One of the most important reporters on neoconservatism, Jim Lobe of IPS, has an item on Freedom’s Watch in which he notes the mainstream press’s lazy and fearful shorthand re neoconservatism–"strong supporters of Israel." Why don’t those reporters spell out the neocon agenda re Israel, so we can understand the motivations of the greatest foreign policy disaster in a generation? Hear hear.
Lobe goes on to quarrel with the descriptor, "Strong supporters of Israel." The neocons are acting against Israel’s best interest, he says, by wishing to annex the West Bank and sticking a wrench in the works of the peace process. To be a strong supporter of Israel would mean encouraging it to give up the settlements, etc. Calling these guys "strong supporters" undermines the public position of IPF and APN, which are pushing for concessions on Jerusalem that will ensure Israel’s long-term survival.
I find this thinking too convoluted. It’s hard enough to sort out America’s best interest, as an American, let alone trying to figure out another country’s best interest. Again I say, Let Israel be Israel. Our fates are too mixed up; and part of the peace process, which I endorse, is having the United States firmly separate its own interests from the Jewish state’s. I also wonder if Lobe’s statement, and IPF’s position, too, don’t represent some idealistic but essentially romantic view of Zionism. What if, as new historian and son-of-Holocaust-survivors Ilan Pappe says in this forum at Oxford last summer, Israel is essentially an expansionist state that wants to dispossess the Arabs in Palestine? It has consistently conducted policies in this manner for two or three generations. And would that break your Jewish heart to say so, Jim? What if Zionism has worked out this way, just as communism, which was also great on paper, resulted in the gulag–and a chorus of deniers in the leftwing chapel here? Maybe the neocons are strong supporters.
Alas, I think Pappe may be speaking the truth about things he knows a lot better than I do, and again I say the crucial task for Americans post-9/11 and -Iraq is to distinguish their own interests from other countries’, whether that’s Syria, Russia, Iran or the Jewish state. Pappe also says in that Oxford forum that Israel’s greatest achievement has been to utterly divorce its thriving democracy–and it does have a thriving democracy for Jews; Arabs can’t serve in the Israeli army; how would you feel if we didn’t let blacks serve in our army?–divorce its democracy in the eyes of the world from its policy of relentless dispossession of the Arabs in Palestine. Amazing that it has done so. That has been the achievement of the Israel lobby. At times like this, I want all lobbyists begone…
