Commentary and the New Republic Say, Repeat After Me: 'There Is No Israel Lobby'
In the January Commentary, Gabriel Schoenfeld returns to his theme, Jewish powerlessness, when he argues that the U.S. government has always supported Israel for its own (goyische) reasons, not through any Jewish prodding. By this analysis, AIPAC should fold up its tent tomorrow, it's wasting a lot of hardworking people's money. And the ailing British chemist Chaim Weizmann should never have rushed to the White House to extract a commitment from Harry Truman to a Jewish state in 1948, again, a waste of time, Truman was planning to defy his own State Department and oppose a binational state.
Israeli scholar Benny Morris was the point man for the New Republic in its attack on Walt/Mearsheimer last year. Outraged that the authors had cited his (honorable) investigation of the expulsions of '48, Morris was shrill, his piece filled with meaningless discussions of his favorite subject, troop strengths in battles long ago. (What is it with these writers who fetishize combat?)
But in his 2001 book Righteous Victims, Morris several times refers to the Zionist and Israel lobby. He says, quite accurately, that Zionist pressure tactics were used on the Truman Administration to bring about American support for partition in '47 (in defiance of the State Department and the recommendations of the Anglo-American Inquiry Commission, the equivalent of the Iraq Study Group of that time). And Morris honestly describes the Israel lobby as a potent force in U.S. politics when he cites the secretary of state's threat to cut off "all public and private aid to Israel" to punish Israeli belligerence in the Suez crisis of '56:
President Eisenhower had just been elected to a second term; he could allow himself to ignore Jewish lobbying.
It just goes to show: Everyone knows there's an Israel lobby. The journalistic challenge is, what are its dimensions? The New Republic and Commentary have chosen to react angrily to the non-Jewish authors' statements rather than doing what they should do, telling us how the lobby works. By responding so defensively, these journals have damaged themselves, and the discourse; American readers deserve better.
P.S. Morris's point re Suez reveals the poverty of Dennis Ross's analysis of the lobby in the debate at Cooper Union last September. Ross basically said, Sure, AIPAC has the Congress in a half-nelson, but no one controls the presidency. Morris (and Abba Eban) contradict this claim.
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there is no mafia either
I think it is significant that defense/denial of the power of the lobby has Commentary and the New Republic as political bookends. It has long become clear that by putting forth this message from opposite sides of the political spectrum, that the intent is to give credibility from whichever side the reader finds most in line with his or her worldview.
Even in a piece in defense of President Carter's book (or at least the charges against him as an anti-Semite), the author Jay Bookman of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution states the following, "There is indeed a shameless, shameful canard to that effect, and it is classic anti-Semitism, attributing to Jews some secret conspiratorial control of world affairs."
http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=11&ar=793
However, if one modifies the sentence to read "some" Jews, or "Zionists", I would argue that a case could certainly be made. I have seen political leaders of almost all nations (certainly in the US) rated exclusively by their position on Israel regardless of where they stood on most any other issue no matter how extreme. And in regards to "secret", I would instead offer "largely unnoticed" in its place. Part of that is the tendency of many to "circle the wagons" in light of any criticism of Israel as an attack on all Jews. The very fact of this trait is what facilitates so much of the rest of the disinformation and obfuscation.
Finally, the echo chamber has the power to declare which argument "wins", no matter which side presents the more compelling argument. This fact above all others is surely a prescription for disaster.
The non-existent Jewish lobby is in the process of constructing an eight story building on Capitol Hill to house its hundred non-existent lobbyists and its political operation. It is as powerful and heavy-handed as the non-existent NRA and the pharmaceutical lobbies.
Carter's decency is given.
The problem is the indecency of the Islamic, Arabic, Palestinian and Iranian leaders:
OBL, Mubarak, Assad, Haniyeh, Khamenei, Ahmedinejad
These people are elusive, and will survive many of us.
We have much indecency inherent in US leaders as well. For actual talking rather than bloodshed to be able to make a substanitive difference, it first needs to start with a truthful accounting of the players and the history. As long as Israel gets to shape the official narrative, we will not be getting an accurate picture.
Marco Ross sarcastically notes that the Jewish lobby is real, as real as any other lobby promoting the interests of its group. But when Jay Bookman refers to the canard about Jewish control of world affairs, he is referring to the singling out of Jewish interests for condemnation precisely because they are interests that are Jewish. Because the Jews called out for the blood of the Savior to be upon them and their children, and Judas got 30 silver pieces for the deal, it is assumed that all Jewish interests are inherently mercantile and are at odds with the notion of the common good. Nothing could be further from the truth.