Ron Kampeas has a good piece on JTA "clear"-ing Rashid Khalidi of the charge that he was a PLO spokesman. Kampeas points out that the PLO has been the internationally-accepted representative of the Palestinians since 1988, and that Khalidi wasn't their spokesman anyway:
Starting in 1988, intermittently at first and then routinely from the launch of the Oslo talks in 1993, U.S. presidents have waived bans on contacts with the Palestine Liberation Organization. What everyone acknowledges is that Khalidi was an adviser to the
Palestinian delegation to the 1991 Madrid talks. That delegation – to a
person – could not have had any formal affiliation with the PLO. Israel
regarded the group as terrorist and its laws banned contact with its
members; then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir made NOT being affiliated with the PLO it a condition of Israel’s agreement to participate. The names of the Palestinian team would have been vetted by Israeli intelligence.
I must say I find this whole argument disgusting. Yitzhak Shamir was a former terrorist. His Stern gang killed Count Bernadotte in Jerusalem in 1948 and before that helped to ethnically cleanse Palestine. Who is he to tell us who we can talk to? And who is anyone to smear Khalidi, a historian who has tried to bring Palestinian suffering to the attention of the world, as a neo-Nazi?
The bigger picture here is obvious. The fact that McCain can smear Khalidi, purely because he's Palestinian, and Obama does not rush to defend him–these political facts are the achievement of the Israel lobby in the U.S. Why does Kosovo have a Muslim state in Europe, a few years after a bloody war with tons of atrocities committed by Kosovars? Why do India and Pakistan both have states, 61 years after their partition and ethnic cleansing? And why are Palestinians again and again disqualified from political self-determination, 61 years after the U.N. said they were to get a state? The answer to all these questions is today reflected in the fact that a distinguished Arab-American professor is smeared and Democrats won't lift a finger for him.
What's Obama say about his one-time friend: "We gotta be careful about guilt by association."
Here's how one outsider sees Jewish power in the U.S.:
Jews hold stunningly powerful positions and clout in the United States. The combination of the American state's power and the Jewish power in the areas of legislation, administration, media, law, business, culture, and entertainment have made the Jews a defining factor of contemporary America. Because Israel is inseparable from the identity of American Jews, Israel is inseparable from the American experience….American Jews today are no longer part of the minority coalition with African Americans and Hispanics and the rest of the domestic coalition in the struggle for American justice and liberties. Too many of my Jewish American brothers and sisters have become the beating heart of neoconservatism. They are part of the white, right-wing, nationalist, and powerful establishment…[my emphasis]
That's Avraham Burg, in the new book, The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise From Its Ashes. Beautiful. I guess he can say that because he doesn't live here. He's talking about the Israel lobby as a living part of the establishment. The marginalization of honorable Palestinians and the denial of their right of self-determination for decades are its achievements.
