The other day I noted the groundswell response at the Greenwich Library to the nearly-censored group, If Americans Knew, which argues that If "Americans" knew the full scale of what our government and the Israel lobby were licensing against the Palestinians, "Americans" would change their policy re Israel in a heartbeat. I said that the rage against the speaker among Jews in the audience (Jews as identified by the Times) and the tremendous support she got from the rest of the crowd, was evidence of a growing division in our country over Middle East policy. And not a division among intellectuals, and not an unspoken division, which is all we have had for years. But in the end a robust debate over policy, in which empowered Jews must be open about their feelings about Israel, and interrogate them, because god knows they are having a real effect on American statecraft, or lack thereof.
Well today brings further evidence for my claim. The Jerusalem Post notes that the assiduous Abe Foxman (who is hedgehoglike, not foxlike, per the old Isaiah Berlin dichotomy) went to the Knesset and presented a survey showing that a third of American believe that American Jews are more loyal to Israel than the U.S. The writer notes:
Now, with Mearsheimer and Walt's campaign against the "Israel lobby" and Jimmy Carter's righteous indignation (but refusal to debate), American Jews are increasingly feeling the sting of the accusation as it enters the mainstream of American political discourse. In supporting Israel, are they in fact disloyal Americans?
Is support for what they see as the "Jewish interest" - supporting a safe haven outside America for their brethren worldwide - somehow against the interests of America?
The writer, Haviv Rettig, goes on to say that Madison said that lots of interests should contend in a democracy and there is nothing wrong with Jews bringing their interest to bear. And the last time Jews were accused of such disloyalty, it ended badly. A blackmail, that: a reference to the Holocaust. The problem with Rettig's formulation is that a, Madison believed that factions could distort policy and b, Madison sought open Madisonian debate as a corrective. There is no debate. Just look at the Democratic presidential campaign, or the Republican one. Only one guy questions it, Ron Paul. Yet there truly is a large mass of Americans who are questioning our policy toward Israel, and they are shamed as antisemitic by the likes of Rettig, and nearly censored in Greenwich, as "offensive" (!) and an eyebrow is raised over their vehemence in the New York Times. They are marginalized, even as a persuasive argument is made that our skewed policies re Israel, generated by askew Jewish neocons, got us into the morass of Iraq (killing 600,000 Arabs, says Arabist Sharon Stone). Smart Americans now understand this. And yet the media are not giving a prominent place to these views, and our politicians are giving no voice to them. That's unhealthy, that's not Madison. Leave alone the fact that the American Jewish establishment has maintained a ban on using the words "Palestinian suffering" in the public square--a ban that more and more informed Americans find hateful. No, there must be a robust debate of foreign policy and of what Israeli "democracy" means for Palestinians under Israeli control, and also a robust debate among Jews (and nonJews too) of Jewish identity, and what the creation of Israel has done to American Jewish loyalties (which is not an antisemitic canard, it is precisely what the anti-Zionist American Jews worried about publicly generations ago: that a Jewish state with a right of return would divide American Jewish identity/loyalty). This debate will happen without pogroms because we are Americans who debate these things. And it will happen before long, I promise. There is simply too much instability in the discourse, i.e., the natives are gettin restless. With reason.
The long-standing stated US policy affirms, that both Obama and Hillary and McCain subscribe to, is of firmly standing behind Israel's defense, and supporting the negotiated establishment of a sovereign and viable Palestinian state.
Our current president implied a fundamental shift in US policy in accepting the settlement blocs as functionally annexed by Israel, and accepted.
Further, when asked to put the weight of US involvement into the negotiations, particularly over bi-lateral hurdles that required accountability to a third party to navigate, Bush's response was "just call me if you ever need me, we'll talk over lunch".
While in most cases, I would describe that as a catastrophe, in Bush's case I don't. He is so inept that if he were involved, he would entirely screw it up. Better that he stay out of it, and wait until a more skilled politician can assist.
The dilemma though, is that Israel/Palestine is such an external issue to president's, not a primary domestic or directly related US interest issue, that it usually gets deferred.
So, the Palestinians would likely then have to wait further, until their concerns reach the next presidents desk.
A third of Americans see Jews as more loyal to Israel than to the US?
That's a big number considering the near total black out of any unfavorable coverage of the Jewish Lobby and groups and Israel's actions in the US media.
And says something too about the power of the net which is the only place Americans can follow jewish political actions and attitudes on Israel.
I have to say that over the past few years I have come to see Jews as a group more loyal to Israel than this country and think it is a problem for America.
However, I don't see this in the Jews that I personally know. That may be because the Jewish families in my community have been here a long time, pre WWI citizens at least and they are not surrounded by a large population of other Jews to influence their thinking on Jewishness and Israel. They didn't have a large group of other jews to tribalize with, so jewishness for them is solely a matter of religion, not Israel, politics or much of anything else.
Nevertheless, something has to be done about the right wing jewish neo cult in our government and foreign policy. It boggles my mind that that the rabid Israel activist don't get that everything they are doing and claiming they have a "right to do" in America becuase of their loyaly to Israel, is reinforcing all the old carnards about Jews being incapable of loyalty to the countries they live in and ect. All the reasons and excuses they offer as to why it is O.K. for them to do this are so delusional that the logic of why it is wrong doesn't pentrate their wall of self deception.
Philip,
I was sent your entry by an alert reader of mine. I am an Israeli, so I can't really comment on your claims that the American "public square" refuses to speak of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians. Certainly the Israeli public square has dealt with it obsessively for almost two decades.
I'm writing only to correct your misreading. You must pay closer attention in the future.
You write that I explain Madison by saying "that lots of interests should contend in a democracy and there is nothing wrong with Jews bringing their interest to bear."
No. I quote Madison saying that nations which define a "general will" end up persecuting in its name – as Madison warned in Federalist 51, and as happened in the French Revolution. Madison's "multiplicity of interests" was to prevent the very existence of a majority will. It was the French Revolution – which killed in the name of "volonte generale" – that I was warning against.
"And the last time Jews were accused of such disloyalty, it ended badly. A blackmail, that: a reference to the Holocaust."
I didn't mention or allude to the Holocaust. I specifically noted the "other revolution" which I said was "simultaneous" to the American one. It's hard to miss the reference.
Madison, not I, gave the warning against the possibility that talk of "American interests" would stifle liberty even more than this alleged Jewish control of the media. As Madison warned, it is America – more than the minorities – that would suffer from demanding that minorities obey the "common interest."
Phil's expressed point is that what is in the common American interest should be debated. Certainly our foreign policy in the Middle East qualifies, too our Foreign and Military Foreign Aid policy. Madison supported checks and balances. We have the Fourth Estate. When it was intentionally blind for decades until W & M & former President Carter took a stance, something's wrong. Madison worried about majorities abusing minorities; he did not fear that minorities could exploit “the greater number.” Here
Madison's imagination lapsed. Special interest lobbies are factions; Madison did not see that minorities could exploit majorities when the benefits of government action to those minorities were huge and the costs to each individual in the majority were small. At least, say, the pros and cons of trade policy, or the Drug Industry are out in the open. Nobody but Ron Paul even addresses foreign aid and the media side-lined him and smeared him until now, when its too late for him to reach
the mainstream audience effectively and the top three candidates are in the bag. The larger issue of refined factions remains, the majority given only news "good for yuze."
Haviv Rettig: "As Madison warned, it is America – more than the minorities – that would suffer from demanding that minorities obey the "common interest."
Oh, contraire, Mr Rettig. A million Arabs and thousand of American and Brit service men dead is because a minority interest upsurped the Common good. American interests was upsurped by a minorities interests (or at least, the way they saw them) and as evidence "Defence of The Realm" (Whose realm, Mr Reetig? It was not ours). In 1998 PNAC designed the wars against Iraq, Iran and Syria. They got Iraq and that's where the common good is, entrenched in a bloody war that never was in the cause of the common good of my country nor it's people save One single minority. AIPAC should be registered as a foriegn interest lobby, PNAC, JINSA et al should be relocated to the country they serve, Israel.
Further, Madison would be horrified at his system of checks and balances today: Congress has delegated too much of its authority to the executive branch where unaccountable
bureaucrats make policy outside the rule of law.
Congress is for sale to the higest bidder, aided by The Fourth Estate when it comes to our Israeli policy. Current campaign finance laws don't work. Half of all funding of electoral campaigns on local, state, and federal level comes from a tiny fraction of the population. We need to arrange a system that sets up a blind trust so that all are free to financially support whom they wish to support but the recipient does not know who to thank with sly quid pro quo.
Don't you just LOVE having Israelis interpret the U.S. Constitution and the Federalist papers for us? I guess that entitles me (despite the fact I don't read Hebrew) to be a Torah scholar — a privilege which I will soon take advantage of, be assured!
Meanwhile, back in the secular realm, let's take a closer look at this awesome piece of sophistry from the estimable Mr. Rettig:
"For over two hundred years, Jews have fared dramatically better under republics than autocracies, so it is no wonder they generally tend to support the growth of free societies … Second, they are, well, Jews. In defending Israel's right to exist, American Jews say they are pursuing the Jewish interest of providing safe haven to fellow Jews."
If Jews fare so well under republics such as the U.S., why then do they simultaneously need to provide a 'safe haven' to fellow Jews — in particular, to fellow American Jews who constitute some of the more hardcore, bellicose settlers?
Oy, the goyim would have to be ox-stupid to swallow this self-contradictory line of nonsense. By the way, has the J. Post endorsed a presidential candidate yet? I always like to take my cues from presumptuous foreigners!
The J. Post is still mourning the demise of Rudy. (They even let him run campaign donation requests from their mailing lists.) But ultimately they'd be happy with any of the mainstream candidates. They're all safe except for maybe Obama.
BTW, the "safe haven" argument loses cogency when two-thirds of the world's Jews refuse to live there. And the share in Israel is declining. Demographically as well as morally, Zionism is a failure.
The only question is how much more suffering will be inflicted on the world before it ends.
I don't like to use words like "goyim" which are pejorative, but I must say that the general population of the US have been incredibly, unfathomably stupid in not confronting the Israel lobby more forcefully. The fact is most of us don't have another country to run to if this one goes bankrupt and falls apart. I was on a plane from Dallas to New York recently, and I was seated by an Israeli medical doctor, who blithely remarked about how the US more and more resembles the third world to him. He told me about a friend of his who is a pediatrician in Detroit, and said even the children's maladies and disorders and diseases that are showing up in places like Detroit are similar to those that doctors confront in third world settings. He contrasted this with Israel, where he told me, "Health care is completely free– even in-vitro fertilization treatments are free there."
Throughout the conversation, this man seemed to show absolutely no cognizance of the ludicrousness of the US, this bankrupt, quasi "third world country", giving vast sums of money each year to a country, that by his own account, has a superior health care system and a superior infrastructure. In fact, whenever he could, this man kept reminding me about how Israel was surrounded by hostile implacable enemies, how he had been a pilot during the 1973 war and had bombed Syria (according to him, his days as a pilot were the happiest days of his life), how Osama bin Laden wanted to take back Spain and Southern Italy, how the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was infinitely complex. Throughout this, I patiently listened, but because I gave no indication that I agreed with any of his propaganda, I guess he finally decided to shut up. My only comment was to joke about how, perhaps Israel should be giving aid to the poorer parts of this country. Needless to say, he didn't find that very funny.
A side note: One thing I found noteworthy is that he seemed to be very critical of how the US had let in so many immigrants recently– his main concern about Dallas, for example, was that in contrast to the last time he had been there, which was 20 years earlier, Dallas had become an "immigrant city" (by which I took him to mean a Latino immigrant city). This was of interest to me, given how Phil and others on this blog have drawn attention to the Lobby's early support for the 1965 immigration act, which opened the doors to Latin American. Interesting that the Israeli view of recent immigration to the US may be very different from the American Jewish perspective on immigration.
The 1965 Immigration Act was very significantly supported by Jewish-Americans. Look it up; see also the legislative history. Their theory was to dilute the white population so no NAZI Germany could be repeated here. It was easily sold to our standard representatives as a good thing, barely changing the status quo, po-pooing its ramifications, ignoring anchor babies and chain migration. If you look back at what its pushers actually
said it would do, if passed, it's hilarious–and now of course… The concept of diversity. Watch out when the underdog becomes the uber dog. Of course the Israel view on immigration mirrors
what the losers argued and lost back here in 1965.
Another thing, Latino-Americans and Muslim-Americans have no guilt about the Shoah and with each amnesty and our current
Immigration Act, there numbers grow. Immigration from Europe
is kept low and they have to jump through every hoop, not that many want to these days.
Charles:
I am not arguing one way or the other with you. I have no doubt that what you say is true about the 1965 immigration act. I am simply saying that the Israeli view of that act is possibly very different from the Jewish-American view of it (as seen by my very obnoxious fellow passenger from Israel).
As for me, while I don't think it was a bad thing to allow more immigration from Latin America (as opposed to Europe), I think at this point it would be a good thing to stop all immigration into the country for at least 20 years, and to end NAFTA and all other free trade agreements which have impoverished both South America and North AMerica.
Let's not discisuss the subject of what the founding fathers would have thought about our current predicament without recalling the thoughts of George Washington in his farewell address:
link to yale.edu
Washington's Farewell Address 1796
( . . . )
"Observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all. . . .
"In the execution of such a plan, nothing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest. Antipathy in one nation against another disposes each more readily to offer insult and injury, to lay hold of slight causes of umbrage, and to be haughty and intractable, when accidental or trifling occasions of dispute occur. Hence, frequent collisions, obstinate, envenomed, and bloody contests. The nation, prompted by ill-will and resentment, sometimes impels to war the government, contrary to the best calculations of policy. The government sometimes participates in the national propensity, and adopts through passion what reason would reject; at other times it makes the animosity of the nation subservient to projects of hostility instigated by pride, ambition, and other sinister and pernicious motives. The peace often, sometimes perhaps the liberty, of nations, has been the victim.
"So likewise, a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions; by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained, and by exciting jealousy, ill-will, and a disposition to retaliate, in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld. And it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite nation), facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country, without odium, sometimes even with popularity; gilding, with the appearances of a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good, the base or foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation.
"As avenues to foreign influence in innumerable ways, such attachments are particularly alarming to the truly enlightened and independent patriot. How many opportunities do they afford to tamper with domestic factions, to practice the arts of seduction, to mislead public opinion, to influence or awe the public councils. Such an attachment of a small or weak towards a great and powerful nation dooms the former to be the satellite of the latter.
"Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow-citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government. . . . "
Haviv Rettig and Richard Witty:
How would you reply to President Washington?
"a persuasive argument is made that our skewed policies re Israel, generated by askew Jewish neocons, got us into the morass of Iraq (killing 600,000 Arabs, says Arabist Sharon Stone). Smart Americans now understand this."
No they most definitely do NOT.
Try making an argument with your American friend that perhaps, just perhaps, the whole Iraq fiasco was partially, just partially, due to Jewish lobby pressure and Israeli intelligence feeding Cheney's Office of Special Services (which cut out the CIA from analyzing intelligence on Iraq and "cherry picked" intelligence that would make Americans support Iraq war).
You just try it.
They will clam up, get red in the face, and it will simply be not accepted.
It is simply too monstrous to contemplate for oh so patriotic Americans that they are dupes to a small Middle Eastern country with a well organized political lobby in Washington.
As I said, the Iraw war is PARTIALLY due to Israeli wishes, pressure and intelligence feeding of Cheney. Not the whole cause of course.
"a persuasive argument is made that our skewed policies re Israel, generated by askew Jewish neocons, got us into the morass of Iraq (killing 600,000 Arabs, says Arabist Sharon Stone). Smart Americans now understand this."
No they most definitely do NOT.
Try making an argument with your American friend that perhaps, just perhaps, the whole Iraq fiasco was partially, just partially, due to Jewish lobby pressure and Israeli intelligence feeding Cheney's Office of Special Services (which cut out the CIA from analyzing intelligence on Iraq and "cherry picked" intelligence that would make Americans support Iraq war).
You just try it.
They will clam up, get red in the face, and it will simply be not accepted.
It is simply too monstrous to contemplate for oh so patriotic Americans that they are dupes to a small Middle Eastern country with a well organized political lobby in Washington.
As I said, the Iraw war is PARTIALLY due to Israeli wishes, pressure and intelligence feeding of Cheney. Not the whole cause of course.
Phil,
Thought that you might want to check this out.
link to counterpunch.org