[NYTr] The Lobby; Investing Hope in Annapolis

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by Ed Pearl

[The peace conference in Annapolis, Md., to start Nov. 26 and last
24 hours or less, is meant to begin - and bless - negotiations between
Israeli and Palestinian leaders on a final peace agreement , ostensibly
to be completed by the end of the Bush presidency. (NY Times/11/19/07)
Roberts, here, presents problematic issues which will not be discussed,
despite their absence almost presaging certain failure.  Roger Cohen's
op-ed in today's NY Times presents others (see below). Maybe next
time.-Ed]

Info Clearing House - Nov 14, 2007
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18714.htm

The Lobby

By Paul Craig Roberts

Experts in the West and ordinary people in Arab lands have understood
for many years that the United States does not have an independent
policy toward the Middle East.  President Jimmy Carter, a man of good
will, tried to use American influence to settle the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, the source of dangerous instability in the Middle East.
However, Israel was able to block Carter’s attempt, while blaming
Yasser Arafat. Carter’s plan would have given rise to a Palestinian
state.  Israel did not want any such state, because obvious military
aggression is necessary in order to steal the territory of an official
state with defined borders.  It is much easier to steal land from a
non-state.

By preventing the rise of a Palestinian state, Israel has been able to
continue with its theft of the West Bank. Palestinians who have not
been driven out have been forced into ghettos, cut off from schools,
hospitals, water, and their olive groves and farmlands. In a recent
book, President Carter called the existing situation “apartheid.”
Carter was demonized by the Israel Lobby for his use of this word, but
some experts consider Carter’s choice of words to be an euphemism for
the continuation of what I. Pappe and N. G. Finkelstein call “the
ethnic cleansing of Palestine.”

That the vast majority of Americans know nothing of this is testimony
to the power of the Israel Lobby. 

A number of writers have exposed Israel’s misbehavior and the power of
the Lobby, but until now, the Lobby has been able to marginalize its
critics by smearing them as “anti-semites,” “nazis,” and “Jew-haters.”
In a new book, John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt have broken the
Israel Lobby’s power to suppress truth by demonizing and intimidating
all who would criticize Israel.

Mearsheimer and Walt are distinguished scholars holding distinguished
appointments at the University of Chicago and Harvard University, two
of America’s most distinguished universities.  Their book, The Israel
Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, published by the distinguished American
publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is a masterpiece of scholarship
and documentation.  Footnotes comprise 23 percent of the book’s pages.

Mearsheimer and Walt easily succeed in making their case that neither
strategic nor moral grounds can explain U.S. support for Israel. Only
the power of the Israel Lobby can explain the juxtaposition of a
dwindling moral and strategic case with ever-increasing U.S. backing for Israel, even to the disadvantage of U.S. national and strategic interests. Indeed, both executive and legislative branches are so completely compromised by the Lobby that the different elements of U.S. Middle East policy “have been designed in whole or part to benefit Israel vis-a-vis its
various rivals.”

Chapter by chapter, Mearsheimer and Walt demonstrate the deleterious
effects the Lobby has had on U.S. relations with Palestinians, Iraq,
Syria, Iran, and Lebanon.  The two scholars conclude:

“The lobby’s influence helped lead the United States into a disastrous
war in Iraq and has hamstrung efforts to deal with Syria and Iran.  It
also encouraged the United States to back Israel’s ill-conceived
assault on Lebanon, a campaign that strengthened Hezbollah, drove Syria
and Iran closer together, and further tarnished America’s global image.
The lobby bears considerable, though not complete, responsibility for
each of these developments, and none of them was good for the United
States. The bottom line is hard to escape, although America’s problems
in the Middle East would not disappear if the lobby were less
influential, U.S. leaders would find it easier to explore alternative
approaches and be more likely to adopt policies more in line with
American interests.”

There is nothing anti-semitic about this book.  Mearsheimer and Walt do
not challenge Israel’s right to exist or the legitimacy of the Israeli
state.  They believe the U.S. must defend Israel from threats to its
survival.  They even regard AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee, as a legitimate American lobby and not as an unregistered
agent of a foreign state. 

The motives of the two scholars, apart from respect for truth and the
obligation to speak it, are to further Israel’s and America’s
legitimate interests.  Mearsheimer and Walt agree with numerous Israeli
historians and commentators that Israel’s policy toward Palestine and
the Arabs, together with the Lobby’s suppression of critics, have been
“directly harmful to Israel.”  The inflexibility that Israel has
imposed on U.S. foreign policy has America mired in wars--now a half
decade or more old--in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even as Muslim rage
threatens to engulf America’s puppet in Pakistan, vice president Dick
Cheney, Israel and its neoconservative allies strive to initiate war
with Iran.  

This is a high price to pay for Israeli territorial expansion even if
the U.S.-Israeli policy of war and coercion succeed. If military
aggression fails to bring the Middle East under the hegemony of the
U.S. and Israel, the dangers to energy flows and Israel’s existence
could result in the use of nuclear weapons. It is literally insane for
the United States to expose the world to such risks for the sake of
Israel’s misguided policy toward Palestine.  

Other scholars, especially those whose sense of justice is offended by
the cruel oppression Palestinians suffer at the hands of Israel, are
more critical than Mearsheimer and Walt.  The latter do Israel and the
Lobby a service by defining the issue as one of U.S. and Israeli
legitimate national interests rather than casting it as a case of
crimes, inhumanity, and injustice. 

Instead of legitimate national interests, James Petras, Bartle
Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Binghamton University in New York,
sees “a level of crimes parallel to those of the Nazis in World War
II” (The Power of Israel in the United States, 2006).  Petras writes
that “the architects of the Iraqi war planned a series of aggressive
wars of conquest based on the principle of domination by violence,
torture, collective punishment, total war on civilian populations,
their homes, hospitals, cultural heritage, churches and mosques, means
of livelihood and educational institutions. These are the highest
crimes against humanity.”  

“The worst crimes,” Petras writes, “are committed by those who claim to
be a divinely chosen people, a people with ‘righteous’ claims of
supreme victimhood.” 

It remains to be seen how much more blood and treasure Zionist
fanaticism will extract from Americans.  But one thing is certain:  the
Israel Lobby is far too powerful for America’s good and Israel’s.  

Forty years ago the Lobby was sufficiently powerful to force President
Lyndon Johnson to cover up the intentional Israeli attack on the USS
Liberty that resulted in 34 Americans dead and 174 wounded.  Admiral
Thomas Moorer, Chief of Naval Operations and Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff declared: “No American President can stand up to
Israel.”  

Forty years later the Israel Lobby is able to reach into Catholic
universities and to overturn tenure decisions. The courageous scholar
Norman Finkelstein was denied tenure at DePaul University in Chicago,
Illinois, because he is an effective critic of Israeli policies. 

In America today academics and intellectuals who fail to toe the
Lobby’s line are unlikely to receive support from conservative or
liberal foundations.  Even Mearsheimer and Walt’s article, “The Israel
Lobby,” commissioned by the Atlantic Monthly and from which their book
evolved, had to be published overseas in The London Review of Books
when the Atlantic Monthly’s editors’ courage failed them. 

American patriots who glorify in their country’s status as the “sole
superpower” have much to learn about the subservience of their
country’s foreign policy to a tiny state of five million people. There
is no better place to begin than with Mearsheimer and Walt’s The Israel
Lobby.


[Paul Craig Roberts wrote the Kemp-Roth bill and was Assistant Secretary
of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of
the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of
National Review. He is author or coauthor of eight books, including The
Supply-Side Revolution (Harvard University Press). He has held numerous
academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair in
Political Economy, Center for Strategic and International Studies,
Georgetown University and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution,
Stanford University. He has contributed to numerous scholarly journals
and testified before Congress on 30 occasions. He has been awarded the
U.S. Treasury's Meritorious Service Award and the French Legion of
Honor. He was a reviewer for the Journal of Political Economy under
editor Robert Mundell. He is the co-author of The Tyranny of Good
Intentions. He is also coauthor with Karen Araujo of Chile: Dos
Visiones - La Era Allende-Pinochet (Santiago: Universidad Andres Bello,
2000).


                           ***

The New York Times - Nov 19, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/19/opinion/19cohen.html

Op-Ed

Israel, Palestine, Crab Cakes

By ROGER COHEN

I would like to invest hope in the Annapolis Middle East peace
conference, or meeting, or parley, or whatever the term is. Really, I
would. The 59-year battle for the same land of Zionist and Palestinian
national movements has not been good for anyone.

I’d like to feel hopeful although no firm date has been set, and it’s
not clear who’s coming, and it’s six years too late, and Israel has
chosen to lure tourists for its 60th anniversary next year with a photo
of an Israeli “cowboy” on a Golan Heights ranch, which hardly seems the
ad campaign of a country about to trade land for peace.

I don’t want to despair although Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime
minister, is beset by criminal investigations, and President Bush is
forlorn, and the only man who makes both these leaders look powerful is
the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, who controls only the West
Bank wing of his national movement.

Hopelessness is no option although the current “West Bank first”
strategy comes just two years after a “Gaza first” approach. This had
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declaring in 2005 how critical it
was to “seize the moment” — before the moment evaporated and Hamas
grabbed control of Gaza.

Remember all the faith placed in Gaza and its greenhouses, all the talk
of a “trial run” for Palestinian statehood after Israel’s withdrawal?
Remember the way Palestinian elections were talked up? It’s not good to
remember. There’s too much memory in the Middle East, too many graves.
They get in the way.

Eyes to the future, I refuse to allow the latest fighting in Gaza
between Hamas and Abbas’s Fatah to make me despondent, even when
Mahmoud Zahar, a Hamas leader, tells me in a phone call that: “Without
unification of the West Bank and Gaza, Abbas cannot represent the
Palestinian side at Annapolis.”

Zahar, a doctor, predicts the get-together in Annapolis, Md., will be
“a unique example of failure.” He counters my inquiries about a Hamas
recognition of Israel with three questions:

“First, what is the border of Israel? And what happens to Jerusalem?
And what happens to Palestinian refugees in the camps?”

Here we go — the old conundrums. Hamas cannot be ignored forever. But I
console myself that the Annapolis meeting, tentatively planned for Nov.
26, is not about a peace settlement. It is about setting a framework
for talks, defining principles, rallying regional support.

Perhaps the Saudis, under heavy U.S. pressure, will show up, although
they are so risk-averse and have staked so much on Palestinian unity, I
doubt King Abdullah will. Perhaps the Syrians will ignore Golan cowboy
ads and appear, but I wonder. Perhaps fear of Iran will lead Sunni Arab
states to show public support for Israel. Perhaps.

Still, despair is a nonstarter, even if a minister in Olmert’s
government is already voting for legislation to block any eventual
division of Jerusalem. So what if Annapolis looks like Rice’s
transparent, last-gasp bid for a “legacy achievement”?

What matters are the two peoples. But even basic principles are
problematic. One core demand of Olmert and his foreign minister, Tzipi
Livni, is for up-front Palestinian recognition of Israel “as a Jewish
state.” But Saeb Erekat, a moderate Palestinian negotiator, has said
that “Palestinians will never acknowledge Israel’s Jewish identity.”

Livni wants clarity on the Jewish character of Israel, which has a
large Arab minority, as quid pro quo for recognition of Palestine and
as insurance against mass Palestinian return.

She’s right to want this; she’s wrong to push for the principle now.
Why should Palestinians offer anything when the West Bank is a shameful
place offering a primer on colonialism and Israeli settlements have
grown almost unabated? Nascent Palestine is in pieces, invisible behind
a reassuring fence-wall.

While the Bush administration looked away, Israelis and Palestinians
lost sight of each other. Perhaps, in the end, the only way to stave
off hopelessness is to think that at least Annapolis will enable them
to commit to seeing each other more. They can set up working groups,
renounce violence, set deadlines.

All the “final-status issues” — Jerusalem, borders, refugees,
settlements, water and security — will have to be left for later. Even
protracted attempts to frame the principles for discussion of these
matters have failed.

“The best we can hope for is an agenda of conflict management and not
have illusions of conflict resolution,” said Shlomo Avineri, an Israeli
political scientist.

More than 200,000 Israeli settlers, the jihadist infiltration of the
conflict and the deep split in the Palestinian movement have created
physical and mental barriers even a strong U.S. president would find
hard to shift. Bush is weak.

Hope is a shrinking refuge. Annapolis looks like a looming photo-op.
Even photo-up-plus would be something at this stage.

Cohen's Blog: http://iht.com/passages