US Policy

By Ralph Seliger:

After a year and a half of planning and preparation, “J Street,” a new progressive Jewish lobby, was launched in the middle of April as a counterweight to the increasingly conservative American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). There is no physical J Street in Washington, DC, but the name conjures up K Street, the actual hub for lobbying on Capitol Hill.

... Click here for the Meretz USA Weblog interview with Jeremy Ben-Ami.

Thomas Mitchell, Ph.D.
The Much Too Promised Land by Aaron D. Miller, Bantam, 2008, 385 pp., $26.

Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace: American Leadership in the Middle East  Edited by Daniel C. Kurtzer and Scott B. Lasensky, the US Institute of Peace, 2008, 190 pp., $16 (paperback).

The first ... lesson is that the US is indispensable to progress in the Middle East peace process.

Miller argues that successful Middle East diplomacy in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict .... would have to employ the deviousness of Kissinger, the missionary focus and attention to detail of Carter, and the ruthlessness of Baker.

Addressing the non-Zionist left

By Dan Fleshler

What’s the point of this conversation about a conversation? I’m here because what we say about Israel in public, and how we say it, has consequences...

ISRAEL HORIZONS - Summer 2006 

COLUMN LEFT by Ralph Seliger

Scholars Blame 'Israel Lobby'

Two prominent scholars have written a far-reaching indictment of Israel and its American supporters as largely responsible for the Iraq war and an albatross on US security and foreign policy interests. References to almost every conceivable documented critic of the State of Israel honeycombs "The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy," a 43-page paper, supplemented with 39 pages of endnotes, by political science professors John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt — of the University of Chicago and Harvard, respectively. This paper is a potential bombshell in reinforcing anti-Israel and anti-Jewish sentiment. Yet the two academics are not inherently anti-Semitic; they make the point that although the pro-Israel lobby worked for the Iraq invasion, poll data indicate that US Jews are more heavily against the war than are most other Americans — but they still are providing ammunition to people who will be less fastidious in drawing conclusions.

They are not quite as vicious in tone as James Bamford, an authority on US intelligence operations, who squarely blamed Israel and its US supporters for the attacks on 9/11 and the Iraq war, but they come uncomfortably close and affirmatively cite Bamford’s A Pretext For War, published in 2004. Bamford went so far as to assert that the inadvertent killing of 100 Lebanese by Israeli artillery in 1996, which he saw as intentional, spurred Bin Laden to wage war on the US. Mearsheimer and Walt also see the plight of the Palestinians and the "unwavering" US support for Israel as crucial to Bin Laden’s evolution.

Bamford, Mearsheimer and Walt all cite the "Clean Break" memo, which Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser submitted to Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996. Bamford argues that this policy direction was pressed upon the administration of George W. Bush, in the exclusive interest of Israel, when the memo’s authors and other neo-conservatives gained influence.

The two professors stack their argument with negative writings on Israel going back to before its creation. One wades through comments by Jabotinsky, Shamir, Ben-Gurion, Meir and other Zionist leaders, invariably reported without context, and references to such worthies as Norman Finkelstein, as if he were an objective source. (Oh, to have been the proverbial fly on the wall following the Mufti and his bunch around!)

They don't even give credence to the fact that the Yishuv faced a genuine threat to its survival in the 1947-48 war. And complex works by such New Historians as Tom Segev and Benny Morris appear to be cherry picked for critical content. A small example is an endnote citing Segev’s One Palestine, Complete as showing that "the British favored the Zionists over the Palestinians during the British Mandate," whereas Segev's book actually depicted how the British were divided and wavering in their sympathies during this period. (See Benny Morris's scathing rebuttal — perhaps only slightly overdoing it — "The Ignorance At The Heart Of An Innuendo: And Now For Some Facts," posted in the New Republic Online, April 28, and published in the print edition of May 8, 2006.)

Another instance of ignorance or distortion was reported by J.J. Goldberg, editor of the Forward, on March 23: "...they attempt to prove how deeply Paul Wolfowitz is 'committed to Israel' by quoting the Forward, [describing him as] ‘the most hawkishly pro-Israel voice in the Administration.’ A check of the endnotes shows that the words did appear in the Forward, but they were describing the conventional wisdom, not the Forward’s view. The article was about a pro-Israel rally where Wolfowitz was booed for defending Palestinian rights. The point was that the conventional wisdom was wrong."

.... Challenge On the Left

At a session of the "Facing A Challenge" conference in Newark, March 25-27, of leftists confronting anti-Semitism on the left, journalist Esther Kaplan approvingly quoted from a Wall Street Journal editorial (the irony did not escape her) bashing the Mearsheimer-Walt paper. Kaplan is very left-wing and takes an extremely critical view of both AIPAC and Israel in general, but she also holds to a professional standard of evidence and indicated how Mearsheimer-Walt failed on this basis. She agrees with the Wall Street Journal that Mearsheimer-Walt has invented an all-powerful "Israel Lobby" that ranges over-broadly from Commentary and the Wall Street Journal to the New York Times, from Clinton-era officials to Bushies and neocons, from AIPAC and the American Enterprise Institute to the Brookings Institution....

Of the few presenters that I got to know for the first time: Chip Berlet is a terrifically entertaining and informative speaker and excellent on the issue of anti-Semitism (he even enhanced his presentation with magic tricks). Dr. Joseph Graves, an academic biologist, was very impressive in speaking of the non-scientific basis for the concept of race.

It's too bad that the meeting drew little more than one tenth the 500 anticipated. This was not for lack of effort by the irrepressible Judy Andreas — who organized this as a follow-up to her highly successful conference on the same theme in Oakland, California, two years ago. She dusted herself off and immediately announced the creation of a "Havurah" of gentiles supporting Jews against anti-Semitism.

But a word of caution, if you do a google search on her name: there is someone presenting him or herself as Judy Andreas, posting viciously anti-Zionist (to the point of anti-Semitic) writings on the Web. "Our" Judy Andreas, although taking no official stand on Zionism, is sympathetic to Israel and has warned people of this imposter.

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Divestment from Israel:
Why it is counterproductive as a strategy for peace

by Rabbi Mordechai Liebling

Within the last year, a number of Protestant denominations have committed themselves to using economic leverage to help resolve the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. There have been scores of media headlines about "Protestants Divesting from Israel." The headlines from all points on the political spectrum are misleading and many of the efforts are misguided.

10/20/2005

Yossi Beilin in  The New York Times

THE original timetable of the Middle East "road map" - the plan given to Israel and the Palestinian Authority three years ago with the aim of restarting the political process between them - is set to expire at the end of this year. While many, buoyed by Israel's Gaza withdrawal and the emergence of a seemingly more moderate Palestinian Authority, may believe there is still a future for the road map, the fact is that unless it is revised, the plan will serve primarily as a pretext for delay by those who don't want to return to the negotiating table.

11/07

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