Smarter people than me say that the lobby has become institutionalized; and that good journalists are caught up in it not out of ideological commitment but because in Washington it’s the water everyone who cares about his/her career swims in. I bet Bill Keller operates that way? Barack Obama? Walter Russell Mead? And the sad thing about the institutional lobby is that its liberal exponents, having checked their values/judgment at the coatcheck some time back, will just roll along with it till they really are dern sure that the rules have changed. Whereas a guy like David Remnick or Peter Beinart, they are more genuine in their degree of pro-Israel feeling, I think they’re actually Zionists; they bought it long ago, and therefore they’re more supple when they see Zionism exposed as supremacism.
Long preamble. Here is Meir Dagan, head of the Mossad, saying in Haaretz what David Petraeus gets eviscerated for saying before the Congress. Because the lobby is operating here, not in Israel. (And Ehud Olmert can say apartheid, but Jimmy Carter can’t)
"Israel is gradually turning from an asset to the United States to a burden," said Dagan, speaking before the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.
Oh even Abe Foxman at J Post gets the story:
"What is becoming a pattern is that when the administration looks at America’s broader interests, it too often chooses to see the Israeli position as undermining those interests. Let’s not kid ourselves. It’s not as if other administration."
