Here’s why I believe in the Israel lobby theory of American Middle East policy.
Here is Anne Bayefsky in Forbes the other day urging the Obama administration not to “sacrifice” Israel to the U.N.’s Durban conference. (Advice taken.) Bayefsky is basically a neocon; Israel is perfect. In today’s Washington Post, Jonathan Chait of the New Republic attacks the Chas Freeman appointment to the National Intelligence Council, saying that Freeman is a realist and in the camp of Walt and Mearsheimer, who are of course not granted space in the same publication to put forward their views. Also in today’s Post, Lally Weymouth, essentially a neocon, sanitizes Benjamin Netanyahu to an American audience as a maturer, gentler figure than he was 10 years ago; and Weymouth seems outraged that John Kerry is carrying a letter to Obama from Hamas.
The issue is not that these people have backward views of the Middle East. There is not much anyone can do about that. Iraq, where terrorists are now part of the government, has taught them nothing. The issue is that they are routinely granted access to mainstream publications. The realists whom Chait despises don’t get that access; Mearsheimer has been out at the New York Times ever since he made the mistake of opposing the Iraq war. Nor do leftwing critics of Israel get access–Glenn Greenwald, Tony Kushner. Nor do Arab-Americans.
It is true, as Chait observed some time ago, that Steve Walt has a blog at Foreign Policy. Great. And yes, I believe that things are softening, and we are winning, under Obama. But Walt’s perch is still the exception that proves the rule.
Neoconservatives and their fellow travelers continue to dominate in the official discourse. The best our side has at the Washington Post is Richard Cohen, and even he feels a responsibility to represent Israel as best he can. A responsibility I assure you that I do not accept; as I don’t feel the responsibility to represent French interests or Syrian ones, or Chinese ones either.
It is impossible to speak of this domination without reference to the large Jewish presence in the establishment (political/financial/media) and Jewish money in the political process–at a time when as Alan Dershowitz has said, supporting Israel is the “secular religion” of American Jews. Adam Horowitz, Jack Ross and Richard Silverstein are making inroads; but Israel pervades the American-Jewish mind.
Speaking for my own political explorations here, I would add that that it is forcibly stupefying, or certainly an insult to the progressive American intellectual tradition that I am part of, to have to discuss these issues without the use of political imagination. And here I invoke my guru Abraham Lincoln. One of our greatest political intellectuals, in the late 1850s, Lincoln hammered away at a “conspiracy” he saw of the southern slave power with northern Democrats to extend slavery across America. The alleged conspirators didn’t like the accusation; when Lincoln accused Senator Stephen Douglas of being a part of this conspiracy, Douglas said it was an “infamous lie.” Still Lincoln kept at it; and always he insisted on the supremacy of his political imagination. I don’t know this conspiracy to exist, he said, but I believe it to exist. And here is my evidence.
And through this insistence, Lincoln built the Republican resistance to slavery, and split the Democratic Party. Frankly, I don’t know whether Lincoln was right about that conspiracy, but his political imagination had tremendous effects.
We are now 6 years into a disastrous war pushed by the New Republic and Lally Weymouth and Bayefsky’s Hudson Institute, and countless other hawkish supporters of Israel–Peter Beinart who is simultaneously paid by AIPAC as he urges a “good fight” on Americans, Paul Berman who is employed by the American Jewish Committee as he urges us to shed blood against Islamists who blend in his mind with the Nazis that exterminated so many of our ancestors; and still it is impossible for our progressive political leaders to say directly, Israel’s war is not our war; and to directly oppose the American springs of support for Israeli apartheid. Kerry carries Hamas’s letter but insists again and again that there is no change in policy.
But Kerry knows, and Obama too, that there will be no progress till Hamas is engaged.
Hamas is little different from the insurgency in Iraq that used suicide bombing against occupation and is now part of a political coalition we applaud on daises. Hamas is little different from the insurgency of John Brown who hated slavery so much he was willing for his own children to die trying to destroy it. Hamas is a resistance movement to an occupation that has utterly corrupted Israel, and powerful American Jews too, who go before Congress and urge the implementation of “appropriate biometrics” to sort out the good Palestinians from the bad ones.
Until my side, in all its dimensions (realist, leftist, Christian, Arabist, Jewish anti-Zionist), gets to state our belief that the Israeli occupation is wicked, and say it in the public square, American politics will remain corrupted by that occupation.
P.S. And I would add this important piece of the hypocrisy/fiction. When Obama condemns lobbyists, as Obama did today; or when MSM writers produce big books about bad bad lobbyists, as Washington Post editor Robert Kaiser does here, it’s never about the lobby that is distorting our policy in the hottest region in the world, and depriving Palestinians of self-government for 6 decades…
