a couple years ago about a deathbed promise he had made to a good friend to look out for the Jewish state. I was thankful to him for his honesty. Daniel Schorr spoke of his mother’s Zionism in his memoir without really saying how it had affected his coverage of Israel. The Times’ Max Frankel spoke of his devotion to Israel very fleetingly in his memoir. More more more.
These sorts of attitudes are important. In a spirit of openness, without hounding people for their attitudes/affections, we need to learn about this social/religious/professional history. And discuss. How about on CNN’s "Situation Room"?
Wolf Blitzer has been criticized quite strongly in Jewish circles for NOT using his position to advocate for Israel.
I did see David Duke refer to Wolf Blitzer's former roles in an "interview" during the Iranian holocaust revision "academic" conference.
It would be useful for those habitually critical of Israel, to actually read of the experiences of Israelis and supportive American and other Jews, and their feelings and reasons for those feelings, towards Israel.
It would also be useful for Jews and Israelis to actually read of the experiences of Palestinians.
Humanize the discussion.
Richard writes: It would be useful for those habitually critical of Israel, to actually read of the experiences of Israelis and supportive American and other Jews, and their feelings and reasons for those feelings, towards Israel.
As someone who was very supportive of Israel until the Iraq War and has since repented, the motives of many gentile supporters of Israel (aside from the rapturists) are familiar to me–they're pretty much what Prof. Matory described in his Harvard Crimson piece. Friendship w. jews has led many to take a sympathetic view towards their cause; this sympathy can be so blinding that one may need to be hit between the eyes by the 2 x 4 of zionist treachery to recognize its prejudicial effect.
The readiness of the zionist side to attribute antisemitism to those betrayed by philosemitism can be galling.
I think there is something to what Christopher is saying regarding non-jews attitudes for Israel. Those who have jewish friends and are familiar with jewish history are inclined to be supportive of Israel. That they don't know a whole lot about the really problematic aspects of zionism and the Israeli state makes them not so different from their American Jewish counterparts. Most American Jews naturally support Israel's right to exist. Those that are familiar with the oppression of the Palestinians tend to be highly critical of those policies and wish to see them change. There are many jewish organizaitons in America focused on this. New Israel Fund, Mertez USA, etc. Many American Jews tend to busy themselves with reading about the threats to Israel from Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, etc., and are hyper-attuned to the dangers of radical fundamentalism in the Muslim world. They are not wrong on these issues per se, but they often fail to grasp the cyclical effect of the violence and the way in which the right wing in Israel promotes it for its own purposes. Those American Jews that do travel to Israel often never see the realities there. Not that different from the millions of fundies that go there as well.
Here is a some unsolicited advice to both jews and non-jews who really want to turn the minds of American jews and not create a defensive reaction that is just counter productive to positive change. Don't ignore the fact that Israel has been in a virtual state of war since its founding and much of the horrible things it has done have occured in a context of a siege mentality. Such a mentality has lead many American Jews to not seriously address the fascists in our midst, if they are even particulary aware of them. Most American jews are highly assimiliated and don't read jewish publications or keep up on Kahana chai type folks.
My guess is that as the discussion of Israel opens up it will be jews leading the way in criticizing Israeli policy and many more American Jews will come around to being more conditiional with their support for Israel. This in itself may be one of the most compelling forces for forcing the hand of the Israeli government to make the concessions necessary for their to be a more just settlement with the Palestinians.
Attributing anti-semitism to some of the more ardent anti-zionists may not be technically correct, but after just spending the last two hours reading through the comments section here I can see why some of them would get that feeling. My guess is that some ardent anti-zionists actually want them to get that feeling.
AIPAC analyst wears keffiyeh?
http://www.forward.com/articles/11608/
I've been called so many names that I tend to dismiss name-callers, whether on the left, right, Jewish, atheist, Muslim, whatever.
Liberal Zionist Jews take it from everybody. To the left, we are too compliant. We are called "brainwashed", "racist", etc.
To the neo-fascist right, our sin is in being Jewish, foe existing, or for not knowing our place.
To patriotic conservative American right, we are bleeding heart liberals, Jews, potentially disloyal.
To patriotic conservative Zionists, we are similarly bleeding heart liberals, not sufficiently pragmatic or cognizant of the physical dangers implied by a large blood-thirsty Hamas, Hezbollah or other enemies.
But, the humanist path, that includes the right of self-determination for defined peoples, is the RIGHT path.
Other paths, one-state for example, whatever flavor of subordination or of fantasy, is a wrong path for the likelihood of violence and subordination (however humane it sounds at the surface).
An interesting "comment" here:
link to tinyurl.com
and here:
link to tinyurl.com
It is still a riddle to me why and how so many people in American academe became panicky about the accusation of anti-Semitism.
Finkelstein's case is exemplary. He was, as is fairly widely known, the first to discover, then being a mere graduate student, that Joan Peters' book 'From Time Immemorial'was a hoax. He circulated a short paper about it and then this happened to him (according to Chomsky's account in 'The Fate of an honest intellectual'):
"Meanwhile his professors—this is Princeton University, supposed to be a serious place—stopped talking to him: they wouldn't make appointments with him, they wouldn't read his papers, he basically had to quit the program.
By this time, he was getting kind of desperate, and he asked me what to do. I gave him what I thought was good advice, but what turned out to be bad advice: I suggested that he shift over to a different department, where I knew some people and figured he'd at least be treated decently. That turned out to be wrong. He switched over, and when he got to the point of writing his thesis he literally could not get the faculty to read it, he couldn't get them to come to his thesis defense. Finally, out of embarrassment, they granted him a Ph.D.—he's very smart, incidentally—but they will not even write a letter for him saying that he was a student at Princeton University."
Now it is a fair guess that not all of these senior academics who were so blatantly running for cover were Jewish and/or Zionists. What scared them so much?
The fear for the accusation of anti-Semitism is supposed to be based on guilt feelings about the holocaust. But this fear seems to be stronger in the US than anywhere else in the Western world. Why? The English language nations, and particularly the US, were least involved in this crime.
The only possible explanation is that the Zionist lobby must have a much bigger stick in the US than elsewhere.
We know the end of the story about Joan Peters' concoction. The publisher made the mistake to have this book, that was (with very few exceptions)praised into the sky by the American intellectual establishment, also published in England – where it was promptly torpedoed (only then did the New York Review of Books have the courage to have it competently reviewed – but it prudently invited an Israeli scholar for the job).
Harking back to an earlier exchange with Alan:
From the (British) Sunday Times:
"AMERICA’s elder statesman of finance, Alan Greenspan, has shaken the White House by declaring that the prime motive for the war in Iraq was oil.
In his long-awaited memoir, to be published tomorrow, Greenspan, a Republican whose 18-year tenure as head of the US Federal Reserve was widely admired, will also deliver a stinging critique of President George W Bush’s economic policies.
However, it is his view on the motive for the 2003 Iraq invasion that is likely to provoke the most controversy. “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil,” he says.
Greenspan, 81, is understood to believe that Saddam Hussein posed a threat to the security of oil supplies in the Middle East."
It is possible of course that Greenspan is covering up for the Israel lobby.
The Coming Collapse of Zionism
September 12, 2006
http://counterpunch.org
The Moral Bankruptcy of Israel's Founding Idea
The Coming Collapse of Zionism
By KATHLEEN CHRISTISON
Former CIA Analyst
Is it only observers outside the conventional mainstream who have noticed that by its murderous assault on Lebanon and simultaneously on Gaza, Israel finally exposed, for even the most deluded to see, the total bankruptcy of its very founding idea?
Can it be that the deluded are still deluded? Can it truly still be that Israel's bankruptcy is evident only to those who already knew it, those who already recognized Zionism as illegitimate for the racist principle that underlies it?
Can it be therefore that only the already converted can see coming the ultimate collapse of Zionism and, with it, of Israel itself as the exclusivist state of Jews?
Racism has always been the lifeblood of Israel. Zionism rests on the fundamental belief that Jews have superior national, human, and natural rights in the land, an inherently racist foundation that excludes any possibility of true democracy or equality of peoples. Israel's destructive rampage in Lebanon and Gaza is merely the natural next step in the evolution of such a founding ideology. Precisely because that ideology posits the exclusivity and superiority of one people's rights, it can accept no legal or moral restraints on its behavior and no territorial limits, for it needs an ever-expanding geography to accommodate those unlimited rights.
Zionism cannot abide encroachment or even the slightest challenge to its total domination over its own space — not merely of the space within Israel's 1967 borders, but of the surrounding space as well, extending outward to geographical limits that Zionism has not yet seen fit to set for itself. Total domination means no physical threat and no demographic threat: Jews reign, Jews are totally secure, Jews always outnumber, Jews hold all military power, Jews control all natural resources, all neighbors are powerless and totally subservient. This was the message Israel tried to send with its attack on Lebanon: that neither Hizbullah nor anything in Lebanon that nurtures Hizbullah should continue to exist, for the sole reason that Hizbullah challenges Israel's supreme authority in the region and Israel cannot abide this effrontery. Zionism cannot coexist with any other ideology or ethnicity except in the preeminent position, for everyone and every ideology that is not Zionist is a potential threat.
In Lebanon, Israel attempted by its wildly reckless violence to destroy the nation, to make of it a killing zone where only Zionism would reign, where non-Jews would die or flee or prostrate themselves, as they had during the nearly quarter-century of Israel's last occupation, from 1978 to 2000. Observing the war in Beirut after the first week of bombing, describing the murder in an Israeli bombing raid of four Lebanese army logistics techs who had been mending power and water lines "to keep Beirut alive," British correspondent Robert Fisk wrote that it dawned on him that what Israel intended was that "Beirut is to die . . . . No one is to be allowed to keep Beirut alive." Israeli Chief of Staff Dan Halutz (the man who four years ago when he headed the Israeli Air Force said he felt no psychological discomfort after one of his F-16s had dropped a one-ton bomb on an apartment building in Gaza in the middle of the night, killing 14 civilians, mostly children) pledged at the start of the Lebanon assault to take Lebanon back 20 years; 20 years ago Lebanon was not alive, its southern third occupied by Israel, the remainder a decade into a hopelessly destructive civil war.
The cluster bombs are a certain sign of Israel's intent to remake Lebanon, at least southern Lebanon, into a region cleansed of its Arab population and unable to function except at Israel's mercy. Cluster bombs, of which Israel's U.S. provider is the world's leading manufacturer (and user, in places like Yugoslavia and Iraq), explode in mid-flight and scatter hundreds of small bombs over a several-acre area. Up to one-quarter of the bomblets fail to explode on impact and are left to be found by unsuspecting civilians returning to their homes. UN surveyors estimate that there are as many as 100,000 unexploded cluster bomblets strewn around in 400 bomb-strike sites in southern Lebanon. Scores of Lebanese children and adults have been killed and injured by this unexploded ordnance since the cease-fire last month.
Laying anti-personnel munitions in heavily populated civilian areas is not the surgical targeting of a military force in pursuit of military objectives; it is ethnic cleansing. Fully 90 percent of Israel's cluster-bomb strikes were conducted, according to UN humanitarian coordinator Jan Egelund, in the last 72 hours before the cease-fire took effect, when it was apparent that a UN cease-fire resolution was in the works. This can only have been a further effort, no doubt intended to be more or less a coup de grace, to depopulate the area. Added to the preceding month of bombing attacks that destroyed as much as 50 or in some cases 80 percent of the homes in many villages, that did vast damage to the nation's entire civilian infrastructure, that crippled a coastal power plant that continues to spill tons of oil and benzene-laden toxins along the Lebanese and part of the Syrian coastlines, and that killed over 1,000 civilians in residential apartment blocks, being transported in ambulances, and fleeing in cars flying white flags, Israel's war can only be interpreted as a massiv act of ethnic cleansing, to keep the region safe for Jewish dominion.
In fact, approximately 250,000 people, by UN estimate, are unable to return to their homes because either the homes have been leveled or unexploded cluster bomblets and other ordnance have not yet been cleared by demining teams. This was not a war against Hizbullah, except incidentally. It was not a war against terror, as Israel and its U.S. acolytes would have us believe (indeed, Hizbullah was not conducting terrorist acts, but had been engaged in a sporadic series of military exchanges with Israeli forces along the border, usually initiated by Israel). This was a war for Israeli breathing space, for the absolute certainty that Israel would dominate the neighborhood. It was a war against a population that was not totally subservient, that had the audacity to harbor a force like Hizbullah that does not bow to Israel's will. It was a war on people and their way of thinking, people who are not Jewish and who do not act to promote Zionism and Jewish hegemony.
Israel has been doing this to its neighbors in one form or another since its creation. Palestinians have obviously been Zionism's longest suffering victims, and its most persistent opponents. The Zionists thought they had rid themselves of their most immediate problem, the problem at the very core of Zionism, in 1948 when they forced the flight of nearly two-thirds of the Palestinian population that stood in the way of a establishing Israel as an exclusive Jewish-majority state. You can't have a Jewish state if most of your population is not Jewish. Nineteen years later, when Israel began to expand its borders with the capture of the West Bank and Gaza, those Palestinians who it thought had disappeared turned out to be still around after all, threatening the Zionists' Jewish hegemony.
In the nearly 40 years since then, Israeli policy has been largely directed — with periodic time-outs for attacks on Lebanon — toward making the Palestinians disappear for certain. The methods of ethnic cleansing are myriad: land theft, destruction of agricultural land and resources, economic strangulation, crippling restrictions on commerce, home demolition, residency permit revocation, outright deportation, arrest, assassination, family separation, movement restriction, destruction of census and land ownership records, theft of tax monies, starvation. Israel wants all of the land of Palestine, including all of the West Bank and Gaza, but it cannot have a majority Jewish state in all of this land as long as the Palestinians are there. Hence the slow strangulation. In Gaza, where almost a million and a half people are crammed into an area less than one-tenth the size of Rhode Island, Israel is doing on a continuing basis what it did in Lebanon in a month's time — killing civilians, destroying civilian infrastructure, making the place uninhabitable. Palestinians in Gaza are being murdered at the rate of eight a day. Maimings come at a higher rate. Such is the value of non-Jewish life in the Zionist scheme of things.
Israeli scholar Ilan Pappe calls it a slow genocide (ElectronicIntifada, September 2, 2006). Since 1948, every Palestinian act of resistance to Israeli oppression has been a further excuse for Israel to implement an ethnic cleansing policy, a phenomenon so inevitable and accepted in Israel that Pappe says "the daily business of slaying Palestinians, mainly children, is now reported in the internal pages of the local press, quite often in microscopic fonts." His prediction is that continued killing at this level either will produce a mass eviction or, if the Palestinians remain steadfast and continue to resist, as is far more likely, will result in an increasing level of killing. Pappe recalls that the world absolved Israel of responsibility and any accountability for its 1948 act of ethnic cleansing, allowing Israel to turn this policy "into a legitimate tool for its national security agenda." If the world remains silent again in response to the current round of ethnic cleansing, the policy will only escalate, "even more drastically."
And here is the crux of the situation today. Will anyone notice this horror? Has Israel, as proposed at the beginning, truly exposed by its wild summer campaign of ethnic cleansing in Lebanon and Gaza the total bankruptcy of its very founding idea, the essential illegitimacy of the Zionist principle of Jewish exclusivity? Can even the most deluded see this, or will they continue to be deluded and the world continue to turn away, excusing atrocity because it is committed by Israel in the name of keeping the neighborhood safe for Jews?
Since Israel's crazed run through Lebanon began, numerous clear-eyed observers in the alternative and the European and Arab media have noted the new moral nudity of Israel, and of its U.S. backer, with an unusual degree of bluntness. Also on many tongues is a new awareness of growing Arab and Muslim resistance to the staggering viciousness of Israeli-U.S. actions. Palestinian-British scholar Karma Nabulsi, writing in the Guardian in early August, laments the "indiscriminate wrath of an enemy driven by an existential mania that cannot be assuaged, only stopped." American scholar Virginia Tilley (Counterpunch, August 5, 2006) observes that any kind of normal, peaceful existence is anathema to Israel, for it "must see and treat its neighbors as an existential threat in order to justify . . . its ethnic/racial character." Even before the Lebanon war, but after Gaza had begun to be starved, political economist Edward Herman (Z Magazine, March 2006)condemned Israel's "long-term ethnic cleansing and institutionalized racism" and the hypocritical way in which the West and the western media accept and underwrite these policies "in violation of all purported enlightenment values."
Racism underlies the Israeli-U.S. neocon axis that is currently running amok in the Middle East. The inherent racism of Zionism has found a natural ally in the racist imperial philosophy espoused by the neoconservatives of the Bush administration. The ultimate logic of the Israeli-U.S. global war, writes Israeli activist Michel Warschawski of the Alternative Information Center in Jerusalem (July 30, 2006) is the "full ethnicization" of all conflicts, "in which one is not fighting a policy, a government or specific targets, but a 'threat' identified with a community" — or, in Israel's case, with all non-Jewish communities.
The basically racist notion of a clash of civilizations, being promoted both by the Bush administration and by Israel, provides the rationale for the assaults on Palestine and Lebanon. As Azmi Bishara, a leading Palestinian member of Israel's Knesset, has observed (al-Ahram, August 10-16, 2006), if the Israeli-U.S. argument that the world is divided into two distinct and incompatible cultures, us vs. them, is accurate, then the notion that "we" operate by a double standard loses all moral opprobrium, for it becomes the natural order of things. This has always been Israel's natural order of things: in Israel's world and that of its U.S. supporters, the idea that Jews and the Jewish culture are superior to and incompatible with surrounding peoples and cultures is the very basis of the state.
In the wake of Israel's failure in Lebanon, Arabs and Muslims have a sense, for the first time since Israel's implantation in the heart of the Arab Middle East almost 60 years ago, that Israel in its arrogance has badly overreached and that its power and its reach can be limited. The "ethnicization" of the global conflict that Michel Warschawski speaks of — the arrogant colonial approach of old, now in a new high-tech guise backed by F-16s and nuclear weapons, that assumes Western and Israeli superiority and posits a kind of apocalyptic clash between the "civilized" West and a backward, enraged East — has been seen for what it is because of Israel's mad assault on Lebanon. What it is is a crude racist assertion of power by a Zionist regime pursuing absolute, unchallenged regional hegemony and a neoconservative regime in the United States pursuing absolute, unchallenged global hegemony. As Palestinian commentator Rami Khouri observed in an interview with Charlie Rose a week into the Lebanon war, Hizbullah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine, having both grown out of earlier Israeli wars of hegemony, are the political response of populations "that have been degraded and occupied and bombed and killed and humiliated repeatedly by the Israelis, and often with the direct or indirect acquiescence, or, as we see now, the direct support of the United States."
Those oppressed populations are now fighting back. No matter how much Arab leaders in Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia may bow to the U.S. and Israel, the Arab people now recognize the fundamental weakness of Israel's race-based culture and polity and have a growing confidence that they can ultimately defeat it. The Palestinians in particular have been at this for 60 years, never disappearing despite Israel's best designs, never failing to remind Israel and the world of their existence. They will not succumb now, and the rest of the Arab world is taking heart from their endurance and Hizbullah's.
Something in the way Israel operates, and in the way the United States supports Israel's method of operating, must change. More and more commentators, inside the Arab world and outside, have begun to notice this, and a striking number are audacious enough to predict some sort of end to Zionism in the racist, exclusivist form in which it now exists and functions. This does not mean throwing the Jews into the sea. Israel will not be defeated militarily. But it can be defeated psychologically, which means putting limits on its hegemony, stopping its marauding advance through its neighborhood, ending Jewish racial/religious domination over other peoples.
Rami Khouri contends that the much greater public support throughout the Arab world for Hizbullah and Hamas is "a catastrophe" both for Israel and for the United States because it means resistance to their imperial designs. Khouri does not go further in his predictions, but others do, seeing at least in vague outline the vision of a future in which Israel no longer enjoys ultimate dominion. Gilad Atzmon, an ex-Israeli living in Britain, a jazz musician and thinker, sees Hizbullah's victory in Lebanon as signaling the defeat of what he calls global Zionism, by which he means the Israeli/U.S. neocon axis. It is the Lebanese, Palestinian, Iraqi, Afghani, and Iranian people, he says, who are "at the vanguard of the war for humanity and humanism," while Israel and the U.S. spread destruction and death, and more and more Europeans and Americans, recognizing this, are falling off the Zionist/neocon bandwagon. Atzmon talks about Israel as, ultimately, "an historic event" and a "dead entity."
Many others see similar visions. Commentators increasingly discuss the possibility of Israel, its myth of invincibility having been deflated, going through a South Africa-like epiphany, in which its leadership somehow recognizes the error of its racist ways and in a surge of humanitarian feeling renounces Zionism's inequities and agrees that Jews and Palestinians should live in equality in a unitary state. British MP George Galloway (Guardian, August 31, 2006) foresees the possibility of "an FW de Klerk moment" emerging in Israel and among its international backers when, as occurred in South Africa, a "critical mass of opposition" overwhelms the position of the previously invincible minority and the leadership is able to justify transferring power on the basis that doing so later under duress will be far less favorable. Short of such peaceful transition, along with a move to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Galloway along with many others — sees only "war, war and more war, until one day it is Tel Aviv which is on fire and the Israeli leaders' intransigence brings the whole state down on their heads."
This increasingly appears to be the shape of the future: either Israel and its neocon supporters in the United States can dismantle Zionism's most egregious aspects by agreeing to establish a unitary state in Palestine inhabited by the Palestinians and Jews whose land this is, or the world will face a conflagration of a scale not fully imaginable now.
Just as Hizbullah is an integral part of Lebanon, not to be destroyed by the bombing of bridges and power plants, the Palestinians before their expulsion in 1948 were Palestine and still are Palestine. By hitting the Palestinians where they lived, in the literal and the colloquial sense, Israel left them with only a goal and a vision. That vision is justice and redress in some form, whether redress means ultimately defeating Zionism and taking back Palestine, or reconciling with Israel on the condition that it act like a decent neighbor and not a conqueror, or finally joining with Israeli Jews to form a single state in which no people has superior rights . In Lebanon, Israel again seemed bent on imposing its will, its dominion, its culture and ethnicity on another Arab country. It never worked in Palestine, it has not worked in Lebanon, and it will not work anywhere in the Arab world.
We have reached a moral crossroads. In the "new Middle East" defined by Israel, Bush, and the neocons, only Israel and the U.S. may dominate, only they may be strong, only they may be secure. But in the just world that lies on the other side of that crossroads, this is unacceptable. Justice can ultimately prevail.
Kathleen Christison is a former CIA political analyst and has worked on Middle East issues for 30 years. She is the author of P
Richard Witty, what are you talking about – Jews are Defensive? What the heck do you suppose we are? AIPAC spying on the USA, Israel (our ally?) spying on the USA, PNAC and JINSA working inside the US pushing for wars that are not in Americas interest instead they make us hated all over the world. Israel selling OUR technology to the Chinese then lining us up to fight them (they are backing the Syrians, Iranians in case you hadn't noticed), getting scot free away with the murder of US sailors and destroying the USS Liberty. Richard Pearl was found giving intelligence to the Israeli's in the early 80's and again no trial even though this is documented fact. He actually served in our government after that and no mention of his duplicity in the MSM? How the hell can something like this be not discussed in the MSM, wasn't it in the national interest to discuss his suitabilty? maybe it is anti semitic to put American interests first?
Get a grip, our guys are dying in your war (see PNAC) and your shrill community is screaming for Iran & syria to be attacked next. Face a few facts and do something about it then maybe other communities will not be so defensive.
Kudos to Philip Weiss for offering ordinary Americans the chance to speak freely about what is a treacherous state of affairs which loyal Americans of whatever ethnicity need to reckon with.
Israel needs to withdraw to 67 borders, set those borders, Jerusalem should be shared with christians and muslims – compensate the Palestinians along similar lines to holocaust compensations which the Jewish community should find itself NOT US, not the euros, no one but yoursleves. You have feet – learn to stand on them – It could be the making of you. And don't give me a chorus about the nazis, my grandparents fought them, and your ADL and Israels president have something in common, they ARE holocaust deniars, they deny the Armenian holocaust. Take a long hard look at yourselves and do something about it instead of off loading on to everybody else.
We can't go on like this – We need change in this country, start with dismantling the lobby system and private ownership of the federel reserve.
Crimson Ghost, Lebanon was once the paris of the middle east. Hizbollah are basically the children / grandchildren of Palestinian refugees taken in by Lebanon and those people are expected to return to their own country when Israel is finally forced to come to the negotiating table. I am not for Israeli grandstanding but you wont get many Americans to back a caliphate either.
Lebanon was once a christian country, the only one in the middle east like Israel is the only jewish country in the middle east.
Both have a right to exist in peace under self determination. Not to expand, not to meddle in other countries as Israel has done repeatedly for decades including their false flag operations inside Egypt and Iraq. The Palestinians have to be returned to a palestinian state and Lebanon and Israel as two minority nations where persecuted jews and christians can live freely – given international protection if they need it.
America does need to be fair and will be once she is unshackled by this cabal of warmongers. The jewish people will find a true friend in America because we want to be not because we are lied to by the Kristols and the Blitzers once they put paid to their spies, liars and parasites.
America should defend two small nations, one christian, one jewish – if need be. The Israelis have been despicable for a long time but true too, we ourselves and the Arab world has tried to destroy real freedom and aspirations of ordinary people.
My position is that jews do not need to behave maliciously toward the West and should take a long honest look at their own performance over the centuries toward gentiles. The attacks vs defensiveness could end tomorrow with some honesty from the jewish people. I would like Israel to survive inside set borders, her diaspora behaving honourably and we defending her if she comes under attack after such a time.
As it stands now, she is looking into the abyss all of her own NEOCON making. Lebanon was a christian country, the Hizbollah are not Lebanese, they are originally from what was Palestine and need to return to a new Palestine for there to be peace and fair settlement for all including the Lebanese who see themselves as a sovereign people. They have rights too not just the Israelis and Pals
The Shia community in Southern Lebanon is permanent, not new.
They are not Palestinian, but Lebanese.
To Richard Witty
Sorry but you are plain wrong. Hezbollah are palestinian refugees, the children of 48 if you like and they are going home despite what the Israelis have to say about it. Lebanon used to have a Christian before they took the pal refugees the Lebs have never given them citizenship, the Israelis call Hezbollah Lebanese for the same reason you call them Lebanese. They are Palestinians so deal with it.
When Israel was bombing the shit out of Lebanon they also bombed Christian areas for no good reason, the MSM didn't tell us that either.
Sorry, mis-spell, should have read, Lebanon had a christian majority before they took the pal refugees. Hezbollah are Pals not Lebanese.
There has been a Shia minority in the same physical region of Southern Lebanon for centuries.
All of the states are relatively new, and vestigial of colonial objectives.
If you want to call that jurisdiction Palestine, it becomes a semantic game.
For what its worth, you err when you presume to know what I think.
To Richard Witty
The Pals are a relatively new colonial people, is that what you are saying? that Jordan is colonial, Lebanon and Iraq so Israel can do as it pleases? Those Palestinians driven out in 48 had been there in historic Palestine since millennia when the european zionists drove them out. New facts on the ground: The Jordanians wish to keep their sovereignty, as does Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Iraq (which the Neo Cons are trying to break up)
Jordan and Syria taking more refugees from Iraq than anyone but both countries expect these Iraqi refugees to go home when it is safe for them to do so just as Lebanon expect the Pals to go home. Lebanon was Christian, you want rights for a jewish state but not for what was a christian state which as Maxi pointed out Lebanon was.
You are the one playing semantics Mr Witty, playing foot loose with what was and is now and cherry picking through it. You are all the more obvious for it.
Ask the Shia if they are Palestinian or Lebanese.
Lebanon has always been multi-cultural. That was one of the jewels of it.
If you wish to take a principled stand against people's being displaced, that is a valid and laudable stand.
If you wish to take the stand that there is no validity to a formerly displaced people settling in a place, that is a more of a fascist argument than a democratic one.
It would have been wonderful if Naziism didn't occur, if the breakup of the Turkish empire didn't occur (?) to be replaced by opportunistic European colonialism. (Sykes/Pinchot).
But those historical events did occur, and were formative in the enormous social changes that reverberate still.
Seeking a resolution based on "they were always there, they OWN the land", is a cruelty in a world of great social change.
My sympathies with Zionism are NOT sympathies with ruthless expansion. I consistently oppose the use of settlements to make Palestinian self-governance impossible.
I strongly support the right of a people to self-govern. Israelis AND Palestinians.
To Richard Witty
I was wondering when Hitler would be pulled out of the deck. I am an American – America is a fairly new colonial state, so is Kuwait. As an American can I go to kuwait and make that my home irrespective of Kuwaiti laws and customs? Should I be able to? You might have an internationalist dream (though I doubt it, internationalism like nazism is just something you're throwing around here to help your argument).
It isn't up to you or the Israelis to decide where the Pals are going to settle in Lebanon or Jordan or any other country and I don't care how old those borders are.
Countries exist, administrations however imperfect exist, people inside those countries have a right to self determination every bit as much as the jewish state.
If Jordan wants the Iraqis to make their way home when it's safe, so it should be. The same with the Pals in Lebanon. It isn't for these small countries to take on the refugees created by Israel or the US.
A million folks dead in Iraq mr Witty, I'm thinking if nazi ideology is involved here it isn't from those of us who respect self determination, it's those who don't and will kill to impose their will on nations.
I forgot to say, mr Witty seeing as you are all for multiculturalism it being a jewel and all – you support the right of however many of the Pals to return to their homes if they want to?
Samie,
Your ignorance of Jewish attitude and consciousness is appalling. Please be so kind as to read the Walt/Mearsheimer article and book at least. Even as much as they generalize and misrepresent, they do so far less than you.
The majority of Jews in the US, Israel, Europe opposed the US invasion of Iraq, as did I vehemently. In a public meeting in my hometown, I publicly confronted John Kerry in 2003 for his voting in favor of the war powers resolution.
Even the Kadima government in Israel urged the US NOT to invade Iraq, largely for the misapplication of military and intelligence funds and effort that ignored the real threats that Iran posed.
Please read about the Shia in Lebanon. They are NOT Palestinian, however they sympathize with the Palestinian people and experience.
My own proposal is that geographic Israel be at approximately the green line, and adopt full and equal civil rights to all residents within that border, with the exception of continuing the offer of easy right of return to Jews within Israel.
And, that Palestine adopt full and equal civil rights to all residents within that border, including the current settlers if they choose to become Palestinian citizens, with the exception of the offer of right of return to Jews within Palestine.
If Jews or Palestinians then consider themselves part of the Jewish nation, so be it. They can be, as I am part of the Jewish nation, but an American citizen.
Correction on the second to last paragraph in the prior post.
That is that the Palestinians should have the right to establish any right of return they desire within Palestine.
That is an appropriate compromise.
The advocates for all of the land being Israel claim that all of the land was their ancestral home, and declare the right of return to apply to the invitation by the land, or God, to Jews as a coming home.
Similarly, Palestinians regard actually a larger portion of land as their homeland.
Either exclusive would be an expropriation and functionally cruel.
Better that there be a just application of partition, than an arbitrary and likely violent forced intimacy.
Forced marriages usually don't work. Forced nations similarly.
Mr Witty, I suggest you google PNAC where you can see on their own web site the blue print for ME conflict, the road to Damascus lay through Baghdad. In the Jerusalem Post today they are retching up the ante for an attack on Iran, "it's 600 missiles pointing at Israel" – "Where is Germany, why are they foot dragging now France has signed up"
It seems to me some of your people cannot live with out conflict, they see danger everywhere and smashing their percieved enemies via American hegemony is their only answer.
I don't want my country to attack Iran – As an American to watch a US president smash the proliferation treaty and start a new cold war with the Russians I see it as it paramount that ordinary Americans take back control of our battered democracy under siege because its ordinary American who are dying and being left without limbs or brain damaged, coming home broken for some seriosuly deranged people who will break this whole world if they can't be stopped.
It is just dandy that so many jewish people say they support two states what isn't dandy is that Israel is still building settlements in the west Bank making a settlement impossible never mind a viable Palestine.
It isn't dandy that most Americans are not given a true picture of what is actually happening in Israel and the OT, or any where for that matter from our MSM, please don't try to tell me different. Here's an extract from a review of W&M who I don't think are misrepresenting anything. But as you mentioned misrepresentation and us all being American citizens and some of us are ignorant, as you say, that's why we're being easily manipulated and allot of our people are dying. This worries me Mr Witty that so many of us are ignorant and cowed from asking questions that need answers.
How mad is Elliott Abrams? If one passage
"cited by
Mearsheimer- Walt is quoted accurately, it would seem
to be the duty of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee to subject Abrams to as exacting a challenge
as the Senate Judiciary Committee brought to Alberto
Gonzales. The man at the Middle East desk of the
National Security Council wrote in 1997 in his book
Faith or Fear: "there can be no doubt that Jews,
faithful to the covenant between God and Abraham, are
to stand apart from the nation in which they live. It
is the very nature of being Jewish to be apart–except
in Israel–from the rest of the population." When he
wrote those words, Abrams probably did not expect to
serve in another American administration. He certainly
did not expect to occupy a position that would require
him to weigh the national interest of Israel, the
country with which he confessed himself uniquely at
one, alongside the national interest of a country in
which he felt himself to stand "apart…from the rest
of the population." Now that he is calling the shots
against Hamas and Hezbollah, Damascus and Tehran, his
words of 1997 ought to alarm us into reflection."
Mr Witty, I suggest you goggle PNAC where you can see on their own web site the blue print for ME conflict, the road to Damascus lay through Baghdad. Israeli / Jewish support for Iraq is well documented but shift the plates as you see fit. In the Jerusalem Post today they are retching up the ante regarding Iran, it's 600 missiles pointing at Israel – Where is Germany, why are they foot dragging now France has signed up"
It seems to me some of your people cannot live with out conflict, they see danger everywhere and smashing their percieved enemies via American hegemony is their only answer.
I don't want my country to attack Iran – As an American to watch a US president smash the proliferation treaty and start a new cold war with the Russians it is paramount that ordinary Americans take back control of our battered democracy.
It is just dandy that so many jewish people say they support two states what isn't dandy is that Israel is still building settlements in the west Bank making a settlement impossible never mind a viable Palestine.
It isn't dandy that most Americans are not given a true picture of what is actually happening in Israel and the OT or any where else for that matter from our MSM, please don't try to tell me different. Here's an extract from a review of W&M who I don't think they are misrepresenting anything. But as you mentioned misrepresentation and us all being American citizens and some of us are ignorant, as you say, that's why we're being easily manipulated and allot of people are dying or coming home brain damaged, limbless, broken. This worries me Mr Witty because untill we start facing a few home truthes and not be cowed to ask who and why, we wont be able to stop what is happening.
How mad is Elliott Abrams? If one passage
"cited by
Mearsheimer- Walt is quoted accurately, it would seem
to be the duty of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee to subject Abrams to as exacting a challenge
as the Senate Judiciary Committee brought to Alberto
Gonzales. The man at the Middle East desk of the
National Security Council wrote in 1997 in his book
Faith or Fear: "there can be no doubt that Jews,
faithful to the covenant between God and Abraham, are
to stand apart from the nation in which they live. It
is the very nature of being Jewish to be apart–except
in Israel–from the rest of the population." When he
wrote those words, Abrams probably did not expect to
serve in another American administration. He certainly
did not expect to occupy a position that would require
him to weigh the national interest of Israel, the
country with which he confessed himself uniquely at
one, alongside the national interest of a country in
which he felt himself to stand "apart…from the rest
of the population." Now that he is calling the shots
against Hamas and Hezbollah, Damascus and Tehran, his
words of 1997 ought to alarm us into reflection."
Mr Witty, I suggest you goggle PNAC where you can see on their own web site the blue print for ME conflict, the road to Damascus lay through Baghdad. Israeli / Jewish support for Iraq is well documented but shift the plates as you see fit. In the Jerusalem Post today they are retching up the ante regarding Iran, it's 600 missiles pointing at Israel – Where is Germany, why are they foot dragging now France has signed up"
It seems to me some of your people cannot live with out conflict, they see danger everywhere and smashing their percieved enemies via American hegemony is their only answer.
I don't want my country to attack Iran – As an American to watch a US president smash the proliferation treaty and start a new cold war with the Russians it is paramount that ordinary Americans take back control of our battered democracy.
It is just dandy that so many jewish people say they support two states what isn't dandy is that Israel is still building settlements in the west Bank making a settlement impossible never mind a viable Palestine.
It isn't dandy that most Americans are not given a true picture of what is actually happening in Israel and the OT or any where else for that matter from our MSM, please don't try to tell me different. Here's an extract from a review of W&M who I don't think they are misrepresenting anything. But as you mentioned misrepresentation and us all being American citizens and some of us are ignorant, as you say, that's why we're being easily manipulated and allot of people are dying or coming home brain damaged, limbless, broken. This worries me Mr Witty because untill we start facing a few home truthes and not be cowed to ask who and why, we wont be able to stop what is happening.
How mad is Elliott Abrams? If one passage
"cited by
Mearsheimer- Walt is quoted accurately, it would seem
to be the duty of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee to subject Abrams to as exacting a challenge
as the Senate Judiciary Committee brought to Alberto
Gonzales. The man at the Middle East desk of the
National Security Council wrote in 1997 in his book
Faith or Fear: "there can be no doubt that Jews,
faithful to the covenant between God and Abraham, are
to stand apart from the nation in which they live. It
is the very nature of being Jewish to be apart–except
in Israel–from the rest of the population." When he
wrote those words, Abrams probably did not expect to
serve in another American administration. He certainly
did not expect to occupy a position that would require
him to weigh the national interest of Israel, the
country with which he confessed himself uniquely at
one, alongside the national interest of a country in
which he felt himself to stand "apart…from the rest
of the population." Now that he is calling the shots
against Hamas and Hezbollah, Damascus and Tehran, his
words of 1997 ought to alarm us into reflection."
Mr Witty, I suggest you goggle PNAC where you can see on their own web site the blue print for ME conflict, the road to Damascus lay through Baghdad. Israeli / Jewish support for Iraq is well documented but shift the plates as you see fit. In the Jerusalem Post today they are retching up the ante regarding Iran, it's 600 missiles pointing at Israel – Where is Germany, why are they foot dragging now France has signed up"
It seems to me some of your people cannot live with out conflict, they see danger everywhere and smashing their percieved enemies via American hegemony is their only answer.
I don't want my country to attack Iran – As an American to watch a US president smash the proliferation treaty and start a new cold war with the Russians it is paramount that ordinary Americans take back control of our battered democracy.
It is just dandy that so many jewish people say they support two states what isn't dandy is that Israel is still building settlements in the west Bank making a settlement impossible never mind a viable Palestine.
It isn't dandy that most Americans are not given a true picture of what is actually happening in Israel and the OT or any where else for that matter from our MSM, please don't try to tell me different. Here's an extract from a review of W&M who I don't think they are misrepresenting anything. But as you mentioned misrepresentation and us all being American citizens and some of us are ignorant, as you say, that's why we're being easily manipulated and allot of people are dying or coming home brain damaged, limbless, broken. This worries me Mr Witty because untill we start facing a few home truthes and not be cowed to ask who and why, we wont be able to stop what is happening.
How mad is Elliott Abrams? If one passage
"cited by
Mearsheimer- Walt is quoted accurately, it would seem
to be the duty of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee to subject Abrams to as exacting a challenge
as the Senate Judiciary Committee brought to Alberto
Gonzales. The man at the Middle East desk of the
National Security Council wrote in 1997 in his book
Faith or Fear: "there can be no doubt that Jews,
faithful to the covenant between God and Abraham, are
to stand apart from the nation in which they live. It
is the very nature of being Jewish to be apart–except
in Israel–from the rest of the population." When he
wrote those words, Abrams probably did not expect to
serve in another American administration. He certainly
did not expect to occupy a position that would require
him to weigh the national interest of Israel, the
country with which he confessed himself uniquely at
one, alongside the national interest of a country in
which he felt himself to stand "apart…from the rest
of the population." Now that he is calling the shots
against Hamas and Hezbollah, Damascus and Tehran, his
words of 1997 ought to alarm us into reflection."
How mad is Elliott Abrams? If one passage
"cited by
Mearsheimer- Walt is quoted accurately, it would seem
to be the duty of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee to subject Abrams to as exacting a challenge
as the Senate Judiciary Committee brought to Alberto
Gonzales. The man at the Middle East desk of the
National Security Council wrote in 1997 in his book
Faith or Fear: "there can be no doubt that Jews,
faithful to the covenant between God and Abraham, are
to stand apart from the nation in which they live. It
is the very nature of being Jewish to be apart–except
in Israel–from the rest of the population." When he
wrote those words, Abrams probably did not expect to
serve in another American administration. He certainly
did not expect to occupy a position that would require
him to weigh the national interest of Israel, the
country with which he confessed himself uniquely at
one, alongside the national interest of a country in
which he felt himself to stand "apart…from the rest
of the population." Now that he is calling the shots
against Hamas and Hezbollah, Damascus and Tehran, his
words of 1997 ought to alarm us into reflection."
Jewish conciousness like this mr Witty? you're right, W?M are misrepresenters of facts, maybe anti semites even. It isn't jews dying in their thousands, it's gentiles and muslims – but you're right, that's ignorance talking.
sorry I have sent this in several times on account it didn't show.
Criticizing specific statements by Abrams makes sense.
Generalizing about an Israel lobby with implied dominance is an innaccurate generalization.
As I've said before, I've been called names and threatened by the left, by conservatives, and by Zionists.
I've never been called names by liberals, thankfully. Liberals don't call names. We respect MULTIPLE parties in conflicts, and in that way seek peace.