Daniel Kurtzer is a big deal. He’s an Obama surrogate and a former ambassador to Egypt and Israel under Clinton and Bush II. His new book, written with Scott Lasensky of the U.S. Institute for Peace, is called Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace and is offered as the last best hope for the 2-state solution. A guidebook to future presidents–and surely a job application too–it is extremely diplomatic. I didn’t see my favorite word, neoconservative, in there. Nor the words Israel lobby.
But the disaster of neoconservatism and the power of the Israel lobby are its themes, and just like the announcement of the alternative Jewish lobby 10 days ago, this book is the Jewish left’s answer to Walt and Mearsheimer. The authors are saying, You’re right, there’s a boa constrictor on our politics; now this is how we get past it.
Kurtzer’s central argument is one I read in The Israel Lobby. George H.W. Bush–Bush 41–led the best presidency on Arab/Israel issues in the last 20 years. His standing up to Israel on the settlements in ‘91 was a great thing, though "some domestic advocates for Israel were unnecessarily alienated." That’s the Israel lobby. And because Bush folded on this issue, it "had a searing effect that far outlasted the Bush 41 administration, reverberating well into the Clinton and Bush 43 years and causing the next president and his team to overcompensate in ways that created a different set of problems."
What do they mean by overcompensate? Well Bill Clinton did "constant courting of Jewish-American interest groups," giving him enormous political capital that alas he did not spend in trying to make a deal. No, Bill Clinton was on Israel’s side throughout the Camp David process, letting the Israelis see papers and mark them up before they were presented to the Palestinians, keeping the Arab states away from Camp David, and gathering a team "with an absence of Arab expertise." (I.e., they were almost all Jews.) Clinton’s willingness to take daily calls from Israeli P.M. Ehud Barak in 2000 and let him come into his office whenever he liked diminished the power of the U.S. presidency and made the U.S. too deferential to Barak’s domestic political concerns, while Clinton’s chief negotiator Dennis Ross was on Israel’s side at nearly every turn. Then "Clinton acceded to Barak’s request to blame Arafat publicly for the summit’s failure." Shameful.
As for Bush 43, he’s been even worse. As I’ve written on this blog before, Bush 41 has blamed his loss in ‘92 on the Israel lobby. The lesson wasn’t lost on his son.
The big claim of this short book is that the Israel lobby can be handled. O.K., it is true that our policy re the Israeli colonies in the West Bank (settlements) has been "preemptively constrained" by the fears over "strong domestic interest groups," but a president has the power to buck these groups. Clinton and Bush 43 both "failed to argue strongly against Israeli policies… such as settlement expansion," but the lesson of Bush 41 is to show "tough love."
The book ends on that muted challenge to defang the lobby. "Israel plays an outsized role in U.S. politics and diplomacy; it is a fact of life…" But the next president must do a better job of having Arabists in high position. "Addressing asymmetries in the peace process–as this book has advocated–does not mean tilting away from Israel." Well actually, it does.
A few comments. 1, This is an important and fair book. It hints at the kind of triangulation that Obama would be likely to perform as president: doing his utmost to keep Jews on his side while also being more evenhanded–taking on the Israel lobby not with fireworks or head-on opposition, but in dulcet tones, and a little Arabism.
2, Liberal Jews are sick of supporting Israel blindly. The book echoes Olmert’s desperation over the two-state solution being now or never. But its overall tone is liberal American outrage at the fact that Palestinian statehood has been so long promised and never delivered. Let’s get this over with, the authors are saying, before the Middle East goes up in flames again. The heroes of the book are George Bush I and James Baker. This represents a staggering shift in liberal establishment Jewish opinion.
3, The book’s attack on the Israel lobby is slowly but surely becoming a conventional wisdom on the center-left of American politics. No you can’t attack the lobby head on, you have to speak in code, as these authors do. But sometimes the anger breaks thru. At one point they say, of Clinton, that his team at Camp David "allowed itself to be manipulated [by the Israelis] and relinquished too much control over U.S. policy."
Horrifying words. They reflect the true crisis that the Israel lobby has produced in the definition of the American interest. Yes, bloody Iraq produced this book. So did the neverending peace process, and the neverending humanitarian crisis in the Palestinian territories. But Walt and Mearsheimer also laid the ground for this analysis, and they are not given credit. The book offers 150 or so Recommended Readings at the end. Edward Said, Rashid Khalidi, Robert Malley and Benny Morris are all there. Not Walt and Mearsheimer. They are beyond the pale, too dangerous even to be cited by anyone who wants a job in the next administration. So the book promotes an anathema on Walt and Mearsheimer, even as it echoes many of their ideas. I’ll take it.
Related posts:
- Obama Surrogate Calls Walt & Mearsheimer ‘Specious, Dangerous, Venomous.’ Well At Least They’re Not Bitter.
- TNR Issues Fatwa Against McPeak for Criticizing Israel Lobby
- Bush Suggests Obama’s an Appeaser at Knesset–the Israel Lobby Finally Enters Our Political Discourse
- Arguing about whether Dan Kurtzer should get the nod from Obama
- Meeting the Palestinians, Obama’s Retinue is Ross, Steinberg, Shapiro, Kurtzer
{ 31 comments }
just a heads up : next week Israel and the US admin. will put out a coordinated dossier full of lies about syria's supposed nuclear installation. You will not find reputable specialists like david Albright endorsing these claims, in my opinion.
This is an interesting development of the old pre-internet method of planting stories in the foreign press and then re-importing them : the people behind world war three have realised that post-internet this is not good enough, and are orchestrating something much more elaborate, involving semi-official spokesmen, which will combine a sort of deniability with a sort of officiality.
Phil,
I came across a blog entry today that is almost unique in my experience, in how it openly discusses the dual loyalties question, while being part of a very mainstream blog, Talking Points Memo. I thought you might be interested. It's short.
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/2008/04/israeli-or-american-its-anyone.php
The fact that a propsal for a new course in American policy in the Mideast has to be "coded",speaks volumes about the power of the Jewish Lobby. Could it possibly be that the obvious fact that Jewish billionires wield enormous power over the workings of both the Dem and the Repubs has anything to do with this? I think it does. And the facts concerning political donations to the candidates as well as the party infrastructures confirm this. Suppose Obama is elected and wants to make changes in our policy towards Israel. If it goes counter to what Saban and other rich Jewish donors want,does he risk the witholding of monies for democratic candidates in 2010? Isn't this what the infamous letter sent to Nancy Pelosi suggests? And if these donors switch to the Republican Party, what happens to possibility of executing a new Mideast Policy,one more just for the Palestinians?
Does someone want to argue that the sum of all the "little people's" contributions can offset this threat? As the old saying goes, "facts are stubborn things",and at the end of the day much more important than pious wishes.
" … before the Middle East goes up in flames again."
Paul Craig Roberts wrote yesterday:
"April 5, 2008. Today the London Telegraph reported that "British officials gave warning yesterday that America's commander in Iraq will declare that Iran is waging war against the US-backed Baghdad government. A strong statement from General David Petraeus about Iran's intervention in Iraq could set the stage for a US attack on Iranian militiary facilities, according to a Whitehall assessment."
The neocon lacky Petraeus has had his script written for him by Cheney, and Petraeus together with neocon warmonger Ryan Crocker, the US governor of the Green Zone in Baghdad, will present Congress next Tuesday and Wednesday with the lies, for which the road has been well paved by neocon propagandists such as Kimberly Kagan, that "the US must recognize that Iran is engaged in a full-up proxy war against it in Iraq.
Don't expect Congress to do anything except to egg on the attack. On April 3 the International Herald Tribune reported that senators and representatives have made millions of dollars from their investments in defense companies totaling $196 million. Rep. Ike Skelton, the Democrat chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, is already on board with the attack on Iran. The London Telegraph quotes Skelton: "Iran is the bull in the china shop. In all of this, they seem to have links to all of the Shi'ite groups, whether they be political or military." Etc.
See:
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts04052008.html
why "in dulcet tones, and a little Arabism" ?
and let these pukes, who after all have connived and conspired to organize genocide against the Palestinians for decades, get away scot-free ?
the best medicine is ones own, thinks me, but that would perhaps be a bit too harsh, just as "dolcetto tones" are way too lenient. a middle way, like disenfranchising them wholesale, would be better suited to put an end to the horror in the ME once and for all times.
Phil,
Why all the war metaphors? "Coded ASSAULT".
I liked the end of your post "I'll take it".
I think its better to promote an alternative means to promote alternative policy, than to remain loyal to a flawed message.
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"Addressing asymmetries in the peace process–as this book has advocated–does not mean tilting away from Israel." Well actually, it does. – Phil
OMG, how can one be an honest broker, while remaining openly tilted toward one of the parties? It's like the mediator in a divorce case announcing, "I'm a lifelong friend of your wife's, but I'm gonna be fair to you too, little buddy." Yeah, right; can I keep my left testicle?
Haven't read the book, but the "Ten Lessons to Guide Arab-Israeli Peacemaking" posted there gives a good flavor of it.
http://www.usip.org/newsmedia/lasensky_kurtzer_press/top_ten.html
This ethereal little ukase should be titled "Mirage of the Technocrats" — every single point concerns U.S. domestic policy. In their pre-Copernican cosmography, America is the center of the universe. Exempli gratia: "Use the diplomatic toolbox judiciously and pay close attention to developments on the ground." Kurtzer and Lasensky sound like feckless yob trainspotters, skulking round the marshalling yard in greasy anoraks, poor sods, clutching spanners and oilcans to minister to dragging brakes and squeaky bearings. Let's get this peace train back on the tracks, they plead.
What would Kurtzer and Lasensky do, confronted with a cunning foot-dragger such as Dov Weisglas, who's proclaimed that peace will be made "when Palestine becomes Finland"? Scrappy little Israel would run rings around them; this is not tiddly-winks at a State Department tea party.
The Bush-Baker skirmish of 1991 probably was the sole instance in forty years when the U.S. actually, briefly, withheld funding from Israel (of supplemental loan guarantees, not its guaranteed $3 billion a year spoiled-child allowance). This is the ONLY mechanism which will show Israel that the U.S. means business about stopping those settlements. Saying that "some domestic advocates for Israel were unnecessarily alienated" is a rose-tinted rationalization: it WAS, and IS, necessary to alienate them, because their stance on funding is "Israel, right or wrong."
Only when Kurtzer's dulcet tones are met with Six Gun Richard Witty summoning his inner rage to call him a "puke" will Kurtzer understand that in this armed bun fight, the Lobby will take no prisoners.
Raw Story have the video of the creepy crawly evangelical fascists behind the white house :
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/NBC_Secretive_DC_prayer_group_has_0405.html
RE: Witty's: I liked the end of your post "I'll take it". I think its better to promote an alternative means to promote alternative policy, than to remain loyal to a flawed message–
This is exactly why W & M wrote their book in the face of the blind elephant..
I'm getting more and more fed up with wealthy deadbeat 'paleocons' hitching a ride on the Left, here's another one, featured for many years at AntiWar, probably because he pays them, and now in CounterPunch too. These people are obvious plants, agents of influence, it is depressing to realise that even the left wing press is too poverty stricken and ignorant to care about being used this way :
"Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation."
sure he is. i feel safer already.
I don't know anything at all about Jacob Hornberger or his foundation, but after reading his piece: "Slip or Tactic? McCain's Al Qaeda Scare," I certainly agree with his take that McCain was using the usual scare words to terrify the American populace into stupidity, but so stupidly, Lieberman had to correct him. Wow, what a president he will make.
What? There is you, Silverstein, JVP and a handful of others. And even you guys can't turn your backs completely on the murderous Apartheid State.
Olmert's Willing Executioners and the Cowardice and Complicity Of The American Liberal Jew
http://homo-sapien-underground.blogspot.com/2008/02/hiddeous-cowardice-of.html
oops. forgot to insert this before my comment.
"Liberal Jews are sick of supporting Israel blindly"
For those who are interested in who is Jacob Hornberger apropos Rowan Berkeley's attitude towards and characterization of him, here's an old interview with Hornberger about his background and approach to ideas: http://www.fff.org/aboutUs/press/fc.asp
A few basic facts, his father was a lawyer, he himself was a trial lawyer for 12 years, he was heavily influenced by Ayn Rand. He has some nuance re libertarian ideas and the role of government. Speaking about his youthful contact with Mexicans in the fields in south Texas, he reminds me of Tolstoy's rendition of Levin; I wonder who Rowan Berkeley prefers compared to Hornberger?
ayn rand – I rest my f+++ case
Frankly, I think the entire USA, including its Jews, is beyond the point from which any sort of intellectual or cultural recovery could occur. The country is doomed to fascism.
what's more, it serves the whole lot of you right. I haven't come across a single person of US origin who understands the nature and purpose of the state as developed over hundreds of years of highly significant trial and error in Europe. You think you are so superior to the 'old world'that you are as it were god's gift to the planet.
thanks but no thanks. as a nation, you are ready to die of premature senility.
in fact, I shall take this blog off my bookmarks – everyone who posts here seems to be some sort of prehistoric relic.
but my parting shot is this : the USA will die, and Israel will live. and that also will serve you right, for your intellectual and moral betrayals.
Rowan Berkeley, I actually agree with you that the USA is ready to die of premature senility. Personally, I have gigantic problems with Ayn Rand. So, let's talk. Don't give up on Americans on yet. I am not the only one on Phil's blog that listens to you. My posts were directly caused by trying to figure out what you were saying, in this case, about Hornberger, and whatever he represents in your mind according to what you have posted in this thread. So, Mister Berkeley, what is the the nature and purpose of the state as developed over hundreds of years of highly significant trial and error in Europe?
I don't, to the best estimation of my own mind and words, dismiss the input of Europe as "Old Europe." I think, rather, that the USA should listen very carefully to what Europe has to say–because Europe has paid a tremendous price, I concede, Americans like me barely understand, having never lived through it.
Don't leave Phil's blog. Just help us to understand. I for one, appreciate it.
.
"I haven't come across a single person of US origin who understands the nature and purpose of the state as developed over hundreds of years of highly significant trial and error in Europe. In fact, I shall take this blog off my bookmarks." — Rowan B.
Poor Rowan loses the plot and auto-ASBOs himself. Why can't the Yank state wield such refinements, administered by a minister named Balls? Cheers, mate!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-social_behaviour_order
http://www.dfes.gov.uk/aboutus/whoswho/ministersinfo.shtml
RE: "Poor Rowan loses the plot and auto-ASBOs himself."
Jim, sorry, I'm obtuse by your ASBOS–meaning?
Rowan, do you think that history only consists of the past?
Isn't the state still mutating? And aren't there slightly different circumstances in the "New World"?
Putting up quaint European structures that had nothing to do with their new environment is what cursed the colonial empires wasn't it?
You definitely have a point, though, that we Americans are historical and political idiots, in European terms. I know I am.
I agree with your prognostication too, by the way, except that 1) U.S. already is corporatist has been for a while; and will continue to be world hegemon a little while longer; and 2) Israel in its current form doesn't exist without massive capital influx from world hegemon U.S.
I'm gonna auto-ASBO myself off this blog, too, as soon as Haygood gets his own place; Phil is drifting off to never never land with all this Panglossian prose… Notice Richard is beginning to approve; ladies and gents that's my cue.. I tried!
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"Jim, sorry, I'm obtuse by your ASBOs–meaning?"
Sorry, Charles. ASBO = Anti-Social Behaviour Order; used as a verb in the UK – "he was ASBO'd," etc. Figured Rowan B. would know.
Details in the link I provided. Essentially an ASBO is a restraining order, but they are issued in far greater profusion, and with far more arbitrary restrictions, than U.S. law would allow.
Auto-ASBO or auto da fe; pick your poison!
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But Blighty sures canes our arse in one department: the discipline of the birch whip, which English gents learn in public school. Time magazine elaborates:
————
Last Sunday the British tabloid News of the World posted video footage on its website of [Max] Mosley and five prostitutes in what it frothily described as "a depraved Nazi-style orgy in a torture dungeon." In the secretly filmed video, the paper reports, Mosley "barks orders in German as he whips two hookers dressed in striped uniforms reminiscent of Auschwitz garb while girls in Nazi uniforms look on."
The video, which has been removed from the newspaper's web site, also captures a prostitute commanding Mosley to strip before she inspects his head and genitals for lice, which the paper suggest was "mocking the humiliating ways Jews were treated by SS death camp guards in World War II."
Placed in chains, Mosley leans over a torture bench and whimpers as a dominatrix strikes him with a rod, saying "You're going to be shown how we treat prisoners in our facility." Later, when Mosley takes hold of a whip, he states that a blonde inmate "needs more of ze punishment."
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1728032,00.html?xid=feed-yahoo-world
————
Oof! Is that stuff antisemitic? Surely this isn't:
http://www.assraelis.com/
What the f… is this? Grade Z horror-porn flicks? I must be missing something. I apologize for my American ignorance, or, merely my own.
Charles, we're headed into the Golden Age of Assmerican-Assraeli politics. You, me, all of us–we got to see it. And it's only going to get much, much better!
Poor Rowan,
He gnashes his teeth over no one grasping the purpose of the "State".
Could it be it serves to mediate between warring factions..ala Hobbes?
Or an instrument of class rule…ala Engels,Marx,Lenin?
Whatever.
apparently no one undertands its purpose outside of Israel maybe.
Could it be in the case of Israel, it serves as a mechanism to protect Jews wherever they may hang their hat?
The question is: protect what? Their rights or their PRIVILIGES??
I got my money on PRIVILIGES.
In the latter half of the 19th Century, both the German goys and the German jews commenced worrying seriously about assimilation. "Is THAT what the Enlightenment means?" they said with pre-modern rhetorical horror. "Where can I hang my hat?"
So NAZIs and Zionists were born.
It was too lonely as an individual, especially after Nietzsche announced the death of God. They worried about their own propensities. Would everybody be JC or Jeff Dahmer?
Maybe G-D had a plan, and hence, gave birth to Hitler?
Whatever, the SS & Zionists found mutual interests.
And Opportunity came on the tracks to Auschwiz (as with 9/11 later).
Lots of vacant land in Palestine.
2 wrongs don't make a right.
As Truman said, I don't have any Arab constituency.
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