David Obey, the great Wisconsin congressman, announced his retirement yesterday. He wanted to do it a long time ago, but when he saw George W. Bush coming along, he said, he realized he had to keep his finger in the dike and try to stop Bush’s madness. Well Obey is an “unstinting” critic of AIPAC, and Israel, per the JTA. Here’s the key excerpt. Emphasis mine:
He took on Israel and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in
1991-92, when AIPAC sought to overcome through Congress President
George H.W. Bush’s threat to withdraw loan guarantees unless Israel
stopped settlement building. Israel was seeking $10 billion in loan
guarantees to help settle the massive post-Cold War influx of Jews
from the former Soviet Union.Obey warned AIPAC that even if it got the votes on the House foreign
operations appropriations subcommittee, which he chaired at the time,
he would not allow a vote to override Bush to go through.In his 2007 autobiography “Raising Hell for Justice,” Obey recalled
addressing a 1992 meeting in the Capitol that had been convened by
then-Israeli Ambassador Zalman Shoval to consider ways to resist
Bush’s threat.Obey stood on the sidelines before finally speaking up.
“Mr. Ambassador, I want to help Israel settle Soviet Jewish refugees,
everybody in this room probably does, but not at the expense of
gutting the administration’s ability to be seen as honest brokers in
the peace process in the Middle East,” he said.“I will not be party to day-in, day-out end runs around the president
on this issue. He is not of my party, but he is our president. He is
defending longstanding U.S. policy and I will not cooperate in any
attempt to undermine that policy.”The confrontation meant that Obey would never again enjoy an intimate
relationship with the pro-Israel community.
This excerpt is a demonstration of what I always say: Palestinian statelessness is an American Jewish achievement. Obey was against settlements in 1991; he said it was American policy on an important question; still, the settlements continued.
The other day at Columbia University, Gershom Gorenberg flashed a memo on the screen that he had turned up during his prodigious research for The Accidental Empire— an airgram signed Rusk in 1968, meaning that it went out from the State Department under Johnson, saying that creating settlements in the West Bank was “contrary to Article 49 of the Geneva Convention.” You cannot transfer population into occupied territories. So for more than 40 years Israel has thumbed its nose at American policy. And how has it gotten away with this? Because of the power of the lobby, which till now has represented the American Jewish community. Yes there are many two-state Jews. But even Peace Now has never walked out of the minyan– membership in the rightwing Conference of Presidents, which gets access– over this issue. And of course today only cool grassroots groups like Jewish Voice for Peace are even for divestment targeting the occupation.
So Kosovo gets a state and Turkmenistan and Tajikistan and Pakistan and Ukraine, but 63 years after the world promised one, Palestinians are still without self-determination; and the settlements continue.
