Saying the unsayable

Published 13 September 2007

The links between the Israel lobby and US foreign policy are a Washington taboo. But a controversial new study is opening up a long-stifled debate

The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy

John J Mearsheimer & Stephen M Walt Allen Lane the Penguin Press, 484pp, £25

You have to have lived in America a long time before you realise that political correctness - far from ridding the country of -isms such as racism, sexism and anti-Semitism - has merely driven them underground. Words that are completely unacceptable in public, for example, are used every minute of every day in living rooms and bars across the country. It took me quite a while, too, to realise that coded words and phrases have also insinuated themselves into the national vocabulary to replace the unacceptable: that "single-parent mothers on welfare" really means "blacks", or that when Republicans lash into Democrats for their supposed reliance on "Hollywood" for election funds, what they really mean is "Jews". Americans, though few outsiders comprehend this, instinctively understand these many hidden codes that disguise intolerance supposed not to exist.

I was thinking about this when I picked up John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's important new book, while simultaneously watching the most crucial debate so far of Republican candidates for next year's presidential elections. The no-hoper who refuses to conform so much that he is fast becoming my hero - 72-year-old Representative Ron Paul, a trained obstetrician who has continued to deliver babies while being a far-right, libertarian congressman - suddenly broke away from the sanitised scripts of the others and launched into words I've never heard any politician of either party use in public: "Why leave the troops in the region?" he responded dramatically when pressed about Iraq. "It was the fact that we had troops in Saudi Arabia [that] was one of the three reasons given for the attack on 9/11." Amidst the resulting Republican booing, he went on: "The American people didn't go in. A few people advising this administration, called the neoconservatives, hijacked our foreign policy. They're responsible, not the American people."

This was pretty revolutionary stuff, but even when he was saying the unsayable - that US foreign policy was really to blame for 9/11 - he was still resorting to coded language. You can be sure that his constituents back in their homes and bars in Lake Jackson in Texas, though, knew exactly what he was saying: that US troops were being killed in the Middle East to protect Israel, and that this policy and the invasion of Iraq had been cooked up by Jews. That really was unsayable: Americans love to tut-tut that anti-Semitism is on the rise again in Europe, but very few want to acknowledge that it is also alive and well in the US, except that is has been driven underground.

We should, then, welcome the publication of this book in the hope that it will finally open a vital discourse that has been stifled for 35 years. Mearsheimer and Walt say that Israel became the centrepiece of US foreign policy after the Six Day War in 1967 - a more accurate date would be 1973, when major military assistance began - but what is indisputable is that the whole subject of what the authors call "the unmatched power of the Israel lobby" in the US, and its most prominent cheerleaders such as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, has been virtually taboo since then.

Did they hijack US foreign policy in order to synchronise it perfectly with the needs of Israel, culminating in the Iraq catastrophe? "Bush and Sharon Nearly Identical On Mideast Policy," a Washington Post headline proclaimed just a month before the invasion. This discussion might seem old hat elsewhere in the world, but in the US the issue has largely been driven underground until now; even to mention the existence of the Israel lobby is to risk being labelled anti-Semitic ("Andrew Stephen should be exterminated with extreme prejudice," an American reader wrote to the former NS editor after I had made some mild observations about a strong Jewish presence in the Bush administration early in 2001).

It's a cliché of present-day bigotry that only blacks can call themselves niggers or Jews make jokes about Jews, so I will leave it to a veteran Israeli commentator and a former member of the Bush administration to say the unsayable for me. Akiva Eldar, of Ha'aretz, says that the likes of Feith and Perle are "walking a fine line between their loyalty to American governments . . . and Israeli interests"; while Colonel Larry Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell, says he has put this book on his students' curriculum because it contains "a lot of blinding flashes of the obvious but, that said, blinding flashes of the obvious that people whispered in corners rather than said out loud at cocktail parties where someone could hear you".

It is a major symbolic step forward that, following the publication of Jimmy Carter's Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid last year, a mainstream American publisher in New York should dare to pay an advance of $750,000 to two academics - albeit distinguished ones from the University of Chicago and Harvard respectively - to write a book that represents such a huge political and commercial risk for them. It is almost impossible to convey the degree of sensitivities and touchiness that the subject evokes - among both Jews and gentiles - throughout the US.

The thesis put forward by Mearsheimer and Walt, briefly, is that Israel has become a "strategic liability" for the US and that ending the special relationship - the one the British delude themselves they, rather than Israel, have with Washington - would benefit not only the US, but the rest of the world, including Israel itself. They are proponents of the "offensive realism" school of foreign policy thinking, which (put simply) argues that the more powerful a major power becomes, the more aggressively it will act in what ultimately becomes a relentless quest for hegemony. Mearsheimer, a former military man, has argued in works such as The Tragedy of Great Power Politics that the US should encourage countries such as Germany, India and the Ukraine to develop nuclear programmes to hinder the rise of hypernationalism elsewhere.

The genesis of this book is highly revealing in itself. The authors were first commissioned to write a long, scholarly article on the Israel lobby by Atlantic magazine in 2002, but editors sat on the manuscript for months before deciding not to publish it. The article ended up in the London Review of Books in March 2006, and the authors then wrote a longer, 42-page version (plus an additional 40 pages of footnotes), which was posted on the website of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

Furious denouncements followed. Dr Eliot Cohen, a prominent neocon who was appointed by Condoleezza Rice as her adviser in the state department as recently as last March, accused Mearsheimer and Walt in a prominent comment piece in the Washington Post (headlined "Yes, It's Anti-Semitic") of having "obsessive and irrationally hostile beliefs about Jews" whom he said they accused of "disloyalty, subversion or treachery, of having occult powers and of participating in secret combinations that manipulate institutions and governments".

The ubiquitous academic showman Alan Dershowitz, meanwhile, law professor at Harvard and author of The Case for Israel, likened Mearsheimer and Walt's writings to "contemporary variations on old themes such as those promulgated in the notorious czarist forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, in the Nazi and America First literature of the 1930s and early 1940s, and in the propaganda pamphlets of the Soviet Union". Harvard soon caved in under such pressures, removing the Kennedy School's logo from the web pages carrying Mearsheimer and Walt's study; Walt stepped down as academic dean at the Kennedy School.

Reading any of the articles or the book itself - 484 pages with 127 of them footnotes and indexes - it is hard to understand what has inspired such extravagant venom. The authors go to some trouble to explain that they are writing about an "Israel" and not a "Jewish" lobby, and that a significant proportion of members consist of the so-called "Christian Right", or "Christian Zionists". They write, too, that the lobby is a "loose coalition of individuals and organisations"; it is "not a single, unified movement with a central leadership, and it is certainly not a cabal or conspiracy that 'controls' US foreign policy . . . it is engaged in good old-fashioned interest-group politics, which is as American as apple-pie".

They point out, though, how the special relationship has worked. Israeli leaders have addressed Congress six times since 1976, far more than those of any other country and have also been, by far, the recipient of the most US foreign aid during that period.

Mearsheimer and Walt estimate that Israel currently receives $3bn a year from the US, three-quarters of it for military purposes, or $4.3bn if you accept the estimate of former congressman Lee Hamilton, the highly respected Democrat who was co-chairman of the 9/11 Commission. They add that Israel is unique in that it receives all its aid in one lump sum at the beginning of each fiscal year and, unlike other countries, does not have to account for how it spends it - details too complicated to go into here but which Hank Gaffney, former chief nuclear planner at the Pentagon, describes as "absolute bosh" and "bullshit". Mearsheimer and Walt then point out that the second and third largest recipients of US aid are now Egypt and Jordan, which is "at least partly intended to benefit Israel as well . . . as a reward for good behaviour".

Phew. The j'accuse statistics run thick and fast, with the book emerging as a curious combination of academic scholarship and journalistic polemic, reading rather like a prosecutor reeling off an endless series of misdoings. I can dismiss the overheated rhetoric of Cohen and Dershowitz, but not the reaction of people like Gaffney - neither an Arabist nor a Zionist - when he describes the book as a "rant" and says "they haven't done their homework and [have got] an enormous amount wrong". Indeed, the authors concede that they are not Middle East experts, and it shows. They repeatedly single out for criticism Martin Indyk, for example, an Australian-turned-American who was Clinton's ambassador to Israel; he is actually a remarkably level-headed and moderate representative of the Israel lobby, about as far from being a neocon extremist as a member could be.

Yet anybody who has lived in Washington as long as I have knows that the Israel lobby can be extraordinarily ruthless and unpleasant, and I'm not just talking about the deranged letter-writers and threat-merchants. Take the example of my good friend Tim Tyler, who was the US Navy's Israel desk officer during the 1973 Yom Kippur War as a young naval officer, before he joined the Pentagon's secretive Defence Security Assistance Agency, where he performed various important roles including that of chief of the Middle East South Asia Division.

He then worked at Nato as a defence planner with special expertise in Pershing II and cruise-missile deployment, before returning to the Pentagon to be "deputy director plans", when he was directly involved in international sales of major weapons systems.

He has recently retired, and is thus free to speak to me for publication. He tells a chilling story, however. In the 1980s he recommended that the Pentagon stop funding the development of Israel's own multibillion dollar Lavi jet fighter, but offer them America's own F-16s instead. His recommendation, much to the fury of the Israelis, worked its way up the Pentagon hierarchy and was eventually accepted. I will let him recount the sequel in his own words:

"Through all of this I remained friends with Marvin Klemow [negotiator for the Israelis] and one holiday I was at his house for a party. It was a good party, and the only slight hiccup was the rather brusque manner of an Israeli colonel who was there - but I thought nothing of it. Then Marv pulled me aside. He said something along the lines of, 'You won't believe this, but I just got chewed out for inviting you to this party.' I asked him why, and he told me that he had just been informed that I was on the [Israeli] embassy's anti-Semite list because I didn't support the Lavi programme. We were both flabbergasted. But, sadly, I was never invited back to Marv's house."

The story of another friend is no less chilling. Former Senator Chuck Percy is now nearly 88 and far from well, but until 1985 was a vigorous and moderate Republican senator who was chairman of the all-powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He started to ruin his career, though, when he refused to sign a letter sponsored by AIPAC - the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the best-known and most powerful individual lobby - which had been drawn up to protest against President Ford's proposed "reassessment" of Middle East policy. Then he said publicly that Yasser Arafat was more moderate than some other Palestinian leaders and - despite having a generally pro- Israeli record - began to be perceived by AIPAC from then on as an enemy.

The final blow, in fact, came when he supported the sale of Awacs aircraft to Saudi Arabia. Huge sums of money duly poured in from AIPAC supporters all over the country to support Percy's Democratic opponent in the 1984 elections, and despite huge popularity in his native Illinois, Percy narrowly lost - and never returned to politics. Mearsheimer and Walt quote Tom Dine, then executive director of AIPAC, saying after Percy's defeat: "All the Jews in America, from coast to coast, gathered to oust Percy. And the American politicians - those who hold public positions now, and those who aspire - got the message."

They certainly did, and some of the handful of politicians who have dared to defy AIPAC have got the Percy treatment, too. Mearsheimer and Walt say, of next year's presidential elections, "on one subject, we can be . . . confident that the candidates will speak with one voice." Indeed so, after reading this book; both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama attended this year's AIPAC conference in DC, giving media briefings in rooms 25 yards apart afterwards, while Benjamin Netanyahu was also briefing frantically away behind closed doors a few steps from them.

Perhaps it is hard, for those of us who are not Jewish, to understand the passion and intensity with which America's Israel lobby pursue their goals. It would have been helpful if Mearsheimer and Walt had tried, dispassionately, to explore why they are so often driven, sometimes to the excesses I have described. But the authors are too busy with their prosecutorial charge-sheet to pause and wonder. We read all too much about AIPAC, but next to nothing about the Project for the New American Century - a genuinely sinister group that included the now-discredited neocons but also, more crucially, non-Jewish fanatics such as Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and John Bolton. In my opinion it, far more than the likes of AIPAC, was responsible for the foreign-policy calamities - culminating in the Iraq tragedy - that have occurred under George W Bush.

We should be grateful to Mearsheimer and Walt, nonetheless, for embarking on their near-impossible task and bringing out into the open a rancorous issue that desperately needs to be addressed by all concerned. The passions and anger - and, indeed, anti-Semitism - are such that writing a detached and lucid book on this subject is probably impossible. Heaven knows what Mearsheimer and Walt have been through, but we should all now hope that it has been worth it and that their book marks the beginning of a new and more open era when it comes to this most painful of subjects.

Post this article to

139 comments from readers

Carl Jones
13 September 2007 at 10:47

Hi Anderw...smoke and mirrors sping to mind. In the context of accepted fact, "The Israeli Lobby and US Foreign Policy" is a fair peice of work, but its in the same frame as Michael Moore`s Fahrenheit 9/11, in that it reaches a specific point and stops. Anti Bush Democrat bleeding heart liberals love it, but Repulican necons will remain unconvinced, even if the facts destroy there hardright position.

The term "Jewish lobby" is too kind. The idea that they "lobby" is a joke. You can`t get elected in the US until you`ve been interviewed by a Jewish committee. Only by answering all questions correctly, do you stand any chance of election.

The Bush cabal (inc Clinton) has a special relationship with the Saudi royal family, courts the Bin Laden`s family and its famous son is a cornerstone of US foreign policy. The CIA continues to produce, edit, ship and show this necon propaganda. All this and Israel remains the fulcrum of US policy!!!!

Just as this book is "smoke and mirrors, so we have this. "When Republicans lash Democrats for their supposed reliance on "Hollywood" for election funds, what they really mean is Jew". This being an excellent example of "double double reverse flip-flop spin. Hollywood is run by Jews...all 5 top media corporations are owned, or run by Jews. Charlie Sheen has openly questioned the official 9/11 account...do a Google search for CS and the third result will start you on your way to enlightenment.lol However, the MSM has ignored Charlie Sheen, even though a CNN phone poll backed Sheen`s position by 80%!! Meanwhile the BBC has bent over backwards to rubbish Mr Sheen and his marrige breakup...but not a single word on his un-pc 9/11 views.

The idea that US troops in Saudi led to 9/11 is moronic. Saddam invaded Kuwait so that US forces could be stationed in Saudi. This to protect the Saudi royal family from a potential coup. These forces were only withdrawn when US forces walked into Baghdad...then NWO sponsored terrorists all of a sudden became active in Saudi...I wonder why?lol

Ron Paul is being ignored by the US media and poll`s are being rigged against him. If Hilary looks weak, RP might get more air play in order to fracture the Republicns. Having said that, the US election is a done deal and this is only happening for public consumption.

I am reminded of Gordon Brown`s first speach as PM. He talked about fighting"racism", but he made a specific mention of "anti-semitism"...another tug on the forelock...total obediance to the Jewish led Western elite. One only has to look at all the Jewish oligachs in London....princes paying homage to Lord Jacob Rothschild....oh dear....did I mention something that I shouldn`t have?lol

Democracy and the MSM are the "glass ceiling (one way) which keeps us from seeing elite hands at work.

Pencils
13 September 2007 at 11:13

Am I the first to notice this. We can expect a deluge of virulent propaganda from the 'Give Israel Your United Support'(GIYUS) crowd, so I'll rush in a few quick thoughts.

First - the author of this article seems to be ' damning with faint praise' but covering himself with some none-too-subtle ' it's just a lot of nonsense really' messages:

"Perhaps it is hard, for those of us who are not Jewish, to understand the passion and intensity with which America's Israel lobby pursue their goals. It would have been helpful if Mearsheimer and Walt had tried, dispassionately, to explore why they are so often driven, sometimes to the excesses I have described. But the authors are too busy with their prosecutorial charge-sheet to pause and wonder. "

and

"The passions and anger - and, indeed, anti-Semitism - are such that writing a detached and lucid book on this subject is probably impossible. "

Why does 'antisemitism' make broaching this subject impossible?

" hard, for those of us who are not Jewish, to understand... why they are so often driven, sometimes to the excesses."

So we can't understand the Jews because we didn't suffer the Holocaust so leave alone?

"We read all too much about AIPAC, but next to nothing about the Project for the New American Century - a genuinely sinister group that included the now-discredited neocons but also, more crucially, non-Jewish fanatics such as ..."

Well, it's a book on the Israel lobby not on the PNAC, which has been written about extensively already. This is a none-too-subtle allegation of bias, i.e. antisemitism.

"Martin Indyk, for example...is actually a remarkably level-headed and moderate representative of the Israel lobby, about as far from being a neocon extremist as a member could be. "

Says who? Says the Israel lobby, the neocons and their house-trained 'journalists'.

"we should all now hope that it has been worth it and that their book marks the beginning of a new and more open era..."

Can't dispute that BUT

" when it comes to this most painful of subjects."

Why is it the most painful of subjects , exactly? I don't need to spell it out.

Well, maybe the Israel lobby will try to pretend they don't exist by restraining their running-dogs from deluging this thread with comments.

Pencils
13 September 2007 at 11:30

Carl Jones - well said, but I hope you don't lose your posting rights. On the Guardian's 'Comment is Free' blog the J-word can only be associated with praise, sympathy for victimhood, or support for Israel - anything else will get a post removed or posting rights withdrawn.

I think this bit could do with a bit more filling out though, to be honest:

"The idea that US troops in Saudi led to 9/11 is moronic. Saddam invaded Kuwait so that US forces could be stationed in Saudi. This to protect the Saudi royal family from a potential coup."

mitchy
13 September 2007 at 13:14

Yup, it wont be long before the right wing, pro-zionist lobby notice this article and jump on it with their blinkered viewpoints. Watch this space...

Harvey
13 September 2007 at 17:52

Mitchy

Regret we weretoo late - you Pencils and the storm troopers beat us to it.

Carroll
13 September 2007 at 22:31

Unfogging the fog.

The majority of Americans have but one country to call home.

Jews and all of our varied ethnic and religious groups of every heritage have been blessed in this country because the majority of melting pot Americans aren't bigots or anti-semitic.

But we will not be held hostage or used by any group because of their claims that their own personal ethnic nightmares or loyalty to another country for any reason, ethnic or religious or historical trumps the common good of all other citizens or the original principles and purpose of America.

And that's as good as it gets and the way it should be.

Anyone who disagrees is free to look for a better deal in another country.

simonpsc
14 September 2007 at 00:12

Richard Perle and Alan Feith authored a Report for Binyamin Netanyahu in 1996 called 'Clean Break Israel'. This called for the Israeli government to go on the attack and break the military of its enemies befoer they got too strong. Perle was one of the designers of the Iraq war and he would have known that the decision to stand down the army and police in Iraq would lead to civil war. Rumsfeld and his friends wanted a New American Century but Perle and his Israeli friends wanted a broken Iraq military. The New American Century is in tatters in Iraq but Israeli' objectives have been fully met. Israeli's and their Zionist supporters - both Christian anmd Jewish Zionists - need to heed Isaac Deutscher's warning in 1967 that, should Israel drag the world into a conflagration, then they will not be forgiven.

Douglas Chalmers
14 September 2007 at 06:26

And AIPAC is at it again to drag everone into an unnecessary conflict with IRAN!!! AIPAC "wishes you a sweet new year....". http://www.aipac.org/

And from JTA:- 09/11/2007(note the date!): "About 100 top AIPAC activists lobbied Congress to pass Iran sanctions bills. The executive committee of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee's met this week in Washington.

AIPAC staff told the executive committee that a comprehensive bill that would expand existing sanctions against Iran and restrict the president's ability to waive them was likely to pass in the U.S. House of Representatives by October....... The AIPAC activists also lobbied for passage of the Bush administration's agreement to increase military assistance to Israel to $3 billion annually from $2.4 billion.

Prior to lobbying on Tuesday, the executive committee was given a "pep talk" by Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), the House majority leader, and Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), its minority deputy whip, who recently returned from leading congressional delegations to Israel...."

Also note that "restrict the president's ability to waive them..." is a kind of code regarding sanctions, too, in as much as it really means underlining the president's ability to veto the congress if it opposes them! Any further interpretations?

Cybertiger
14 September 2007 at 09:31

"most prominent cheerleaders such as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith ..."

I can see this cheery triumvirate riding high ... high above the Middle East ... wafting along on one of Aladdin's magic carpets. When the American people finally pull the plug, tug the rug from under ... I fear the leading happy clappy triad ... may drop ... to the deepest depths of the Dead Sea.

carolb
14 September 2007 at 10:45

We are in agreement with the two professors, and with Jimmy Carter's book. In fact, we are very much looking forward to reading the book referred to above as soon as it is published!

Carl Jones
14 September 2007 at 10:49

Pencils...just for you.

The US had no way of stopping a coup against the Saudi royal family. At the time, this was a real possibility. If this happened, the US might invade, but this would take time. By the time Amerika was read to move, Kuwait could also have fallen.

At the time, Saddam was a US/UK ally. Looking at the above senario, this would leave Iraq surrounded by fundamentalist states...Syria, Saudi, Kuwait and Afghanistan. So Saddam knew he was on borrowed time.

Kuwait was side drilling into Iraqi oil fields...was this by design? The US ordered/hinted via deplomatic means, that he should invade Kuwait....the Kuwaity leadership was in on this. Short term pain for long term stability. The MSM reported that Iraqi troops were massing on its Southern border, yet the US did not warn Saddam off.

Amerika acts all supprised at the invasion of Kuwait. A coalition is formed. Turkey is in on the plot and its agreed that Saddam won`t be removed from power, so he can keep the Kurds under control. As coalition forces are deplyed, 14,000 US troops are stationed in Saudi...not a lot of force, but enough to give anyone thinking of a Saudi coup, second thoughts. Because the US could just invade Saudi. US forces remained in Saudi for 12/13 years...until US forces "walked" into Baghdad.

Before you all laff, I have talked to a few well heeled Saudis about the above interpretation, and all agreed with it in its basic structure. One Saudi said to me "you are remarkably well informed". In fact I get to talk with many people from the ME. They are amazing thinkers.

Like the illegal invasion of Iraq, Desert Storm was a farce...maybe someone should tell Peter and Dan Snow.lol

Carl Jones
14 September 2007 at 12:18

My post above has a mistake; Afghanistan should read "Iran"...sooo much time pressure.lol

mitchy
14 September 2007 at 12:29

Sorry Harvey, not sure what you mean there. Are you suggesting that you are an example of the right-wing pro-zionist lobby, or I am?

Fact is, every time there's even a sniff of anything relating to the Israel-Palestine issue in this magazine, the zionists crawl out of the woodwork. Check anything by John Pilger if you dont believe me.

Cybertiger
14 September 2007 at 13:51

... "non-Jewish fanatics such as Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and John Bolton" ...

I spy with my little eye ... a trio of jolly pranksters aboard another of Aladdin's magic carpets ... circling ... on a thermonuclear thermal ... high up above the Dead Sea. Bag a carpet now; shoot this unholy trinity out of the fetid, rarefied air ... for the greater safety of the public ... at large in the world.

Ergo
14 September 2007 at 20:31

From what I have heard there never were Iraqi troops

massed along the Saudi border; no aerial photographs and no other evidence. This was simply a ruse to

allow US troops in as a base for further operations. The Sunnis in Iraq were secularists as opposed to the more religious Shia and this is an anomaly - it's the reverse in other ME countries. Why would Saddam want the Saudis ousted and the government taken over by militant Wahabis? He had enough problems. I've heard that a settlement of $15 billion US was being considered by Kuwait and might have settled the matter had the US not "encouraged" the invasion. Obviously, the US "wanted in"; this was an opportunity.

If an actual "conspiracy" of AIPAC, Israel and the US

doesn't exist, we can safely say that their goals have been and are, for the time being, anyway, consonant.

Sharon himself bragged that it was Israel holding the US dog's tail, not the other way round. And that US congressman and presidential candidates must run the AIPAC gauntlet, there is no doubt .

Harvey
14 September 2007 at 22:03

Whatever it is you 'reon Cybertiger can i try some.

For one moment i thought i had been transported back to 1001 nights

Harvey
14 September 2007 at 22:15

Mitchy

Tell it kike it is son.

For Zionists read Jews

At least have the courage of your convictions.

Your predecessors ,the left wing appeasment movement of the 30s also formed an unholy alliance with the Nazis .

History repeats itself only now the left are playing footsie with Islamofascists.

Just remember you are still Kuffir to these meglomaniacs . The sad thing is the realists always have to pick up the tab for your misplaced socialist nonsense.

Carl Jones
15 September 2007 at 00:44

Get off Harvey..."misplaced socialist nonsense"...stop playing in the dirt!

Our elite rulers aren`t rightwing and they aren`t socialists. Left and right are mechanisms of control. Follow your thinking through and it ends in war and more elite profits.

Roger Algase
15 September 2007 at 08:46

They can try to blame the Jews as much as they want for invading Iraq, but about the oil companies, these two "chochems" (Yiddish for "wise men") say nothing?

Roger Algase

New York NY

fanonite
15 September 2007 at 13:38

I take back the last sentence in my previous post. I appreciate the fact that AS is taking on this very important subject, however, I do wish journalists would not insult the readers' intelligence with 'fair and balance' a la Fox.

Amihai
15 September 2007 at 14:22

Debunking the Newest – and Oldest – Jewish Conspiracy: Reply to Mearsheimer-Walt……, by Alan Dershowitz, Harvard Law School.

Abstract:

The working paper by Academic Dear and Professor Stephen Walt and Professor John Mearsheimer presents a conspiratorial view of history in which the Israel Lobby has a "stranglehold" on American foreign policy, the American media, think tanks and academia. In his response, Professor Alan Dershowitz demonstrates that the paper contains three types of major errors: quotations are wrenched out of context, important facts are misstated or omitted; and embarrassingly weak logic is employed. One of the authors of this paper has acknowledged that "none of the evidence represents original documentation or is derived from independent interview". In light of the paper's errors, and its admitted lack of originality, Dershowitz asks why these professors would have chosen to publish a paper that does not meet their usual scholarly standards, especially given the risk – that should have been obvious to "realists" – that recycling these charges under their imprimatur of prominent authors would be featured, as they have been, on extremist websites. Dershowitz questions the authors claims that people who support Israel do not want "an open debate on issues involving Israel". He renews his challenge to debate the issues.

(The full article may be found at: http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/research/working_papers/facultyre...)

Amihai
15 September 2007 at 14:33

In addition to the previous post, please read the following as well. NK

The Israel Lobby

From Alan Dershowitz

As an advocate of free speech and an opponent of censorship based on political correctness, I welcome a serious, balanced, objective study of the influences of lobbies – including Israeli lobbies – on American foreign policy. I also welcome reasoned, contextual and comparative criticism of Israeli policies and actions. But in light of the many errors in John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s article, and their admission that ‘none of the evidence’ they give ‘represents original documentation or is derived from independent interviews’, it is fair to ask why these distinguished academics chose to publish a paper that does not meet their usual scholarly standards, especially given the obvious risk that it would be featured, as it has been, on neo-Nazi and extremist websites, and even those of terrorist organisations, and that it would be used by overt anti-semites to ‘validate’ their claims of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy (LRB, 23 March).

The authors pre-emptively accuse the Lobby of indiscriminately crying anti-semitism: ‘Anyone who criticises Israeli actions or argues that pro-Israel groups have significant influence over US Middle East policy . . . stands a good chance of being labelled an anti-semite’; ‘In other words, criticise Israeli policy and you are by definition an anti-semite.’ This is demonstrably false, though it is a charge made frequently in the hate literature. Several years ago, I challenged those who made similar accusations to identify a single Jewish leader who equated mere criticism of Israeli policy with anti-semitism. No one accepted my challenge, because no Jewish leader has made such a claim. Among the harshest critics of Israeli policy are Jews and Israelis: just read the mainstream Israeli and Jewish-American press.

Mearsheimer and Walt rely on discredited allegations and partial quotation. They twice quote David Ben-Gurion out of context so that he appears to be saying the exact opposite of what he actually did say. First, the authors have Ben-Gurion stating: ‘After the formation of a large army in the wake of the establishment of the state, we shall abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine.’ The clear implication is that this would be done by force. Yet, in a follow-up question, Ben-Gurion was asked whether he meant to achieve this ‘by force as well?’ He responded in the negative: ‘Through mutual understanding and Jewish-Arab agreement.’ Mearsheimer and Walt omit this important qualification. Ben-Gurion is then quoted as saying that ‘it is impossible to imagine general evacuation’ of the Arab population ‘without compulsion, and brutal compulsion’, which makes it seem as if Ben-Gurion was advocating ‘brutal compulsion’. They omit what he said next: ‘But we should in no way make it part of our programme.’ Either they were unaware of the context of the quotes because they read only misleading excerpts ripped out of context; or they decided to misuse the quotes so as to mislead the reader.

There are many other factual errors, but I will draw attention to just a few. ‘Israel,’ they state, ‘was explicitly founded as a Jewish state and citizenship is based on the principle of blood kinship.’ This mendacious emphasis on Jewish ‘blood’ is a favourite of neo-Nazi propaganda. It is totally false. A person of any ethnicity or religion can become an Israeli citizen. In fact, approximately a quarter of Israel’s citizens are not Jewish, a higher percentage of minority citizenry than nearly any other country. Indeed, Mearsheimer and Walt admit that Israel has 1.3 million Arab citizens – about 20 per cent of its population. The paper’s authors confuse Israel’s law of return – which was designed to grant asylum to victims of anti-semitism, including non-Jewish relatives of Jews – with its law of citizenship.

If Mearsheimer and Walt were truly concerned about racist citizenship statutes, they could have looked right next door to Jordan, which openly and explicitly refuses to grant citizenship to Jews. When asked by the New York Sun about Arab citizenship laws, Walt responded: ‘We were not writing on Saudi Arabia and Jordan.’ Mearsheimer and Walt in fact compare Israel to its Arab neighbours on several occasions, finding – incredibly – that ‘in terms of actual behaviour, Israel’s conduct is not morally distinguishable from the actions of its opponents.’ Walt’s evasive answer reminds me of a remark attributed to another Harvard administrator, A. Lawrence Lowell, who fought fiercely to keep Jews out of Harvard. His reasoning was that ‘Jews cheat.’ When it was pointed out to him that some non-Jews cheat, Lowell allegedly responded: ‘You’re changing the subject. I’m talking about Jews.’

Mearsheimer and Walt contend that the ‘United States has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel, not the other way around . . . There is no question, for example, that many al-Qaida leaders, including bin Laden, are motivated by Israel’s presence in Jerusalem and the plight of the Palestinians.’ In fact, bin Laden was primarily motivated by the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia, recall, had asked the United States to defend the Arabian Peninsula against Iraqi aggression prior to the first Gulf War. So it was America’s ties to and defence of an Arab state – from which 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers originated – and not the Jewish state, that most clearly precipitated the events of 11 September 2001. Nor does Israel’s supposed domination of American public life explain the terrorist massacres in Bali, Madrid, London and elsewhere. Europe, after all, is praised for being less susceptible to the Lobby’s manipulation.

Mearsheimer and Walt’s boldest mis-statement concerns the negotiations at Camp David in July 2000. ‘Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s purportedly generous offer,’ they write, ‘would have given the Palestinians only a disarmed and dismembered set of Bantustans under de facto Israeli control.’ Barak has said that the Bantustan accusation was ‘one of the most embarrassing lies’ Arafat told about Camp David. Mearsheimer and Walt do not cite the map Dennis Ross published in his book The Missing Peace, which contrasts the Palestinian characterisation of the final proposal at Camp David with the actual proposal. The second map – the real map offered to the Palestinians at Camp David – shows a contiguous Palestinian state in the West Bank. Prince Bandar, a member of the Saudi royal family, was so astounded by the generosity of Israel’s offer that he told Arafat: ‘If we lose this opportunity, it is not going to be a tragedy. This is going to be a crime.’

Even if the scholarship were sound and the facts accurate, the paper’s thesis would remain unsound. Their first argument is that the very existence of an Israeli lobby proves that support for Israel is essentially un-American. ‘The mere existence of the Lobby,’ they write, ‘suggests that unconditional support for Israel is not in the American national interest. If it was, one would not need an organised special interest group to bring it about.’ In other words, any group that needs a lobby must be working against the ‘American national interest’. The most powerful lobby in the US is, in fact, the American Association of Retired Persons. According to Mearsheimer and Walt’s logic, that would mean that the rights of retired people are inconsistent with American national interests, as is equality for African Americans (NAACP) and choice for women. The reality, of course, is that virtually all interest groups and many foreign countries undertake lobbying, but only the ‘Israel Lobby’ is accused of being contrary to American national interest.

Mearsheimer and Walt attribute anything that Israel and America do or aspire to achieve in common to Israeli manipulation. They confuse correlation with causation. The upshot of their argument concerning the invasion of Iraq is that Ariel Sharon duped President Bush into overthrowing Saddam Hussein. They do not consider the more likely explanation: that Bush and Sharon shared the same worldview and vision for the Middle East.

Walt’s Harvard colleague David Gergen – who has a great deal of experience of the decision-making process in the White House – finds the paper’s thesis ‘wildly at variance’ with what he witnessed. Had Mearsheimer and Walt interviewed Gergen they would have learned the following:

Over the course of four tours in the White House, I never once saw a decision in the Oval Office to tilt US foreign policy in favour of Israel at the expense of America’s interest. Other than Richard Nixon – who occasionally said terrible things about Jews, despite the number on his team – I can’t remember any president even talking about an Israeli lobby. Perhaps I have forgotten, but I can remember plenty of conversations about the power of the American gun lobby, environmentalists, evangelicals, small-business owners and teachers unions.

It is not only Mearsheimer and Walt’s words that invoke stereotypes and canards. It is the ‘music’ as well – the tone, pitch and feel of the article – that has caused such outrage. Imagine if two academics compiled an equivalent number of negative statements, based on shoddy research and questionable sources, to the effect that African Americans cause all the problems in America, and presented that compilation as evidence that African Americans behave in a manner contrary to the best interest of the United States. Who would fail to recognise such a project as destructive?

Walt and Mearsheimer repeatedly claim that they wrote their article, at least in part, in order to stimulate a discussion about the influence of the Lobby. They claim that it is the pro-Israel side that seeks to suppress this ‘because an open debate might lead Americans to question the level of support they provide’. My invitation to debate remains open. I challenge Mearsheimer and Walt to look me in the eye and tell me that because I am a proud Jew and a critical supporter of Israel, I am disloyal to my country.

Alan Dershowitz

Harvard University

Pierre
15 September 2007 at 15:17

The occupation of Palestine can only accurately be described as a cancer.

Perhaps history provides a more accurate insight than first envisioned.

Amihai
15 September 2007 at 15:20

The following should also be of much interest to the serious critique,

From Jeffrey Herf & Andrei Markovits

Accusations of powerful Jews behind the scenes are part of the most dangerous traditions of modern anti-semitism. So it is with dismay that we read John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s ‘The Israel Lobby’. We have known and respected John Mearsheimer for over twenty years, which makes the essay all the more unsettling.

First, it is not true that the American relationship with Israel has been ‘the centrepiece of US Middle Eastern policy’. That centrepiece has been and remains access to oil for the United States and for the global economy. As it became apparent during the 1960s that Israel was not merely the only democracy in the region but also a supporter of the West in the Cold War, the American relationship intensified. At that point, support for Israel, which had been strongest among liberals who supported a Jewish state in the wake of the Holocaust, expanded to include the previously less than enthusiastic military and diplomatic foreign policy establishment, some of which was deeply hostile to Israel and suspicious of Jews, to put it mildly. This was not due to the efforts of the Jewish Lobby or the power of the five million Jews (in a country of almost 300 million). It was due to an assessment of American national interest made by an overwhelmingly non-Jewish political and military establishment long before Christian fundamentalism became a factor in the Republican Party. It coincided with increasingly close ties with the Saudi regime.

Second, it is not true that the United States went to war in Iraq because of the pressure of a Jewish Lobby. Even if the key decision makers were Jews, this would not prove the point about the Jewish Lobby. As it happens, the primary advisers and war planners for Bush were Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell and Rice and the entirely non-Jewish military leadership, not the usual suspects now trotted out by those peddling stories about Jewish power behind the scenes. Whatever Israel or its supporters in the US may or may not have wanted, American and British leaders decided to go to war for reasons grounded in their own interpretation of their respective national interests. Saddam Hussein stunned and surprised his own military leaders three months before the US and Britain invaded by revealing to them that Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction. There were many officials in London and Washington – or Berlin and Paris, for that matter – who would have been just as surprised.

One need not think the decision to go to war was the correct one to remember that it was not motivated by concerns about Israel’s national security. One need not agree that oil below the ground and dictatorship above it posed an immediate threat to recall that British and American (as well as other Western) leaders believed that Saddam with weapons of mass destruction in years to come would have posed a threat to the other Arab oil-producing states as much as to Israel. Mearsheimer and Walt’s realism ignores this conventional threat in the minds of American and British policymakers.

Third, while much opinion in the Arab and Islamic world has rejected the presence of a Jewish state in its midst, anti-Americanism, hatred of Europe (including Britain) and of liberal modernity in general would exist if Israel was not there. Mearsheimer and Walt stand in a long tradition of ‘realist’ political scientists known for naivety regarding the power and import of ideological fanaticism in international affairs. This naivety is the reason that radical Islam and the enduring crises of modernisation in the region that produced it receive hardly a word in their long attack.

Fourth, American Jewish citizens have a right to express their views without being charged with placing the interests of Israel ahead of those of the US. Mearsheimer and Walt’s attack appears eight years after the terrorist war against the West declared by Osama Bin Laden; six years after Ehud Barak offered a compromise plan to end the conflict and occupation of the West Bank, and Yassir Arafat responded with a terrorist campaign of his own; after countless terrorist attacks all over the world by al-Qaida and its sympathisers, including the London Underground bombings; after repeated acts of terrorist barbarism in Iraq by radical Islamists; after the declaration by the Iranian president that Israel should be wiped out and that the Holocaust was a myth; and, most recently, after the world’s first electoral victory with a solid majority won by an openly anti-semitic terrorist organisation, Hamas. Mearsheimer and Walt further ignore that all of this happened also after Israel withdrew from Lebanon, offered the Barak plan, retaliated to the terrorist campaign as any state – including Britain or the United States – would, accepted the principle of a Palestinian state and thus agreed to withdraw from over 90 per cent of the West Bank, and then withdrew completely from Gaza. If the Palestinians had responded to these offers of a compromise peace, they would perhaps have had a functioning state before radical Islam came to dominate their politics. It was radical Islamist and secular Palestinian militants, not the Jewish Lobby, that destroyed prospects for a compromise settlement.

If the US concluded that it no longer had a vital interest in the continued survival of the only democracy in the Middle East, those now attacking Western modernity might conclude that the Americans could be convinced that the defence of Europe – and Britain – was also not in the American interest.

Jeffrey Herf & Andrei Markovits

University of Maryland & University of Michigan

Amihai
15 September 2007 at 15:30

Where, Eartoground, has Ariel Sharon said the following thing? Would you share it with us, and if you can not, why write such nonsensical stuff? "Sharon himself bragged that it was Israel holding the US dog's tail, not the other way round. And that US congressman and presidential candidates must run the AIPAC gauntlet, there is no doubt".

Pencils
15 September 2007 at 18:16

NadavKatz - sorry, that's not quite clear - could you expand on your views a bit?

el-jefe
15 September 2007 at 19:42

Alan Dershowitz is the right one to speak about scholarly misconduct. His own 'scholarly' pretences were laid to rest in this debate by Norman Finkelstein:

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/09/24/1730205

(Dershowitz's reference to Orwell's 'turnspeak' [sic] never fails to crack me up. On the subject also don't miss Alexander Cockburn's illuminating piece in The Nation, "Alan Dershowitz, Plagiarist" http://www.thenation.com/docprem.mhtml?i=20031013&s=cockburn)

That this man should retain his position in one of America's most prestigious institution despite being exposed on Live TV, and instead he should question the scholarly bona fides of two of America's respected scholars -- is that not in itself proof of the power of the lobby?

p.s. If someone thinks this is a Left-Right issue, Dershowitz's scholarly misconducts have also been noted on the right. See for example: http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.840/article_det...

fanonite
15 September 2007 at 19:59

My apologies to Andrew Stephen for misidentifying the Gaffney in question. Andrew is referring to Hank Gaffney, whereas I thought it was Frank Gaffney he was talking about.

I still am not sure what makes Martin Indyk, head of the hawkish Saban Centre, "a remarkably level-headed and moderate representative of the Israel lobby"? Are you not aware of its role in selling the Iraq war? Have you not heard of Kenneth Pollack and his famous 'Threatening Storm'? Have you no recollection of Indyk's statements on CNN during Israel's 2006 invasion of Lebanon?

Otherwise you have done a superb job, and once again, my apologies for the intemperate response earlier.

M.I.A

Amihai
15 September 2007 at 20:13

Yet, another interesting observation, this one from Mr. Adam Glantz

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s piece (LRB, 23 March) boils down to a simple argument, despite copious circumstantial detail and politically correct evasiveness. The ‘Israel Lobby’, spearheaded by AIPAC, is a coterie of Jews, neo-conservatives and Christian Zionists that dominates US foreign policy. It achieves this through the strategic activity of its leaders and its ability to deflect criticism with accusations of anti-semitism.

This argument rests on the belief that a small clique can achieve hegemony over an entity as complex as the US government. AIPAC commands great resources, but its reputation for untrammelled dominance is grossly overstated. There are plenty of countervailing centres of power, such as paleoconservatives, Arab and Islamic advocacy groups (e.g. CAIR) and the diplomatic establishment. A more powerful explanation for the influence of the ‘Lobby’ is that its values command genuine support among the American public. According to a February 2006 Gallup poll, 59 per cent of Americans express strong support for Israel. This figure includes 77 per cent of Republicans, but also half of all Democrats. Far from being the result of unschooled myths and stereotypes, support for Israel is higher among people who follow international events than among those who don’t (i.e. 66 per cent v. 59 per cent).

In addition, reducing American (and Western) conflict with Islam to the issue of Israel obscures more than it reveals. It fails to explain anti-Western Islamicist movements in places as far from Israel as Algeria and the Philippines. It refuses to examine instances when the US, on its own merits, trampled on Muslim self-esteem (in Iran from 1953 to 1979, in Lebanon in 1958), and when non-‘Lobby’ Americans may have had personal axes to grind in the Middle East (e.g. the Bush family in Iraq). Mearsheimer and Walt don’t consider the way that Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf sheikhdoms justify their own autocratic privileges by bankrolling extremism against Israel, or the reasons young European Muslims respond to discrimination in their host societies with anger not at white Europeans, but at a country thousands of miles away. Could it be that vote-seeking European leftists and Saudi-funded Islamic clerics are amplifying the conflict in the Middle East into a transnational obsession? The violence following the publication of Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad in late 2005 may be instructive in this regard: though touching a real nerve, it was widely recognised that particular groups and countries were prolonging the outrage for their own benefit. Josef Joffe argued in Foreign Policy last year that ‘far from creating tensions, Israel actually contains more antagonisms than it causes.’ The USA may very well be purchasing world stability at a bargain through its alliance with Israel.

Perhaps hardest to swallow is Mearsheimer and Walt’s moralising tone. They present themselves as hard-headed realists dispassionately guarding America’s national interest, which is surprisingly not compromised by nuclear weapons in North Korean or Iranian hands. They then catalogue Israel’s moral flaws, refusing to give equal time to Palestinian extremism, maximalism and truculence. We are left with the impression that Israel’s founding and post-1967 expansion were gratuitous sins, while the refusal of the Palestinians to compromise in the 1930s or their current cult of violence are (presumably) natural responses, fixed and unalterable. Having made this point, the authors presume to suggest that a more restrained US policy will be good for Israel. This is probably a display of monumental presumptuousness, but I’ll give the authors more credit than they give Israel and chalk it up to sheer myopia.

Adam Glantz Herndon, Virginia

Ergo
15 September 2007 at 20:54

Nadav Katz, whom do you think you are kidding? You yourself ominously hinted that a poster on a related NS article questioning Israel's actions might be perceived as an anti-Semite. It seemed threatening to me.

As for Alan Dershowitz, he has been so discredited

in his vindictive and unprofessional behavior towards Finkelstein and on other issues that most knowledgeable people would check the time of day were he to give his opinion on it.

Ergo
15 September 2007 at 22:12

Mr Katz, I can't remember where I read that Sharon boasted he was the lead and US the sidekick and in terms which I used above involving dogs and tails, but I will report when and if I can confirm it. But while we are on the subject of Sharon, and I don't think you want to be on that subject, maybe you can refute as "silly" the many quotes attributed to him reviling not only Palestinians but what Jews traditionally were in his opinion - peaceful, reasonable and human. I refer you to the interview by Amos Oz originally published in the Israeli daily Davar, 17 Dec. 1982. But maybe it's all a hoax, like the accusations concerning his role in Sabra and Shatilla 1982, the Jenin refugee camp and the US part in the cover-up. Israel has been betrayed by its own leaders and knee-jerk

defensiveness by people like you help to insure it will continue to be.

MF 16 September 2007 at 02:59

What Mearsheimer and Walt won't tell you, because it blows their argument right out of the water, is that the

PM Sharon personally lobbied Bush NOT to invade Iraq. This story has been confirmed by former State Department official Lawrence Wilkerson. After all, why would Israel want to turn Iraq over to Shiite extremists?

Who says the Iraq war was good for Israel? Paul Wolfowitz? Who appointed him spokesman for the Jewish and pro-Israel communities? The truth be told, Wolfowitz has always been closer to the Arabs!

Amihai
16 September 2007 at 05:57

The following letter from Robert Pfaltzgraff sheds more light on the authors of the book reviewed:

Having read John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s extensive writings in international relations theory, I assumed that, as realists or neo-realists, they attached primacy to the international setting in shaping foreign policy choices. According to such theory, states act in accordance with national interests which are shaped by the outside world and in response to threats within an anarchical international system and society. If this is the case, their thesis about the alleged influence of the Israeli Lobby on US foreign policy contradicts the essential tenet of the theory on which they have in large part constructed their academic reputations.

However, I have a more immediate concern. The authors allege that ‘over the past 25 years, pro-Israel forces have established a commanding presence’ at US think-tanks, and give a list that includes the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis. The basis on which the authors make this assertion escapes me. We have undertaken studies of US policy towards the Gulf States as well as Israel and other countries in and around the Middle East. To the extent that such studies support Israel or any other states in the region, this is the result of an independent analysis of US needs and interests. If Mearsheimer and Walt had taken the time to interview me or any of my colleagues, they could easily have discovered this.

Robert Pfaltzgraff

Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Amihai
16 September 2007 at 06:00

In response to Robert Pfaltzgraff's letter who claims that "if Mearsheimer and Walt had taken the time to interview me or any of my colleagues, they could easily have discovered this", what were the authors motives for not wishing to inverview him........?

Joe Feld
16 September 2007 at 09:41

I apologise for being three days late. The 13th and 14th were the Hebrew New Year and 15th was the Sabbath. I recall very clearly that in the run up to the War in Iraq, Western intelligence agencies all agreed Iraq was the real danger, while Israel made it clear the only real threat was Iran. Israel was probably the only friend of the US that did not suport the invasion of Iraq.

The suggestion that no senator or congressman could afford to criricise Israel is also unrealistic. Jewish voters are a significant factor in a few states like New York, Florida, California. The grassroots support for Israel comes from major Protestant churches for whom Israel is theologically imporant, and from mainstream Americans who identify with Israel because they see Israel's founding as reflecting the American 'pioneer spirit' and democracy in a part of the world where democracy is not the rule.

It is probably also fair to say that many Americans of a certain age feel some guilt about the way America closed her doors of Jews trying to flee from Nazism. America's quota system for immigrants was clearly intended to stop the flow of Eastern Europeans at the turn of the Twentrieth Century.

Amihai
16 September 2007 at 10:19

Joe Feld writes, correctly, that "it is probably also fair to say that many Americans of a certain age feel some guilt about the way America closed her doors of Jews trying to flee from Nazism. America's quota system for immigrants was clearly intended to stop the flow of Eastern Europeans at the turn of the Twentieth Century".

My questions to you, Britons, is: Have any guilt feelings for stopping Jewish refugees fleeing Nazism from entering their ancestral homeland of Eretz Israel (Land of Israel) and as a result have been slaughtered? Do you, Britons, have any guilt feelings for stopping Jewish refugees fleeing Europe after the Second World War, hoping to put their lives together in Eretz Israel but instead found the gates to their historic homeland closed, guarded by British troops who placed them in concentration camps in Cyprus or sent them back to Europe, the same place that had set out to exterminate them in mass in the first place?

Reading the attitude towards the Jewish people in some "socialist" and other "enlightned" British circles in publications such as the Guardian, the New Statesman and the London Review of Books it appears that the New-Socialism trend carries no guilt feelings what-so-ever, none!

Pencils
16 September 2007 at 10:32

The point about the Israel lobby is that if Robert Pfaltzgraff, Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis, Cambridge, Massachusetts. had said otherwise he would become just plain Robert Platzgraff. As Carl Jones pointed out 'Israel lobby' is a euphemism for a fascist propaganda and coercion organisation which will destroy any public figure - with slander, innuendo, blackmail, financial assistance to any rivals - who criticises Israel, or for that matter anyone who pretend that this coercion machine exists. So how can policy analysts make realistic assessments of US interests when there is one area of those interests - the activities, both inside and outside the US, of a foreign power - where they must always say 'this is a good thing' or commit professional suicide. This is a ' bad thing' even for US elite interests (which is all that policy analysts are interested in). Recent history has shown several congress members destroyed by the lobby, which evidences further that US politicians must now serve Israel or fail. While no-one seriously believes that any US politician could be elected if he/she had the interests of the people rather than the elites at heart, it is proving increasingly too much to swallow that these politicians must also serve foreign elites. And if anything goes disastrously wrong, who will be the scapegoat? Not the well-connected spivs of the Israel lobby, but average American Jews. Claims that Israel advocated against the invasion of Iraq seem designed to preempt exactly that scapegoating, though in this case it would not be scapegoating - for the lobby, not the Jews. Israel has increasingly little to do with Judaism; as the recent Nazi activities among Russian immigrants have vividly illustrated recently, much of the so-called Jewish population has no link to or love for Judaism, and in effect all the laws that give preferential treatment to jews - in land and property rights for instance - actually favour non-Arabs rather than Jews. Israel has ceased to be a ' jewish state' (which was bad enough) and become an anti-Arab state, and an American mafia spiv embezzlement, extortion and arms-dealing operation, which has got so out of hand it is threatening to de-stabilise the home base, the US itself.

Amihai
16 September 2007 at 11:31

Yes, It's Anti-Semitic

By Eliot A. Cohen

Academic papers posted on a Harvard Web site don't normally attract enthusiastic praise from prominent white supremacists. But John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" has won David Duke's endorsement as "a modern Declaration of American Independence" and a vindication of the ex-Klansman's earlier work, presumably including his pathbreaking book, "Jewish Supremacism."

Walt and Mearsheimer contend that American national security dictates distancing ourselves from the state of Israel; that U.S. support for Israel has led to such disasters as America's status as the No. 1 target for Islamic terrorists; and that such an otherwise inexplicable departure from good sense can be accounted for only by the power of "The Lobby" (their capitalization), an overwhelmingly Jewish force abetted by some Christian evangelicals and a gentile neocon collaborator or two, who have hijacked American foreign policy and controlled it for decades.

One of Mearsheimer's University of Chicago colleagues has characterized this as "piss-poor, monocausal social science." It is indeed a wretched piece of scholarship. Israeli citizenship rests "on the principle of blood kinship," it says, and yet the country has a million non-Jewish citizens who vote. Osama bin Laden's grievance with the United States begins with Israel, it says -- but in fact his 1998 fatwa declaring war against this country began by denouncing the U.S. presence in Saudi Arabia and the suffering of the people of Iraq. "Other ethnic lobbies can only dream of having the political muscle" The Lobby has -- news to anyone advocating lifting the embargo on Fidel Castro's Cuba. The Iraq war stemmed from The Lobby's conception of Israel's interest -- yet, oddly, the war attracted the support of anti-Israel intellectuals such as Christopher Hitchens and mainstream publications such as The Economist. America's anti-Iran policy reflects the dictates of The Lobby -- but how to explain Europe's equally strong opposition to Iranian nuclear ambitions?

Oddly, these international relations realists -- who in their more normal academic lives declare that state interests determine policy, and domestic politics matters little -- have discovered the one case in which domestic politics has, for decades, determined the policy of the world's greatest state. Their theories proclaim the importance of power, not ideals, yet they abhor the thought of allying with the strongest military and most vibrant economy in the Middle East. Reporting persecution, they have declared that they could not publish their work in the United States, but they have neglected to name the academic journals that turned them down.

Inept, even kooky academic work, then, but is it anti-Semitic? If by anti-Semitism one means obsessive and irrationally hostile beliefs about Jews; if one accuses them of disloyalty, subversion or treachery, of having occult powers and of participating in secret combinations that manipulate institutions and governments; if one systematically selects everything unfair, ugly or wrong about Jews as individuals or a group and equally systematically suppresses any exculpatory information -- why, yes, this paper is anti-Semitic.

Mearsheimer and Walt conceive of The Lobby as a conspiracy between the Washington Times and the New York Times, the Democratic-leaning Brookings Institution and Republican-leaning American Enterprise Institute, architects of the Oslo accords and their most vigorous opponents. In this world Douglas Feith manipulates Don Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney takes orders from Richard Perle. They dwell on public figures with Jewish names and take repeated shots at conservative Christians (acceptable subjects for prejudice in intellectual circles), but they never ask why a Sen. John McCain today or, in earlier years, a rough-hewn labor leader such as George Meany declared themselves friends of Israel.

The authors dismiss or ignore past Arab threats to exterminate Israel, as well as the sewer of anti-Semitic literature that pollutes public discourse in the Arab world today. The most recent calls by Iran's fanatical -- and nuclear weapons-hungry -- president for Israel to be "wiped off the map" they brush aside as insignificant. There is nothing here about the millions of dollars that Saudi Arabia has poured into lobbying and academic institutions, or the wealth of Islamic studies programs on American campuses, though they note with suspicion some 130 Jewish studies programs on those campuses. West Bank settlements get attention; terrorist butchery of civilians on buses or in shopping malls does not. To dispute their view of Israel is not to differ about policy but to act as a foreign agent.

If this sounds personal, it is, although I am only a footnote target for Mearsheimer and Walt. I am a public intellectual and a proud Jew; sympathetic to Israel and extensively engaged in our nation's military affairs; vaguely conservative and occasionally hawkish. In a week my family will celebrate Passover with my oldest son -- the third generation to serve as an officer in the United States Army. He will be home on leave from the bomb-strewn streets of Baghdad. The patch on his shoulder is the same flag that flies on my porch.

Other supposed members of "The Lobby" also have children in military service. Impugning their patriotism or mine is not scholarship or policy advocacy. It is merely, and unforgivably, bigotry.

The writer is a professor at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies.

Pencils
16 September 2007 at 15:58

The author of the above letter is a prominent neocon, Israel advocate and associate of the Bush/Cheney gang. He was a prominent advocate of the Iraq war - so would we take his word for anything else? Can that be considered an impartial

assessment? The lies and distortions in Cohen's letter are too obvious and too stupid to be worth refuting. The fact that he is a professor at John Hopkins university says more about the corruption of American academia...

Joe Feld
16 September 2007 at 16:06

It's good to hear from a Johns Hopkins Professor. The only two top rank American univesities that do not take money from Arab governments or Arab foundations for their Middle Eastern Studies departmens are Princeton and Johns Hopkins.

Amihai
16 September 2007 at 16:16

It is interesting that all that "Pencils" can say about the argument forwarded by people above is attacking them in person instead of addressing their arguments!

One such personal attack is being "neocon". Well, may I suggest that "Pencils" is a neo-Socialist, that is one who attempts to harmonize supposed Socialism with Islamism and/or anti-Jewish racism.

So, all the neo-Socialists out there, we know who you are and you really don't need to respond to this post; instead I suggest you listen to what some knowledgable and bright people above have to say about the "Israel Lobby", this new addition of the Jewish Cabal.

Amihai
16 September 2007 at 16:18

I am sorry, it should be read: "this new edition of the Jewish Cabal.

Joe Feld
16 September 2007 at 18:11

Dear Pencils,

Whose side are you on? The real corruption of American academe is that almost all Middle Eastern Studies departments are beholden to 'the Arab Lobby' for part of their financing. Bernard Lewis at Princeton and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins are the most 'Independent Academic Voices' in America. Its all the more amazing that most top American university presidents have publicly condemned the UCU's proposed academic boycott of Israel.

Pierre
16 September 2007 at 19:03

It's ironic , the victims of one Holocaust initiate and perpetuate another.

Amihai
16 September 2007 at 19:04

The 'Israel Lobby' Myth

By George P. Shultz

Israel is a free, democratic, open, and relentlessly self-analytical place. To hear harsh criticism of Israel's policies and leaders, listen to the Israelis. So questioning Israel for its actions is legitimate, but lies are something else. Throughout human history, they have been used not only to vilify but to establish a basis for cruel and inhuman acts. The catalog of lies about Jews is long and astonishingly crude, matched only by the suffering that has followed their promulgation.

Defaming the Jews by disputing their rightful place among the peoples of the world has been a long-running, well-documented, and disgraceful series of episodes across history. Again and again a time has come when legitimate criticism slips across an invisible line into what might be called the "badlands," a place where those who should be regarded as worthy adversaries in debate are turned into scapegoats, targets, all-purpose objects of blame.

In America, we protect all speech, even the most hurtful lies. We allow a virtual free-for-all by which laws are adopted, enforced, and interpreted. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent yearly to influence this process; thousands of groups vie for influence. Among these are Jewish groups that have come under renewed criticism for being part of an all-powerful "Israel lobby," most notably in a book published this week by Profs. Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer.

Jewish groups are influential. They also largely agree that the United States should support Israel. But the notion that they have anything like a uniform agenda and that U.S. policy in Israel and the Middle East is the result of this influence is simply wrong.

One choice. Some critics seem overly impressed with the way of thinking that says to itself, "Since there is a huge Arab Islamic world out there with all the oil, and it is opposed to this tiny little Israel with no natural resources, then realistically the United States has to be on the Arab side and against Israel on every issue, and since this isn't the case, there must be some underhanded Jewish plot at work." This is a conspiracy theory, pure and simple.

Another tried and true method for damaging the well-being and security of the Jewish people and the State of Israel is a dangerously false analogy. Witness former President Jimmy Carter's book Palestine—Peace Not Apartheid. Here the association on the one hand is between Israel's existentially threatened position and the measures it has taken to protect its population from terrorist attacks, driven by an ideology bent on the complete eradication of the State of Israel, and, on the other, the racist oppression of South Africa's black population by the white Boer regime.

The tendency of mind that lies behind such repulsive analogies remains and is reinforced by the former president's views, spread across his book, which come down on the anti-Israel side of every case. These false analogies stir up and lend legitimacy to more widely based movements that take the same dangerous direction.

Anyone who thinks that Jewish groups constitute a homogeneous "lobby" ought to spend some time dealing with them. For example, my decision to open a dialogue with Yasser Arafat after he met certain conditions evoked a wide spectrum of responses from the government of Israel, its political parties, and American Jewish groups who weighed in on one side or the other. Other examples in which the United States rejected Israel's view of an issue, or the view of the American Jewish community, include the sale of arms to Saudi Arabia and President Reagan's decision to go to the cemetery at Bitburg, Germany.

The United States supports Israel not because of favoritism based on political pressure or influence but because the American people, and their leaders, say that supporting Israel is politically sound and morally just.

We are a great nation. Mostly, we make good decisions. We are not babes in the woods. We act in our own interests. And when we mistakenly conclude from time to time—as we will—that an action or policy is in America's interest, we must take responsibility for the mistake.

So, on every level, those who blame Israel and its Jewish supporters for U.S. policies they do not support are wrong. They are wrong because, to begin with, support for Israel is in our best interests. They are also wrong because Israel and its supporters have the right to try to influence U.S. policy. And they are wrong because the U.S. government is responsible for the policies it adopts, not any other state or any of the myriad lobbies and groups that battle daily—sometimes with lies—to win America's support.

George Shultz was secretary of state from 1982 to 1989. This is excerpted from his introduction to The Deadliest Lies: The Israel Lobby and the Myth of Jewish Control by Abraham Foxman (Palgrave Macmillan).

Pencils
16 September 2007 at 19:52

Nadavkatz -I don't respond to Cohen's 'arguments' because they are not arguments but soundbite propaganda lies - their only force is that they are backed up by a massively funded machine to ensure they are constantly repeated in the media. Say it often enough and loud enough.

I don't respond to your own arguments because, apart from some short ones, I don't read them.

Amihai
16 September 2007 at 20:03

"Pencils" does not respond to arguments by people whose last names are Cohen and Katz....!!! And as I recall, Friedman and Dershowitz and other such people with such names.....!!!

Yes, this is our very "Penciles", the neo-Socialist guard here.

Pencils
16 September 2007 at 21:07

Nadav Katz - Grow up! but at least that one was short.

Carl Jones
16 September 2007 at 22:00

I can`t believe some of the stuff above, so lets be real. I`m not a Jew hater, I`m not anti semitic. But if you want to undrestand todays context, you must understand the past context. Much of what I`m about to say, has a lot to do with stopping verious elites from abusing their own people. British soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are fighting corporate wars...I don`t see them removing Mr Mugabe!!

Hitler was an illigitimate Jew conceived in the Rothschild masion in Geneva. Hitler was supported by the Rothschilds by second and third parties. A typical Rothschild practice. Hitler came to the UK in 12/13 and spent about a year, maybe two here. He spent some time in Tavistock in Devon where he was prepared for his future role. He faught in the First World war and was captured twice. Normally this would result in a bullet in the head, but British SIS saved his life on both occasions...he had future business to attend to.

The elite Western families (inc Bush family) built up the Germany industrial war machine. Hitler was installed and so began the Second World War...all by design. The head of German military intelligence informed certain European nations not to enter the war because Britain would win. Spain is an excellent example, politically aligned and deeply in debt to Germany, but did not enter the war. Even when the British army was on its back in Dunkirk. Hitler allowed their escape, because the war was not supposed to end then.

There were many attempts on Hitlers life by his own military, they all failed...I wonder why. Even Hess who was speaking for many was taken away.

The only aspect that might not of been accounted for was the success of the Russian front and this led to the late entry of the US.

The war made a fortune for the already stinking rich elite, it allowed the creation of the EU (google Bilderberg), the occupation of Germany. What we don`t know, was the holocaust part of the brief. I will add that none of the war time leaders mentions anything that could be understood as the holocaust in their post war writings. The Red Cross also produced a huge post war report and that also failed to mention any event which could resemble the holocaust.

This is elites abusing their peoples. In a recent poll, many Israeli`s want Israel to join the EU...protection from their own elite/US? Others would like to migrate to Europe...not the US, but Europe!!

This elite constructed war also leads to the creation of the Israeli state with the help of Rothschild funds.

Like Bush today, Hitler was surrounded by people who knew the grand plan and like Saddam emerging from his hole, so did Hitler, both were taken way for sweet retirement.

I believe the nuts and bolts of the above and if the holocaust happened to the degree which is relentlessly peddled by the Jewish controlled US/UK media. Then you can see just how much elite abuse is going on Iraq now stands at 2.2 million murdered Iraqi`s. The CIA/MI6 assisted in the slaughter of a million Indonesians in the 60`s "New Rulers of the World" by John Pilger Verso.

My real fear, is that Isreal will suffer a major attack by the Western elite and that this will be blamed on the Muslim world/Iran.

The elite doesn`t care for politics that much, they simply see it as a tool of control. Both politicians and the media promote constructs like Iraq and the sham War on terror and you know what, its not the US who`s running the show, no, its the elite through MI6, they run the CIA and Mossad...this is your NWO!

You will note that I`ve warned about an attack on Isreal, by doing this, I have a little bit of hope that such an attack will be called off, some hope.

Checkout the picture of Bush and Blair on the Newstatesman front cover. The smirking president, this was taken a second or two after Bush said sorry for all the mistakes in Iraq...look, he laughing at you, me and you over there!

Pencils
16 September 2007 at 22:21

Carl Jones - You've made some good points before and there's much of the above that has some truth in it, but you're getting dangerously near Space Lizard territory now, and your bit on the holocaust just serves to discredit all your good points - I don't know if it's what you intended but it could be interpreted as holocaust denial, which I find as abhorrent as the attempt to associate the holocaust solely with the jews. I believe you to be wrong about the postwar writings of the war leaders, and I've never heard that about the Red Cross report - but if true, it must be because they didn't deal with the concentration camp survivors or something like that. Also, I've never heard that about Hitler being born in the Rothschild mansion - any source for that?

Pencils
17 September 2007 at 01:59

Pierre - the NadavKatz committee are giving Dershowitz a good run for his money in the Goebbels tribute act league.

dennyboo
17 September 2007 at 04:19

Gee! Here's a question few attempt to answer except the Jews.

Why have the Jews been so disliked by Asians, Africans Europeans and just about any other ethnic group or society which has had the pleasure of their live-in company?

is it just a personality thing? Or are we gentiles all so inferior intellectually or spiritually that we just envy them their success and power with regard to anything they take a liking to?

That's the response implied in most answers offered by Jews.

I'd like to benefit from a little feedback from those who have an opinion on the subject.

Amihai
17 September 2007 at 05:30

Dennyboo, you see, it is not politically correct yet, only three generations after the Jewish Holocaust, to come out and state one's anti-Semitic attitude, hence a substitute: It could be "anti-Zionism", "anti-Israel", "anti-Israeli policies", "anti-occupation", etc. All of these euphemisms represent the national movement of the Jewish people, the most important national institution of this people during the 20th and 21st centuries, and the efforts the Jewish people as a people through its nation-state, the Jewish state of Israel, have made to protect themselves.

No other people, no other ethnic and national group, no other race has been subjected to such an obsessive relentless demonizing attack, without any proportion to the size of Israel - seven million people located in as small a country as Wales, Slovenia or New Jersey - and its importance in world affairs, which can only be described as an anti-Jewish racism.

Some have attempted to take their supposed Socialist outlook on world affairs and harmonize it with Islamism and/or anti-Jewish racism, hence advancing the concept of neo-Socialism, one that has taken hold in "enlightened" and "progressive" circles, largely in academe, and is promoted in and by publications such as the Guardian, the New Statesman and the London Review of Books.

I hope we, Jews, will continue to recognize this new wave for what it really is and will know how to resist it: By exposing it and the people who subscribe and promote anti-Jewish racism for what they are: Racists.

Pencils
17 September 2007 at 09:58

Dennyboo - That sounds like a possible trap that could give NadavKatz scope to depict us as racists, but I'll answer in a roundabout way (though I disagree, obviously, that Jews have always been disliked or are still): read Hannah Arendt's book 'the Origins of Totalitarianism' - I disagree with much of the direction of her thought but it's all interesting especially the long chapter ' the Origins of antisemitism' which is often quoted and is the best answer I can think of to your question above - she shows that there were often good reasons for the dislike of Jews in Europe pre-19th century, whether or not the Jews had any choice about their situation. Israel Shahak's book 'Jewish History, Jewish Religion' is shorter and more correct than Arendt and is also essential, as for modern times is Norman Finkelstein's 'the Holocaust Industry' and Peter Novick's 'the Holocaust in American Life'. Novick is roughly in agreement with the author Philip Roth that the only belief that American Jews grow up with is that they are special and superior: that could get up people's noses. All these writers are Jews, by the way. Another jewish writer Kinky Friedman ( amusing in his early books but reactionary and ultimately obnoxious) has a phrase that sums up the likes of NadavKatz perfectly - " a black belt in Jewish whining".

I dispute that Jews were always disliked in the Muslim world. I know that NadavKatz has a list of massacre he likes to roll out on every occasion, but the human race has a very brutal history and massacres and persecutions for any excuse have been our common history; the treatment of the Jews in medieval times compares very favourably with the treatmant of left-handed people, redheads, women, homosexual, and any group following any variation from whatever the dominant strain was of any religion in any area. There is, much to the chagrin of the zionists, still a large and well-integrated jewish population in Iran. And remember that, no matter how things turned out, the nazis' primary targets for extermination were the slavs and the communists ( and the disabled) not the Jews. The original intention was to 'evict' the jews, the extermination being an improvisation due to evolving circumstances - I think that is the conclusion of Christopher Browning in his 'origins of the final solution', the most up-to-date assessment, universally praised.

So I maintain if Jews are widely disliked today it is due to the success of the Israel lobby in depicting themselves as the voice of the Jews, rather than of what they are - a collection of interest groups that includes some jewish elites.

Pencils
17 September 2007 at 12:15

It is not politically correct yet, only three generations after the Jewish Holocaust, to come out and state one's anti-Semitic attitude, hence a substitute: It could be "anti-Zionism", "anti-Israel", "anti-Israeli policies", "anti-occupation", etc. All of these euphemisms represent the national movement of the Jewish people – Zionism; the most important national institution of this people during the 20th and 21st centuries – the state of Israel; and the efforts the Jewish people as a people through its nation-state, the Jewish state of Israel, has made to protect itself.

No other people, no other ethnic and national group, no other race has been subjected to such an obsessive relentless demonizing and baseless attack, without any proportion to the size of Israel - seven million people located in as small a country as Wales, Slovenia or New Jersey - and its importance in world affairs, which can only be described as an anti-Jewish racism.

Spkurious, NadvKatzes - Yawn.

Oh, and Nad... 4 times now you've posted ( twice on 2 different threads) you've posted the following quote word for word. That is very RUDE!

WE HEARD YOU THE FIRST TIME!

David Lindsay
17 September 2007 at 12:20

What is this lobby fighting for these days? How I was scorned in various Internet fora a couple of months ago for pointing out a few home truths about what Israeli society was now like. But now, to apparently universal shock yet entirely predictably, an Israeli neo-Nazi gang has been discovered.

Over half of Israeli Jews are now Sephardic, with little or no ethnic memory of the Holocaust, but rather culturally Arab, while the Israeli Arabs ordinarily so called continue to grow at a far healthier rate than do the ageing, dying Ashkenazi Zionists.

Put these two factors together, and Israel is simply reverting to membership of a much older, deeper and wider Levantine society of Jewish, Christian, Muslim and Druze Arabs, with its capital (insofar as it has one) at Damascus; Greater Syria, if you will. That, in turn, will be a very significant and welcome force for pan-Arabism against "political Islam".

The Ashkenazim could prevent this by the simple expedient of having children. They are not doing so, and they are not going to do so. Indeed, the single most common name for new born baby boys within Israel's pre-1967 borders is now Muhammad.

Is there an alternative? Well, if it can be so described, then it has now made itself abundantly clear. The Law of Return, the touchstone of Zionism, is flooding Israel with resolutely Russian-speaking pork sausage munchers of the most tenuous Jewishness, who are at best Christians, and in some cases violent Nazis. This is impossible to arrest without repealing the Law of Return.

(On the ever-expanding lists of Book That I Will Write Eventually is a study of the post-War political impact, right up to the present day, of each of the foreign divisions of the SS and Waffen SS, even leaving aside the persistent rumours of British and American divisions, some of whose members would presumably still be alive. Of course, I'll first have to teach myself to read German properly.)

Thus is dying the Zionist project, not dramatically as a result of an Iranian or Iraqi nuking, but slowly, though determinedly and irreversibly. The question now is who will inherit the spoils. The little Muhammads? Or the Little Hitlers? It will be one or the other.

I know which I'd prefer, and I know which anyone who still thinks that the Holocaust is important ought to prefer. Do they? If so, then they must repeal the Law of Return, thereby consigning Zionism to the history books.

mitchy
17 September 2007 at 12:48

No, Harvey, where is says Zionists, read Zionists, not Jews. I have plenty of courage in my own convictions, I say what I mean. However, I think you might be speaking through a hole in your bahookies there. As it happens I'm Jewish myself, but dont subscribe to Zionist thinking - there is a difference. Suggest you read some Chomsky or Sacco if clarity is needed.

Pencils
17 September 2007 at 13:01

Well said David Lindsay! I hope it won't be considered rude if I second-guess NadavKatz response to your excellent post. I predict that if I don't beat him to it NadavKatz will reply:

Me, I say to Nad again:

WE HEARD YOU THE FIRST TIME!

Amihai
17 September 2007 at 13:50

Professor Alan Dershowitz, Harvard University

Professor Jeffrey Hert, University of Maryland

Professor Andrei Markovits, University of Michigan

Professor Robert Pfaltzgraff, Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis

Professor Eliot Cohen, Johns Hopkins University

Mr. George P. Shultz, former US Secretary of State

These are some of the people who expressed their opinions about the subject at hand, the "Israel Lobby" or if you will the "Jewish Cabal", re-presented here at length.

Yet, all that the Neo-Socialists in this crowd can exhibit is the shallowness of their anti-Jewish racism, without even attempting to critically engage with the opinions presented here by these very esteemed minds.

Yes, this is anti-Jewish racism in action, permitted by the New Statesman in this case!!!

Pencils
17 September 2007 at 14:46

Katzy baby - your writing seems more inspired by the Caballah than the cabal.

David Lindsay
17 September 2007 at 15:04

And he doesn't answer any of my points. Israel is no longer worth lobbying either for or against, because the Zionist project is at demographic death's door, entirely of its own volition.

Anyway, the problem with claiming that "necon" is a coded way of saying "Jew" is that by no means all neocosn are Jews. We need to eduacte ourselves about what neoconservatism actually is.

Neonconservatism has no roots whatever in the mainstream political tradition of any country on earth. Even in the United States, its intellectual debts are to Max Shachtman, Leo Strauss and Ayn Rand. Shachtman tried to make Trotskyism Americanist. Meanwhile, Strauss and Rand gave life to Huey Long's prediction that America would one day produce its own Fascism, but would call it anti-Fascism.

Neoconservatives remain Marxist in their dialectical materialism; Leninist in their vanguard elitism, in their democratic centralism and in their cultivation of religious and other interests as “Useful Idiots”; Trotskyist in their entryism and in their belief in the permanent revolution; and yet also Stalinist in their desire to create the dictatorship of the victorious class (the bourgeoisie) in a superstate from which it is to be exported, including by force of arms, throughout a world in which vanguard elites owe patriotic allegiance to that superstate rather than to their own respective countries.

“Revolutionary truth” dovetails horrifically with the thought of Rand and, above all, Strauss, who, believing himself and his followers to be the elite, holds them to have a positive duty to lie to the common herd.

Then add in, first and i do not deny it, the sort of Zionism that denies the very existence of the Palestinians as a people. It would annex the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to the State of Israel, along with Lebanon south of the Litani River. And it would clear all non-Jews from Israel thus expanded: they could go to Jordan or to a northern Lebanon annexed to Syria, or they could be put to death.

But add in, secondly, a stock Irish-American saloon-bar rant against a perceived Anglophile network within the WASP elite. Neoconservatism takes this anti-British hysteria even further, demanding the wholesale Americanisation of Britain's, Canada's, Australia's and New Zealand's economic, social, cultural and political systems, though without the conferral of American citizenship, and thus without representation in Congress or the Electoral College.

So much for the Anglosphere, from which America is in any case busily detaching herself by means of the unrestricted immigration supported by the neoconservatives. That support is because they rightly recognise that there cannot be a "free" market in goods, services and capital but not in labour (or vice versa), there being nothing less conservative than capitalism.

But it is also because insistent non-English-speakers are cheap labour for the neoconservatives' financial backers, and provide an electoral base for their standard-bearing dynasty. And it is because they actively want to make America as unlike the hated Britain (and by extension Canada, Australia and New Zealand) as possible. Indeed, they want to make Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand into totally dependent carbon copies of this America purged of real or imaginary British influence.

Their definition of the Anglosphere so as to exclude the West Indies is because they deny the economic, social, cultural and political Christian heritage common to the Anglo-Celtic and the West African slave-descended peoples. That heritage includes not only their common English language (which the neoconservatives' immigration policies are doing so much to displace in the United States), but also their common blood ties. And those ties are not only in the Americas, but also here in these islands, and thus also in later settler societies.

By excluding the West African slave-descended and the Christian dimensions abroad (in American terms), the neoconservatives very deliberately exclude both the West African slave-descended and the Christian dimensions at home (in those terms), and thus also in their narrowly defined Anglosphere as remade in the image of their own racist, anti-Christian remaking of the United States.

Not that the neoconservatives have no interest in the Commonwealth countries of the Caribbean, with which so many British Citizens have such close connections. It is possible in principle for any of the Commonwealth Realms to retain or abolish the monarchy regardless of the decision of any other of them. But it is very difficult to see how any of those in the Caribbean could do so in practice if the forcible Americanisation of Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand had included (as, of course, it would have to) the abolition of the monarchy in all four of those countries.

Thus will the Commonwealth Realms and British Overseas Territories of the Caribbean be made ripe for invasion and colonisation, along with the two republics (Guyana, and Trinidad and Tobago) to which they are so intimately related. Something very similar will happen in the Pacific.

It is striking how many neoconservatives are self-hating Canadian subjects of the Crown and products of the Keynes-Beveridge settlement: David Frum, Mark Steyn, Conrad Black, Barbara Amiel, and so on. Not that Canada is the only, or even the worst, case of the closely related rise of hostility to that settlement, hostility to the Crown, and support for American neoconservative foreign policy.

Add in, thirdly, the influence of neo-orthodoxy, a mid-twentieth century movement to salvage the traditional vocabulary of Protestant theology even while surrendering to every liberal, secularising assault. As among Lutherans and Calvinists on the Continent, and as in the Anglican, Scottish Presbyterian and historic Nonconformist bodies in Britain, so also in the related "mainline" churches in the United States, neo-orthodoxy successfully sold itself as a vindication of popular orthodoxy. But it is actually ruinous of such faith, as is evident from, among much else, "mainline" churchgoers' support for neoconservatives.

And add in, fourthly, one of the two de facto schismatic Americanist bodies within the Catholic Church. For American Catholics now divide almost entirely between those who agree with the Pope about sex but not about economics, and those who agree with him about economics but not about sex. The latter are termed "liberals" and excoriated by the former, termed "conservatives".

But, in fact, they are equally far removed from the Church's position, which includes a huge amount of almost unutterably important work on how all these things are connected. The "liberals" just happen to fail to give the Papacy any credit when they are heavily dependent on its work. By contrast, the "conservatives" lionised the old Pope, lionise the new one, and simply ignore the vast amount of Papal Teaching with which they happen to disagree.

Thus, the "conservatives" are able to present themselves as more loyal to Rome than are the "liberals". In reality, both bodies believe at some level that the American Church is autonomous, and both behave exactly as if such were the case.

Those who follow the "conservative" schism are key figures in neoconservatism. They attached themselves to the radical-revisionist misappropriation of the name of Vatican II. This brought them into the same counter-cultural circles out of which neoconservatism was to emerge. It should be noted that one of the most powerful neoconservatives grew up as an ultraconservative Lutheran, became a liberal Lutheran pastor, and converted to Catholicism only when he became a neoconservative!

But do not add in Evangelical Protestantism, to which neoconservatism relates much as Irish Republicanism relates to Catholicism. In principle, they have nothing to do with each other beyond being mutually antagonistic. The upper echelons of each hold the views and persons of the other in horrified contempt.

Yet large numbers of devout Catholics have been cajoled or deceived into supporting Irish Republicanism despite its Jacobin and Marxist roots and character. And large numbers of Evangelical Protestants have been cajoled or deceived into supporting neoconservatism despite its Trotskyism, its Straussianism, its Randianism, its Zionism (serious Evangelical scholars are not "Christian Zionists"), its hatred of WASPs and Ulster Scots, its neo-orthodoxy, its Americanist pseudo-Catholicism, and its roots in the counter-culture of the 1960s and 1970s.

Such is the ideology of those who have sold themselves as the defenders of Western civilisation while actively seeking to destroy all memory of that civilisation's roots in the Biblical-Classical synthesis that is Christianity.

They have sold themselves as the West's guardians against "militant Islam" (the only kind that there can ever be, as they pointedly refuse to admit). Yet theirs was active support for that cause in 1980s Afghanistan, in Bosnia (against Europe's real age-old bulwark against Islam) and in Kosovo (likewise). It remains so in Chechnya, in Saudi Arabia and in Pakistan.

That cause has been done no end of good by the removal of one of the Arab world's two principal bulwarks against it, in Iraq. And now the neoconservatives are planning to remove the other such bulwark, in Syria. All this while actively encouraging, through the unlimited immigration without which their capitalist system cannot function, the Islamisation of the West. This whole is with a view to their re-establishment of the privileged dhimmitude that existed in Moorish Spain.

And they have sold themselves as the champions of English-speaking unity while seeking to purge America of what they see as British influence, before seeking to remake the Anglosphere (defined in racist terms) in the image of America thus purged.

In so doing, they have sought to destroy the English-speaking world's single most unifying institution. But, of course, that institution, at the head of or otherwise constitutionally related to nearly forty states and territories, is one of the world's two principal institutional expressions of Christianity.

The other such expression is its historic antagonist, but that is a small and all-but-forgotten matter now, and in any case the neoconservatives have done at least as much to subvert that, too.

Yet it is not in the United States that the neoconservatives have become most hegemonic. That dubious distinction belongs to the United Kingdom. An indivisible New Labour Project, now effectively led by David Cameron following the political death of Tony Blair, constitutes the electorally irremovable neoconservative junta trading under the names of New Labour, the Notting Hill set or Cameroons, the rising Orange Book Tendency within the Liberal Democrats, The Henry Jackson Society, the Euston Manifesto, and so forth.

All in all, it is not the use of "neocon" as an anti-Semitic epithet, but rather the very suggestion that this is the case, which is at fault.

Pencils
17 September 2007 at 17:47

Nadav Katz

And now back to the question at hand:..

Until someone has something new or interesting or even sane about the question at hand...

David Lindsay - I swore to myself that I wouldn't look at this thread for a day or two, but I'm glad I did. That was a fascinating interpretation of the situation - it's coming from a perspective that is quite alien to mine which makes it interesting, and there is much I could agree with but also much I could take odds with.

I don't by and large see religion as a positive influence but I could concede that dispatching our thousands year old cultural heritage and replacing it with Phoenician Baal and Moloch worship and child sacrifice, or whatever the neo-conservatives or neo-liberals have in mind, would not be a step forward.

And that brings me to another point: you seem to use the term neo-conservative where others, if they distinguish between the 2, use neo-liberal. Most use neocon as a quick short hand but some distinguish between the 2. Do you? And do you thing there are still traditional conservatives as opposed to neo-cons?

Also I'm confused about what you mean by neo-orthodox protestantism - do you mean the trend in protestantism to accomodate itself to changing lifestyles, to embrace all and not condemn - like sex outside marriage, gay rights etc?

I think you're right about everything but I think your framework is wrong. The neocon philosophy I see rather as a product than a cause - a product of the inevitability of capitalism to concentrate greater and greater wealth in fewer and fewer hands ( thus far Marx was correct) - all the think tanks that produce the philosophies, including the Israel lobby, are a function of this; they are courtiers, petitioners competing to sell their product which is: bullshit to bamboozle the proles and keep them from acting in their own interests. As Marx predicted capitalism has now reached into everything and every corner of the Earth and is becoming ever more concentrated - the USA is becoming an elite with a military. Fewer and fewer well-paid professionals, technicians etc will be needed in the West when their work can be done elsewhere by people who haven't been used to labour rights and living wages. What well-paid work is left in the 'First world' will concentrate around the centre. Europe and the Anglophone commonwealth are of little use any more except as military bases. So I think that if there are elites who welcome the Islamisation of Europe, it could be because it would then be easier to justify ( to the American populace to minimise opposition) military action against Europe by claiming, as people say incorrectly of the Greeks, that these are no longer the people of the history books or your ancestors.

I recall reading some of your posts before and I looked at your website - I agree with your manifesto 100% apart from the religious element, but I could live with that as long as it was tolerant of other lifestyles.

Amihai
17 September 2007 at 18:31

Professor Alan Dershowitz, Harvard University

Professor Jeffrey Hert, University of Maryland

Professor Andrei Markovits, University of Michigan

Professor Robert Pfaltzgraff, Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis

Professor Eliot Cohen, Johns Hopkins University

Mr. George P. Shultz, former US Secretary of State

These are some of the people who expressed their opinions about the subject at hand, the "Israel Lobby" or if you will the "Jewish Cabal", re-presented here at length.

Yes, this is anti-Jewish racism in action, permitted by the New Statesman in this case!!!

Carl Jones
17 September 2007 at 21:00

Second bite...lol

http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?id=7200

Pierre
17 September 2007 at 21:59

If the jews illegally occupying Palestine were to give up their racism and allow the Palestinians to return to their homes/ homeland there would' nt be any basis for the reference to the Palestinian jews as racist land theives.

Amihai
18 September 2007 at 04:42

...yet, all that the Neo-Socialists in this crowd can exhibit is the shallowness of their anti-Jewish racism, without even attempting to critically engage with the opinions presented here by these very esteemed minds!!!

Yes, this is anti-Jewish racism in action, permitted by the New Statesman in this case!!!

Tom Paine
18 September 2007 at 10:05

There are a couple of people on this thread that strike one as utterly racist. Nadav Katz you are most certainly one of them. You have utter hatred for non-Jews and you can keep repeating your verbose paranoid remarks but repetition does not make your arguments true any more than they did Goebbels'. In previous posts someone has accused you of being mad. Initially I thought his name-calling offensive but actually the more time has gone on I've become convinced they are right. If the New Statesman is permitting anti-Jewish racism - which I don't believe they are - they are allowed you more than enough space to spread your foul views. Get a job, get a life and stop boring everyone!

Amihai
18 September 2007 at 10:36

When one singles out a people, a race for constant reletless baseless attacks for the sake of demonizing that people, that race, for the sake of belittle it and eventual negating its universally accepted rights this is racism.

Without any proportion to Israel's size - that of Wales, Slovenia, New Jersey - and its importance in world affairs Israel has been targetted by certain circles of "enlightened" and "progressive" people, to the exclusion of all else to the point of calling for the elimination of the Jewish state all together.

The Jewish state of Israel is the expression of a people, of the Jewish people, to national independence. Israel has been proclaimed, 14 May 1948, based on the recognition by Britain in 1917, the League of Nations in 1920, and the UN in 1947 that the Jewish people, as all other peoples, is entitled to self-determination and statehood in its historic homeland of Eretz Israel/Palestine.

Whoever singles out Israel, the most important national symbol of a people, of a race, during the 20th and 21st centuries, the Jewish people, to be dimonized and eliminated is a racist.

Sadly, many in the left have accepted this racist attitude towards the Jewish state of Israel while also combining it with an appreciation of Islamism and supposed socialism, and obsessively spew their venom towards the national home of the Jewish people.

This is indeed anti-Jewish racism!!!

Jane Greene
18 September 2007 at 11:19

Israel was a beacon of political hope - a country where deserts were turned into farms, a place where radical political thought and social experiments played a central part. Now it is lost nation defended by fanatics on a tit for tat basis. Where 10 must pay for every Israeli life. Where no-one can accept any failings of their own.

Until people like you Katz stop pointing the finger at everyone else and consider the possibility of your own failings then this awful situation will continue. I'm sorry you feel so persecuted but get over it and start thinking about some of the things your country has done wrong too! Then amends, reconciliation and peace will surely follow.

David Lindsay
18 September 2007 at 11:19

Pencils, very many thanks.

Very broadly, neoliberalism is about economics, whereas neoconseravtism is about geopolitics. The former leads to the latter, and the latter has no rationale except the former.

No-orthodoxy, meanwhile, was a post-War movement to retain the vocabulary of calssical Protestnatims, including taht of historic Christianity generally, while effectively emptying it of any substantial content. Wrongly seen by many clergy and laity as a vindication of popular orthodoxy, it has been, and remains, enormously influential, including as I described. Both it and the Catholic element in neoconservatism tend to be ignored, but between they account for its electoral success in the United States, in particular.

The Jewish element, by contrast, is indeed why the neocons are so supportive of Islam (which, in point of fact, they are - in the former Yugoslavia, in Saudi Arabia, in Pakistan, in Chechnya, and so on). And yes, their model here is Moorish Spain, not only for Europe, but also for the increasingly Islamised America.

Or for Israel, come to that. When is Nadav Katz going to answer my simply factual points about how the Zionist project is effectively over, due to the pointed failure of the participants to reproduce? And of course, when he talks about a Jewish people, then he, like the founders of Zionism, only means the Ashkenazim, and the more-or-less secular Ashkenazim at that. There will soon be next to none of them in Israel.

So, Nadav, would you rather that it reverted to being part of the Levant? Or would you rather that it became a statelet for Russian neo-Nazis? One or other of these is going to happen. So, where have Jews been better off historically? "Greater Syria"? Or Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe? I think we all know the answer to that one.

And you can only guarantee the former rather than the latter by repealing the Law of Return. In other words, by giving up on Zionism as such. After all, Israel's secular Ashkenazi themselves obviously have done. So why should anyone else still bother with it?

davidaslindsay@hotmail.com, http://davidaslindsay.blogspot.com

Tom Paine
18 September 2007 at 11:26

Yigal Amir won and Yitzhak Rabin lost. That's all there is to it.

Pierre
18 September 2007 at 13:29

If the jews are entitled to take land from another State then equally deserving are the Rastafarian's,

A small area around Jeruselum would seem to be the most attractive for these poor people and once in they could employ ethnic cleansing to expand their area/control.

They would eventually need nuclear weapons of course in order to blackmail the rest of the World but to bad , They are special.

Pierre
18 September 2007 at 13:32

Sorry for the double post.

Robert Powell
18 September 2007 at 13:33

Look if you all stop posting then mad Nadav might go away...

Pierre
18 September 2007 at 13:42

Fine I will pass the tourch to you.

Amihai
18 September 2007 at 13:47

Jane Greene,

Thank you for your advise. I actually do not feel persecuted; I only feel some people in "progressive" and "enlightened" circles, especially in the UK attempt to persecute our people, the Jewish people, and we have no intention of letting them do so.

As for introspection, I don't think you would find a society that is as self-critical as the Jewish society in general and even more so Israeli Jews. Being part of this group, I assure you I too look at matters critically, but I refuse to be critical about my personal and my people's right to be, to exist!

And finally, I assure you, Israel is a very dynamic and creative place. I am yet to see a more dynamic and creative country in which despite all the existential threats we produce and create and contribute to human kind in nearly every endevour and every disciplin in complete disproportion to our size.

I suggest you come and visit. You'll be pleasantly surprised.

Pencils
18 September 2007 at 14:05

Robert Powell - Look if you all stop posting then mad Nadav might go away...

Yeah, I know - It's tiresome but I really grudge giving him the last word, which is what he wants; - he's not aiming his posts at us who argue with him but at undecideds who might casually peruse this -to pretend there's a debate when there is none.

That's why he rarely responds to and never really answers others' points - it's the propaganda approach favoured by all politicians in the television age ( and probably before) - ignore questions and just keep repeating your message and that's what the audience will remember, because most of them will know nothing about the subject. However most people who would seek out this site probably do know a lot, so maybe he's just trying to kill discussion, or provoke angry responses so he can provide evidence of ant-semitism to lobby groups to use against the New Statesman - that's the general strategy of the Israel lobby, an assault on democracy. I imagine he( or they) is flooding the moderators with complaints too.

I wonder if he's paid to do this, or if he's a front for a group of paid propagandist. I used to feel sure of that , because of the amount of time and effort he puts into it - he seems to be non- stop here and on the Guardian's 'Comment is Free' , and produces reams of material ( even if much of it is just recycled, copied and pasted) - but I'm increasingly coming to think that he is just very mentally ill!

Pierre
18 September 2007 at 14:07

Thats a lot to hope for but I will pass the torch to you.........................................................

Amihai
18 September 2007 at 14:15

Jane Greene,

Thank you for your advice but I really don't feel persecuted. I only observe how certain "progressive" and "enlightened" people attempt to make my people persecuted trying to harmonize supposed Socialism with Islamism and anti-Jewish racism.

I must also share with you that it will be difficult for you to find a more introspective society than Jewish society in general and Israeli Jewish society in particular. As a proud member of my people I too am critical of matters about which one should be. I refuse, however, to be critical about my personal and collective right to exist, to be.

And finally, Israelis, despite the small size that we are and despite the non-stop existential threat from our Arab neighbors, continue to maintain a very creative and dynamic society. Our people continue to produce and create in just about any discipline, in the humanities and the arts; in the social sciences; in the exact sciences, life sciences, natural sciences and technology. Indeed, I suggest you come and visit with us. You'll be pleasantly surprised.

Amihai
18 September 2007 at 14:18

Jane Greene, due to technical difficulties I have had to re-write my post to you. Both turned out to have been published. Sorry for any inconvenience. Nadav

Robert Powell
18 September 2007 at 15:00

Thanks Pierre but the torch conjures up something a bit too Nuremburg Rally for my particular political tastes...

Oops Nadav's escaped from his white jacket - and blow me if he isn't repeating himself again. Blah, blah cabal. Blah, Blah proud member. Blah, blah existential. Blah, blah liberal democracy = fascist state.

Jane Greene
18 September 2007 at 15:24

Alas Nadav I go to Israel every year to see my grandmother! I dislike it more each visit. I think the consensus is that you're a delusional propagandist. Now for god's sake go away.

Amihai
18 September 2007 at 15:46

Thank you, Jane Greene, for coming to visit with us annually. Perhaps a longer stay either at Eilat, the Dead Sea, the Upper Galilee or Jerusalem will please you? In any event, thank you again and do convey my best regards to your grandmother. Nadav

Amihai
18 September 2007 at 16:15

Well, Jane, I am so glad you come to visit with us regularly. Perhaps on your future visits you may wish to go with your grandmother to the Upper Galilee, the Western Galilee, to lake Kinneret, or rather to the Dea Sea and Eilat. These are lovely places in which to visit, relax and reflect about life. In any event, enjoy your future visits and please convey my regards to your grandmother. Nadav

Carl Jones
18 September 2007 at 18:41

Nadav,

Today I read that Israel is worried about some sort of attack from the sea...I`ve been warning of such an attack on other forums for over two years....the BBC didn`t like it so they`ve banned me as "anti-semitic...so why would a warning to protect Israeli`s be taken this way? I suppose just rumbling such an attack would be labled anti-semitic by the Jewish elite...I wouldn`t want to be in Israel right now. The question is, who will take the blame, if and when it takes place?

Admin
18 September 2007 at 18:48

From letters to the editor

Sent by Joseph Palley

Harry Truman recognised the state of Israel fifteen minutes after it declared itself a nation. "In all of my political experience," he said, "I don't ever recall the Arab vote swinging a close election." But it's wong to blame uncritical US support for Israel on the Lobby ("Saying the Unsayable", 17 September). British Jews are as well organised, well funded, almost as numerous relative to population and just as pro-Israel as American Jews. Yet European and US public - and therefore government - attitudes to Israel are very different.

Until 1967 Israel was admired equally on both sides of the Atlantic, despite the 1947-48 ethnic cleansing. Its subsequent colonisation of East Jerusalem and chunks of the West Bank - on top of the 78 per cent of Palestine it already had - gradually alienated most Europeans, whose overstretched governments had just given up their colonies. In a 2003 European Commission poll in 15 EU countries, 59 per cent of those who responded named Israel as a threat to world peace; significantly fewer named Iran, Iraq, North Korea or Afghanistan.

Americans, however, kept the faith. In the 1980s Republican support for Israel hardened as a result of the growing Christian fundamentalist movement, which believes Jerusalem's holy sites belong in Western hands. Then there's the analogy between the Zionist "recovery" of Palestine and the early North American settlers' flight from religious persecution in Europe. Could America's support of Israel be driven in part by identification with its own history?

Robert Powell
18 September 2007 at 20:33

By turns paranoid, racist and sexist. Then obsequious, gushing and ghastly. Nadav I've said it before and I'll say it again. You're a looney!!!

gnuneo
19 September 2007 at 03:16

we are all in deep doodoo, from israel to the west to islam.

and need it pointing out that it is actors from a roughly homogeneous group that is creating it?

some call it "neo-conservatism", some call it "the pharaoh insanity", there are many terms for it, the "illuminati" is one usually accompanied by hundreds of exclamation marks, however it all really refers to the same meme.

it is the belief that some are "special", that they are born to rule (usually held by people born into old money, and need to justify their circumstances to themselves), and has caused the corruption of the term "capitalism" from being a liberal, cooperative economic model, to being a hierarchical, destructive model that every society has to fight against to evolve. This is surely their worst crime, blood-brother to turning 'democracy' into a meaningless popularity contest every few years.

mckenna called it "the dominator culture", a good a term as anything.

as to the article, all that american zionists are accomplishing, is the certain destruction of israel, by isolating it, arming it with highly oil-dependant 1st world arms, leaving it at the mercy of a massed attack by low-equipped forces, especially combined with an oil embargo, effectively making israel's elites only weapon to be the nuclear doomsday device.

will they follow the logic of religious prophecy and use them on the plains of Armageddon? Will they finally (after all these millennia) grow up and realise that JHVH 'punishments' against them are in response to their own arrogance and treatment of 'lesser' races, that they only way out for them is to finally choose a path of peace, pull back to their borders, build up palestine, and become allies of their neighbours?

only time will tell, but by damn - i hope they manage this evolutionary growth before it is again too late.

Amihai
19 September 2007 at 06:05

The Israel Lobby

Alan Dershowitz

Harvard University

Also of interest for an expanded discussion of the subject:

http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/research/working_papers/facultyre...

Joe Feld
19 September 2007 at 08:59

Reply to Joseph Palley,

You are quite right to note that Americans identified with Israel. Americans tended to see their history in terms of building a Promised Land , giving freedom to those fleeing religious persecution. Unfortunately this feeling did not extend to opening America's doors to Jews fleeing Nazi persecution. After the war, many Americans supported the restored Jewish homeland as the best option, even though about 77% of British Mandatory Palestine was now included in the Kingdom of Jordan and Israel received only about 22%. Most Americans were probably unaware that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem had spent much of the war in Berlin, supporting Hitler as a true friend of the Arabs.

Pencils
19 September 2007 at 10:09

Dershowitz

I challenged ... to identify a single Jewish leader who equated mere criticism of Israeli policy with anti-semitism...

...‘Israel,’ they state, ‘was explicitly founded as a Jewish state and citizenship is based on the principle of blood kinship.’

...This mendacious emphasis on Jewish ‘blood’ is a favourite of neo-Nazi propaganda.

Robert Powell
19 September 2007 at 12:57

Moderator please note Nadav Katz has just called for the "extinction of the Jews". He is clearly posing as an Israeli propagandist in order to perpetuate hatred of the Jewish people. I strongly suspect that in real life he is an active Nazi and I urge you to delete his posts, ban him from your website and spare us his racial hatred! I always knew you were irrational Nadav and now we know why! What's your real name?

Pencils
19 September 2007 at 13:00

I shouldn't have to spell this out but I realise Katzbo is challenged in some areas:

the point of my last post was that Dershowitz " challenged ... to identify a single Jewish leader who equated mere criticism of Israeli policy with anti-semitism... " and then went on ( he is a jewish leader of sorts isn't he?) to do just that. with:

".‘Israel,’ they state, ‘was explicitly founded as a Jewish state and citizenship is based on the principle of blood kinship.’ This mendacious emphasis on Jewish ‘blood’ is a favourite of neo-Nazi propaganda.

Colonel Blimp
19 September 2007 at 13:04

I knew a young man in the army who thought everyone but him was a homo! Name of Noel Coward!

Amihai
19 September 2007 at 13:17

Having earlier used the Nazi salute the "Pencils" now equates Israel to Nazi Germany, and instead of shutting up he continues to dig himself down deeper and deeper, and he is probably not even aware of it!!!

So, let me repeat my previous observation:

Israel is of course the nation-state of a people, formerly referred to as the Hebrew people, then Israelite people and now the Jewish people. And this ancient – nearly 4,000 year old – people consists of human beings who are white, black, brown and yellow skinned individuals. Many of us are even red-headed. The common denominator of members in our "tribe" is an adherence to our Jewish civilization.

The Jewish people in this sense is as the Greek people or as the Danish people or as the Armenian people, but this makes little difference to those who are out to obsessively spew hate of everything Israel - the nation-state of the Jewish people - and by extinction the Jews.

P.S. I wonder how often the "Pencils" shave off his head to fit with the rest of them skin heads….??

Robert Powell
19 September 2007 at 13:33

Please stop this Nazi madness. Von Katz is calling for the extinction of the Jews! It's outrageous that he should pose merely as a mad, racist, sexist Zionist when in fact he's clearly a supporter of policies of the Hitler regime!

Amihai
19 September 2007 at 13:41

Mr. Powell, you mean "pencils", don't you?

Robert Powell
19 September 2007 at 14:04

Moderator I beseech you. Stop this jackbooted looney addressing me!

Amihai
19 September 2007 at 14:27

Is that because you are a non-entity, you whom I do not address?

gnuneo
19 September 2007 at 14:50

scary thing is, i have met many 'nadav katz'es debating the issue of israel/palestine, he is hardly unique in being literally insane upon the topic.

better to have him posting, where others can see the insanity and can reply to it, than suddenly having 10,000 other 'nadav katz'es descending upon the NS every time israel is mentioned.

consider him an easy introduction in to how to deal with such loonacy.

---and anyway, his c/p posts are easy to skip over! ;)

Amihai
19 September 2007 at 15:26

I have known it all along, "gnuneo", that I am not one of a kind. I am a simple Jew, a proud Jew at that, one of several millions worldwide, who is interested in seeing that the presenting of matters related to the Jewish people and its nation-state, the Jewish state of Israel, is fair, honest and accurate. Often times this is not the case, hence the increasing reaction of some anti-Jewish racists, here included. And often times specific publications actively seeking commentaries which are neither fair nor honest and certainly not accurate. The New Statesman, I regret, is one such publication. So I, one of many worldwide, try to share my knowledge and experience about the subject at hand. I don't think you will even attempt to learn from it, but I do hope others do instead of allowing their view of international matters be based on a shallow, indeed very shallow basis.

gnuneo
19 September 2007 at 19:18

and your view is that Israel will be permanently surrounded by enemies, and must always behave in a manner that springs to mind germany and its "empty land" to the east, formerly known as poland?

that IS your view, isnt it? Or how do you see peace being achieved, bearing in mind the almost identical nature of the polish and palestinian resistance movements?

peace will be achieved when the pals are finally wiped out 'for good'?

because i see no other logic in your situation.

Phil Chester
19 September 2007 at 19:26

Having been involved in relief and development work for over 22 years - 15 of them implimenting programs and the last 7 in developing strategic approaches for none governmental agencies, I believe I have a relative perspective to offer. Whatever the rights of wrongs of US foreign policy and it's support for Israel, anyone who, as I have, has had the opportunity to witness first hand the actions of Israel in it's dealings with the Palestians of Gaza and the West Bank can have no doubt that their actions are unconcionable and measure up in many respects to those of other "rogue" nations. Association and support offered individually by US politicians and collectively by the current US administration is beyond belief.

Amihai
19 September 2007 at 19:33

Gnuneo,

I shall be delighted to respond to your questions if they were addressed to me as questions instead of statements about what I think and what I don't.

I am pointing at the concept of conversation in which listening is a more important skill than stating.

Can you please bring yourself to politely and respectfully refer to me? Once you do that, I shall be responsive.

Thank you.

gnuneo
19 September 2007 at 21:52

not particularly, i simply don't appreciate being called an "anti-semite", as you repeatedly did in another topic.

oddly, that doesn't make me very 'warm' towards you, and when combined with the fact that the views you are espousing are little other than blatant nazism, then i'm afraid my tolerance for you is extremely low.

now, are you going to avoid my questions, as you did in the other discussion, or are you going to answer them?

or is it you simply don't *have* any answers? I wouldn't be at all surprised.

Robert Powell
20 September 2007 at 10:06

Apparently on this website it is perfectly acceptable to pose as Israeli and accuse people of being anti-semitic whilst simultaneously being racist and sexist. But when a canny reader realises that one of the posters, Herr Katz, is actually not who he says he is but in fact a supporter of a certain regime dating from 1933 to 1945 then they - that reader - is censored. It is clear that Herr Katz has developed an internet persona where he poses as a supporter of Israel bringing all his skills to bear as the the most irritating man on Earth in order to drum up hatred of a particular people - namely the Jewish race. I ask that you all should boycott this unsavoury character with his horrible far-right views. Incidentally he clearly uses the words Neo-Socialist in order to make us think Neo-Nazi in a dastardly ploy. He may be mad but he is undoubtedly tricky!

dowkiller
20 September 2007 at 14:51

would nadav katz kindly comment on the attack on the USS Liberty, or any other jew?

Amihai
20 September 2007 at 14:53

The question has been raised: What is Neo-Socialism

To the best of my knowledge, it being a term I picked up as being used by Europeans, its stands to denote those who attempt to harmonize their supposed socialist view of world affairs with Islamism and/or anti-Jewish racism.

This term to the best of my knowledge has nothing to do with Neo-Nazism, unless of course some feel that they deserve this description.

I use the term Neo-Socialism, as all others that I have noticed so far, when I wish to describe the ideology that I described above.

Coming from a true Socialist background, it troubles me to see people abusing the term and the ideas for which it stands on the alter of racism. But that is why, I assume, some have added the "Neo" to it.

How sad, how sad indeed.

gnuneo
21 September 2007 at 02:21

ROTFL - so to make that into real terms, what you *actually* mean is that a "neo-socialist" is a socialist that despises zionism, or what it is currently doing?

and naturally you automatically make jew and zionist synonymous, whereas there have always been jewish opponents of zionism, and they are not limited to only the hassis.

which means by definition anyone who opposes zionism or what it is currently doing, is an anti-semite.

as you say mr powell, tricky. And i don't mean the superb musician.

Amihai
21 September 2007 at 07:53

Some appear to have difficulty in the comprehension, hence I suggest to re-read the following:

Neo-Socialism:

To the best of my knowledge, it being a term I picked up as being used by Europeans in general and in Britain in particular. It stands to denote those who attempt to harmonize their SUPPOSED socialist views of world affairs with Islamism and/or anti-Jewish racism.

This term to the best of my knowledge has nothing to do with Neo-Nazism, unless of course some feel that they meet this description as well.

I use the term Neo-Socialism, as all others that I have noticed so far, when I wish to describe the ideology that I described above.

Coming from a true Socialist background, it troubles me to see people abusing the concept of Socialism and the ideas for which it stands on the alter of racism. But that is why, I assume, some have added the "Neo" to it.

How sad, how sad indeed.

Jenny Webb
21 September 2007 at 09:26

Well I live in Europe and never heard the term Neo-Socialist and I like to talk about politics a lot. You've made it up - as someone else said - to make a link with Neo-Nazism. You can keep blasting out these ridiculous theories but it doesn't make them true. It's very plain Nadav that you are an ultra-nationalist with some very nasty reactionary (racist and sexist) views which you project on to everyone else. Because you are so wound up you can't see that you are fanning the flames. I shan't bother reading your reply because you'll only repeat the same old crap.

Amihai
21 September 2007 at 09:56

Some appear to have difficulty in the comprehension, hence I suggest to re-read the following:

Neo-Socialism:

This term to the best of my knowledge has nothing to do with Neo-Nazism, unless of course some feel that they meet this description as well.

I use the term Neo-Socialism, as all others that I have noticed so far, when I wish to describe the ideology that I described above.

How sad, how sad indeed.

Paul M
21 September 2007 at 17:50

I will not comment on the rest of this discussion but merely point out how wrong David Lindsay is on the demographics. The Israeli Arab birth rate is plummeting. Since the start of the decade, Arab births as a % of Israel's total have fallen from nearly a third to less than a quarter. The birth rate differential between the (normally more right wing) Jewish refugees from Arab lands and the Ashkenazim is also falling as the 'Sephardim' become more 'Europeanised' while a higher % of Ashkenazim are represented by the Ultra Orthodox, who have a higher birth rate than the Arabs. Meanwhile, the lowest birth rate of all is among the Russian immigrants. So not much chance of either the Muhameds or the 'Adolfs' (a very unfair representation of the Russian immigrants as a whole) taking over. Of course demographics change and are hard to predict, but on current trends the Arabs will stabilize at around 20% of Israel's population while the Ashkenazi Ultra Orthodox will grow.

Pencils
21 September 2007 at 21:26

Paul M. - well, that's good news then, maybe you could improve the situation further by disallowing 'undesirables' from letting or buying property or extending their homes - Oh, I remember now...they do that already. Well, maybe you could sterilise the low-lifes?

The most horrible thing about this discussion is that we all know that NadavKatz can go out of his house any time he feels like it and torture or murder a Palestinian child with complete impunity. How would you like to be at the mercy of NadavKatz (or NadavKatzes more likely)?

You are a monster Katz!

Cybertiger
22 September 2007 at 09:13

"You are a monster Katz! NadavKatz can go out of his house any time he feels like it and torture or murder a Palestinian child with complete impunity."

Mr. Katz has got tickets for the ball again - the Monsters Ball - next year in Jerusalem - and the following summer in Houston, Texas.

Amihai
22 September 2007 at 21:11

The Israel Lobby

Alan Dershowitz

Harvard University

Also of interest for an expanded discussion of the subject:

http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/research/working_papers/facultyre...

Cybertiger
23 September 2007 at 09:30

I hear that Mr. Dershowitz, while a proud Jew and critical supporter of Israel, is a loyal advocate for torture, a lobbyist even, on behalf of his great country.

Paul M
23 September 2007 at 11:44

Pencils writes:

"The most horrible thing about this discussion is that we all know that NadavKatz can go out of his house any time he feels like it and torture or murder a Palestinian child with complete impunity. "

The Palestinians have a genuine grievance which the world should hear and deal with. One of their major problems is that they have always attracted the wrong kind of friends and got backing from the losers. That's why Husseini spent the WW2 in Berlin, that's why the Arabs relied on Soviet moral and material support. Today, the Palestinians get support from people like Pencils, who so exagerate what is going on, as above, that they just become a laughing stock.

The idea that any Israeli can - or would - walk out of his or her house and go and 'torture a Palestinian with impunity' is such a ridiculous claim for anyone with any knowledge of the situation on the ground, that it just undermines the Palestinian cause.

Similarly people writing above and their ilk, claiming Zionist Lizards are taking over the world, Hitler was a Rothschild secret agent who spent years in England, the Holocaust never happened and if it did it was done by the Zionists, the Jew controls the world, Alan Johnson was kidnapped by Israelis, Zionists are injecting Arab babies with aids...

These cranks and fringe elements, who are attracted to the Palestinian cause because of their virulent and mind-destroying Jew hatred, are in fact the worst friends of the Palestinians.

Pencils
27 September 2007 at 10:27

Paul M. - and you're a friend of the Palestinians ? As long as they disappear or die?

Paul M
27 September 2007 at 12:51

Pencils - I am not claiming to be a friend of the Palestinians, nor an enemy, neither am I suggesting they disappear or die.

This 'disappear or die' just typifies the problem. So far as their disappearing is concerned, their numbers in the Occupied Territories has grown hugely since 1967, largely thanks to Israeli-level health care. The Jews in the Arab world really have just about disappeared. Muslims in Darfur really are disappearing. Why is it that the 'friends of the Palestinian' ache so badly to see a genocide where the opposite is true?

Furthermore, more Palestinians in the last year or two have died at the hands of other Palestinians - never mind at the hands of Lebansese - than Israelis. Why do the true friends of Palestinians seem so unfussed?

It is, of course because they are not really friends of the Palestinians, but see the Palestinians as a handy stick with which to beat the Jews. If the stick breaks in the process, they will just discard it and find another one.

govfoe
28 September 2007 at 21:13

Jews should identify themselves on these boards... name changes like Cohen to Parker is misleading - giving readers the idea that there is non Jewish support for Israel - besides the knuckle dragging contingent of the GOP -

that anyone would call Israel a 'democracy' is an offense to the term.... Israel is an exercise in apartheid - facing a demographic meltdown.

My biggest problem with Jews is stealth ethnocentrism on all things ISRAELI.

When European cities asked that Jews be identified, it was because of the mischief they cause pretending to be 'just one of the locals' -- when they are absolutely NOT one of the locals.

Its always treason with Jews.... and treasonous members of AIPAC should be tried under RICO statutes.

I want my country back ... much like the Germans, Austrians, Russians wanted....

Watch the French - they'll get a snout full of Sarkozy and his Israeli first policies.... and they'll send him packing as well

govfoe
28 September 2007 at 21:28

Paul M - a Jew of course....

Yes, Palis are murdered and tortured by every day Israelis... I"ve seen the videos... I've read the reports...

No - the Jewish press doesn't cover the genocide.... and no, Jews don't identify themselves as Jews when polluting these threads with their treason and lies.

DAN ROSE
29 September 2007 at 07:46

The problem with the Jews and Israel that in present term they are not at least 100 million and they have not territory of at least of 500000 square Km and their territory in the wrong place and that they have not enough wise to understand 1. That in the long term almost only this gives them as a nation acceptable guarantees to survive 2. How to achieve this goal in the future (the future is long).

Cybertiger
29 September 2007 at 17:18

@DAN ROSE

"the future is long ..."

I think Israel's long term future lies in Texas. For its future safety, if not its continued existence, Israel should move to Texas, lock, stock and Jewish barrel.

Paul M
29 September 2007 at 18:41

Govfoe - how right you are about Jews identifying themselves. Perhaps you could suggest to Google a sort of yellow badge for the cyberage? But of course Google is a Jewish firm itself. Well maybe suggest it to the New Statesman so that at least it could be used on the New Statesman site? But damn it, the New Statesman has an editor called Kampfner. Perhaps there is no hope but for you and Noam Chomsky, Harold Pinter and Norman Finkelstein to set up a colony on the moon to escape from the 'trouble makers' who are everywhere below.

You make my point for me. One of the major problems the Palestinians have is the friends they attract.

Paul M
29 September 2007 at 18:43

Govfoe - do you not think you should identify your own nationality?

Since you do not know the difference between 'everyday' and 'every day', and since you do not know the difference between the singular and plural forms of the verb ('name changes... is misleading') I presume you are not a native speaker of English.

Cybertiger
29 September 2007 at 22:54

@Paul M

"Perhaps there is no hope but for you and Noam Chomsky, Harold Pinter and Norman Finkelstein to set up a colony on the moon to escape from the 'trouble makers' who are everywhere below. "

Actually, I suspect the Zionist trouble makers are pond-life, grubbing around at the bottom of the 'Sea of Immorality' on the other side of the Moon - the dark side.

azazel
01 October 2007 at 19:35

As God's Chosen People The zionists has the right to displace 6 million palestinian Gentiles of their homeland. As for the rest of the Gentiles all over the world, fear must be instilled in their midst of ZION. All those critics and cynics will be marked with the beastly brand of "Anti-semite" until God inherits the earth.

Joe Feld
01 October 2007 at 23:02

To Azazel,

There are several problems with your post. Zionists were secularists, not the Chosen People, and wanted to be a nation like all other nations. Orthodox Jews have always been among the biggest critics of secular Zionism. Far from displacing 6 million Arabs, there was a similar number of Jews from Muslim lands and Arabs from Israel 'displaced'-- about 750,000. How can God inherit the earth? He is the Creator. To keep other posters happy I am wearing my yellow star, as well as my stars and stripes!

Pencils
02 October 2007 at 01:21

Joe Feld - "... a nation like other nations"

Well. let me see - like what other nation is made up of people who are scattered throughout the world in different countries, but happen to have one grandmother who was born into a religious group and didn't convert to another religion? All other nations are the political organizations of peoples in a discrete geographic space. zionists were secularist? Yes, I believe that's true of the originators of zionism - so why Palestine? Jews have no more historic connection with Palestine than with Iran, Iraq or Poland. The historic claim to Israel has no more force than if the gays were to lay claim to Greece. What if some rich homosexuals buy up Greece and evict the Greeks, claiming that it was their original homeland?

As for the displaced - the zionists started it; their brutal ethnic cleansing of Palestine aroused anger and distrust where there had been goodwill for centuries between Jew and Muslim. And there is ample evidence of zionists conspiring to arouse enmity against Jews by bombings and assassinations to persuade Jews to leave Iraq, Egypt etc. And it's not just the 750,000 Palestinians who were displace in '48, it's also the rest within Israel and in occupied Palestine who have been denied their birthright and human rights that the world community expects all 'normal nations ' to confer on their citizens.

Anyway, I like to picture you in your stars and stripes and your yellow star - why don't you top it all off with one of those nice clown's hats?

Joe Feld
02 October 2007 at 08:49

Dear Pencils,

Zionism was part of the nationalist self-determination movement that saw its fulfillment in the break up of empires following World War I. Aside from the thousand year Jewish state in Israel from Joshuah's time until 70 AD, there has been a continuous Jewish presence ever since. Jews have seen Israel as their national homeland for thousands of years. The majority of Arabs in Israel arrived after 1880 -- just like the majority of Jews -- because they wanted to be part of the economic renewal that accompanied the Zionist movement. 16% of Israeli citizens are Arabs. No one can deny that Arabs in Gaza have suffered, but no one can also deny that Israel tried to return Gaza to Egypt and Egypt refused to accept it back. Most of the suffering has come about because of Arafat's intifada and Israel's need to tighten security. Gaza was semi-autonomous for years as part of the move towards a Palestinian state offered by Rabin, Barak and others. Israelis and Jews and Arabs generally do want to see a Palestinian state. I hope that we will see some real progress in that direction soon.

gnuneo
02 October 2007 at 12:13

"the majority of Arabs in Israel arrived after 1880"

ROTFLMAO :D

so the arabs started moving into Israel in the 1880s, did they?

are you sure you're not confusing them with Jews, or indeed Israel with Palestine?

talking to Zionist Israelis about israeli policies has a ghastly similarity to talking to German's during the Nazi years - the same lack of knowledge about the *realities* of the human rights abuses, the same lack of comprehension as to why these 'other races' reject the 'superior civilising nations' control, the same self-justifications on the grounds of supposed 'national security'.

it is a simple fact, the state of Israel was born out of the Nazi holocaust, and has a direct memetic lineage from it.

all Jews with any common sense left whatsoever should realise the situation is long-term untenable, and that Israel has been set-up to be the ultimate 'Final Solution', the ingathering of Jews to have their necks placed in a noose.

it is no wonder the religious Jews rejected Zionism, they know their history, and they know already the inevitable consequences of Israel's current behaviour.

were i an Israeli, i would be looking at South America, china, New Zealand or Brazil with some longing - hell, even Crawford, Texas!

Cybertiger
02 October 2007 at 21:45

@gnuneo

"were i an Israeli, i would be looking at South America, china, New Zealand or Brazil with some longing - hell, even Crawford, Texas!"

Texas is hell - and that's where Israel is headed. Bring it on!

Pencils
03 October 2007 at 01:34

Dear ( we're getting very sweet now, eh?) Joe Feld,

I suspect, as gnuneo noted, that you're not interested in facts, but I'll try anyway. Israel was not ' part of the movement for national self-determination ' because, as I said above, that movement consisted of long established nations or populations freeing themselves from foreign rule. Zionism was a movement whose aim was to establish a colony in mandate Palestine to be populated by Jews from other countries - Israel was in fact the last act in the European colonial settlement of Africa, following S.Africa, Rhodesia, etc.,

As for the idea that the majority of Arabs came after 1880 - that is just ridiculous: the very name ' Palestine' comes from the Biblical word ' Philistine', the name for the peoples of the land who were there before, during and after ancient Israel. There was no thousand year Jewish state; see ' the Bilble Unearthed' by Finkelstein and Silberman, the most up to date archaeological assessment. There is scant evidence for the Israelites as a distinct people before about 700 BC. 2 small kingdoms, Israel and Judea, arose; Israel, the Northern kingdom, was destroyed by the Assyrians; Judea had a continuous existence, apart from the Babylonian exile, for a few hundred years until the Greek invasion. While Judea was independent, it was rarely and briefly powerful - how could it be, sandwiched between the Egyptians. the Babylonians and Persians, the Assyrians and the Phoenicians of Tyre and Sidon? Judea never controlled the coast completely, and rarely controlled any of it. Judea was essentially usually a client state of more powerful neighbours, with an interest in trade between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, probably mostly Tyre and Sidon. The Bible itself, in the stories of Omri and Ahab and Jezebel, gives some hints of strong links between Judea and the Phoenicians. At the time when the Romans expelled the Jews from Judea, more Jews were already living outside of Judea than in it: There was a very large population in Babylon, and Alexandria, and there were Jewish populations scatttered throughout the Roman world; interestingly these populations were almost exclusively in the old Greek, Phoenician and Carthaginian colonies in North Africa, Spain, and around the Black Sea coast., which suggests to me that Jewish traders built up trade links as clients and partners with the Phoenicians, and these links continued and expanded under the Greeks and Romans. I have no doubt that they regarded Judea and the temple in Jerusalem as their spiritual home, and it must have been a sad day for all Jews when the temple was destroyed. BUT THAT WAS 2000 YEARS AGO! - a thousand years before the Incas and the Aztecs ! You've claimed that the original zionists were secularist, and I agreed; but what 'secular' reason could anyone make for a link between 19th century Jews and Palestine? And what are Jews if not a religious group? Would you claim that someone was a negro if they had a negro ancestor 2000 years ago - and how could you be sure that the line hadn't been broken over the generations? And what about the Khazars? An entire Turkic kingdom ( check Wikipedia) in Southern Russia converted to Judaism in the 12th century: it's impossible that a significant number of E. European Jews are of Turkic rather than Semitic origin.

In the Ottoman period Palestine was inhabited by mostly muslims, but also (as still) a sizeable Christian community, and, yes, a small Jewish community - whether any of them were strictly 'Arab' or not is neither here nor there.. So what ,anyway, if most Arabs came after 1880? The much greater population at the time of partition was non-Jewish: end of! And the Jews are a small religious group with no more link to Palestine than to many other places. End of!

Admin
03 October 2007 at 10:05

From letters to the editor

Sent by Moritz Bilagher

Andrew Stephen blames the authors of a new study on the American pro-Israel lobby for not taking a step back to understand the persistence of AIPAC’s support for Israel (NS 17 September, p. 50). He might also blame them for failing to deliver a solution for the problem of climate change, but we can hardly expect Mearsheimer and Walt to do everything in one book.

The real question is: why does criticism of the American pro-Israel lobby amount to as much as saying the unsayable? It is hardly likely that this is because of compassion with Jews, as there are many other groups in the world that are worthy of compassion, but are nonetheless not spared the critical eye of the mass-media or academia when necessary. It is therefore more likely that the real answer is fear. Fear of being silenced, of being side-lined, accused (of anti-semitism, of course) like Mearsheimer and Walt were for publishing their study.

Now that the US is a global power, and the pro-Israel lobby one of the leading forces of foreign policy of that global power, it is high time for its influence to be exposed in a fair study. The truth should not be confined to only what we want it to be.

Joe Feld
03 October 2007 at 15:26

I admire Pencils careful selection of facts that fit his theories. Sometimes life is more complicated. Palestina and Philistia have nothing to do with Arabs. Arabs arrived with the spread of Islam in the 7th Century A.D. , nearly 2,000 years after the Hebrews or Israelites arrived. Israel was part of the Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman and British empires, but no such state as Palestine ever existed. Until recently the name 'Palestinian' referred to Jews who were building a Jewish state, while Arabs were generally called Arabs. Although Jews were defeated and exiled by the Romans, there has been a continuous Jewish presence and Jewish claim to Israel. The present Arab states in the Middle East were largely given their borders after World War I and the break up of the Ottoaman Empire. The British and League of Nations decision to help set up a Jewish homeland took place at this time -- not after the Holocaust. The Khazars may have converted to Judaism but DNA evidence suggests Jews today are descended from ancient Israelites. Evidence even supports the shared descent of Cohanim, the Jewish priestly class, from Aaron, the elder brother of Moses. Recently released UK government documents confirms that Arafat opposed creating a Palestinian state, even though the Arab nations supported it. Arafat was a successful 'warrior for freedom', but not a very able head of government. When he rejected Ehud Barak's extremely decent offer for a Palestinian state, Arab leaders were openly critical. One Saudi leader called Arafat's unwillingness to move forward a crime against the Palestinian people. The Israeli-Palestinian situation is extremely complicated on both sides.

Cybertiger
03 October 2007 at 20:39

"Arafat was a successful 'warrior for freedom', but not a very able head of government. When he rejected Ehud Barak's extremely decent offer for a Palestinian state ... "

Dear Mr. Feld, the peace warrior.

You don’t seem to be a very serious historian. May I recommend the book by Tanya Reinhart entitled “Israel/Palestine: how to end the war of 1948.”

The reality is that at Camp David, Barak offered nothing to Arafat except the preservation of the existing state of affairs. However, Barak vehemently demanded of the Palestinians an “end of conflict” declaration that would have seen UN resolutions 242 and 194 completely nullified. This was not something Arafat could possibly have accepted, nor something that he could have concealed from his people.

Like many Israeli politicians, Ehud Barak was a trickster, a con artist, a fraudster – and judging by her commentary, Tanya Reinhart would have agreed.

Paul M
08 October 2007 at 15:20

NS Administrator asks why Israel is not subject to criticism and assumes that it is due to fear of 'The Lobby'.

But certainly relative to the casualties involved, no country on earth has been more scrutinised, report on and condemned that Israel.

Israel is the only country named by the UN Human Rights organisation. Compare the reporting of the huge number of civilian casualites inflicted by NATO in Afghanistan with those inflicted by Israel in Gaza and then compare the reporting.

The insult added to the injury is that not only is Israel examined and condemned out of any proportion to her 'sins' and with little regard to the difficult situation she finds herself in, but then the NS Administrator et al say 'And nobody dares to criticise Israel'.

Admin
08 October 2007 at 17:59

Paul M, NS administrator definitely did not pose the question you suggest. When we get letters on an article we sometimes post them on the relevant comments thread. Just wanted to clarify! Best wishes,

Ben Davies

Editor, newstatesman.com

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website

About the writer

Andrew Stephen was appointed US Editor of the New Statesman in 2001, having been its Washington correspondent and weekly columnist since 1998. He is a regular contributor to BBC news programs and to The Sunday Times Magazine. He has also written for a variety of US newspapers including The New York Times Op-Ed pages. He came to the US in 1989 to be Washington Bureau Chief of The Observer and in 1992 was made Foreign Correspondent of the Year by the American Overseas Press Club for his coverage.