Jerry Slater has a wonderful analysis here of how the "moral collapse" of Israel and the failure of the peace process have been aided by American peace groups, Americans for Peace Now and J Street, because they are not giving the real news about the situation over there to the American Jewish community, which is the most important community politically. Instead of denouncing war crimes, these groups have chosen to preserve "cherished mythologies" inside the Jewish community. Slater singles out APN for giving a platform to Yossi Alpher, who justifies the Gaza onslaught; J Street for failing to criticize Gaza; and the Israeli human-rights group B’Tselem for not supporting Goldstone forcefully.
(To Slater’s analysis, I would only add that it describes the left wing of the Israel lobby, that portion of the liberal Jewish community that, out of ethnocentrism or generational fears of anti-Semitism or romantic ideas about Jews as righteous outsiders in American life, has failed to publicly repudiate neoconservatism because the liberals recognize it as an expression of the Jewish community, and they’ve got neocons in their family, and on the board.)
Read the whole piece. Here are excerpts:
Even those who deny the existence of an Israel lobby that dominates U.S. policies towards Israel are not likely to deny that the Jewish community is the most important sector of American public opinion on all issues pertaining to Israel. Consequently, domestic politics ensures that there will be no change in American government policies in the absence of strong Jewish support for sustained pressures on Israel. And if they are to have any chance of success, those pressures must include making U.S. diplomatic, economic, and military assistance of Israel conditional on major changes in its policies…
[T]he Israeli government is getting worse and worse, and the Obama administration has essentially surrendered. We may be winning the battle for the hearts and minds of a small minority, but we are still losing the much more important battle: to persuade the dominant majority in both the U.S. and Israel of the need for radical changes in Israeli attitudes and behavior towards the Palestinians. Indeed, even the Israeli attack on Gaza last year and the subsequent Goldstone report (hereafter referred to as Gaza/Goldstone) have failed to turn around U.S. public opinion and government policies….
[T]he failure of the peace groups is not simply a strategic one but one of understanding and analysis as well: an inability to fully confront the overwhelming evidence that demolishes the most cherished mythologies in Israel and the American Jewish community. This is clearly the case with Peace Now in Israel and APN in the U.S. and there are signs that it may also be true of J Street…
Two months ago, Alpher summed up his views on Gaza and Goldstone in his regular interview with APN. From the strategic point of view, Alpher said, the consequences of the war had been “a decidedly mixed bag.” On the one hand, it did add to Israel’s “deterrence,” as evidenced by the marked drop in Hamas attacks in the last year which, along with the fact that during the war there were few Israeli military or civilian casualties, had made the war “far more tolerable for the Israeli public.” On the other hand, Alpher conceded, the large numbers of “enemy” civilian casualties had “radically exacerbated…the [international] drive to delegitimize Israel–a drive that the Goldstone report, probably unintentionally, played into.” (emphasis added)
Moreover, Alpher continued, “Goldstone singled out Israel at a time when far worse civilian casualties were being inflicted by the United States and its allies in Iraq and Afghanistan and by Sri Lanka in Jaffna, with few if any international questions asked. But nobody wants to hear these Israeli responses. Nobody wanted to hear that very true and courageous statement by British Colonel Richard Kemp, veteran of the Afghan war, that ‘the IDF did more to safeguard civilians than any other army.’"..
Pragmatism, indeed. The finest moment of Israel’s Peace Now organization—and perhaps, for that reason, its greatest influence—came when it led mass public protests against the 1982 Israel attack on Lebanon that resulted in the killing of an estimated 10,000 Lebanese civilians, as well as the complicity if not the collaboration of the Israeli army with the terrible Lebanese massacres of Palestinian women and children in the Sabra and Chatilla refugee camps in Beirut. What Peace Now objected to was not that the massacre of innocent civilians was “counterproductive,” [an Alpherism] or even that it harmed Israel’s “image,” but that it was evil.
In short, so long as its de facto chief political analyst is Yossi Alpher, APN can provide no guidance to those who think that the moral issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be taken seriously and analyzed coherently….
….[L]ike Americans for Peace Now, and J Street, B’Tselem has largely marginalized itself on the Gaza/Goldstone issue.
What accounts for B’Tselem’s depressing descent towards irrelevance on what is the most important human rights issue in recent Israeli history? Perhaps its leaders simply are unwilling to acknowledge even to themselves the full extent of Israeli criminality. That would appear to be the case for Yael Stein, but it seems unlikely to be true of Jessica Montell, particularly in light of her previous statements about Israel’s policies in Gaza.
It seems more likely, then, that B’Tselem has decided that the domestic political climate in Israel is such that it must move to the right. If so, that is certainly understandable, in light of the fact that since the Gaza attack and then the election of Netanyahu, the Israeli government, with the backing of a majority of its citizens, is increasingly pressuring and even repressing not just the Palestinians or Israeli Arabs–that’s old news– but even Jewish peace and human rights groups.
