This past weekend I spent some time with my brother-in-law, a music lover who lives in Philadelphia. He told me of the pleasure he gets from concerts at the new Kimmel Center and, for chamber music, the Perelman Theater. I couldn't help reflecting that the Kimmel Center is funded by Sidney Kimmel, a huge supporter of Jewish charities and the Jewish day school movement, and the Perelman Theater was funded by Ruth and Raymond Perelman, parents of Ron Perelman, all three of whom are big on Jewish and Israeli charities. The Perelmans started a Jewish day school in Philadelphia, so Jews can learn apart from gentiles and not get socially comfortable with gentiles.
Tony Karon has criticized Walt and Mearsheimer, saying that support for Israel is a deep "trope" in American public life regardless of the lobby's influence. Michael Oren stakes a similar claim in his recent book, Power Faith and Fantasy, America and the Middle East (or something like that, the book's in the other room now): Americans have always had a religious connection to the Holy Land and now Israel. LBJ cared about Israel for religious reasons, Oren says--not as I suggested so cynically the other day, because he aspired to the presidency. Richard Witty has written, "the relationship is permanent, not because of any shift of strategic alliances, but because of permanent economic, religious and personal ties." Israel lobbyists are always saying, Americans naturally love Israel. Marty Peretz says so in tomorrow's Haaretz:
People like Walt and Mearsheimer are "facing a stone wall, which is the fact that the American people like Israel and identify with it," he says. That support has little to do with the Israel lobby. "We have petitions upon petitions from centuries ago by Americans who wanted a Jewish homeland in Palestine," he says. "That's from before there were any Jews in the U.S.
This is romantic hogwash. Most Americans feel little emotional connection to Israel, but they are keenly aware of how much entrepreneurial Jews are contributing to the American economy and culture; and they accept that the price of this is a political concession that is actually inimical to U.S. interests overseas (Israel's treatment of Arabs), and they say, Let them have it. The Kimmel/Perelman example I offer above is merely the latest evidence I've found of the thorough integration of Jews into the American establishment, an integration that is occurring because Jewish gifts are prized in the global information age. In a sense, it comes down to money. And entrepreneurial Jews are the engine of the service/information economy, from Google to Clintonism to the New England Patriots.
The best analogy for the Israel lobby is the Ibsen play An Enemy of the People, in which a town in Norway ostracizes a doctor who says that the town baths are polluted and are killing people. Because the baths are the source of the town's income. So the doctor must be silenced. Sort of like Walt and Mearsheimer, being marginalized for challenging the righteousness of Israeli apartheid. In my analogy, the town baths are the Jewish genius for this economic moment, Jewish success in the late 20th century. What Yuri Slezkine called The Jewish Century, of "priests and merchants," not "princes and peasants..." Yes I know this moment may be coming to an end. Still it is a Jewish moment, and we are keeping America on top, and keeping the Democratic presidential candidates afloat, and keeping Freedom's Watch going on the right.
I know there are non-Jewish elements in America that do love Israel. Some of them are powerful. It is just hard to tell how powerful when someone else has their thumb so firmly on the scale, as the Israel lobby does, and is chanting, Don't you love Israel! I don't think Americans really care about Israel. Yes they care about the Holocaust, they care about justice for the Jews. But most of all they care about being on top. And so at some level the success of the Israel lobby is transactional. Keep us on top, we will continue to let Israel colonize the West Bank, carve up the international holy city of Jerusalem with concrete walls, and subjugate the Palestinians. That contract may be ending, now that the economy is slipping and the history of Palestine is being revised publicly in the States at last, and young American Jews are wondering why they have to work for an oppressive state here and the Associated Press uses the word "Nakba." Still that's the contract. Because remember, The business of America is business.
[Wrote this late last night. One revision: I dont wish to suggest that the Jewish entrepreneurial genius is a bad thing, no it's a great thing. I like what it does for the country, with some reservations. It's the fact that this gift is connected to the older Jewish generation's unreconstructed Zionist dream that is the problem...]
Sydney Kimmel – Asian schmatta production pioneer.
The permanence of the relationship, between states, as well as between peoples, stands.
The only valid moral question should be what forms that relationship takes.
The sickening thing about Walt/Mearsheimer is the generalization, the application of incremental switches, pretending to be intellectual math.
Specificity ONLY when it serves their purpose, then stupidly imprecise substitutions.
I thought you were smarter and had more integrity than that than to engage in similar rhetorical games.
There is intellectual integrity at stake, that is a value in itself. It spreads. When people rumor, the rumor itself is conveyed, but also the implied establishment of rumor as acceptable norm.
One can fight the content of the rumor by contesting facts, contesting context and interpretation. But, the process of rumoring, and the neo-leftish desire to demonize, is itself already done, already advocated by example.
Propaganda, generalization, invocation of fear, invocation of anger.
Instead of specificity, candor of one's process of interpretation, and desire to understand for the purpose of transformation (not for the purpose of judgement).
An Enemy of the People as metaphor for the relationship between American Jews and Israel?
Odd, Phil.
When I first read Ibsen in undergraduate I tended to think of Enemy of the People as metaphor for every social ill. It seems so universal, a cynical willingness to subvert one's conscience for expediency, and the young adult social pressures.
It rang true to my experience when I was a new and insecure CPA. When some of my clients were discovered to have done immoral or overtly illegal things, I felt pressure to stretch the truth so I would still get audit fees for example, so my family could eat.
But, the invocation really is adolescent in itself, and expression of the absence of confidence and backbone to stand by what is known, and to responsibly choose to design and propose, rather than villify.
You're too hard on Tony Karon. As he explained in a comment to another thread here, what he said was that, over time and through its influence in the media, the lobby has succeeded in getting its message internalized by large swathes of the public.
This is not the same claim as Peretz's, that there never has been any need for a lobby because any right-thinking person already loves The Jewish State.
"Most Americans feel little emotional connection to Israel, but they are keenly aware of how much entrepreneurial Jews are contributing to the American economy and culture; and they accept that the price of this is a political concession that is actually inimical to U.S. interests overseas, and they say, Let them have it."
Bullshit. "Entrepreneurial Jews" could dry up and blow away tomorrow, and America would never miss them. In fact, America would be better off if "entrepreneurial Jews" had never darkened it's door in the first place. We were a great country before they arrived and we'll be a great country again once they're gone–and not a moment before.
There are plenty of entrepreneurial Christians who would take their place tomorrow without all the dysfunctional moral rot and contempt for non-Jewish humanity that the bitter ideological Jew has brought to our shores.
As far as American culture goes, the "entrepreneurial Jew" has brought nothing but trash: Hollywood, Madison Avenue? Nothing but degeneracy. Turn on the TV…what do you see? The dysfunctional diaspora Jew’s sick brain puking all over himself, America and the world.
"Keep us on top, we will continue to let Israel colonize the West Bank, carve up the international holy city of Jerusalem with concrete walls, and subjugate the Palestinians."
A Faustian bargain, if ever their was one. Like all Faustian bargains, there is a price to pay; we are paying it now.
BTW…Richard Witty…based on your comments, you're getting crazier by the hour. Just make aliya and get it over with. Won’t everyone be better off?
You are one bigoted fool, "Ed".
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During the year of the hudna, incidents of both terror and incursion reduced significantly.
It broke down largely due to Hamas' "acceptance" of other groups shelling Sderot (Islamic Jihad, PFLP, PRC), later discovered to have been collaborations between the groups.
Hamas doesn't want to stop the incursions. It wants Israel to invade Gaza. Its primary weapon is propaganda (on the ground for the hearts and minds of Palestinians on the basis of who is more effective at sticking it to Israel) and similarly propaganda among the "solidarity".
The past is past. There is NO prospect the Israel will cease to exist. At no time in the future will the nakba not have occurred. It cannot be undone in that sense. History proceeds forward not back.
The only questions are then what direction forward.
You've done a great service to the masses here in suggesting that they read Ibsen.
How many here do you think have read even "The Israel Lobby"? 5%?
Hey Ed, how sorry are you that you missed those wonderful days on the eastern front, Treblinka, Babi Yar, the einzatsgruppen. Wonderful times weren't they.
Has anyone seen my KY jelly? Justin Raimando is coming over in a minute and I want to be prepared this time.
5%? Well, I for one here have read Ibsen and I am half-way through The Israel Lobby, including the 100 pages or so of footnotes.
About that thumb on the scale, since Americans love movies lets see how that fact fits in here with Phil's ramblings about the heart and mind of the American public–it might be contextually useful to call it:
The thumb on the scale at the local drug store, or the Bernays-Goebbels-Leon Uris syndrome; there's difference between, on the one hand, demagogy and propaganda and, on the other hand, a factual call to reason and justice:
link to counterpunch.org
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"… a town in Norway ostracizes a doctor who says that the town baths are polluted and are killing people. Because the baths are the source of the town's income. So the doctor must be silenced."
Cf: "When some of my clients were discovered to have done immoral or overtly illegal things, I felt pressure to stretch the truth so I would still get audit fees for example, so my family could eat."
'You are one bigoted fool, "Ed".'
You are right, my comments did come across as somewhat bigoted. I had just watched 'There Will Be Blood' and had a few glasses of wine, so my politically correct meter was out of whack. That said…
Where are we really in disagreement, Witty? I want fanatical Jewish Zionists out of America because I believe no one can serve two masters. You are a big supporter of Zionism, and so you support Jewish Zionists going to Israel as well.
I don't support separate sets of laws for separate races (as is the case with Zionism in Israel right now), so I am not a Zionist.
I don't have a problem with Jews who aren't more loyal to Israel living in America, so long as they take their responsibilities as citizens seriously and don't behave dysfunctionally/criminally/monopolistically/undemocratically and don't put the interests of a foreign state ahead of America.
Some Jews (like Phil) can act responsibly in the diaspora and can handle their freedom and life away from the tribe and maintain their loyalty and allegiance to their country of residence, others simply can't. As the saying goes, "there's nothing wrong with that."
I see dysfunctional diaspora Jewish behavior either as a function of their repressed longing for the tribe in Israel, or as the result of pressure put on them by Jewish nationalists/Jewish supremacists (who themselves should be living in Israel) to be hostile to gentiles, which makes them act out in destructive ways.
Those types are simply better off in Israel, and America would be better off for their absence. Many Jews seem to agree with this conclusion, if not the underpinnings of my logic.
On some level, you, myself and even gideon (who is clearly an example of a Jew who can't handle life away from the tribe) are in complete agreement.
I just don't think Israel's race laws should be subsidized/underwritten by Americans, and on that, we differ.
That a majority of americans support or even like Israel is one big myth these zionist tell themselves and others to hide the fact that support for Israel is attached politically thru the Jewish Lobby not the american people.
I never thought about Israel, most
americans don't, they don't, or didn't care one way or another.
But since the ME disaster Israel has gotten some well deserved attention and the majority of americans are disgusted with what they see and even more disgusted their tax dollars are supporting some midget nazis state on our welfare rolls only becuase the jewish lobby buy politicans.
None of the poeple that I discuss Israel and the ME with think the US should be letting the jewish tie to a foreign country be dictating our foreign policy…and that includes the six jewish, and intermarried btw couples, in our social circle….they in fact want even less to do with Israel. Ten years ago on a trip to Singapore I suggested to one of the jewish couples on our tour we could take a detour and go by way of Israel…they responded with a resounding "NO". I didn't give it much thought at the time becuase I wasn't aware then of exactly what Israel was and was doing. But now it makes sense to me why they were so against it. The only jew I know who has ever been to Israel was one whose first wife was a jewish girl from NY who was batshit crazy, literally she had to be confined to a mental hospital, and after they seperated she got only visitation rights and so she abducted their 4 year old son and took him to Israel and it took him several congressmen and lawyers to get his son out of Israel and back to the states.
Support for Israel is popular and real.
It is independant of military or strategic relationships. Thats what makes it real and permanent.
Americans are most disgusted with the prospect of terror on civilians. They empathize with the experience of civilians that must deal with random shelling.
They are appalled by the consciousness that considers that "resistance".
They are NOT sufficiently informed of the Palestinian experience, and their sympathies are therefore more simplistic than realistic.
But, the intention to demonize is to replace an innaccurate simplicity with an innaccurate simplicity.
RE: "They are NOT sufficiently informed of the Palestinian experience."
You got that right. And isn't access to information everything in a democracy? But it's worse because misinformation is laid atop dirth of information in MSM.
On "the intention to demonize" Jewish Zionists, a recurring Witty meme:
Witty wants to believe that Jewish Zionists and Israelis have not earned their increasingly unpopular status through their own loathsome behavior, but rather that their ostrisization is the result of a systematic conspiracy to defame them simply because they are Jews.
There seems to be a pathology in the Jewish Zionist psyche that prevents them from seeing how their own actions lead to the contempt they inspire. In the Middle Ages, an argument might have been made that Christine doctrine was the reason Jews were so despised, but in modern times, Jewish Zionists are venerated by hard Christians but increasingly despised by nearly everyone else, including in particular lefties and liberals, who historically have had a bias in favor of persecuted minorities, and Jews in particular.
Why might this be? Are liberals inherently anti Semitic now, or are they reacting to Jewish Zionist provocations and systematic, institutional racism?
Witty says: “Americans are most disgusted with the prospect of terror on civilians” and he is right, which is why more and more Americans disapprove of the state terrorism and collective punishment that Israel imposes upon Palestinians.
The more Americans learn about the reality of Israel as opposed to the romantic myths spun by Jewish American Zionists over the decades, the less they like it.
Anti-semitism. Who looted Germany after WW1? Who looted the USSR after its collapse? Marx knew something about the roots of anti-semitism.