A little more debate. National Journal is having an experts colloquium on Should we maintain a special relationship with Israel. The discussion was marked till yesterday by an absence of Realists, let alone lefties, and imbalance, with 6 of the then-7 experts saying that Israel and the U.S. are joined at the hip because… well, we're joined at the hip! Dov Zakheim saying there is no Israel lobby, Americans love Israel. Happy talk, now very tired. Now I see they have Paul Pillar, a former CIA guy with a B- record on Iraq and some distinction since as an expostfacto intelligence whistleblower. Here he is on the distinct interests of the US and Israel, beginning with the point that Israel may be a democracy, but
interests that the United States and Israel share lead people to
overlook the other matters–perhaps less numerous, but still very
important–on which U.S. and Israeli interests diverge. The litanies
tend to reinforce the unfortunate taboo against any discussion of
divergence between US. and Israeli interests.
These patterns are all too apparent in discussion of the current
bloodshed in the Gaza Strip. …Most discussion overlooks the astonishing
disproportionality represented by those casualties, which in just a few
days have become an order of magnitude greater than all of the Israeli
victims of all of the rockets fired from the Gaza Strip since the
Israelis departed it several years ago. The discussion also largely
bypasses whether the current conflict could have been avoided by more
attention to the Israeli blockade of Gaza (the other major subject of
the cease-fire that broke down last month) and whether the current
military action has any hope of solving the Hamas problem (whether the
problem is defined in terms of politics or in terms of security).
the United States it would be responsive to U.S. pressure–and I
believe he is–then there is a long continuum between the extremes
represented by the current administration's policy at one end and the
straw man of "abandonment" at the other.
Weiss comment: This piece by an establishment figure is in its careful way about the Israel lobby, which the great Michael Scheuer dispatches in the same colloquium here as a "cancer" on our foreign policy. Note that only one of the extremes Pillar offers is actually an extreme: neoconservatism. Abandonment is a straw man. John Mearsheimer and the realists are 2-state-guys. Obama's friend Ali Abunimah would insist, I'm sure, on preserving Jewish life, property, even position in his imagined One state. I'm an anti-Zionist 2-state-guy out of a belief that an American interest requires self-determination by a significant and oppressed minority; and as for the Jewish state, I'm somewhat indifferent: there are tons of other religious states. Though the US is shackled to none of their radiators.
