This diary is . . .

For decades it has been impossible to make a legitimate criticism of the decisions and/or policies of the Israeli government without being beaten around the head with charges of anti-semitism. I believe there was an incident not too many years ago where someone remarked that Ariel Sharon was fat, and this too was conflated with some sort of anti-semitism.

I hope that this article will finally get us past that kind of immature foolishness. We must be able to have rational, adult conversations about American-Israeli relations as well as Israeli policies without having to worry about baseless, foolish charges of anti-semitism and things of that nature.

A earlier diary @BooMan ::
Israel Democracy Day ¶ Keep A Date June 17

▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY

The Walt/Mearsheimer paper offers no new information - they even address that at the beginning of the paper - but they've opened the doors for a wider and hopefully constructive discussion of the huge problem which is the skewing of US foreign policy in favor Israel. While the discussion will favor the US, the problem this supposes for Israel - as a "zionist" entity promoting "western" and "zionist" interests in the region - is that Israel has no viable economy to stand by itself once sugar-daddy Uncle Sam stops the money flow. The "jewishness" of the place and its "zionist" identity would be called into question by virtue of necessity; they'd have to come to equitable terms with the arabs.

But, in an indirect way, an open and hurtingly honest discussion of Israel will be the only way to save Israel as a country and a place for Jews to live in. As things look right now, Uncle Sam has more trouble than he would like to, and eventually his capacity to continue supporting Israel economically as well as in the realms of politics, diplomacy and the military will wane, and when this happens, Israel (I mean the jews living there, not the Arabs)) as a nation will stand before some stark choices:

• Gamble it high and continue the rampage of gross injustice against Palestinians and eventually lose everything, and hope that the nations from where their ancestors immigrated will accept them before the Arabs overrun them. This might be a background for the "reviving Jewish culture in Berlin" bit mentioned above.
  
• Search for a new sugar-daddy to support the continuing of the genocide campaign against Palestinians. Would be nice (wouldn't it ?), but in a world living under a very different set of constraints (energy prices and all that ...) people might offer far more resistance to the idea of underwriting a genocide and looking bad with people who should be their friends (hint: those are the Arabs, muslims in general, who live above the oil).
  
• Two-state "solution" with bantustans for the Palestinians. Another gamble because it would involve continued military presence and bad PR for Israel and anybody supporting them.
  
• Some variation of ditching the kooks in the West-Bank colonies together with the outdated zionist ideology, stopping the apartheid and integrating all residents into one society for all (jews, muslims, christians, ...), paying compensation - even symbolic - to displaced Palestinians, welcoming back those who want, bringing down the wall of shame and letting the Palestinians either have their nation in the West Bank delimited by the "green line" or making one country from Jordan to the sea.

A secondary consequence of such a discussion would be that Jews would be knocked from their position of sublime sanctity and uniqueness in public discourse. This would without doubt do big strides to normalize how they relate to gentiles, and ultimately relegate those who shout "anti-semite, anti-semite !" at anybody trying to address all of this to their well-deserved place in the dunce's corner.

Last but not least I'd like to say that I am translating the Walt/Mearsheimer paper to German. I see a big need to open a similar discussion here, and the paper is definitively a help. I respectfully suggest that other people translate the paper to their own language and post it as well, as I am not aware of any translations.

I think we approach a different status quo in the Middle East...with calm and quiet for the next decade.A small palestine state will be set within two years according to all newspapers....of course unilaterally...everything unilaterally...but a new status quo is in the horizon...something is moving in Washington and Jerusalem.

A pleasure

I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact. Levi-Strauss, Claude

But we can talk all we want, until Israel stops annexing the West Bank slice by slice there will never be any hope of progress. They cannot win, but the longer they carry on with their attempt to eradicate the Palestinians from the memory of time, the harder it will be to achieve a just peace.

keep to the Fen Causeway

  I'll be adding to my series of "Common Persistent Error" one about what I'll call tribal mentality, tribal thinking or tribalist thinking--of which so much about Israeli supporters' exceptionalism is a variety.

  But tribal thinking also is at work among the 34% of the American public who still declare their view of Bush as favorable and, of course, among other partisans including Democrats who see only Republican corruption; opponents to Blair who hope to replace him with his clone, Gordon Brown; etc.  When one lives in a tribe, one supports that tribe against all "outsiders" at all times, no matter what.  The tribe and its leader are paramount--above all things.  If one has doubts, criticisms, they are and they must be kept unuttered.  Tribal thinking is simply the antithesis of critical thinking.  It's indulged in a lot!

  There are--in my opinion, anyway--other equally taboo aspects of judaism, Israel as a religious nation state which remain undiscussed.  That, too, is a pity in my opinion.  Notice how, in this realm, I feel the need to repeat that this, that or the other remark is "my opinion"?  In so much of the discussion of Jews and judaism, that people are entitled to hold unorthodox opinion seems to be constantly in need of defending.

  For those who haven't seen it, Sam Harris's book, The End of Faith is another good and much-needed opening into discussing touchy issues.  He has a website with its own discussion forum.  You'll find some comments there by "Proximity1".

 DeAnander, I admire you for your readiness to buck the conventional "wisdom" and to "go radio-active"--and this site's proprietors  for making this site one where the taboo can be broached.  

  ;^)

"In such an environment it is not surprising that the ills of technology should seem curable only through the application of more technology..." John W Aldridge

There are many parallels between Israel and the US at this time.  Both countries have a national/cultural mythos cementing a "White" national identity in contradistinction to a "dark, inferior indigenous" population whose land has been occupied -- a "cowboy legend".  The Palestinians are being confined to reservations now;  for Native Americans this struggle was waged and lost a century ago and more.  (And yet both countries also claim a religious identity which is inclusive;  Christianity is according to its lights small-c catholic, and Judaism accepts converts;  in fact Israeli wingnuts have gone so far as to convert mestizo peasants from S America and then award them "right of return" land in the OT;  both countries' national myths uneasily ride two divergent rails of inclusivism/cosmopolitanism and nativism/racism).

Both Israel and the US were in fairly large part colonised by outcasts, people fleeing danger and persecution in other places, and hence their citizens can easily and with some reason see themselves as champions of freedom, poor people who made good via hard work, perpetual innocent victims seeking refuge from an Evil Other (the Israelis with more recent and vivid reasons).  Both countries are paid up true-believers in Modernity and Industrialism, staking their whole economies on cheap fossil fuel, patting themselves on the back for growing crops in deserts artificially irrigated with repositioned water at great energy expense, etc.  (and both are ironically situated in areas not rich in fossil fuel)...  

Many Israelis aspire to a US suburban type of lifestyle;  one [Jewish, I hasten to add] friend of mine compared Israelis to Boers, complete with the affluent suburban White S African swimming-pool-freeway-and-air-conditioner lifeway that Americans also practise in the desert areas they wrested from more adaptive and sustainable indigenes.  Much of the OT is carburb.  In both cultures peasant farming and sustainable practise is being (has been) swept aside in favour of corporate factory ag, resulting in ever greater food and water precarity.

In both countries a radical rightist/fundie religious bloc dances a dangerous mambo of tail and dog with rightwing and militarist politicos.  Both countries have turned aside from a more leftist/pacifist period (many of the Kibbutzinm did genuinely try to come to terms with Arab neighbours) and into a hardening rightist/patriarchal/capitalist/authoritarian period.  Both countries are heavily enmeshed in the international weapons trade and have large nuke arsenals, yet cannot provide real security for their own populations.  Both rightwing elites rely on "with us or against us" millennial rehetoric and threatmongering to ensure compliance of the electorate with territorial/resource grabbing ventures.  

Both enjoyed at one time a much higher and more idealistic reputation on the world stage and are now falling into relative disrepute, and upset about this loss of reputation.  Both are (officially or by majority mood) in denial about the shadier aspects of their own national foundation, and tend to take refuge from that realpolitik in emotional patriotism, flag waving, and religion.  And both are powered by strong narratives of Exceptionalism which they both draw from the same Old Testament sources.  It's worth noting (again) that a large bloc of the Likudnik lobby in the US is rightwing Christians with millennial belief systems, who regard the return of world Jewry to a refounded Nation of Israel as a precondition for End Times prophecy.

Israel and the US could learn a lot from one another.  But whether their policies are actually good for Americans or good for Jews -- and specifically whether AIPAC represents anything recognisable as "Jewish" welfare or interest -- is a whole 'nother matter.  RQbbi Warshal of Florida writes:

I agree with Walt and Mearsheimer that AIPAC controls our American government policy toward Israel. But in their paper the two political scientists point out that, "In its basic operations, the Israel Lobby is no different from the farm lobby, steel or textile workers' unions, or other ethnic lobbies. There is nothing improper about American Jews and their Christian allies attempting to sway US policy; the Lobby's activities are not a conspiracy of the sort depicted in tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion."

Coming from South Florida, I am acutely aware that our government policy toward Cuba is dictated by the Cuban Lobby. Why else would we have such an absurd opposition to Castro? If we can make peace with Red China and the "evil empire" of the Soviet Union, why do we continue an embargo against an obscure Communist island, if it were not for domestic political pressure? So it is with the Jewish domestic lobby. My complaint is that the self-appointed Jewish leaders who control AIPAC and other positions of power within the Jewish community do not represent the best interests of Jews, Israel or the United States in the long run.

Let's zero in on AIPAC. It is controlled by right-wing, rich Jewish neo-conservatives. As one manifestation of the truth of this assertion one merely has to look at its annual meeting this past month. At a time when Vice President Cheney's popularity has dropped below 20 percent, the 4,500 delegates to the AIPAC convention gave him a standing ovation for almost a minute before he even opened his mouth and then proceeded to give him 48 rounds of applause in a 35-minute speech. (As my colleague Leonard Fein pointed out, that's once every 43.7 seconds). Considering that 75 percent of American Jews voted for Kerry, it is obvious that these people are out of the mainstream of Jewish thought.
t the same conference, preceding the recent Israeli elections, these delegates were addressed by Ehud Olmert (Kadima), Amir Peretz (Labor) and Benjamin Netanyahu (Likud) by video link from Israel. Olmert and Peretz received polite applause. The AIPAC delegates cheered enthusiastically for Netanyahu, especially when he presented his hard line that was overwhelmingly rejected by the Israeli electorate. Once a great organization, today AIPAC does not even represent the feelings of the average Israeli, let alone the average American Jew.

[...]

 Beware that you are reading treasonable material. If you "out" the Israeli lobby and you are Gentile, you're branded an anti-Semite; if you are Jewish, you're obviously a self-hating Jew. The Jewish establishment abides no criticism of Israel. You don't agree with me? Take this example: Last month a pro-Palestinian play entitled My Name is Rachel Corrie was to open at the New York Theatre Workshop, a "progressive" company on East Fourth Street. The play is based on the writings of a young British girl who was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer when she was protesting the demolition of Palestinian homes in Gaza two years ago. Although the play was widely praised in London last year, it never opened in New York. The theater producers spoke to the ADL and other Jewish leaders, including big-money Jews on its board, and that was the end of that. But, of course, we don't "censor" discussion concerning Israel. We just politely give our opinions and the voice of the other side disappears.

Another example: 400 rabbis, including myself, signed a letter sponsored by Brit Tzedek v'Shalom that appeared in the Forward this past month. It was a mildly liberal statement that proclaimed that "we are deeply troubled by the recent victory of Hamas," but went on to urge "indirect assistance to the Palestinian people via NGO's, with the appropriate conditions to ensure that it does not reach the hands of terrorists." Pretty mild stuff. Yet pulpit rabbis across this country who signed the letter have reported a concerted effort to silence them. The letter has been branded a "piece of back-stabbing abandonment of the Jews of Israel." Synagogue boards have been pressured to silence their rabbis by that loose coalition called the "Israel Lobby."

Just another example of the Jewish establishment stifling any discussion of Israel that does not conform to the neo-conservative tenets of AIPAC and its cohorts. Beware of these self-appointed guardians of Israel and Jewish values. In the end they will destroy everything that makes Judaism a compassionate religion, and if in their zeal they do not destroy Israel, they certainly will not make it more secure.

also worth a think, Marc Ellis on 'Constantinian Judaism' or the peril of religion hijacked into the service of (ethnic) nationalism.

my $0.02 as of today:  I think we have to understand AIPAC and the rest of the Israel Lobby as an integrated part of a rightwing, fundamentalist, and tribalist backlash worldwide.  Like the rest of the rightwing spin machine one of their primary tactics is to silence any opposition.  This omerta has been broken by Walt and Mearsheimer, who may well pay heavily for it professionally and in broken friendships and damaged collegial relationships.  But simply by opening up that locked box I think they have done everyone -- including Israelis -- a favour.

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...

I do know one thing-people in my country are definitely brain washed by the media into believing Israel=good/just and Palestinians=bad/terrorists period.  I know that is what I thought for a long time-I just assumed this to be true(foolish me) before I got a computer and actually started to try and read more balanced articles concerning Israel and Palestine and the trying to read up on the history of this whole issue.

This really is almost a taboo subject in the US, you're either pro-Israel or your anti-semitic period.

"People never do evil so throughly and happily as when they do it from moral conviction."-Blaise Pascal

as an amateur detective, the next step seems to me to be to trace the membership of the aipac and israel lobby, and figure out why they're so much more hardcore right than the israelis themselves, and the jewish democrat vote in america.

my guess...military-industrial-complex connections, hiding under a shroud of victimology.

some people are making a tidy profit off of all this military aid to israel, at both ends.

it is their economic interest to hush debate and silence scrutiny, by yelling 'anti-semite' and 'holocaust' as emotive invocation of past gentile mistakes, while bizniz as usual continues.

the fact that these shenanigans are ramping up to a possible WW4, is irrelevant to their bottom line....in fact it raises the stakes on their psychopathic power-games.

try to drag pigs away from a feeding trough, it's hard work.

~Government budget deficits are not nearly as dangerous as the deficits we have created in vital and complex natural systems.~ Naomi Klein.

I think this--from Judt's piece--needs a closer look:
Official Soviet-bloc communism was anti-Zionist of course, but for just that reason Israel was rather well regarded by everyone else, including the non-communist left.

When Zionism emerged in the 1890's, it offered itself as an alternative to Socialism, which in one form or another had the allegiance of most Jewish workers -- and most Jews then, in Europe and the US, were workers.

This was at a time when official Socialism took a very hostile attitude toward nationalisms of all kinds -- it was Lenin, somewhat later, who drew a distinction between "nationalism of oppressed peoples" and "nationalism of oppressor nations," and proposed that revolutionary Socialists should support the former while pointing out that only a proletarian state would offer them self-determination, i.e. the choice to establish sovereign states or not. (The characteristic model was minority nationalities inside a multinational empire like Russia, Austria, etc., not colonized peoples in what we now call the Third World -- though Lenin was perfectly willing to extend the argument to include them.)

Rosa Luxemburg, from the Left, opposed this view as a concession to retrograde ideology and a strategy that would subordinate newly sovereign peoples (as a Pole, she had Poland in mind) to "their own" capitalist classes;  Connolly made the same case for Ireland, though he eventually allied himself with the Fenians.

Socialism was so solidly entrenched among Jewish workers, meanwhile, that many Zionists tried (whether from conviction or not) to find a way to combine the two programs... whence Labor Zionism and its alliance, in the US, with Social-Democratic union leaderships in overwhelmingly Jewish sections of the working class, i.e. the garment workers.

In short I think there's an arguable case that the US-Israel bond is a Cold War survival at several levels: not only the heavy arming of Israel as a reliable gendarme in the region, but also the murky soup of ex-Trotskyists, ex-Shachtmanites, ex-Social Democrats, and "Labor Zionists" (like the late Albert Shanker of the NYC Teachers) in and out of outfits like the AFL-CIO's old international committee (headed up for years by ex-Communist Jay Lovestone) and the Scoop Jackson hawkish wing of the Democratic Party which always operated in cozy company with AFL-CIO leadership. These forces, were united in their opposition to Communism beyond any differences on other question;  they were, in fact, the "non-communist left" Judt refers to.  And indeed they did function as the Left in US politics: generally pro-civil rights, pro-union, pro-social welfare etc.-- policies they also viewed through the prism of anti-Communism, as ways to outflank revolutionary agitation and contain unrest, while also maintaining support for the warfare state that kept everybody working and the treasury well-supplied with funds. (There's an aphorism sloshing around here somewhere, something about "You combine Theodor Herzl, V.I. Lenin and J. M. Keynes, and whaddaya get? Boeing Aircraft!" Needs work...)

Another point I think needs closer examination is Finkelstein's claim that Israel isn't a liability to US "national" interests, since -- he argues -- these coincide on major points, even if they occasionally differ in emphasis. I'm inclined to agree with him (always keeping in mind that "US national interests" !=  the actual interests of most people living in the US.)

I think I tend to agree with the Cold War survival theory.

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...

kudos to them!

they knew it would be a rough ride...

why not put the united nations in jerusalem?

bolton would be happy.

i know it was an american invention, but these days i'd be more comfortable knowing it was somewhere more....central.

after 9-11, you can't really claim NY to be any more immune from attack, can you?

~Government budget deficits are not nearly as dangerous as the deficits we have created in vital and complex natural systems.~ Naomi Klein.

the palestinian families who had to leave their houses in 1948, 1967 and at various other dates before, between and after those years, have taken with them the keys of their dwellings and the documents proving that they own those places. these keys and documents have been passed down thru generations. this is not only a symbolic act, it is meant to serve as a basis to return and claim that property whenever that becomes possible.

ownership of land or a house is taken very serious in that part of the world. not for nothing do the places described and named in the bible thousands of year ago remain - more or less - as they are, but the ownership of specific properties can be traced back thru millenia. for example, the abraham cave (a.k.a the ibrahimi mosque or the cave of the patriarchs) in hebron is called that way because the patriarch abraham was buried on that patch of land. that was about 5000 years ago if i'm correct.

i conjecture that to ask from americans and europeans to believe that there exist people who - materially - exist as an organized society for so long a time is asking too much.

To give an example of sloppiness - the treatment of Israel in the Cold War. M&W suggest that Israel was the biggest beneficiary of US help among its client states.  Really? - I'd say the scale of US engagement on behalf of South Korea and South Vietnam was quite a bit larger. Same goes for Western Europe.  The claim might be true if one only counts direct financial aid, but that is a disingeuously narrow definition.  

Tendentiousness - In discussing the US arms lift to Israel in the 1973 war they note the costs of that action - i.e. the oil embargo. What they don't mention is the flip side - that if Israel were facing imminent catastrophic defeat by the the Egyptian and Syrian forces they would have most likely acted according to the standard policy of nuclear armed states in such a situation - turn the enemy into mushroom clouds. Also not a particularly satisfying outcome.

Another example is in making the case that Israel commits crimes - well yes, but it's not like that has been a hindrance to America in its support for other countries, particularly during the Cold War. Or afterwards - America rushed a half million troops to fight on behalf of Saudi Arabia in 1991-1992.

Straight out stupidity - The idea that the Jewish vote is a key factor. As the paper itself notes Jews make up only three percent of the population, and the majority disagree with the AIPAC line. Furthermore, they are concentrated in a few, mostly solidly blue areas.

 Monocausality - M&W see the US pro-Israel policy as self-evidently bad for US national interests (something I agree with). But they attribute far too great a role to this far flung 'Lobby' and discount other factors, e.g. ideology, lack of any significant constituency that cares deeply about the Palestinians, strategic concerns, oil, etc.  They address each of those issues, say that they cannot explain US policy on their own, and then discount them as irrelevant - completely illogical. National policies have multiple causes.

Realist paradox - The two scholars are both 'realists' - that is they believe that states have foreign policy interests that are objectively clear and which they will always pursue. Domestic political concerns and ideological biases are not factors in determining foreign policy.   Here they have found an exception to their model - US Middle East policy is not in its national interest.  As ideology and error are not possible explanations, the only one that makes sense to them is that the US is being misled by those who place another state's interests over their own - hence the all-powerful Lobby. (So what's their explanation for Vietnam?) Catch is, they also mention that the policy being supported isn't in Israel's interests either. So what we're left with in their own terms is a nonsensical situation - a superpower led astray by a                        
group of its own citizens, primarily defined by their ethnicity, who are acting against the interests of their own country in favour of the country of their co-ethnics, except that they're also acting against the interests of that country. Furthermore the majority of their co-ethnics and of the rest of the population doesn't support them.

Borderline racism.  They note a claim that in presidential contests Dem candidates get as much as sixty percent of their money from Jewish sources. But how many of those donors are Likudnik types, how many are Meretz types? No idea but rather obviously both exist, yet the implication is that 'Jewish money' is monolithic.

The Larry Summers analogy

I've mentioned before that I see political correctness in its soft, non administratively or legally enforced form, as a good thing. Among other things that means applying a very strict standard when it comes to playing with racist, sexist, or homophobic stereotypes.   If a scholar wishes to play with such issues - e.g. black crime or poor school performance, lack of women in science, or all powerful Jewish conspiracies, he or she should be extra careful about the quality of the work, and avoid making exaggerated claims about the truth of such stereotypes. And if they do the reverse, they should be condemned. Mearsheimer and Walt are no Charles Murray, there is no pattern of racism in their lives. There is also no clear pattern of sexism with Larry Summers. But both M&W and Summers offered support for noxious stereotypes without sufficient evidence.  I have no sympathy for them when they ended up burned.