I need to perseverate about Charlie Rose's show the other night. Both Robert Simon and Andrea Mitchell, his two media-elite Jewish guests that night, offered the same bluntly-honest statement about Israel's motivation: It is political in that Israel doesn't know what Obama's going to bring. They know that Bush will greenlight them, as he has. Mitchell seemed critical of Israel/the lobby, in her fairminded way. Simon said, One thing you can count on: This thing is over by January 20.
Now the staggering thing about this assertion is: We have just been through a bruising political year in which Sarah Palin's illiteracy and Rev. Wright's racial resentment were anatomized for the masses. The Iraq war withdrawal schedule was reviewed again and again; and I still can't tell you the difference between one candidate and another.
But here was a potentially stark wedge issue--where are you on Israel's militant conduct in the occupied territories--and it was never debated. The Republican Jewish Coalition and I wanted it debated, because they support that conduct with every fiber of their being and I oppose it fibrously. But Obama didn't want it opened up, and neither really did McCain, and the media elites respected this silence and did nothing to open it up even during the Khalidi flap near the end. The Democratic political leadership did nothing to open it up, didn't want to open it up. And as Glenn Greenwald says, they are now in lockstep on Gaza with the Republicans.
So this potential divide remains latent. And this was/is a decision of the elites. Because the divide is not latent in the American street: The political divide exists among the American people, we are arguing about it at delis and dinner tables now. Progressives are horrified by Gaza, and the Democratic Party faithful are against it, by 3-2, a good majority. And the centrist liberal New York Times, to its credit, is now showing some intellectual leadership on the slaughter, as of yesterday anyway. But all of this could have been discussed and we all could have angrily divided during the designated political season--around such questions as the brutal blockade of Gaza, or the wall being built on Palestinian land, or the "lovely" apartheid road system, as Simon characterized it with irony.
The reason no one opened it up during the political season (and Matt Brooks and Ari Fleischer and other neocons will agree with me here) is that it would have potentially divided Obama's Jewish media/financial support, and that would have been too destructive to his campaign. McCain had his own reason not to broach it: because voters would see that he was going to keep us in wars forever, and he didn't want to scare them. What I am saying is that the actual division between neocon/Reform/AIPAC Jews and J Street/anti-neocon Jews, which has now broken out into the open and forced people to take a stand, might have taken place during the campaign. Had the media hammered it ala Palin's illiteracy or Wright's black nationalism, Obama would have been forced to be somewhat more forthright about his views re the settlements/wall/siege of Gaza, and possibly he would have said something horrifying like, Palestinians are suffering in oppressive circumstances, and as a result the Marty Peretz/Jeffrey Goldberg wing of his coalition would have split off and gone to McCain. Sayonara.
But possibly too, non-Jewish Americans might have learned about Israel/Palestine and gravitated to Obama about the issue. The elites didn't want to take that risk. Some democracy.
As Alan Weisman notioned to me yesterday, What if Obama gave his race speech to Americans, explaining the history of Palestinian dispossession? What if he had been compelled to say to the American people what his friend Rashid Khalidi has said: that the same people who are being blockaded in Gaza were forced out of Ashkelon when it had an Arabic name 60 years ago? By giving such a simple historical speech, he would have taken this great moral issue of our time out of the possession of elites and allowed the people to learn and debate it. He would have dispelled what his friend Chuck Hagel calls "the fog that has surrounded, dominated, and consumed the effort that all Presidents have made since 1948" on Israel.
Of course he never gave that speech. But as Obama said of his race speech (and as Lincoln and the Republicans said of the slavery question in 1854): Some day these things must be said by an American politician. If not this year then in two years, or four years, or forty. Because this is rightfully a political question. One for the people to debate and divide over. Not one for elites to broker.
And now I will break the seal and tell you something else that will be in that great American speech, something else that Bob Simon said on Charlie Rose: Israelis do not want a democracy with one man, one vote. "It will never happen," Simon said.
Do Americans who have sacrificed so much blood and treasure in Iraq for the sake of purple fingers support such a religiously-exclusive political system? More to the point: Do they know about it?
Great post, thanks.
But let's not forget, virtually every issue of the day is "brokered" by the media and political elites. It is hardly limited to the I-P issue.
Even when the media finally opens up the books and allows discussion of say, the Iraq war, public opinion is ultimately ignored by the political elite.
"Do they even know about it?"
No, of course they don't. Americans believe what they're told, which is that Israel is a "democracy" where Jews, Muslims and Christians live side by side in peace.
Recently I asked a Jewish acquaintance about this. Her response: the only right that Israeli Arabs forego is the right to serve in the army.
Thanks Philip for an excellent post.
Re: "The political divide exists among the American people, we are arguing about it at delis and dinner tables now"
Suddenly I am at odds with my next-door neighbors of 17 years, lovely people in their late 50's with whom we've never had even the slightest problem or dust-up. They are Conservative Jews, and we are gentiles. On New Year's Day, my neighbor and I were chatting out in the side yard. She expressed sympathy for the plight of the residents of Beersheba who live in fear of the rockets. In the calmest fashion I could muster, I suggested that it might be horrific to be living in Gaza as well. She was most taken aback that I would express such an opinion, and proceeded to state that Hamas was going around Gaza shooting Palestinians in order to inflate the death toll, how Arabs have a "culture of death" implying that death is welcome to the Palestinians, etc. It is clear our brief exchange has changed our relationship from 2009 forward.
"Do Americans who have sacrificed so much blood and treasure in Iraq for the sake of purple fingers support such a religiously-exclusive political system? More to the point: Do they know about it?"
Well, that is the $64 question, isn't it? Although virtually all our Western democracies are dysfunctional to the point of absurdity, our elites have no trouble at all sending our young men and women to kill and die in order to bring this blessing to the "primitive" Arabs. It would never occur to us to ask: Why would they want it? (Especially after watching, say, the 2000 US election circus.) And that's what our elite count on–that our men and women in uniform will never ask that question.
Where the elite go wrong is in thinking that they know Arabs and Muslims and can manipulate them as well as they know and manipulate us. See, for example, Jackson Diehl's column in today's WaPo. It is the epitome of Western arrogance and ignorance:
"Egypt was working on brokering a deal between the two Palestinian parties. A split began to emerge in Hamas between leaders who wanted to make that deal and extend the peace with Israel, and Iranian-backed hard-liners who wanted to draw Israel into a fight. Israel probably could have ensured that the moderates won the argument by offering to lift its economic blockade of Gaza in exchange for a continued cease-fire. It then could have focused on negotiating a two-state settlement with Abbas and on improving life for Palestinians in the West Bank, while Hamas absorbed the blame for the unremediable misery of Gazans."
He seems to think that Palestinians just have to be stupider than we are and would, of course, fall for this. On top of that, he also assumes that what Israelis want is the "two-state solution"–without even the slightest pause to consider that if Israel wanted the two-state solution, we would today be celebrating its 40th birthday.
I bloody give up!
Wrong. Americans been told over and over that Israel is a "Jewish democratic state." It was established as a Jewish state first and foremost. The idea that "one man one vote" would ever apply were it to threaten Israel's Jewishness has never been propagated.
"Hamas was going around Gaza shooting Palestinians in order to inflate the death toll, how Arabs have a "culture of death" implying that death is welcome to the Palestinians, etc."
The commenter Richard Witty also believes this. Ultimately, to be a Zionist you must believe this, for otherwise you'll be forced to concede that you're hated for what you're doing, not for what you are.
And what fun would that be?
The comments on this post well illustrate the "fog," as Phillip calls it. I am convinced the whole show is over. We'll all know that for sure when Obama at last announces defeat at the diktat of the money system (Fed Res, etc.) The world has to get back the right to live. How we do that in the face of the implacable Israelis I do not know, but I do know we will get it back. So we continue to wait, which is, after all, all that we are permitted to do. Wait, and wait, and wait. They also serve, etc. Tom White
If the Obama team and the left-liberal media establishment ignored/blacked-out the Zionist issue for electoral political purposes, why doesn't Obama say something about Gaza now that he has been safely elected? Why are media still blacking out the Zionist problem, particularly in light of Gaza? Why didn't McCain hammer away at Obama's supposed "soft-on-Palestinian-terrorists" position as a means of getting elected?
It's because they all have blood on their hands on this issue, and the two-party regime and left-liberal media establishment all work as a team to shape the Israel question as beyond reproach, and keep the wars for Zionism status-quo under cover.
And yet the Zionist issue was brought up, as you noted, by the Republican Jewish Coalition. Why? Because they don't believe America is yet pro-Judeofascist enough, and felt McCain should have distinguished himself from Obama by being holier-Zionist-than-thou on the issue. Narcissistic Jews that the RJC'ers are, they didn't realize that Americans are getting fed up with wars for Zionism. And as shrewd and corrupt as the two-party regime and the left-liberal media establishment is, they wanted to keep the wars for Zionism issue under cover in order to maintain the pro-Zionist status quo.
The corrupt, increasingly Commu-Fascist Establishment circled the wagons on that issue, as they have on so many others. It’s why the country is such a mess, and is quickly going the way of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
Great post, Phil! I agree.
William In Maryland. You are not alone. My wife is Jewish. None of her family will talk to me because I don't buy their one-sided view.
They only continue to talk to those of my blood relatives who are
basically apolitical–and ignorant of the history of the I-P conflict.
'This potential divide remains latent. And this was/is a decision of the elites.'
Only certain ideological issues are allowed to be debated in the ostensibly 'two-party' U.S. system. Flag-burning, for instance. Or abortion. What these 'acceptable hot-button issues' have in common is the elite doesn't really care about them one way or the other.
However, the elite does care very much about the global American military empire, and its client states including Israel. So issues of enormous long-term significance, such as NATO expansion and aid to Israel, are never debated at all.
In this sense, the U.S. is a one-party system … as encapsulated in the hoary old saying, 'partisan politics stops at the water's edge.' Beyond those watery edges, there is only the united, seamless Depublicrat party. So it has been for our entire lives.
This is the tragic error of fantasies that Obama might make a 'race speech on Palestine.' He is part of the elite which developed the no-debate rule. He has moved through the gateway of Harvard, been vetted for loyalty, inducted as a 'made man' of the CFR, and compromised with unearned wealth so that he can never escape the web of obligation without destroying himself.
'Change we believe in' has to be the most ludicrous nursery rhyme in history. Only a wide-eyed three-year-old could take this seriously. Or an indoctrinated MSM-victim adult, of which there are millions.