Phil Weiss thinks the Israel lobby has been transformed by recent events, and we are seeing it in decline (even as the damage is done in the Middle East). J Street, a Lebanese-American envoy, Barack Hussein Obama, talking to Iran. Etc. Jeff Blankfort says the lobby's powers are still at their apogee:
George Mitchell tried to make peace in Northern Ireland, he had not only the
publics of both the UK and Ireland behind the deal but the
Irish-American community as well. Here, while most Jews would support a
peace agreement, the entire Jewish political establishment will
resist if pressured to do so by the Israeli government, and what the
Jewish establishment wants, the Democrats do, since it is their major
funding source, and they will tell Obama in very clear terms, that if
he wants his domestic and other programs to succeed, he is going to
have to join the other presidents who have failed to resolve the I-P
problem. As to the lobby being stronger, I can only say that the
proliferation of powerful active groups like CAMERA, HonestReporting,
and the Israel Project have helped to curb the kind of criticism
of Israel that once was possible in the media
and, without the media, even with the best of intentions, the Obama
administration won't have a chance.
Whereas there used to be a few
members of Congress who would challenge Israel, there is only Kucinich
now. I haven't even mentioned the problems of who is going to negotiate
for the Palestinians? Abbas is dead meat, Fayyad is seen as America's
man and Washington won't talk to Hamas, which is itself divided. What
needed to happen was that Obama should have forcefully condemned
Israel's bombing of Gaza with the US of US weaponry and declared a
moratorium on further arms shipments to Israel, which both Ford and
Reagan had done, and announced that in the interest of both Israelis
and Palestinians and for the entire world, this conflict has to be
brought to a peaceful and just conclusion. The world would have
applauded, as would have most Americans and the lobby would have been
shaken and run for cover as it did when Bush Sr. went on TV denouncing
the lobby's efforts to get $10bn in loan guarantees. Obama not only
didn't come anywhere close to that, he couldn't utter a word of
criticism of Israel. Mitchell, schmitchell, it don't make a bit of
difference, I'm afraid. But, again, we will see very soon, and may I be
wrong.
