I looked at it. No plans to respond. It didn't have much to do with the few paragraphs I've written on this subject, and avoided all of the main issues. The history is also spotty. As I've mentioned several times, if the thesis about lobby power were correct, it would be a great relief to me and others who have been actively engaged for years in trying organize popular pressure to lead to abandonment of US rejectionism. We could stop all of that, just go to the corporate headquarters of Lockheed Martin, Intel, Microsoft, and others and explain to them that their interests are harmed by US support for Israel, so they should terminate their investments in Israel and use their political and economic clout to put the lobby out of business. Anyone with a little familiarity with American society and political economy knows that they could do that in their sleep. That in fact is the sole activist-related conclusion that follows from the thesis. But none of the believers do it. Why? Noam Chomsky
Weiss: I profess a little familiarity with "American society and political economy" and my conclusion is that the corporate levers of "economic clout"--Chomsky's materialist understanding of the powers that drive policy--are rivaled or mastered by political/religious/nationalist-Jewish clout with respect to the occupation, and the Iraq war. The great Chomsky's complete elision of the religious/nationalist factor in our political life has made him an unreliable narrator, or an insufficient one, on the question of What makes Middle East policy?
I dare say that rambling little screed is by Chomsky, but it still doesn't make any sense. The argument would still be a nonsequitur, even if it did make sense.
Chomsky and a lot of left-wing Jewish intellectuals of his stripe who play down the power and threat of Zionism were likely brainwashed by their Jewish upbringings. I was looking at a picture of Chomsky on Wikipedia, and physically he resembles Bernard Madhoff. The synapse brainwork in terms of their vulnerability to intellectual denial and their orientation towards fraud (in Madhoff’s case, economic; in Chomsky’s case, intellectual) likely follows similar patterns. Deep down, I doubt that either believes they are in any way “wrong.” This capacity for denial may be transmitted down the generations from centuries of Christians telling Jews they were “wrong,” which likely built up a kind of hard-wired stubbornness in surviving Jews.
Whatever the psychological causes or emotional reasons behind their stubbornness (which, now that I think about it, may be almost entirely physiological given that “the stiff-necked people” goes back to pre-Christianity), if they are objectively wrong on any given provable issue, there’s simply no getting around it, no matter how deeply their ego/megalomania compels them to dig in their heels.
In other words, no matter how flippantly or dismissively Chomsky denies the power of the Israel lobby, the body of evidence at this point is overwhelming. The fact that he’s apparently a stubborn psychological basket case doesn’t change that.
James Petras lays waste to Chomsky embarrasing lobby-denial in this interview:
The Art of Plain Speaking
[Audio] George Kenney asks James Petras about the 'Israel Lobby,' what's behind it, what makes it different than the tobacco lobby, the NRA, or the AARP. Total runtime fifty six minutes.
Electric Politics 01.27.2009
In the UK press one frequently finds tough criticism of Israel. See, for example, this recent essay by Mark Steel in the Independent, a thoroughly mainstream UK paper [proving me wrong the paper pulled the article sometime in the last 24 hours, but you can still find it at Mark's site]. One cannot imagine a similar essay appearing in the New York Times, or the Washington Post, or the Los Angeles Times, or the Wall Street Journal, or USA Today, or indeed any other major American newspaper. Why not? Perhaps more taboo than mentioning the 'Israel Lobby,' is asking what's behind it, what makes it different than the tobacco lobby, the NRA, or the AARP? To get at this vexing issue I turned to an extraordinarily distinguished leftist academic, Dr. James Petras. Jim is one of the very, very few people that I know of who reasons sensibly about the problem of Zionist influence and who isn't afraid to speak out. And he's an amazing conversationalist. It was kind of Jim to talk with me and I'll try to live up to his example. Seek justice without fear or favor.
Permanent Link
Chomsky's glib and feeble response ignores the roll of economic sanctions, especially the role of US corporate divestments in toppling apartheid S Africa. Students, shareholders, consumers acted together, and the corporations fought them tooth and nail right here in the USA. That small band of university professors who recently spoke out are, I hope, the start of a similar campaign against Israel. S Africa then was not even on the annual American tax tit.
Chomsky should read Yagil Levy. Perhaps then he would realize that those pulling the levers ultimately are of the same crowd, whether over there or over here. It's indeed strange (and worrisome) that he does not see this.
Interesting that in the case of S.Africa, Israel was opposed to the sanctions, because they had done business together, and because they had similar governance structures. Simultaneously, a lot of diaspora Jews, both corporate and activist, supported the sanctions (they must not have been staunch Zionists). But when it comes to sanctions against Israel, the same group is digging in its heels, even though it would be much easier to reform Israel in that all it would likely require is cutting down or off US aid.
This goes to show how un-objective and unreliable most Jews are when it comes to their own. And yet successive administrations have stocked Middle East policy formulators to the hilt with Jews. This is no accident. They don’t want a solution because they want a pretext for their greedy ambitions, and Israel provides one. Greedy and ethnocentric Jews and greedy gentiles are working together on this one, and making a lot of money doing it.
I'm going with Chomsky on this one. Lockheed Martin, Intel, Microsoft have far greater clout than all the loosely affiliated groups that get labeled "the Israel Lobby." Not least because the two constituencies overlap. Ask the pro-Israel exec high up in the hierarchy of one of these corporations what he would choose: Greater Israel or the corporation, and he would become a peacenik over night.
It doesn't matter which loose confederation of entities defined as lobbies has the greater clout. The difference is only in degree, not kind. Both are hugely influential, and each have their own particular constituencies. Both need to be on board for things like Iraq. or at least not at cross-purposes. People like Dov Zackheim have a foot in each camp, acting as a sort of sinister glue. My sense is that the Israel Lobby has greater media control than Northrop/Lockheed/GE etc – you are more likely to get a piece critical of the MI complex in the MSM than of the Lobby. Both are generally pernicious and need exploding (so that the cost of the imperium can be turned to feeding and housing millions of people) if America is to weather the coming storm.
Of which, more here:
http://market-ticker.denninger.net/archives/759-Here-It-Comes.html
very glamorous prose, delia, but you have conveniently said the pro-Israel exec, not the Jewish exec, thereby mis-phrasing the dilemma.
Great Petras interview. Thanks LTF.
Chomsky plays deliberately dumb.
The weapons industry couldn't sucessfuly 'lobby' for a war…even congress has to have some moral 'cover' for their actions.
So far the holocuast has been the covering justification for aiding nazi Israel and 'security' for all the little scared Americans was the excuse for Iraq.
If the weapons lobby meets the jewish lobby it is in the lobby of JINSA..Jewish Institute for National Security…that's where the zionist weapons groups resides.
Chomsky is full of shit…according to him the US is at fault for everything in the universe…that premise is what he has built hs entire career on.
The problem with pepole like Chomsky is that he combines half truth with nothing else and makes it his his whole arguement.
Onc you understand that's all he is about he isn't worth reading…it's always the same song…never changes.
Chomsky usually limits his criticisms to US foreign policy. In this case, Israel would not be able to destroy Palestine without US support and weapons. His argument: As soon as it is against powerful interests in this country to continue to support Israel, then US policy will shift, regardless of what the pro-Israel lobby thinks. That is because the Israel lobby has almost no sway when it comes to business interests in the United States, where all of the true power is held.
@ Tyler,
If the Jewish Chomsky doesn't realize (or want to realize) that tens of thousands of Jewish Zionists are also wealthy and powerful Corporatists, and that a significant percentage of them made their fortunes largely as a result of their membership in the Jewish Zionist network, then he's not much of an intellectual.
One can be both a Corporatist and a Zionist simultaneously. In fact, Capitalism has now been harnessed on behalf of Zionism (Jewish supremacism) just as Communism was once harnessed on behalf of Jewish supremacism in the early Soviet Union.
By portraying the issue in either/or terms, Chomsky is actually helping Zionism (consciously or sub-consciously) by forcing those on the Left to choose between targeting the Capitalists and targeting the Zionists. This is of benefit to the Zionists, as the vast majority of Leftists will target the Capitalist, if forced to choose.
Is Chomsky unfamiliar with concentrated benefits and distributed costs? The fact that a policy doesn't serve some people's interests does not mean that it is cost effective for them to lobby against it. If there not only to lobby but to abandon long-term investments, that would be quite costly.