This is a guest post from David Green. My own take generally aligns with Green’s. Since 1967, Israel has constructed itself as an imperial asset in the Middle East. I don’t think we have a satisfactory synthesis explaining the Israel Lobby’s role in shaping American foreign policy. I don’t think the Walt-Mearsheimer argument is very satisfactory, and am consistently stunned at the welcome their work has received from leftists. Various domestic interests assert themselves in various ways. Some do so through lobbying, some through Congress, some through the executive, some through the Pentagon. Ideology plays a role, too, manifested in this case most powerfully as Jewish nationalism and tribalism–Zionism. The Lobby and Israel uses these forces to mobilize people, often enough against more tangible economic interests. What the Lobby–defined narrowly, say, focusing on AIPAC–is , is an organization that advises the affluent, and especially affluent Jews, as to how they should disburse their money, telling them which congressional candidates they should support. The notion that the Lobby does nothing for American capitalism-imperialism (same thing) more broadly isn’t serious. Gabriel Ash has pointed out that the Lobby and fears of anti-Semitism stalled the Durban process, and canned Cynthia McKinney when she got out of line by doing her job–representing her constituents, or starting to. Likewise the canard of anti-Semitism, pushed by the Lobby, has been used to attack Venezuela, an enemy of the Empire. I’m sure there are other examples. In the absence of a rigorous materialist analysis, there’s no analysis at all.
The Israel Lobby has for decades played an integral role in promoting American support for Israeli depredations, and in shaping the ideological and sanitizing component of American geopolitical strategy in relation to oil. Nevertheless, those so-called realists who claim that the Lobby drives American foreign policy in Israel’s interests and which undermine U.S. interests—and who have been especially dogmatic and vitriolic in the wake of Mearsheimer/Walt (2006)—have in effect enlisted an aspect of the Palestinian rights movement in the service of imperial U.S. elite interests. In doing so, they have propagated a remarkably banal account of the U.S., Israel, Palestine, and our wars in the region.
The doctrinaire anti-Lobby phenomenon on the left has found its platform most noticeably at the popular websites Counterpunch and Mondoweiss. Jeffrey Blankfort, accurately described by Left Business Observer’s Doug Henwood as a “toxic character,” holds forth regularly on both sites, including in the Comments section on Mondoweiss, where he disciplines anti-anti-Lobby heretics such as me in dismissive fashion, having accused me of “drinking Chomsky’s Kool-Aid.”
Blankfort has, incredibly, taken on the mission and obsession of convincing the pro-Palestinian community that Noam Chomsky has for all these years worked tirelessly and insidiously to undermine the Palestinian cause: first by criticizing American and Israeli policies (for the cover of credibility); second by challenging the notion of the all-powerful Lobby, and thus undermining efforts to ferret out the Zionist conspirators among those who have made it so difficult for the U.S. to control Middle East oil. Blankfort asserts that this has indeed been a conscious strategy on Chomsky’s part, and he clearly has the approval of his internet proprietors in his efforts to convince others of this astonishing turn of events in the history of Zionist and anti-American strategy.
Only the fanatical anti-Lobby can, in its clueless way, make actual Lobbyists appear to be more factual and convincing in their arguments than their doctrinaire opponents. Recently, at the Nixon Center, the contemptible Robert Satloff of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy debated Chas Freeman, recently celebrated as an anti-Lobby realist whose appointment by the current administration was subverted by the Lobby (as most certainly it was). Nevertheless, within the realist and elitist assumptions that structured the definition of “strategic interests” in this debate, Satloff got much the better of Freeman. While of course he understands American “interests” in crass terms, he also correctly understands Israel’s role as a strategic asset, especially in terms of innovation and testing of military technology.
In relation to the First Gulf War, celebrated by anti-Lobbyists as sterling proof of Israel’s uselessness, Satloff offered this accurate assessment: “America began stocking war reserves in Israel fifteen years ago. Those stockpiles are hardly ‘minimal’—the total value is approaching $1 billion. They’re U.S. property and the Pentagon can draw upon them at any time. America has shown it is able to move military supplies from Israel to the Gulf; for example, it sent Israeli mine-plows and bulldozers to Iraq during the first Gulf War in 1991.”
In contrast, Freeman lamely and bitterly complained that out of hundreds of billions of dollars of military spending, we give Israel $3 billion, and that Israel is already rich anyway. Clearly, for U.S. planners, the truth is that Israel has always been a strategic bargain and continues to be so. This is somehow lost on those realists who while supporting imperial strategy have now been enlisted by leftist and quasi-leftist websites into the Palestinian cause.
Meanwhile, Blankfort’s latest effort at bringing anti-Lobby pseudo-intellectualism to a wider audience has been his utterly bizarre promotion of a recent, ponderous 610-page tome by military historian Geoffrey Wawro titled Quicksand: America’s Pursuit of Power in the Middle East, featured on both above-mentioned websites and in the Counterpunch subscribers-only newsletter. Blankfort claims that this is a book “that the Israel Lobby doesn’t want Americans to read.” In truth, the Lobby won’t hear of it except for Blankfort’s WWF-style and self-promoting efforts to bring it to their attention by picking a fight that otherwise would not exist, and for all his efforts almost certainly never will.
Wawro, a perfectly conventional realist, Cold Warrior, and amateur strategic planner, has written a long and generally informative history of American involvement in the region. It is written in a melodramatic, bombastic, Stephen Ambrose-like journalistic style, and is thus superficially entertaining. But there is no reason for it to be positively reviewed or indeed reviewed at all by serious diplomatic historians, as (in spite of Blankfort’s claims to the contrary, in which the quantity of footnotes apparently correlates with originality) it brings no significant new research to light, and offers no convincing argument—indeed, no argument whatsoever—to support Wawro’s conclusion regarding the dominant power of the Lobby over an extended period of time in undermining U.S. strategic interests.
Wawro’s realist and exceptionalist banality is clear in both the book’s title and in the Introduction: “Quicksand sets out to discover and elucidate the countries, interests, raw materials, and ideas that have lured us to the Middle East and snared us there (emphases mine).” On this basis, one must conclude that over the past two centuries, Americans have been “lured and snared” nearly everywhere, innocents that we are, wanting only “markets” for the resources that somehow exist beyond our borders of a given era.
Similarly, Wawro’s naiveté is displayed in this banal conclusion: “From the Balfour Declaration to the Bush Doctrine, the United States has struggled to find its stride in the Middle East, as our latest stumbles in Iraq and Afghanistan merely confirm (emphases mine).” It is just remarkable that someone who uses such precious terminology is endorsed by those with claims as leftists.
In spite of all the footnotes, Wawro’s assertions often hang in conjectural mid-air: “Although Kennedy balked at a formal security guarantee for Israel—fearing that it might prompt an equivalent guarantee from the Arab states and lead to World War III—Israel did receive critical hardware…” Or, “In an act of breathtaking chutzpah, the first Hawks were installed around Israel’s nuclear weapons facility at Dimona, which the Kennedy administration staunchly opposed.” The latter assertion is attributed to the most recent book of “historian” Michael Oren. And of course while the power of the Lobby in such instances is implied, it’s rarely clearly proved—no less proved to be determinant. This is history as hearsay, transparently intended to imply the power of the Israel Lobby to control American decisions without the bother of a thorough and respectful argument, and the scholarly integrity that would be required to go with it.
In other instances, Wawro’s grasp of major historical contexts is simply absent. For example, he says nothing about the power struggle between Secretary of State William Rogers and Henry Kissinger during Nixon’s first term, central to—among other things—the real possibility of a nuclear war. But of course, this topic would have no payoff in terms of exaggerating the power of the Lobby, unless we simply assume that Kissinger=Jewish=Lobby. Beyond that, many chapters of the book bear not even superficial interest in relation to the Lobby question, consisting of recounting our involvements in Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
Ultimately, Wawro’s naïve realism does not allow for a fundamental, actually-existing reality: both during the Cold War and since, the U.S. requires official enemies in order to pursue its strategic goals through “persuasion,” intimidation, and violence. It was on this basis that relations with Egypt’s Nasser were aggravated during the Cold War, and that Iran is currently demonized. Israel’s role continues to be usefully secondary in this regard, and clearly helpful in pursuit of our leaders’ resource-related interests. Wawro asserts that oil and Israel are the “chief drivers” of his narrative. But over 610 pages he fails to entertain the notion that among U.S. planners, these “drivers” might have been (and continue to be) vitally and “positively” interrelated. Instead, our “stumbles” are regularly attributed to the Israel Lobby with claims that assume causation rather than demonstrating anything remotely of the sort.
Incidentally, Wawro has nothing to say about the Palestinian plight, and is clearly a garden variety racist regarding the Arabs: “Where strongman rule faltered, mass movements—Arab nationalism, Sunni fundamentalism, Shiite revolution—suggested themselves, in the Arab and Persian street, as the only virtuous way forward. The book looks at the seductive appeal those mass movements have had for the Middle East and the deadly threat they seemed to portend for American interests, which have always preferred bilateral relations with reliable strongmen in states like Saudi Arabia, imperial Iran or the Egypt of the free officers. Our preference for states over transnational movements is understandable, but we have so often attached ourselves to the wrong states or the wrong leaders (emphasis mine).”
There you have it, in a nutshell—the pro-Palestinian left as we now know it at Counterpunch and Mondoweiss.
In conclusion, these issues are not merely historical and academic, but are central to the strategy and tactics of the Palestinian rights movement, especially among Americans, in terms of our understanding of and relation to our government’s actions. Again, it is appalling that Blankfort (and Wawro) have any presence at all on allegedly respectable pro-Palestinian websites, no less a favored status. Beyond his anti-Lobby fanaticism, Blankfort brings absolutely nothing of any intellectual or political interest whatsoever, other than a kind of (no, a real) Stalinism.
I will conclude by stating to the reader, who is not reading this at either the Counterpunch or Mondoweiss website, that a shorter version was indeed submitted to both. At that point the reader is justified in concluding that in relation to this issue, and even on the pro-Palestinian left, free speech and honest debate have their doctrine-imposed limits, convoluted as they are in terms of the case at hand. So much for the role of the American left in the Palestinian cause.
David Green (davegreen84@yahoo.com) lives in Champaign, IL. He has been involved in serious anti-Israel Lobby activities there for the past 12 years: in relation to the local media, local Jewish institutions (as both a member and non-member), and the University of Illinois and its supporters of Israel.
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Blankfort asserts that this has indeed been a conscious strategy on Chomsky’s part, and he clearly has the approval of his internet proprietors in his efforts to convince others of this astonishing turn of events in the history of Zionist and anti-American strategy.
Wrong. Both editors of Counterpunch are friends of Chomsky and people like Finkelstein. Just because they publish Blankfort’s essays doesn’t mean they approve everything he writes.
Philip Weiss also is not an enemy of Chomsky.
Counterpunch and Mondoweiss both publish a wide variety of essays, not necessarily a coherent whole, not necessarily all of them leftist, from different ideological viewpoints.
What Max says is true. While Phil Weiss and Alexander Cockburn have their differences with Chomsky they don’t consider him their enemy and certainly are not willing to go as far in criticizing him as I have. They definitely do not agree, however, with his take on the pro-Israel Lobby. I also should say that I don’t recall ever writing that Chomsky’s behavior was part of a “conscious strategy.” Rather, I have just written about what he has said and written about, or as important, not written about, taken at face value.
Ajit is not Max.
Nice posting. I am not happy to read that it was not accepted at counterpunch
or mondoweiss. I am surprised about the latter, since in the past they have
posted stuff critical of the Israel Lobby viewpoint as well.
On a minor note, the “emphasis mine” emphases are not showing up,
at least on my browser.
As far as Blankfort’s bizarre account of Chomsky’s “conscious strategy”,
I think you may be referring to the exchange that we both had with him
on mondoweiss, here:
http://mondoweiss.net/2010/01/chomskyabunimah-the…
(in particular comments 123–125)
and I think for anybody who wants to waste time on this, it is worth
reading for the sheer irrationality of Blankfort’s comment, and the total
lack of response from the mondoweiss commentors. Blankfort is also
unable to accurately report Chomsky’s position on a number of issues.
The crux of the argument whether AIPAC is the driving force behind American foreign policy vs. a mere strategic asset of the U.S. is a powerful point to debate. Being of Lebanese/American ancestry my knee jerk reaction, along with others of similar ethnic background, is to root for the Walt-Mersheimer theory, but as Finkelstein in the past and Green certainly in this blog have presented cogent arguments to rethink this claim of Israel’s dominance over America’s foreign policy. Although I need to examine both sides’ arguments more carefully, I would think that what is needed are carefully examined global case studies where AIPAC can be linked to having an instrumental role in American foreign policy until then the Walt-Mersheimer argument will be relegated to the status of another conspiracy theory shared by even political scientists sympathetic with the Palestinian cause.
It needs to be mentioned that quite recently there was a Los Angeles Time article reporting that Lebanon is the second largest recipient of U.S. military aid after Israel. According to the report, Lebanon has made prolific use of the funds to investigate and nab Lebanese citizens who are trading secrets with Israel.
With respect to the 3 billion aid Israel receives from the U.S., I was recently arguing with a friend of mine over this point and his response was: the 3 billion amount represents along with other foreign aid 10 % of U.S. spending. Without available figures at hand to rebut, I responded does it legitimize us to support an occupation. Any suggestions for a more powerful argument?
Diane, By accident, I learned about David Green’s latest attack on me. When I have written about Chomsky, at least I had the decency to send him a copy of what I had written. If you wish to get a better line on what I have said about Chomsky and what he has said himself, and whether Israel is or is not supported because it is an asset, I encourage you and others to read this article, Damage Control: Noam Chomsky and the Israel-Palestine Conflict, http://www.leftcurve.org/LC29WebPages/Chomsky.html
I’m sure Noam really appreciates that–you’re quite the gentleman when you smear people.
“I would think that what is needed are carefully examined global case studies”
The reason that you won’t hear any global case studies coming from proponents of the Lobby Hypothesis is also the reason that the most enthusiastic supporters of the Hypothesis tend to be people with little or no knowledge of US policy outside of the Middle East. Namely, that global case studies are totally devastating for the Lobby Hypothesis. It only works in a knowledge vacuum.
Walt & Mearsheimer make a number of statements about US foreign policy that could be considered naive coming from anyone less knowledgeable, such as the notion that US policy is about “spreading freedom and democracy” and the like. W&M fans have sometimes claimed that this was just a way for W&M to “soften the blow” and not lose readers.
In reality, it’s absolutely essential to their thesis. Their thesis is that US policy in the Middle East is determined by The Israel Lobby. In order for that claim to make even elementary sense, one must assume that US policy in the Middle East is fundamentally, qualitatively different from US policy elsewhere. Indeed, we must assume that, were it not for The Lobby, the US would be doing marvelous things to help the Palestinians (like we’ve helped the Timorese and so many others over the decades).
After all, why would we need an all-powerful lobby to explain why the US does basically the same thing in the Middle East that it does everywhere else?
Throughout the world, US policy has been to maintain control over strategic resources and to prevent independent development, by installing what JFK once referred to as “a Trujillo” (referring to the racist mass murderer that the US installed in the Dominican Republic to replace the mild social democrat Juan Bosch). When it comes to projecting power, the US is not squeamish. Support for (and direct commission of) mass murder, including genocide, is not off the table, as the Mayans of Guatemala, the East Timorese, the Sunnis of Iraq, the Kurds of Iraq and Turkey, the people of Indochina, and the Palestinians can attest. Indeed, during what is misleadingly called the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Kennedy Administration consciously risked global nuclear war in order to defend the principle that the US has the right to engage in terrorism and outright warfare against Cuba for overthrowing the government that we were nice enough to impose on them.
And what does the US do in the Middle East? Prop up and lavishly support bloodthirsty dictators, brutal military occupations (Palestine and Western Sahara — people often forget the latter), and arm whatever regime will provide an effective base for US power. In that region, it doesn’t get more effective than Israel, because there’s no chance that the Israeli regime is going to be overthrown in favour of an independent government that seeks reconciliation and regional integration anytime in the foreseeable future.
While US aid to Israel — 75% of which ends up in the pockets of US military corporations — is the largest item in the US foreign aid budget, this is merely a quantitative difference. The Middle East has a lot more to offer the US than a lot of other regions. There’s always going to be a largest recipient of aid. In Latin America, it’s the murderous Colombian regime (another example of our famous “yearning for democracy”).
What amazes me about Blankfort is that people publish him at all. It’s not just that his arguments — when he deigns to make one — are generally fairly asinine. It’s that he’s so blatantly dishonest, and has absolutely no compunction when it comes to simply making shit up in order to discredit an opponent (for examples of his pervasive lying, see his distortions of Chomsky’s positions and writings in just about anything he’s written about Chomsky). Blankfort is intellectually just one step above David Icke, and yet he’s published by people who usually have at least some degree of quality control.
http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/08/the-right-and-l…
Elise, you can check this out if you’re in a masochistic mood. I tried the pestering approach, and of course JB has no straight answers. It turns out, he’s also a 9/11 Truther, and perhaps a JFK conspiracy theorist–he actually believes that in regard to Israel, everything would have been different had he lived.
His logic with Wawro is that a supposedly credible realist thinks Israel’s bad for our interests; by JB’s logic that makes the realist correct, and the Lobby powerful.
You’re more of a masochist than I. I would have called it a day after exposing this Kim and Blankfort as intellectually dishonest and/or ignorant of the matters they hold forth on. Personally, I don’t see any need to argue at length with people who have essentially excluded themselves from solidarity with the Palestinians.
I also love how these people have total amnesia about the USS Stark.
yes, Elise, about case studies, see my responses to _bd at the bottom of this thread
a comparison of, say, the US relationship with Israel and Taiwan since 1950 would be most illuminating, I think
My thanks to Max for posting this.
It has not been posted by: Counterpunch, Mondoweiss, Z, Palestine Chronicle, and Dissident Voice (although have have posted Jeremy Hammond’s recent thorough evisceration of Blankfort.
I will write a straight review of Quicksand for ElectronicIntifada. They’ve actually been good about this, although Stephen Maher evoked a hysterical reaction from Mondoweiss. Another gatekeeper there, Idrees Ahmad, along with Blankfort, guards the territory.
PC did publish this in March: http://www.palestinechronicle.com/view_article_de…
But they’ve refused to publish any follow-up. I think Baroud was intimidated by the ridiculous response on Mondoweiss.
And no, Counterpunch hasn’t published a rational perspective on the Lobby issue since Finkelstein’s in 2006, so far as I can tell.
Weiss has never, as far as I know, allowed for full debate on this issue, except in the comments section, where Blankfort and the proto-anti-Semites hold forth, as Seth notes.
David has none nothing but insult me in all his posts, whether they were on Mondoweiss or here. Not once has be actually published what I have said and then criticized it. If he did it once and I missed it, I apologize. His attacks on me remind me those made against me by David Hororwitz who called me “the teacher from hell” because I asked any student that stood for the pledge of allegiance to tell me of a single minute in US history when this country had “justice for all” or any evidence that had been the intention of the “founding fathers.” But, at least, he quoted me correctly. I have privately challenged David to debate be on the issue of The Lobby but so far, as I expected, he has not taken up the offer. It is a lot easier to offer cheap shots from the sidelines.
Jeffrey, you’re welcome to make specific responses to my post, which basically means addressing my problems with Wawro: do you identify with his exceptionalist view of U.S. history? Do you believe in the historic good intentions and manifest destiny of our leaders and people?
OK Jeffrey, I’ll make it easy for you; compare and contrast your understanding of raghead politics to Wawro’s:
“Where strongman rule faltered, mass movements—Arab nationalism, Sunni fundamentalism, Shiite revolution—suggested themselves, in the Arab and Persian street, as the only virtuous way forward. The book looks at the seductive appeal those mass movements have had for the Middle East and the deadly threat they seemed to portend for American interests, which have always preferred bilateral relations with reliable strongmen in states like Saudi Arabia, imperial Iran or the Egypt of the free officers. Our preference for states over transnational movements is understandable, but we have so often attached ourselves to the wrong states or the wrong leaders.”
The point of my review of Wawro for CounterPunch was that as a thoroughly mainstream historian, which I acknowledged, he had the temerity to criticize the Israel lobby and challenge the myth perpetuated by AIPAC and the Chomskyist Left that Israel gets it support from the US because it is a “strategic asset” and that because, he did so, his book had not received a single review or even a mention by the usual stable of reviewers who review history books for the mainstream media. But notice how Green tries to shift the discussion from Chomsky to Wawro.
Just a moment ago I came across another critical commentary regarding Chomsky’s myopia when it comes to The Lobby. It was made by Ilan Pappe, the renowned Israeli anti-zionist historian in 2006 and it essentially is in agreement with me. Check it out, folks: http://ww4report.com/node/1826
Ilan Pappe used to run a website, he’s apparently taken it down, but not long ago he used to have a site. The site contained all the interviews with him and all of his articles. It was riddled with mentions of Chomsky in a good number of interviews and articles, all of the mentions of his name were quite positive i remember/ I’ve searched the site using Google site search (the quickest way to get what you’re looking for). I read that ww4 site report of someone quoting an alleged email received from Pappe on Chomsky: “We can find out what Noam has missed in his analysis in the last twenty years” this seems a very strange sentence from someone who claims to greatly respect Chomsky and has recently authored a book with him.
http://www.flipkart.com/gaza-crisis-noam-chomsky–…
Granted, he doesn’t have to agree with Chomsky’s precise position on the Israel lobby or the Jewish lobby, whatever you’d want to call it, but antagonistic to Chomsky he is not.
I also recall an interview in which he was specifically asked about the Zionist lobby, his response was that he didn’t think the Jewish lobby (he used that term) was as powerful as Walt and Mearshimer claimed it was and also made the claim that the evangelical Christian Right had more pull.
I have no links for this since the website is nowhere to be found at the moment.
So how well does Wawro prove his point? Does he consider the alternatives–that Israel is indeed a strategic asset (including forays around the world, Central America, etc.)? What evidence does Wawro provide that are difficulties in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, etc. can be attributed to the intervention of the Lobby and Israel’s behavior? A competent book would address these obvious issues. Instead, Wawro simply asserts the power of the Lobby, while in most of the book he simply describes events that clearly have nothing to do with the Lobby–Afghanistan, Iran, etc.
That’s the biggest problem with Counterpunch. Even though it is (partially) an online publication, it does not allow readers to present alternative views in something like a comment box such as this. Alexander Cockburn is a rather imperious character who would never be comfortable with this. Mondoweiss I know much less about, but I have had the impression that Philip Weiss is mostly right just as Max Ajit is right on most questions–except for Iran, of course.
Louis, watching the evolution of Weiss’s Jewish-oriented site has been interesting. His own beliefs focus on the Lobby and the “dual loyalty” of Jewish supporters of Israel, and how we have to “have this conversation” and “have that conversation” about being Jewish, the Lobby, etc. Weiss has no real political analysis, as far as I can tell. His co-editor Adam Horowitz is I think genuinely a leftist. The comments section is dominated by Lobbymongers, creating little space for rational debate. At the bottom of it all, of course, is an ignorance about U.S. foreign policy, neoliberal economics, etc. It’s just a mess. I don’t think it reflects the left as a whole re Palestine, but it sure eats up some space and time.
Weiss is indeed right that a debate TODAY on the power of individual American Jews and mainstream Jewish organizations, and wily exaggerations of that power, will not put American Jews in danger as individuals or as a group in America. They can sure “take it”.
But what it is its poisonous to the left and deadly to the Pro-Palestinian left.
It has the power to break apart important associations and activists, it has the power to dope the left with rightist solution (as in a mix) which would dwindle the consistent left.
Yes, exactly.
Notice how Blankfort simply cannot engage any specific point regarding my criticism of his beloved military historian. Notice how Blankfort brings in Chomsky in order to avoid addressing substantive issues. Notice how Blankfort’s comments are invariably devoid of serious content, logic, and analysis. This is the “new Left”, which is now the “realist center.” Our government is not the problem, it’s the Jews. For goodness sake, if they hadn’t stabbed us in the back, all would be well in the Middle East, with all our potentates, satrapies, and puppets in place doing our bidding in peace and joy.
I was disgusted with Jeffrey Blankfort’s essay in the otherwise very good compilation The Politics of Anti-Semitism and his haranguing about the מecessity to identify the bad guys as Jews.
When I’ve read Blankfort’s response to Joseph Massad’s essay on the Israel lobby and his petty baiting Massad for a “debate” and his response to the fact that Massad didn’t bite, I was done with Jeffrey Blankfort.
He’s already privately baited me for a debate today. That’s his only tactic, since he has no rational analysis to put forward.
It is curious that I have been unable to get a single Jew to debate me on this issue. In 1991, when we were on friendly terms and after an exchange in the old National Guardian, a friend in NY wrote to Chomsky, suggesting that he and I debate at the 1992 Socialst Scholars Conference. He declined, writing that “it wouldn’t be useful.” Then I asked Prof.Joel Beinin, with whom I was and remain friendly, if he would debate me and his response was, “it wouldn’t be useful.” Years later when after I had a public exchange on the issue with Phyllis Bennis whom I have known for years regarding the lobby, Elias Davidsson, an anti-zionist Israeli living in Iceland, asked me what could he do to get us to together. I asked him to write Phyllis and ask her if she would debate me. She wrote back saying that she and I probably agreed on almost every other issue (which was true) but that, yes, “it wouldn’t be useful” for us to debate. Now, I have debated Steven Zunes, who is not Jewish, twice on this issue, once on KPFA in Berkeley and another time at USF. It was all very civil. Why, I wonder, among all those Jews out there who say such nasty things about me for having criticized their guru, do none have the guts to debate me? Green’s response is revealing. But if you want part of my analysis in short it is that the fact that the Palestine solidarity movement, which I have been a part of since 1971, has been such an utter failure is because it has been dragged down, held back and stifled by Jews [Edited by Max: seriously, Jeff? I come back from Gaza to read that shit? This is not Mondoweiss.]. The comments by Green and others attacking me attest to that and will be the subject of a forthcoming article.
Maybe that’s because you can’t chalk differences of opinion or analysis up to anything other than ethnic-religious identification when you debate said Jews in print or on the internet.
The sad fact of the matter is that I can find no other reason than ethnic-religious identification that explains why otherwise intelligent Jews have not only a blind spot when it comes to the question of Jewish political power in the US, but are so ready with insults, as opposed to arguments by anyone who raises the issue. In my article that first appeared in Left Curve and in a slightly edited version of The Politics of Anti-Semitism, entitled, “The Israeli Lobby and the Left: Uneasy Questions,” http://www.leftcurve.org/LC27WebPages/IsraelLobby.html I did not raise the issue as I raising it now, but perhaps I should have. For in almost every instance, it was the Jewish leadership and activists in the SWP, Socialist Action, Line of March, CP, All Peoples Congress/Workers World, plus the union activists who went out of their way to block any mention of the US role in the Middle East, let alone Palestine, in their calls for the major mobilizations against South African apartheid and US intervention in Central America. Sure there was a handful of Jews, a literal handful, such as Lenni Brenner and Steve Zeltzer pushing for the inclusion of the Palestinian issue, particularly after the beginning of the first intifada, but we were blocked.These same groups also went into the tank when it was revealed that the ADL had been spying on virtually every political organization left of center in Northern California as well as 10,000 individuals, agreeing to settle a law suit with the ADL and getting nothing, even an admission of guilt by the ADL in return. It was all pretty ugly.
Perhaps times are changing.
Look Jeffrey this is straightforward: you have a Venn diagram. One circle is people who are not unequivocally in favor of justice for Palestinians. All kinds of people fall into that circle: right-wingers, American centrists and liberals, Christian Zionists, Jewish Zionists, Jewish progressive-except-for-Palestine. There’s another circle of progressive/left Jews, with varying, majoritarian, but never absolute overlap with the first circle. Why do you want to alienate people who aren’t part of that overlap? What’s the point?
There was just a whole Assembly devoted to these issues in Detroit with 200 people in attendance, discussing precisely these issues against a background of Marxian and anarchist politics and analysis, discussing unlearning Zionism, tribal identification, Zionism as a subspecies of white power, etc.
Perhaps people would be more welcoming if you were circulating the literature from Gabriel Ash–the most correct, although not the most comprehensive–in the genre, instead of a knucklehead like Wawro. Check out this Wawro link, a totally egregious mistake in the 1st paragraph: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/geoffrey-wawro/a-he…
The guy studies military history! He’s practically by definition an asshole.
Here are the relevant links to Ash: http://dissidentvoice.org/Apr06/Ash20.htm http://dissidentvoice.org/Apr07/Ash21.htm http://dissidentvoice.org/Apr06/Ash18.htm
Jeffrey, people who use facts, logic, analysis, and background in a careful, thoughtful, coherent, and scrupulous way do not like “debating” those who simply pile on facts (if they are facts) to reach a pre-ordained conclusion. Like Chomsky, I don’t find the notion of “debate” helpful. I’m not wedded to a particular point of view. I’m perfectly willing to consider new information and change my argument. The point is to find out what’s plausibly true. I don’t see that you’re interested in that.
I can’t speak to the others, but Phyllis Bennis can be difficult. I interviewed her once on KDVS after Obama’s Cairo speech, and she got very testy when I challenged her praise for it, claiming that he was even handed towards the Israelis and the Palestinians. Unfortunately, for her, I had read the speech, and it was obvious that he hadn’t been remotely even handed, chastising the Palestinians for their violence, without similarly doing so in regard to Israel. After I pointed this out, she pulled a classic Stalinist debating tactic of attacking the speaker (me), instead of addressing what I said, and then, when I responded by saying, “I have said two things … ” and proceeded to reiterate my position again, she wisely moved on to other subjects. By now, I think she knows that she was mistaken about the purported opening that some said that the Cairo speech represented at the time.
How curious, David writes “I’m perfectly willing to consider new information.” That just happens to be the exact wording contained in an email sent to me earlier this year by Prof. Chomsky when I again asked him to debate me. In response I sent him the article I had written about him in 2004 which he had earlier refused to read. That wasn’t, apparently, the information he was looking for. The article, for which I have provided the link below, has been widely reproduced and praised, including by acquaintances of Chomsky who shared my criticism but for both professional and personal reasons are afraid to say so. While the Chomskyites or Chomskyists have railed at me for writing it, not one has provided anything that could be called a critique, just the same name-calling that we have seen from David on this site and on Mondoweiss. Here’s the link: http://www.leftcurve.org/LC29WebPages/Chomsky.html
So why don’t you ask Weiss to post my current piece, and then let the Comments jackals have at it? I mean, what could be more satisfying to you? Why would you want to debate me when you can just defeat me?
And you can also send Cockburn a note in that regard, while you’re at it. I’m sure that would bring Allison Weir into the fray. Or does Counterpunch not want to foster “debate?”
I made it clear in my review of Wawro’s book was that was important about it was that here was a mainstream historian who had a conventional view on 9–11 and supported the US war in Afghanistan dissecting the pro-Israel lobby, using reliable sources, and that his book was therefore being ignored by the reviewers, who as in the op-ed pages are under the Zionist thumb.
I happen to believe the pro-Israel Lobby/American Jewish establishment is at the moment out of control and pushing the US to attack Iran or back an Israeli attack. I consider them to a 5th Column that puts what it believes to be Israel’s interest above that of their fellow Americans and any semblance of morality in the public sphere. That it/they represent maybe a third of the Jews, at most, is irrelevant Members of this Zionist clan have been appointed to key positions in the Obama adminstration that have to do with formulating public policy, establishing terrorists lists, etc., and they all have high security clearances.
When one brings up this subject, however, even the otherwise bright Gabriel Ash, says that to do so is dangerous because it appeals to the “nativist” right-wing. If it does, so be it. The nativist right wing didn’t create the problem. The Jewish establishment did and it is high time those claiming to be anti-Zionists need to start proving it.
The truth is not fucking dangerous. What’s dangerous is refusing to contend with the truth. I posted above links to serious, materialist analyses–or better, research programs–for understanding the Lobby. What is wrong with them? Are they incorrect? If so, how? It’s not going to help to write that Ash is Jewish, and it’s not going to help to call me Jewish. I want answers and not evasions.
You write, “happen to believe the pro-Israel Lobby/American Jewish establishment is at the moment out of control and pushing the US to attack Iran or back an Israeli attack. I consider them to a 5th Column that puts what it believes to be Israel’s interest above that of their fellow Americans.”
Yes, ideology and tribalism plays a role here. And so does materialism, the bedrock of leftist analysis. Seriously: an attack on Iran actually benefits Israel? Of course not. Does the Lobby push for it, against American interests? Sure, the same way all Lobbies push for policies against American interests, the same way they should all be analyzed and destroyed. Will the Lobby get its attack? Maybe it will, and we will wonder: who are those with millions who invested their money in paying off a lobby to support an attack on Israel? Jeffrey I am stunned that you don’t see that the problem here is that you have no materialist analysis and no class analysis. Do you think the questions I’m posing are important, or not? Do you think key analytical units are classes within states, or just “states”? Do you accept the M-W framework of “national interest”?
M-W, as the “otherwise bright” Ash points out, want technocracy, the rule of enlightened experts over American foreign policy, perhaps running the Empire at a lower level of tribute, perhaps letting energy conflicts wane as a component of doing so. Is this what the left is reduced to, fighting for technocracy? Really?
Of course, the notion of “American interests” is in itself worthy of questioning. What are “American interests”? Does this mean the magical “national interest” of Walt and the other “realists”? Or do we mean the interests of the ruling class, the major power concentrations in a given society?
I’m not surprised that this piece was rejected by various outlets. The tone is aggrieved and self-righteous and the analysis puerile. Take a single example, Satloff’s claim that the US has stockpiled billions in supplies that it can draw on at any time. When material is forward-deployed for US use, it is organized in warehouses and sections and subsections and freight pallets and assigned on that basis to individual units down to company level and below so they can swoop in and pick up exactly their equipment. Otherwise it would be chaos, would defeat the purpose. The “US stockpile” in Israel is not organized like that, for the benefit of US units. It is rather organized as part of Israeli supplies, and the whole “stockpile” argument is just a fig leaf to conceal another perk for Israel. A few plows and whatnot hardly make Israel a crucial stockpile. The US moved millions of tons in GW 1 without Israel’s help, despite Israel’s threat to attack and upset the whole apple cart, prevented only because the Pentagon would not supply the avionics codes to distinguish friendly aircraft from foe electronically.
Zionism has crippled the “left” with the vulgar Marxist emphasis on “oil”. The real force is radical nationalism, US and Jewish, working in virulent tandem, an analysis which is quite beyond this author, but is affirmed by people who actually study Saudi Arabia, like Robert Vitalis. Tariq Ali also deprecates “oil”, cites nationalism.
[Edited by Max; start your own blog for that shit. Perhaps “Anti-Semitic Verbosity: A View from Someone Totally Unconcerned for Palestinians” would be a good title. And correct, that did get edited out because I’m Jewish, although that’s incidental; it mainly got edited out because I know what anti-Semitism looks like, and I know who its primary victims will be. Not Jews, but the left, and by way of a weakened left, the Palestinians.]
This isn’t Stormfront, and the notion that I’m discrediting myself by not giving a platform to Atzmonites may be true; I’m discrediting myself to Atzmonites. Trust me: I don’t give a fuck.
Thanks for a great post. Analysis of Israel on the left usually falls into either the Israeli Tail Wagging the US Dog category, or the Israel is the military base of the US category. Both camps are void of real analysis.
The Israeli US relationship is/was a perfect storm where as the US was the only economic and political game in town and Israel’s military might was untouchable. Both of those facts are slowly but surely changing and in it we see a small gap in the US Israeli relationship as both are becoming less useful to each other.
Those who think that the source of the problem is the israeli lobby also probably imagine that campaign finance reform will fix the american political system.
This is a good, concise evaluation, which opens the door to understanding the situation more effectively. Personally, I think that we should give more consideration to the immediate post-World War II context of how the US/Israeli relationship evolved. As with South Africa and Taiwan, Israel become a bastion of US imperial policy in a region of the world subject to decolonization. All three had powerful lobbies that represented their interests here. Indeed, it was Taiwan, with the “China Lobby”, that was initially most powerful, and, interestingly, it still remains so, despite its seeming invisibility, with the US providing sotto vocce guarantees of its territorial integrity along with advanced weaponry and the presence of the US navy. A case study that compared and contrasted the trajectory of the US relationship with both would provide some valuable insights, I think. For example, the US has a critical economic relationship in relation to both in regard to communications technology.
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[…] some obvious problems with this theory, which I will outline only briefly, as they have been discussed in great detail elsewhere. If we are to assume that The Lobby is the driving force behind US […]
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With the passage of time, Israel assisted the US covertly in both South Africa and South America, but, now, with the US recession and the increasingly lack of utility of the Israeli military in dealing with threats to its Zionist vision, both the US and Israel face a dilemma in how to proceed. It is precisely because of this confusion that an attack upon Iran is more likely under Obama than it was under Bush.
[…] The Banality of Anti-Israel Lobby Doctrine This is a guest post from David Green. My own… […]
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