Rene — Opening the Debate on Israel
Topic(s): Palestine / Israel | Comments Off on Rene — Opening the Debate on IsraelOpening the Debate on Israel
by Norman Solomon
Sunday, May 7, 2006 by the Baltimore Sun (Maryland)
The extended controversy over a paper by two professors, “The Israel
Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” is prying the lid off a debate that
has been bottled up for decades.
Routinely, the American news media have ignored or pilloried any
strong criticism of Washington’s massive support for Israel. But
the paper and an article based on it by respected academics John
Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt, academic
dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, first
published March 23 in the London Review of Books, are catalysts for
some healthy public discussion of key issues.
The first mainstream media reactions to the paper – often with the
customary name-calling – were mostly efforts to shut down debate
before it could begin. Early venues for vituperative attacks on the
paper included the op-ed pages of the Los Angeles Times (“nutty”),
the Boston Herald (headline: “Anti-Semitic Paranoia at Harvard”)
and The Washington Post (headline: “Yes, It’s Anti-Semitic”).
But other voices have emerged, on the airwaves and in print, to bypass
the facile attacks and address crucial issues. If this keeps up,
the uproar over what Mr. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt had to say could
invigorate public discourse about Washington’s policies toward a
country that consistently has received a bigger U.S. aid package for
a longer period than any other nation.
In April, syndicated columnist Molly Ivins put her astute finger on
a vital point. “In the United States, we do not have full-throated,
full-throttle debate about Israel,” she wrote. “In Israel, they
have it as a matter of course, but the truth is that the accusation
of anti-Semitism is far too often raised in this country against
anyone who criticizes the government of Israel. … I don’t know that
I’ve ever felt intimidated by the knee-jerk ‘you’re anti-Semitic’
charge leveled at anyone who criticizes Israel, but I do know I have
certainly heard it often enough to become tired of it. And I wonder
if that doesn’t produce the same result: giving up on the discussion.”
The point rings true, and it’s one of the central themes emphasized
by Mr. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt.
If the barriers to democratic discourse can be overcome, the paper’s
authors say, the results could be highly beneficial: “Open debate
will expose the limits of the strategic and moral case for one-sided
U.S. support and could move the U.S. to a position more consistent
with its own national interest, with the interests of the other states
in the region, and with Israel’s long-term interests as well.”
Outsized support for Israel has been “the centerpiece of U.S. Middle
Eastern policy,” the professors contend – and the Israel lobby makes
that support possible. “Other special-interest groups have managed to
skew America’s foreign policy, but no lobby has managed to divert it as
far from what the national interest would suggest,” the paper says. One
of the consequences is that “the United States has become the de facto
enabler of Israeli expansion in the occupied territories, making it
complicit in the crimes perpetrated against the Palestinians.”
In the United States, “the lobby’s campaign to quash debate about
Israel is unhealthy for democracy,” Mr. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt
assert. They point to grave effects on the body politic: “The inability
of Congress to conduct a genuine debate on these important issues
paralyzes the entire process of democratic deliberation.”
While their paper overstates the extent to which pro-Israel pressures
determine U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, a very powerful
lobby for Israel clearly has enormous leverage in Washington. And
the professors make a convincing case that the U.S. government has
been much too closely aligned with Israel – to the detriment of human
rights, democracy and other principles that are supposed to constitute
American values.
The failure to make a distinction between anti-Semitism and criticism
of Israel routinely stifles public debate. When convenient, pro-Israel
groups in the United States will concede that it’s possible to oppose
Israeli policies without being anti-Semitic. Yet many of Israel’s
boosters reflexively pull out the heavy artillery of charging
anti-Semitism when their position is challenged.
Numerous American Jewish groups dedicated to supporting Israel are
eager to equate Israel with Judaism. Sometimes they have the arrogance
to depict the country and the religion as inseparable. For example,
in April 2000, a full-page United Jewish Appeal ad in The New York
Times proclaimed: “The seeds of Jewish life and Jewish communities
everywhere begin in Israel.”
Like many other American Jews who grew up in the 1950s and ’60s,
I went door to door with blue-and-white UJA cans to raise money for
planting trees in Israel. I heard about relatives who had died in
concentration camps during the Holocaust two decades earlier and
about relatives who had survived and went to Israel. In 1959, my
family visited some of them, on a kibbutz and in Tel Aviv.
The 1960 blockbuster movie Exodus dramatized the birth of Israel
a dozen years earlier. As I remember, Arabs were portrayed in the
picture as cold-blooded killers while the Jews who killed Arabs were
presented as heroic fighters engaged in self-defense.
The film was in sync with frequent media messages that lauded Jews
for risking the perilous journey to Palestine and making the desert
bloom, as though no one of consequence had been living there before.
The Six-Day War in June 1967 enabled Israel to expand the territory
it controlled several times over, in the process suppressing huge
numbers of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Their plights and
legitimate grievances got little space in the U.S. media.
In 1969, the independent American journalist I. F. Stone expressed hope
for “a reconstructed Palestine of Jewish and Arab states in peaceful
coexistence.” He contended that “to bring it about, Israel and the
Jewish communities of the world must be willing to look some unpleasant
truths squarely in the face. … One is to recognize that the Arab
guerrillas are doing to us what our terrorists and saboteurs of the
Irgun, Stern and Haganah did to the British. Another is to be willing
to admit that their motives are as honorable as were ours. As a Jew,
even as I felt revulsion against the terrorism, I felt it justified
by the homelessness of the surviving Jews from the Nazi camps and
the bitter scenes when refugee ships sank, or sank themselves, when
refused admission to Palestine.
“The best of Arab youth feels the same way; they cannot forget the
atrocities committed by us against villages like Deir Yassin, nor the
uprooting of the Palestinian Arabs from their ancient homeland, for
which they feel the same deep ties of sentiment as do so many Jews,
however assimilated elsewhere.”
When I crossed the Allenby Bridge from Jordan into the West Bank 15
years ago, I spoke with a 19-year-old border guard who was carrying a
machine gun. He told me that he’d emigrated from Brooklyn, N.Y., a few
months earlier. He said the Palestinians should get out of his country.
In East Jerusalem, I saw Israeli soldiers brandishing rifle butts
at elderly women in a queue. Some in the line reminded me of my
grandmothers, only these women were Arab.
Today, visitors to the Web site of the Israeli human-rights group
B’Tselem can find profuse documentation about systematic denial of
Palestinian rights and ongoing violence in all directions. Since
autumn 2000, in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, according to the
latest figures posted, the number of Israelis killed by Palestinians
has totaled 998 and the number of Palestinians killed by Israelis
has totaled 3,466.
Overall, in the American news media, the horrible killings of Israelis
by Palestinian suicide bombers get front-page and prime-time coverage
while the horrible killings of Palestinians by Israelis get relatively
scant and dispassionate coverage.
If the U.S. news media were to become committed to a single standard of
human rights, the shift would transform public discourse about basic
Israeli policies – and jeopardize the U.S. government’s support for
them. It is against just such a single standard that the epithet of
“anti-Semitism” is commonly wielded. From the viewpoint of Israel and
its supporters, the ongoing threat of using the label helps to prevent
U.S. media coverage from getting out of hand. Journalists understand
critical words about Israel to be hazardous to their careers.
In the real world, bigotry toward Jews and support for Israel have long
been independent variables. For instance, as Oval Office tapes attest,
President Richard M. Nixon was anti-Semitic and did not restrain
himself from expressing that virulent prejudice in private. Yet he
was a big admirer of the Israeli military and a consistent backer of
Israel’s government.
Now, the neoconservative agenda for the Middle East maintains the
U.S. embrace of Israel with great enthusiasm. And defenders of that
agenda often resort to timeworn tactics for squelching debate.
Last fall, when I met with editors at a newspaper in the Pacific
Northwest, a member of the editorial board responded to my reference
to neocons by declaring flatly that “neocon” is an “anti-Semitic”
term. The absurd claim would probably amuse the most powerful neocons
in the U.S. government’s executive branch today, Vice President Dick
Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, neither of whom
is Jewish.
Over the past couple of decades, a growing number of American Jews
have seen their way clear to oppose Israeli actions. Yet their
voices continue to be nearly drowned out in major U.S. media outlets
by Israel-right-or-wrong outfits such as the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee, the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish
Committee.
As with all forms of bigotry, anti-Semitism should be condemned. At
the same time, these days, America’s biggest anti-Semitism problem
has to do with the misuse of the label as a manipulative tactic to
short-circuit debate about Washington’s alliance with Israel.
Norman Solomon is executive director of the Institute for Public
Accuracy and the author of “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits
Keep Spinning Us to Death.” E-mail to: mediabeat@igc.org.