It it indisputable that Walt and Mearsheimer and Jimmy Carter have had a great effect: it is impossible to have a discussion about Israel/Palestine in respectable intellectual circles without being conscious that at any moment someone is likely to start screaming from the sidewalk, Israel lobby! or Apartheid! Now I am not saying that those voices are in the room. They're not. But the voices of conventional wisdom inside the room are aware of them, and a little afraid of them.
This explains a couple of recent developments. AIPAC has evidently been trying to hold the lobby's hardliners here back on divestment campaigns aimed at Iran and Syria. The dual-loyalty crowd, in this case, Caroline Glick, an editor at the Jerusalem Post who is also a fellow at a Washington thinktank, is appalled by this behavior:
in Texas and California, AIPAC lobbyists led by AIPAC's policy director Brad Gordon, advocated that divest-terror bill sponsors take North Korea and Syria off their bills. As they did in Ohio, they also strongly recommended that divestiture from companies invested in Iran be limited to companies that invest more than $20 million in Iran's oil and gas sector.
I wonder whether AIPAC isn't softpedalling the Confront-Iran agenda because the neoconservative moment is over. And because people are drinking water fluoridated with Walt and Mearsheimer.
Then there's Roger Cohen's op-ed piece ruling that Obama is good for the Jews, in the Times today. The piece is careful on Israel/Palestine. Obama is strong on Israel "but not uncritical." Obama was right to say that Palestinians are suffering the most. Obama "feels Israel in his kishkas, all right." A bit of Yiddish, to make Jews feel good about him. The piece concludes,
Nor is he blind to the fact that backing Israel is not enough if such U.S. backing provides carte blanche for the subjugation of another people.
This is a true statement, with a beautiful emphasis-- the last word in a column. I do not believe that Cohen, a CFR sort of official journalist, would have written such a thing were it not for the drip-drip-drip of Jimmy Carter and Walt and Mearsheimer, talking to the American people. It's good that Cohen is saying this, of course, as it is good that the Times is printing his opinion that the Palestinians are suffering the most. But in the end the only two questions are, A, If the Israelis have been granted "carte blanche for the subjugation of another people," then why isn't the Israel lobby a fit subject for investigative exposure in the pages of the Times, on a weekly basis (as we got ad nauseum exposes of the Christian right in its heyday)? And B, if the Israelis are subjugating another people, and believe me, they are, I've been to the West Bank--why isn't the U.S. sanctioning this behavior? Back to A.
‘If the Israelis have been granted "carte blanche for the subjugation of another people," then why isn't the Israel lobby a fit subject for investigative exposure in the pages of the Times.’
All of us here already know the answer to that, don't we? It's because the Times is largely owned and staffed by Jewish Zionists.
But the question I have is: Do the majority of those Jewish Zionists really believe the myth of Israel as an imperiled state and a last refuge for downtrodden Jews, or do they understand the truth of Israel as a spearhead for fascism? I used to believe the former, but the more I learn about the inner workings of organized Judaism, the more I think that that assessment may have been overly charitable.
Carter's influence is more important, more respectful, and more precise (even with only 10% of the footnotes).
RE: "Obama is strong on Israel 'but not uncritical.'"
But he's been learning what it takes to be an "American" leader, just as Hillary had to learn. Following the 9/11 attacks, Obama was an early opponent of Bush's push to war with Iraq. Obama was still a state senator when he spoke against a resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq during a rally at Chicago's Federal Plaza in October 2002.
"I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars," he said. "What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other arm-chair, weekend warriors in this Administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne."
"He’s a bad guy," Obama said, referring to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. "The world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him. But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history."
"I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences," Obama continued. "I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda."
Zionists are right to be leery of him as he retains some idealism, the very thing that brings out the young and independent vote in his behalf.