Chas Freeman made a speech on the lobby and the two-state solution at the Middle East Policy Council the other day, in "Remarks to Diplomatic and Consular Officers Retired (DACOR)":
For the past forty or more years, the achievement of a peace that could
secure the future of Israel has been a core objective of U.S. foreign
policy. Every president has made the pursuit of such a peace a central
element of his diplomacy. To this end, over this period, the United
States has transferred more than $100 billion directly to Israel and as
much as another $100 billion indirectly. We have also spent well over
a trillion dollars and thousands of lives on wars that relate at least
in part to the objective of securing peace for Israel. Yet there has
never been a national intelligence estimate (NIE) on the prospects for
Middle East peace or, for that matter, on the prospects for the state
of Israel in its absence. Nor has there been such a review of either
the impact of the US-Israeli strategic partnership on our relations
with the Arab or Islamic worlds or the role that Arab and Muslim
perceptions of it may play in stimulating anti-American terrorism.
There has been no independent evaluation of the perpetually
unsuccessful “peace process” despite repeated charges from the peace
movement in Israel that their government gives lip service to peace
while acting to stall it so as to wrest ever more land from
Palestinians. Our understanding of events in the Holy Land has been
left to be defined by AIPAC and other American supporters of the
settler movement in Israeli-occupied Arab lands. They have brazenly –
and quite successfully – insisted that the Likud Party and related
right-wing factions in Israeli politics should have the right to decide
U.S. policy as well as the policy of Israel.
Is it possible that the suspension of independent judgment by the
United States has something to do with the utter failure of our
forty-year effort to produce a just and lasting peace between Israelis,
Palestinians, and other Arabs? Could it be that in this instance, as
in others, foreign policy by franchise serves the interest of the
operators of the franchise more than it benefits anyone else? Might
our unconditional, unexamined support of the Jewish holy war for land
in Palestine have something to do with the expanding holy war against
us by some Arabs and Muslims? Israelis regularly ask these questions
and vigorously debate them. Until recently, at least, Americans, by
contrast, have been effectively enjoined from asking them and hence
from considering policies that might secure Israel while securing
ourselves.
Such silencing of debate is a perversion of democracy. The Likud
lobby does not simply seek to ensure that the positions it advocates
receive favorable consideration in the policy-making process, as it is
fully entitled to do. It strives to block contrary views by applying
odious labels to their spokespersons, distorting their records,
ostracizing them, and obstructing the circulation of their views in the
media. It prefers to operate in the shadows. Its characteristic mode
of attack is the whisper campaign and hit-and-run; having struck, it
denies that it was even on the scene. Like the Bolsheviks, the Likud
lobby falsely claims to represent a majority – in this case, a majority
of the American Jewish community – when it does not. Its thought
police are in fact especially vicious in their suppression of contrary
opinion among the three-fourths of Jewish Americans who favor peace
over continuing land grabs in the Holy Land.
The Likud lobby should not be allowed to usurp the title, “Israel
Lobby.” It is pro-settler, anti-Arab, and anti-free speech. It does
not care whether those it lobbies hate it as long as they fear it. Its
answer to the possibility that its actions might rekindle anti-Semitism
in this country is intensified intimidation of Israel’s American
critics, whom it conflates with the dwindling band of citizens who
object to the extraordinary contributions to our nation’s public life
of Jewish Americans . This lobby’s object is not to win debate but to
preclude it. To that end, it insists that only those associated with
its viewpoints occupy positions of public trust in our government. It
is a menace not so much because of what it advocates, with respect to
which reasonable men might differ, as because of the profoundly
anti-democratic means by which it ensures that no one, Jew or gentile,
reasonable or not, can exercise the right to differ with it.
We have seen this phenomenon in our politics before. The “China
Lobby,” which, in association with Senator Joseph McCarthy, advocated
the interests of Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang by branding its opponents
as treasonous and silencing them, is a case in point.
Full transcript at Snuffysmith.
