The Israel Lobby has entered the political discourse in a big way. The problem is that it is completely ignored as a factor in the mainstream media, and completely glommed by the outsider media. Here is Paul Craig Roberts, a former Reagan Administration Treasury official, describing the lobby as powerful interest in the presidential race:
Obama might not bring any change either. But he is the only
candidate in the running who has expressed concern over Israel’s
mistreatment of the Palestinians and who voted against the Iraq
invasion….If Obama were to appoint people opposed by the
military-security lobby, the Israel Lobby or the offshoring
lobby, the Senate would be unlikely to confirm them. No
president wants to nominate people who cannot be confirmed.
Presidents have to staff their administrations according to who
can get the approval of powerful interest group.
And here is author Antony Loewenstein writing in the Australian Age about a nefarious, octopus-like lobby that permeates American politics:
American professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt hypothesise
that pro-Israeli advocates have so thoroughly infiltrated the
American body politic that the US government is no longer capable
of recognising its national interests in the Middle East. [Weiss’s emphasis. Cool!] On Friday
[November 30] Israeli diplomats demanded that the US withdraw a resolution to the
UN Security Council endorsing the Annapolis summit on the grounds
that the UN is insufficiently pro-Israeli to be involved in the
peace process. The resolution was promptly withdrawn.
There’s a real problem here: that people who are outside the mainstream/Establishment believe something fervently, and people in the Establishment insist this is not the case, or it is exaggerated, or delusional. Still the knowledge creeps in on little cat feet. Years ago only leaders in the Arab world subscribed to this "conspiracy theory," as Tom Friedman once smeared talk of the lobby, after a whirlwind tour of Arabia. Now it is thoroughly in our discourse, on the right– Roberts– and the left, Loewenstein. Still it is marginalized, the Times and the New Yorker and ’60 Minutes’ and the CFR saw to that. Respectable people stay away. The marginalization of such an important idea is unhealthy. The establishment must integrate this understanding, or at least have an honest discussion of it.
Or I suppose the establishment could collapse around it. The same kind of dislocation of narratives occurred after Vietnam, our last great war, and a social order fell. Somehow this worldview feels more tenacious, as it is entwined with globalization and hedge funds, all the engines of the American economy, such as it is…
