Israel Lobby

A review of Jewcentricity by Adam Garfinkle, Part 3 of 4: The Israel Lobby

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Part 1
Part 2

It angers Garfinkle (doubtless due in large part to his role as speechwriter for Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice) that the influence exerted by the Israel Lobby over the foreign policy of the United States, and other Western nations, provides yet another focal point for “negative Jewcentricity.” Garfinkle’s discussion of this issue centers on the publication and reception of Mearsheimer and Walt’s The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy in 2007. He notes how:

In recent years, this debate has revolved around the writings of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, notably a paper and then a book they wrote called The Israel Lobby. The authors argue in essence that U.S. foreign policy has been distorted, particularly in the Middle East but really on a global scale, by the exertions of Jews in the United States who have managed to bend the American national interest to that of Israel. The authors believe that the Israel Lobby — they always use a capital L for that word — has made U.S. foreign policy too interventionist, notably in causing the Iraq war, and that U.S. support for Israel is a main source of Islamic terrorism directed against the United States.[1]

Garfinkle freely engages in ad hominem attacks on Mearsheimer and Walt, implying that they wrote their book mainly out of desire for financial gain, rather than from a deeply felt conviction about the misdirection of American foreign policy under the influence of the Lobby. He claims “the authors parlayed the ruckus [over the influence of AIPAC] into the book, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2007, for which the two reportedly received an advance of $750,000 to split between them.”[2] He likewise notes the furor over the book soon died down “despite the authors’ efforts to keep the buzz buzzing, the better to sell more books and promote their views.”[3]

As well as writing their book for mercenary reasons, Mearsheimer and Walt were also, Garfinkle contends, unqualified to offer their thoughts on American foreign policy because they are not “Middle East experts” and do not speak any Middle Eastern language. He writes:

Like many other Israel lobby critics before them, Mearsheimer and Walt are not themselves Middle East experts. Before their Israel Lobby essay and book, neither had written much on the region and anything at all for scholarly, expert audiences. They have never claimed to be regional experts, and rightly so, for neither seems to have studied, let alone mastered, any Middle Eastern language. The many factual errors they make illustrate their lack of familiarity with the basic literature on the subject. … [S]erious scholars are supposed to respect certain standards of logic and rules of evidence, and tenured faculty at prestigious institutions are presumed to be among those professionals.”[4]

Having engaged in some initial character assassination, Garfinkle finally addresses Mearsheimer and Walt’s thesis that American foreign policy has been unduly influenced by an Israel Lobby which has pushed the American government into wars not in the American national interest. Garfinkle claims this assumption is based on a “vast exaggeration” and claims The Israel Lobby is marred by a “fundamental illogic,” despite himself having, as previously noted, acknowledged in other parts of Jewcentricity the existence of a plethora of powerful and well-funded activist organizations “serving parochial Jewish ethnic interests that are simultaneously distinct from broader American interest but not related directly to religion.”[5] Read more

Netanyahu election aftermath: Reaping the consequences of Israeli fanaticism

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In my 2007 review of The Israel Lobby I noted that

Mearsheimer and Walt try to see Israel as a normal state capable of making rational decisions, but the extremists are in charge and have been so at least since the 1967 War. Any attempt to make a meaningful withdrawal from the West Bank and Jerusalem and to allow a viable Palestinian state would produce a civil war among Israelis and likely provoke a strong response by the lobby on the side of the nonaccommodationists. The fate of the Oslo peace process, the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and the support by the lobby of the most radical elements within Israel certainly argue that there is little chance of a successful move in this direction.

As throughout Jewish history, it is the most committed members who determine the direction of the entire group. This is doubtless true of most groups, but it is especially the case with Jews where there is a long history of fanaticism. I am reminded of Christiane Amanpour’s depiction of Jewish fanatics in her excellent TV documentary, God’s Jewish Warriors. These West Bank settlers and Jewish activists are massively ethnocentric, and, unlike the propaganda put out by the lobby, they are not at all democratic. They live in a completely Jewish world where their every thought and perception is colored by their Jewish identity. Theirs is an apartheid world separated by high concrete walls from their Palestinian neighbors, where even tiny settlements are necessarily protected by the Israeli army. And at a time when Americans are constantly being encouraged by Jewish organizations like the ADL to be ever more tolerant of all kinds of diversity, these people are anything but tolerant. Calls for expropriation and expulsion of the Palestinians are commonplace among them. Israel has created a classic Middle Eastern segmented society in which different groups live in an ingroup/outgroup world, completely isolated from each other.

And  since the fanatics are the ones having the children, this situation will become more extreme with time.

Which is why I was unsurprised by the results of the Israeli election. A Labor government would have been a sign that the most extreme elements were not in charge and would have been heartening news to the Obama administration eager to make a deal with Iran.

But this time Netanyahu may have gone too far. His speech to the U.S. Congress and open dispute with the Obama administration were incredibly aggressive moves, bound to further sour relations with the Obama administration. In this context, some pre-election rhetoric by Netanyahu has provided an opening for some real changes in policy. In the desperate lead up to the election, with polls indicating that he would lose, he pulled out all the stops, stating that there would never be a Palestinian state while he was prime minister. Read more

Steve Sailer on the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement

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Steve Sailer has produced an interesting piece over at Takimag, with his thoughts on the growth (or lack thereof) of the BDS movement on US college campuses. The overly-optimistic title of the article can be overlooked in favor of what remains — a very astute summation of the state of this decade-old movement in America. Given that BDS is ostensibly built along the same lines and moral foundations as the agitation against White rule in South Africa, Sailer questions why BDS “hasn’t yet become respectable in the United States.” His answer is that as long as Whites clung to the top rung of America’s demographic ladder, Jews enjoyed power and control, as victim and outsider, over the Israel-Palestine discourse. They could also present themselves to the gullible and venal members of the White “pro-Isruhl” crowd as the apple of Jehovah’s eye, with every moral and divinely sanctioned entitlement to their ‘birth right.’ With the grip of the White demographic slipping (or lost entirely in the case of many Californian college campuses), the rainbow coalition of minorities, religions, identities and perversions now challenges organized Jewry for the gold medal in the farcical victimhood Olympics which comprises modern political culture.

Sailer points out that in the quest to crush ‘privilege,’ the new coalition has not failed to note the “privileges of the single richest and most influential group in America: Jews.” In response, Jewish journalists like Jonathan Chait and Jamie Kirchick have become increasingly alarmed over “whether the Obama Coalition’s identity politics jihad against white privilege, male privilege, straight privilege, and now even cisgender privilege” will eventually turn against them. One of the ways in which this had become manifest is in relation to the BDS movement on California’s college campuses. Sailer demonstrates that BDS has been least successful on those campuses which retain the highest percentage of White students (e.g. UC Santa Barbara which has a 36% White student body — the whitest college to table a BDS resolution). But among those colleges burgeoning with the new ethnic demographic, Jewish influence and arguments hold little sway: “So far, BDS resolutions have been passed by eight student governments, Loyola of Chicago and seven California schools: private Stanford and a half dozen public University of California campuses, including Berkeley and UCLA, both of which are of symbolic importance.” Read more

Philip Weiss on Jewish Power

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Not for the first time (see here and here), Philip Weiss has expounded on Jewish power, this time as it relates to Netanyahu’s speech (“Netanyahu’s speech and the American Jewish condition“).

The fear [of persecution] blinds Jews to our power, in Israel and the United States. It is hard for Jews to think of ourselves as powerful because of a historical and collective memory of persecution. Yet the world regards us as powerful. It sees the Jewish state as a nuclear armed country with a huge army, and it sees Jews as an elite in the United States with a ton of clout. “Why is the American Jewish community so determined to convince itself that we are living in 1938?” the late Tony Judt asked nine years ago. “Why does the most successful, the most well integrated, the most culturally and politically influential, the most socially and economically well situated Jewish community since the late years of the Roman republic, why is it so worried about the demon of anti-Semitism?”

We are as I like to remind readers the wealthiest American group by religion and we took over many establishment perches in the last generation. We are three of the four Democratic appointees to the Supreme Court, and whenever I turn on the news, I see influential Jews. Andrea Mitchell the wife of Alan Greenspan interviews Kenneth Pollack, Matt Lauer interviews Lorne Michaels. Last night I watched a panel on CSPAN about the Charlie Hebdo murders at the French-American Foundation and it appeared that all four speakers were Jewish.

Read more

UN Reveals Israel’s Support for ISIS

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I think that there are two prominent phenomena which will soon make people aware of the fundamental importance and extent of the Jewish question in the present world.

The first phenomenon is the existence of Israel, a prime signal of Jewish ethnocentrism’s inevitable double standard when compared to the ethnically and culturally pluralist attitudes of Diaspora Jews in the West.

The second phenomenon is the exposure of how easy it is for Jews to ally themselves with (or taking the side of) Muslims, if it suits their interest either in their war against the White gentiles — their perceived main Western enemies — or in other ways.

Among major examples of this tendency are European Jewry’s “heightened empathy and sympathy for Islam” and invention of the myth of Islamic tolerance; and the Jewish collaboration with Muslims during the invasion of Christian Spain.

Both phenomena are on display in the Middle East’s current events. Read more

I agree with Adelson: Democracy is not a Jewish value (or a reality in the U.S.)

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The meeting of Jewish oligarchs Haim Saban and Sheldon Adelson at the Israeli-American Council has attracted considerable comment. Obviously, it’s another illustration of the power of a minuscule number of very wealthy individuals to influence the political process. And since Adelson is partial to Republicans to the tune of $150 million in the last election (more to come) while Saban donates to the Democrats (substantially less [after all, he’s only worth 3.4 billion], but certainly not to be ignored), both parties are quite prone to doing their bidding. The Israel Lobby is nothing if not bi-partisan.

As Justin Raimondo noted, “Oh, it was quite a party, as the two philanthropists did their best to conform to every caricature out of the anti-Semites’ playbook” (“Oligarchs for Israel“).

(Isn’t it amazing that if one listens to activists on the left, such as MoveOn.org [originally funded by Jewish megadonors of the left, George Soros, Peter B. Lewis, and Linda Pritzker], one would think that the only wealthy individuals involved in U.S. politics are the safely non-Jewish Koch brothers?)

In the paranoid world of pro-Israel fanatics, even the New York Times and Washington Post are insufficiently pro-Israel. Scott McConnell in The American Conservative:

The two naturally agreed that the American media was terribly biased against Israel, except for maybe Fox News, and they discussed whether they could buy the Washington Post or New York Times to correct the problem. This aspect of the performance was comic, the lament, commonplace enough among neoconservatives, that the American press is biased against Israel. Consider that the Washington Post runs (the Wall Street Journal aside), the most neoconservative major editorial page in the country, and it’s been a long time since someone that one can even conceive of being slightly sympathetic to those subjected to Israeli occupation (perhaps the late Mary McGrory?) has written there. TheTimes is more diverse and makes occasionally sincere efforts at both balance and objective journalism, but if one looks at the roster of Times-men who regularly cover Israel, one could conclude that having a child serving in the IDF is a job requirement.

Sheldon and Haim then amused themselves and their audience by talking about taking over the Times and Washington Post.

Read more

Jews, ‘Israelis’ and the Israel Lobby

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News from England conveys that Andrew Bridgen, a Member of Parliament for the so-called Conservative Party, has troubled those of the Hebrew persuasion by daring to mention that there is a link between the Jewish people and the State of Israel. During an exchange in the House of Commons on proposals to recognize a State of Palestine, Bridgen is alleged to have said:

Does my hon. Friend agree that, given that the political system of the world’s superpower and our great ally the United States is very susceptible to well-funded powerful lobbying groups and the power of the Jewish lobby in America, it falls to this country and to this House to be the good but critical friend that Israel needs, and this motion tonight just might lift that logjam on this very troubled area?

A report at Breitbart.com is illustrative of irrational and pathological responses to any acknowledgement that Jewish lobbying groups (of which the Israel Lobby is only one) are well-funded and highly influential. Despite the measured tone of Bridgen’s comments, Breitbart’s journalist described the statement as a “scathing, anti-Semitic attack on pro-Israel groups in the United States. … Mr Bridgen’s comments give fuel to the anti-Israel lobby in the UK, and echo statements made by a number of anti-Semites. According to the European Monitoring Centre’s definition on Anti-Semitism, equating the actions of the State of Israel with Jewish people as a race is classed as anti-Semitism.”

Bridgen’s sin, we can deduce, is deemed to be two-fold. The first element was that he dared to state that a Jewish lobby existed and that the government of the United States is “very susceptible” to its influence. Although this is a clear and demonstrable fact, it is off-limits for public discussion. His second sin was to dare to suggest that Britain should be a “critical” friend, and that Israel “needs” friends who will carefully point out when it has committed wrongs or errors — another perfectly reasonable statement, that is, unless you are Jewish in which case anyone who criticizes you or blames you for anything is an “anti-Semite.”

Israel’s actions are clearly blameworthy, and have cost it support. The Guardian reported that in the same debate, Sir Richard Ottaway, the Conservative chairman of the foreign affairs select committee, said the Netanyahu government’s recent appropriation of land in the Etzion Bloc area of the West Bank had cost Israel his support. He said he had long been a supporter of Israel but “I realize now Israel has slowly been drifting away from world public opinion. The annexation of the 950 acres of the West Bank just a few months ago has outraged me more than anything else in my political life. It has made me look a fool and that is something I deeply resent.” A significant problem is that there are many more fools, with a variety of motives, who will persist in their support for Israel. Read more