Haaretz’s Anshel Pfeffer on the Israel lobby, lately exposed by Channel 4 in Britain. The piece overall is unpersuasive. Pfeffer is talking about something he doesn’t know well, American and British politics, but he knows this is a real issue. And not, as elsewhere asserted in Haaretz, an antisemitic trope.
But the real problem with today’s Israel lobby, in Britain and the United States, is not with its finances and their lack of transparency but with its entire mind-set. The basic fact is that by its actions, the lobby is now causing Israel more harm than good. That’s the point Oborne almost totally missed. On every level – moral, political, diplomatic, economic, military and religious – this country is being rapidly corrupted and damaged by the continuing occupation of the West Bank. By granting blanket support to all policies of whatever Israeli government happens to be in power, and by branding critics of these policies as either self-hating Jews or anti-Semites, they’re contributing to Israel’s siege mentality and delaying the day when Israelis will finally realize that there’s only one practical and ethical alternative.
In this sense at least, Oborne was right to make the connection between the political lobbying and the relentless pressure on the media which has totally blurred the lines between legitimate criticism and real bias. These knee-jerk reactions to any form of criticism have become so second nature to the Israel lobbyists that they’re now trying to stifle debate even within the Israeli media. Their shrill reactions to the eyewitness accounts of soldiers who fought in Gaza and were brave enough to say that the IDF did not always act there as "the most moral army in the world" are a good example.
