I just listened to Jeffrey Goldberg’s attack on Walt and Mearsheimer’s book the Israel Lobby back in 2007 at Yivo, the Jewish historical center in New York. Goldberg said that the book was in line with the anti-Semitism of Charles Lindbergh and represented an assault on Jewish political enfranchisement.
Well that was 7 years ago. Now the Forward understands what a great story the Israel lobby is, and Nathan Guttman has done first-class reporting on the tsunami of attention freshman congressman Beto O’Rourke of El Paso got this summer when he was one of eight congresspeople to oppose the $225 million emergency funding to Israel during the Gaza massacres. In “How the Israel Lobby Set Beto O’Rourke Right,” Guttman three times mentions donor pressure on O’Rourke.
Critical local press coverage included a public comment by one of his own Jewish donors to the El Paso Times that in voting as he did, O’Rourke “chooses to side with the rocket launchers and terror tunnel builders” of Hamas.
And in my favorite line in the piece:
He reached out to Jewish donors and friends who were more than happy to start the healing process.
That would get your attention. O’Rourke explains that he only voted against the funding because he felt it was rushed and irresponsible, and hadn’t considered the political repercussions. Now he’s going to be flying to Israel! The process that Guttman describes reminds me of the education of Judge Richard Goldstone. First he worried about civilian casualties. But in the end he worried more about his standing inside a small rightwing Jewish community (South Africa establishment Jewish community).
But since then, behind the scenes, what has followed is a long process of mutual outreach and hours of hashing out differences, until the final act, which is now in the works: an El Al flight to Tel Aviv on the pro-Israel lobby’s dime.
“He’s a good guy, but he didn’t know how the Jewish community would react,” said Daniel Cheifec, executive director of the Jewish Federation of El Paso. “Now he knows that this community is not going to be very happy if he screws up again.”…
“I really don’t understand how he makes his decision,” Rabbi Stephen Leon of Congregation B’Nai Zion, a local synagogue, told the El Paso Times even before The New Yorker piece [by Connie Bruck] picked up on the pushback. “It’s a great, great disappointment to the Jewish community here. We had meetings with him prior, to talk to him about the importance of Israel, and the way he voted makes very little sense.”
El Paso, a city with a 70% Hispanic majority, has a relatively small Jewish community, estimated at 4,000, amid a population of some 862,000. But Jews are well represented on O’Rourke’s donor list, with local businessman Stephen L. Feinberg among the top contributors to his campaign.
O’Rourke, in a Facebook posting, tried to explain his vote. “I could not in good conscience vote for borrowing $225 million more to send to Israel, without debate and without discussion, in the midst of a war that has cost more than a thousand civilian lives already, too many of them children,” he wrote…
Hours after the controversial vote, O’Rourke launched a damage-control campaign that proved to be effective. He reached out to Jewish donors and friends who were more than happy to start the healing process.
A meeting was arranged with a group of 10 pro-Israel local leaders, including key members of AIPAC, along with heads of the local synagogues and of the Jewish federation…
After the first meeting came another and then a third one. In between, pro-Israel activists sent O’Rourke articles explaining Israel’s position. O’Rourke also met with the Israeli consul general to the Southwest, Meir Shlomo, and invited federation leaders to meet with him in Washington when they come to the capital for the Jewish federations’ General Assembly in November.
Those who care about the 500 children killed in Gaza have our work cut out for us. And it’s important to identify what is in the road. This article is clear about that: the Israel lobby, the aging American Jewish establishment with its religious attachment to a Jewish state. There are many ways to counter that power. My own way is organizing inside the enlightened idealistic American community, which includes many many Jews– crucially.
Sounds like a brainwashing trip to me. Making sure those who have fallen on the way, and not drunk the zio cola, gets the full treatment in zio land.
There goes one voice who did see a little sense initially, but now on the dark side.
The power of AIPAC and the subservience of our leaders. Oy vey!
Denis Staunton has a great piece over at the Irish Times on the situation hasbara finds itself in outside Israel . I wonder for how long more the rich bots in the State can control the narrative.
Israel is really nuts.
http://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/middle-east/israel-and-palestine-the-new-war-for-hearts-and-minds-1.1945547
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On July 23rd, two weeks into Israel’s military offensive in the Gaza Strip, Brazil condemned what it called a “disproportionate use of force” and withdrew its ambassador from Tel Aviv for consultations. Israel’s general consul in São Paolo politely expressed his disappointment, adding that Israel had a right to defend itself against missiles being fired into its territory by Hamas.
Back in Tel Aviv, Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor was a lot less sanguine. “This is an unfortunate demonstration of why Brazil, an economic and cultural giant, remains a diplomatic dwarf,” he said. “The moral relativism behind this move makes Brazil an irrelevant diplomatic partner, one who creates problems rather than contributes to solutions.”
Israeli president Reuven Rivlin would later apologise to Brazil’s president, Dilma Rouseff, for the “dwarf” slur. But Palmor wasn’t finished. Later that evening, in an interview on Brazilian TV, he dragged up Brazil’s humiliating defeat by Germany in the World Cup semi-final two weeks earlier.
“Israel’s response is perfectly proportioned in accordance with international law,” he said. “This is not football. In football, when a game ends in a draw, you think it is proportional, but when it finishes 7-1 it’s disproportionate. Sorry to say, but not so in real life and under international law.”
During the same week, Israel’s embassy in Dublin tweeted a picture of the Palestinian flag superimposed with a picture of Adolf Hitler and the words “Free Palestine now!”. A few days later the embassy took down four images from its Twitter feed, including one featuring the capital’s statue of Molly Malone covered in a traditional Muslim niqab with the caption “Israel now Dublin next”.
Other images in the sequence included the Mona Lisa wearing a hijab and carrying a large rocket and Michelangelo’s David wearing a suicide bomber’s explosive belt.
These were only the most striking in a stream of bizarre tweets from the embassy that continued long after the Gaza ceasefire in August. The Irish Times was a regular target, sometimes dubbed The Palestinian Times, The Hamas Times or Pravda. One of the newspaper’s columnists was compared to Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister,
and a female journalist was dismissed as a “hackette”.
Much of the coarseness and low humour was unremarkable by the standards of social media generally. But the shrill tone was highly eccentric for a diplomatic mission, reminiscent of the public style of Iran under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Venezuela in the days of Hugo Chavez.
Daniel Levy, a political analyst at the European Council on Foreign Relations was a member of the Israeli negotiating team with the Palestinians under prime ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak. He believes the new Israeli tone is deeply counter-productive.
“I actually think that this is indicative of a deeper malaise, which is that the longer the occupation goes on and Israel has to justify the unjustifiable, the deeper the moral erosion that goes with that, the deeper you get into the territory of denialism and just being disconnected from reality,” he says.
So I’m sure stuff like that gets lots of positive likes and reinforcement, but they lose contact with the fact that people – even your average punter who might, under circumstances where you’re not quite as mad, might be willing to take on board some of your arguments, you’ve totally lost them. “I think this is what’s going on. I think there’s a deepening of the detachment from reality, a deepening of the denialism and they’re just doubling down on a failed policy and just digging themselves deeper into a hole, which I find quite sad. They become their own worst enemies sometimes.”“
“We had meetings with him prior, to talk to him about the importance of Israel, and the way he voted makes very little sense.”Leon.
The more one reads stories like this , the more one hates Israeli interference in the affairs of sovereign nations.
The irony is that , they are serving to destroy Israel in it,s present form.Laughable .
Israel,s FM lie-berman summoned Sweden,s ambassador for the low chair treatment .I just hope the ambassador leaves even more determined ,(thanks to lieberman,s grasp on diplomacy) and continues his efforts by lobbying the other EU fm,s to follow suit.
As soon as I read about O’Rourke’s vote, in The New Yorker, I sent him a check. If enough of us did that while saying it was because he voted against the $225,000, he would not feel so threatened by the lack of Jewish donations. If we all pledged donate to time and money to Elizabeth Warren in a presidential campaign in which she distanced herself from AIPAC, perhaps it would give her the courage to chart an independent course.
“El Paso, a city with a 70% Hispanic majority, has a relatively small Jewish community, estimated at 4,000, amid a population of some 862,000. But Jews are well represented on O’Rourke’s donor list, with local businessman Stephen L. Feinberg among the top contributors to his campaign.”
What does this say about American democracy? What does this say about the gullibility of the average voter? As long as politicians know that doing the right thing counts for little, whereas, massive campaign funding counts for everything, nothing will change. The question is why the electorate allows themselves to be bamboozeled so easily.