McPeak, Obama and the "Israel Lobby": Why the Right is Wrong, Gidon D. Remba

A new tempest in a teapot has broken out over remarks from 2003 unearthed by a conservative magazine about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by Gen. Merrill A. "Tony" McPeak, Senator Barack Obama’s campaign co-chair. The Republican Jewish Coalition claims that McPeak “blames American Jews rather than Palestinians” for the failure of the peace process.

The Obama campaign issued the following statement on McPeak: "Senator Obama's longstanding commitment to Israel is clear to anyone who has reviewed his voting record, read his speeches or looked at his policy papers. As he has said, his support for our democratic ally Israel is based on America's national interests and our shared values. Neither Senator Clinton nor Senator Obama agrees with every position their advisors take, and in this case Senator Obama disagrees with General McPeak's comments."

The RJC says this is not enough and that Sen. Obama should remove Gen. McPeak. The RJC calls McPeak’s comments from the 2003 interview “offensive” and in its second press release on the subject in 24 hours says that “more telling are the comments General McPeak made to The Oregonian on Wednesday, March 26 [2008] when he said he 'stood by his position that U.S. policy in the Mideast is influenced by pro-Israeli voters'"…The issue is not whether American Jews have any influence, the issue is who is to blame for the problems in the Middle East. General McPeak blamed American Jews in 2003 and he blames them still today. It is painfully clear he does not understand the offensive nature of these comments.”

McPeak’s sin is that he does not subscribe to the dogma that Israel is always the righteous victim and the Palestinians are nothing if not evil terrorists; that all right and good inures to Israel and all wrong falls on the Palestinians. The Republican Jewish Coalition, like the Israeli and American Jewish right, will countenance only the most simplistic Manichean view of the conflict: Israel is the innocent angel and the Palestinians genocidal demons. Israel can do no wrong, nor can any Israeli policy be objectionable or possibly dim the prospects for peace.

McPeak pointed to the role that Israel’s West Bank settlements play in obstructing a two-state solution, and the support Israel’s settlement project receives in some American Jewish quarters. These forces help to reinforce a laissez faire American approach to Israeli construction beyond the Green Line, even as US officials regularly bloviate about the “unhelpfulness” of Israel's long-running West Bank extravaganza. Gen. McPeak rightly challenged the central taboo of the Jewish right’s worldview. (Even some on the Israeli Labor party’s right-wing, including Defense Minister Ehud Barak, have bought into to this, in Barak's case, self-serving, black-and-white portrait.)

But once we acknowledge that US policy in the Mideast is influenced by pro-Israeli voters in the American Jewish community, as even the RJC admits, it’s hard to see why it should be offensive to grant that the way in which that influence is exercised does not always serve Israel’s or America’s interests. It would come as a great surprise to AIPAC, widely considered to be among the most successful and influential lobbies in Washington, that it, and the American Jews it represents, have no influence on US policy vis-à-vis Israel. But as far as the RJC is concerned anything an American Jewish organization lobbies for must ipso facto be as good for Israel and America as hummus and apple pie.

The RJC irresponsibly conflates McPeak’s acknowledgement of that political reality, and his criticism of the misguided policies it sometimes abets, with the recklessly flawed Carter-Walt-Mearsheimer view. (I’ve debunked both Carter and Mearsheimer/Walt in previous publications, while recognizing the grain of truth in their views). But this trio ill-served their own cause by giving a bad name to a well-founded thesis held by many staunchly pro-Israel Jews: that AIPAC and fundamentalist Christian Zionists often exercise their influence and that of the citizens they represent in ways that are harmful to Israel’s security, and may even clash with the Israeli government’s policies. To affirm this one needn’t swallow the wholesale warped worldview of Carter, Mearsheimer and Walt: that Jews have excessive influence on US policy, or that the "Israel lobby" or Jewish neocons betrayed the United States by goading American leaders to invade Iraq for Israel’s sake. But such is the RJC’s standard MO: tar all moderate and liberal pro-Israel Jews by collapsing their views into the most egregious and wrong-headed theories of the far left, and then attack the moderates for buying into the whole noxious mix.

In reality, American Jews do not have enough influence on US policy: the moderate majority is, in fact, not well represented by the mainstream pro-Israel lobbying organizations. It is therefore welcome news that, according to news reports, a moderate pro-Israel lobby is, at long last, now aborning.

Gen. McPeak told the Oregonian on March 26 2008 that “he worked closely with the Israeli military as an Air Force officer and considers himself a strong ally of Israel. But, he added, "the way to get to peace is to find some way out of the box canyon that Israel has built for itself with the West Bank settlements. . . . And it is just a fact that the [pro] Israeli vote -- or the Jewish vote -- is something that all politicians have to consider."

The American Jewish Committee’s Annual Survey of Jewish Opinion for 2007 (November 6-25, 2007) found that while 46% of American Jews favored the establishment of a Palestinian state “in the current situation,” 43% oppose. Let’s set aside, for the purposes of this discussion, how the wording of this question influenced the respondents’ replies, and take the result at face value. Other polls have shown broader American Jewish support for a two-state solution and a robust American role in Palestinian-Israeli negotiations.

This poll suggests that there is a significant minority of American Jews which opposes the creation of a Palestinian state. Given that American Jews are concentrated in major states like New York and Florida, and have among the highest percentages of voter turnout of any religious or ethnic group in the U.S., it is unsurprising that an administration which seeks to invest political capital into brokering a Palestinian-Israeli peace agreement will need to be concerned about the significant minority of Jewish voters—particularly in those two states—who oppose the creation of a Palestinian state, one of the primary outcomes of such negotiations.

Significant American Jewish opposition to US engagement in brokering peace negotiations is indeed a factor in the failure of the Bush Administration, and previous administrations, to become more actively involved in peace efforts, even now as it pursues the “Annapolis peace process.” But still, McPeak is wrong: the neoconservative ideology of the Bush Administration has been the overriding reason why for the last seven years it has not assumed an active role in backing or brokering Palestinian-Israeli peace talks. Under that doctrine—held by Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush—the US must first vanquish radical states like Iraq, Syria and Iran, sapping the Hezbollah and Hamas terrorists they underwrite; peace negotiations must be deferred until the radicals have been neutered by force of arms.

As it faces its final year in search of a legacy, left with the dismal results of its polices from Iraq to Iran, Lebanon and Gaza, the Bush administration--mugged by reality--has been forced to do an about face and, after seven years of malign neglect, had little choice but to get behind a new attempt at Palestinian-Israeli negotiations. This it has done despite the finding of the recent AJC poll that a significant minority of American Jews opposes the intended outcome of those negotiations: a two-state peace deal eventuating in a Palestinian state. The grand failure of its Middle East strategy after eight years is an awful legacy to bequeath the Republican party, this country, and America’s allies from Israel to pro-Western Arab states. Seizing even the appearance of triumph from the jaws of chaos and defeat trumps the wishes of a divided American Jewish public. The opinion of the wider American public as it enters a new presidential election, and the judgement of history, is a far greater burden to bear.

Obama and Israel: Triangulating Between Pragmatism and Idealism, Gidon D. Remba

In a comment on my "The New Republican Jewish Obama Smear: Return of the Big Lie," Richard Silverstein of Tikkun Olam wrote that "some of Obama's statements about Israel have been shamefully one-sided leaving no room for a balanced view of the conflict. He needs to be called on that even by those like me who support him." This raises what for many of us in the progressive community is the most challenging question of the presidential campaign: how do you win an election while at the same time remaining true to your (progressive) principles? Richard, here's my response to your comment.

I’m not sure that we can have it both ways. You acknowledge that adopting a “more one-sided” pro-Israel position is “part of the price you pay for moving from local to national & presidential politics.” Just how much Obama has had to do so is of course precisely the bone of contention between the Obama camp and his right-wing critics. But let's grant, for the sake of argument, that he, like any presidential candidate, has had to do that to some measure.

Yet what positions on the conflict could Obama take, that he hasn’t taken, which would enable him to gain the support of a large majority of the American Jewish community while remaining faithful to a progressive political outlook? We know that a considerable portion of the American Jewish community supports many of the positions of the Israeli peace camp. But can you run a successful presidential race hewing to those positions more so than Obama has so far? Solving this problem requires a complex triangulation between pragmatism and idealism.

I agree that Obama has made a number of AIPAC-like policy pronouncements throughout the campaign, including those he made to AIPAC in Chicago last year. Yet in several key areas he has clearly deviated from AIPAC orthodoxy. I would say that he has probably succeeded in doing that more so than any Democratic presidential candidate thus far.

First, there’s his statement in favor of negotiations with Syria, which is wisely couched in pro-Israeli government terms. In this, Obama has followed the tack that I (and other American Jewish progressive Zionists) took in late 2006 and early 2007, in my case, in a column in the Jewish press which you discussed at Tikkun Olam, "Look Who's Pressuring Israel”, where I wrote: “In reality, the Bush Administration is pressuring the Israeli government to refuse peace talks with Syria, according to the testimony of Prime Minister Olmert, his advisors and cabinet ministers. AIPAC, and its allies in the organized Jewish community, who rush to loudly protest any time there is a whiff of US pressure on Israel in favor of a peace initiative, has absolutely nothing to say when the White House blocks Israel from talking with Syria.” Following this line, which had become a staple of progressive Zionist/Americans for Peace Now criticism of the Bush Administration—see "APN Slams Bush for Pressuring Israel to Avoid Peace Talks", Obama told AIPAC on March 2, 2007, in a twist on its own never-pressure-Israel dogma: “No Israeli Prime Minister should ever feel dragged to or blocked from the negotiating table by the United States.”

Second, Obama has violated AIPAC orthodoxy, which shuns unconditional direct talks with Iran, relying instead on sanctions and implied threats of preemptive war, by repeatedly calling for negotiations with Iran over the nuclear impasse and other issues.

Third, Obama just told a group of leading American Jews in Cleveland, Ohio, that “there is a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt an unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel that you're anti-Israel and that can't be the measure of our friendship with Israel. If we cannot have an honest dialogue about how do we achieve these goals, then we're not going to make progress." (A transcript of Obama's remarks, well worth reading, is here.) AIPAC has not always followed Likud policy of course, but it has often tended to hawkish positions, sometimes more so than the Israeli government itself (as I've discussed in several publications, including "Wanted: A Moderate Pro-Israel Lobby," and "AIPAC Hijack").

Fourth, Obama’s campaign strategist David Axelrod told the New York Times a few weeks ago that, in Roger Cohen’s paraphrase, “There would be no six-year time-outs on Israel-Palestine under an Obama presidency. ‘He’d be actively involved from day one,’ said Axelrod.” AIPAC was quite content to go along with the Bush Administration's policy of malign neglect towards peace efforts during its first six years.

Triangulating between the pragmatic imperatives of winning the Democratic primaries while remaining faithful to his principles, should Obama be criticizing Israeli settlements and occupation policies while running for the Democratic nomination? Should he now, or during the general election campaign, be condemning Israel’s harsh economic pressure on the population of Gaza in response to Qassam rocket attacks? Will that help him win the American Jewish vote and defeat John McCain in the general election? Do we want to turn him into a Ron Paul, a Ralph Nader or a Dennis Kucinich? How much more can he really be like any of them and not marginalize, and forfeit, his candidacy?

During the general election campaign against McCain there will be more opportunity for policy differences on the Middle East (beyond Iraq) to emerge. But I don’t think that the royal road to the White House would have Obama become much more of an advocate for Peace Now positions, or, lehavdil, for those of Jewish Voice for Peace (with whom I disagree on many issues). OK, maybe just a little. But the onus is on us progressive Zionists and other pro-Israel Jewish peaceniks to say precisely how.

Is AIPAC Lobbying for War or Peace with Iran and Gaza?, by Gidon D. Remba

Is AIPAC Lobbying for War or Peace with Iran and Gaza?

By Gidon D. Remba

Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle

July 24, 2007

This month’s column comes to you from Washington, D.C., where I have just attended the Executive Committee meeting of AIPAC, the “pro-Israel lobby,” as a delegate of Ameinu. The meeting, which focused on AIPAC's support for new legislation to ratchet up economic sanctions on Iran, was addressed by Rep. Tom Lantos (D-CA), Chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, thirty freshman members of Congress, other prominent senators and Congress-folk, and Israeli Ambassador to the US Sallai Meridor.

While AIPAC professed its undying belief that "the United States must exhaust every economic, diplomatic and political tool to persuade the Iranian government to end its nuclear program," in fact the organization has completely failed to support any political, security or economic incentives which, when combined with sanctions, might create a real opportunity for the pragmatists in the Iranian leadership to reach an accommodation with the U.S. and chart a way out of the nuclear crisis.

AIPAC claims that its sanctions-only policy is meant to avoid war with Iran, ending the Iranian nuclear program through non-military means. But the lobby's tack would withhold many of the most effective non-military tools which proved successful with North Korea. These include the offer of future commercial ties and normalization of diplomatic relations if Iran reaches a satisfactory resolution with the international community on the nuclear issue and ends support for terrorism, while going along with efforts to settle the Palestinian-Israeli conflict with a two-state solution. This is the “grand bargain” which Iran proposed to the Bush Administration several years ago, to no avail.

The two-day meeting, which culminated in lobbying sessions with members of Congress, opened moments after President Bush made a major speech on Palestinian-Israeli peace. Bush spelled out his (and Israeli Prime Minister Olmert's) strategy of reviving peace talks with the new Fatah Palestinian government under President Mahmoud Abbas and freshly appointed Prime Minister Salam Fayyad in the West Bank, while continuing to isolate and pressure Hamas in Gaza. AIPAC has endorsed the new Bush strategy, instructing its activists to "urge members [of Congress] to support the new Palestinian government” albeit with “proper congressional oversight, and with continued calls on the new government to combat terrorism and fight corruption."

AIPAC insisted that "US support for the new government should be conditioned on its continued rejection of Hamas and a clear understanding that it will not seek an accommodation with a terrorist group committed to Israel's destruction." These conditions, which reflect the Bush Administration's outlook, have set the U.S. against its moderate Arab allies—especially Saudi Arabia and Egypt—which have been encouraging Fatah and Hamas to reconcile and reconstitute a national unity government. Even IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi told the Knesset recently that the return of a Fatah-Hamas unity government is inevitable. Is American and Israeli policy based on a realistic picture of the neighborhood—or on wishful thinking?

While the new Bush-Olmert peace gambit has drawn support from various quarters in both the US and Israel, many critics have expressed strong skepticism over its viability. A policy built on fomenting civil war between Fatah and Hamas insures that Hamas has every incentive to do its utmost to act as the great spoiler. Indeed, many fear that its flaws are so grave it may well make the patient even more violently ill than before. Lest anyone doubt the Orwellian core of this new Bush “peace initiative,” Ha’aretz reported recently that the Bush Administration “does not want a reconciliation” between Fatah and Hamas. “It wants a confrontation. It wants a decisive victory.” That strategy worked out well for Israel against Hezbollah in Lebanon and the U.S. against Iraqi insurgents (and the U.S. against the Viet Cong, and the French against the Algerian FLN), so we can rest assured it will work just fine here as well.

There are, sadly, all too many reasons to doubt that the Bush Administration, the Olmert government, and a Fatah-led Palestinian Authority immersed in conflict with Hamas will execute wisely, robustly or effectively enough for the optimistic forecasts of recent happy peace talk to be fulfilled. So long as Bush refuses to invite Syria to the table or to permit Abbas to co-opt Hamas to return to a national unity government, these forces are likely to work assiduously to undermine his moves. Fatal flaws in President Bush’s game plan are likely to render his peace effort stillborn. In short: hope for success; expect failure.

Nor is it likely that the President’s vaunted fall “peace conference” will bear fruit, following its downgrade by his spinmeister to just a “meeting” on Palestinian institution-building with players who already recognize Israel (that sounds like a trailblazing historic summit now doesn’t it?). With the administration’s belated admission (after Congressional sources revealed) that the financial aid announced in the President’s speech to bolster the new Fatah government was already budgeted beforehand, the absence of substantial new economic assistance to the PA is bound to leave Palestinians bitter and disenchanted. It isn’t hard to embrace cynicism about Bush’s Mideast endgame in his final 18 months in office as he struggles with a region already set aflame by the fiasco he himself has fashioned in Iraq. We can expect, at best, little but sound and light shows on the Arab-Israel conundrum from this administration.

Meanwhile, AIPAC leadership enthusiastically endorsed the fire-breathing March 2007 AIPAC National Policy Conference speech of Rev. John Hagee of the fundamentalist right-wing Christians United For Israel (CUFI), which brought some 4,000 members last week from around the country to lobby on the Hill in support of Israel the day after AIPAC. I’m sure it was entirely coincidental that three of AIPAC’s four lobbying agenda items were identical to CUFI’s, and that the lobbying days were back to back. AIPAC leadership is happy to hop into bed with CUFI on Iran sanctions, US aid to Israel and putting more teeth into UN Security Council Resolution 1701 to enable international forces to better stanch arms smuggling in Lebanon.

But AIPAC leaders prefer to ignore the fact that Hagee and CUFI are implacably opposed to a two-state solution and any territorial compromise, whether with Mahmoud Abbas or with the Messiah himself—even while giving Hagee a platform for just such rhetoric before 6,000 AIPAC zombies. They also choose to overlook Hagee's repeated calls for a preemptive US war with Iran. After AIPAC’s continued warm embrace of Hagee and CUFI, its protestations that it is now all in favor of helping the Fatah government reach a two-state solution, and truly dedicated to a non-military settlement of the Iranian nuclear challenge, ring ever more hollow.


Gidon D. Remba is National Executive Director of Ameinu: Liberal Values, Progressive Israel. His commentary is available at http://www.ameinu.net/ and http://tough-dove-israel.blogspot.com/

AIPAC Hijack: With Friends Like These, by Gidon D. Remba

AIPAC Hijack: With Friends Like These…

By

Gidon D. Remba

Published at Ameinu.net and The Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle

March 20, 2007

http://ameinu.net/perspectives/current_issues.php?articleid=159

AIPAC has long portrayed itself as 'the pro-Israel lobby' representing the entire pro-Israel American Jewish community. As the primary pro-Israel voice in Washington, AIPAC should reflect what is common to all who support Israel, a nonpartisan consensus between Zionists of the left, right and center. But AIPAC has been hijacked by the neocons and the radical right. It no longer represents the majority of American Jews, who are overwhelmingly liberal, centrist on foreign policy and vote Democratic. Pro-Israel Jews need an alternative, a new vehicle for voicing their moderate, pragmatic views on Israel to elected officials in Washington.

I ventured to Washington last week to attend, for the first time in my life, AIPAC’s vaunted national policy conference, a 3-day political pageant which drew some 6,000 people this year, culminating in a day of lobbying on Capitol Hill. I had the privilege of attending not only as one of the throng of Israel supporters who flocked to DC, but as the official representative of a major Jewish organization. I am now the national executive director of Ameinu: Liberal Values, Progressive Israel, the organization which represents Labor Zionism in America, the leading progressive Zionist voice in the American Jewish community.

In this new role, I am one of 50-odd delegates of major Jewish organizations who sit on AIPAC’s Executive Committee. In reality, AIPAC stacks the deck by including in the Committee many more AIPAC leaders and activists than heads of major Jewish groups, thereby insuring that no decision will be taken which flouts the wishes of its hard-line big donors. The AIPAC conference opened with a meeting of the Executive Committee devoted to approving AIPAC’s “action agenda” for 2007. Three days later, a citizens’ army, mostly American Jews, marched on Capitol Hill to meet with their members of Congress, armed with talking points emanating from the order of battle we had approved—over my dissenting vote, and the objections of others.

If 87% of American Jews voted Democratic in the last election, the other 13% seemed to have crowded into the annual AIPAC bash. Where else would Vice President Dick Cheney, king of the neocons, and Pastor John Hagee, the right-wing Christian Zionist televangelist preacher and Greater Land of Israel territorial maximalist, receive a wildly enthusiastic welcome, punctuated by serial standing ovations throughout their bellicose remarks? AIPAC lent its platform to Cheney who informed his cheering audience that anyone who fails to support the Bush Administration’s policy of escalation in Iraq—opposed by most Americans and the great majority of American Jews—is sending a signal of “weakness and surrender” to Iran and endangering Israel.

But surely this highly partisan message was Cheney’s own exploitation of the AIPAC stage to peddle the Bush Administration’s line? Think again. AIPAC Executive Director Howard Kohr followed Cheney and demanded that on Iraq and Iran we American Jewish supporters of Israel should show “no divisions, no weakness.” Disagreeing with our war President makes us appear impotent to our enemies. The pro-Israel lobby which often touts its bipartisanship is in reality quite happy to throw its weight against the policy of the Democratic Party on both Iraq and Iran and to shamelessly align itself with the neocon super-hawks in the Bush Administration.

Not a word was heard from AIPAC—whether from its leaders or in its 2007 policy statement—about attempting to engage Iran and Syria while imposing sanctions, the carrot-and-stick approach favored by most Democrats and moderate Republicans. Though AIPAC’s official focus was on the Iran Counter-Proliferation Act of 2007, new legislation imposing further economic sanctions on Iran, much was heard from AIPAC’s featured plenary speakers about the need for a preemptive military strike, especially former CIA director Admiral James Woolsey and Washington Institute for Near East Policy Director Robert Satloff. Other speakers, like Israel’s UN Ambassador Dan Gillerman, implied as much by saying that Iran cannot be permitted to develop nuclear weapons. AIPAC’s leaders and official spokespersons shied away from overt threats, preferring to obliquely warn Iran of the possibility of a US attack by insisting that no options be taken off the table, and by supporting “all means necessary for the United States, Israel and their allies to prevent Iran and other nations” from developing weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them. It was left mainly to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to remind the audience that diplomacy with Iran must be vigorously pursued.

Israel Apocalypse

The opening night dinner featured televangelist Pastor John Hagee, who recently founded Christians United for Israel, the Christian Zionist lobby which claims 15 million biblical fundamentalist Evangelical Christian devotees. AIPAC’s largely Jewish audience wildly cheered Hagee’s fiery demagogic speech. As they rose to their feet time and again, whistling and applauding in a manic frenzy, I could only wince thinking of another speech Hagee had recently given in Washington of which the AIPAC crowd was apparently unaware. On July 19, 2006, at a Christians United for Israel inaugural event, attended by GOP Party chief Ken Mehlman and Republican Senators Sam Brownback, Rick Santorum, Kay Bailey-Hutchinson and John Cronyn, featuring recorded greetings from President George W. Bush, Hagee declared: “The United States must join Israel in a pre-emptive military strike against Iran to fulfill God's plan for both Israel and the West... a biblically prophesied end-time confrontation with Iran, which will lead to the Rapture, Tribulation…and [the] Second Coming of Christ."

Richard Silverstein reports on his Tikkun Olam blog that “Hagee subsequently wrote, in a Charisma Magazine editorial entitled ‘The Coming Holy War,’ that the preemptive attack he advocates should be carried out with nuclear weapons.” And in his 2006 book, Jerusalem Countdown, Hagee writes that “a ‘remnant’ would be saved by the grace of God, a group of survivors who have the opportunity to receive Messiah, who is a rabbi known to the world as Jesus Christ.” So Hagee and his millions of Christian fundamentalists “support Israel” by advocating a preemptive nuclear war to be launched by the US and Israel against Iran, which will usher in the Second Coming of Christ and the conversion to Christianity or death of the Jews. This is the “Israel advocate” warmly embraced by AIPAC and its minions.

Basking in the glow of his many Jewish admirers at the AIPAC dinner, Hagee announced that he is “concerned that in the coming months yet another attempt will be made to parcel out parts of Israel in a futile attempt to appease Israel’s enemies in the Middle East…Once again those who appease seek to do so at the expense of Israel.” The world—the “misguided souls” in Europe, the UN and the US State Department—thundered Hagee, “will try once again to turn Israel into crocodile food,” whereupon he cited Winston Churchill’s aphorism, “an appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile in the futile hope that it will eat him less.” What’s missing here is the recognition that it is Israel’s pragmatic majority, and its democratically elected government, led by the Kadima and Labor parties, that is seeking a negotiated two-state solution and a territorial compromise with the Palestinians. But Hagee’s politics on Israel, like those of Jewish fundamentalist Gush Emunim settler movement and the National Religious Party, derive not from an understanding of practical realities like demography, or Israel’s security needs, but from his Christian fundamentalist reading of the Bible.

Hagee continues by warning that “America should not pressure Israel to give up land. America should not pressure Israel to divide the city of Jerusalem.” He approvingly cites Israeli right-winger Dore Gold’s latest book The Fight for Jerusalem, which, says Hagee, claims that “Turning part or all of Jerusalem over to the Palestinians would be tantamount to turning it over to the Taliban.” All? Who has proposed turning all of Jerusalem to the Palestinians? No one but the straw man Hagee sets up for rhetorical attack. Jerusalem, continues Hagee, “is the eternal capital of the Jewish people now and forever. Jerusalem is united under Jewish control and must always remain under Jewish control.”

Never mind that refusing to share sovereignty in parts of Jerusalem with a Palestinian state would effectively smother any chance for a negotiated two-state solution to the conflict. Never mind that Israel’s continued rule over hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs in East Jerusalem, like its rule over millions of Palestinians in the rest of the West Bank, jeopardizes Israel’s Jewish majority and its democratic character, as Prime Minister Olmert has acknowledged. Maintaining exclusive Israeli control over Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem and the entire Temple Mount/Haram Ash-Sharif insures that Israel will remain in a perpetual state of war with its Palestinian and Arab neighbors, and potentially with the Islamic world. If this troubles you, it doesn’t bother Hagee, whose theology requires it.

Israel Fantasia

If the policy conference is a circus maximus, a monster rally in a cavernous convention center stretching two city blocks with a giant audio visual show designed to manipulate the emotions, where politicians proffer platitudes tailored to spark applause—mass public political entertainment on a lavish scale—the Executive Committee meeting is the opening chariot race. Rather than devoting itself to a real discussion of the issues, the committee spent the bulk of its time giving far right ZOA leader Mort Klein the opportunity to table some two dozen amendments to AIPAC’s action agenda, designed to push an already hard-line agenda off the cliff into an abyss of ultra-hawkish fantasy. And he who tables an amendment is entitled to step up to the microphone to defend it, followed by others who respond. To be sure, there was a debate, but it was between Attila and the Huns. Virtually no other organization offered an amendment to the agenda (an oddity which, you may rest assured, dear reader, will not be repeated at the next session, if I and others in the moderate pro-Israel camp have our say).

AIPAC’s agenda opens with a pious promise to “build on the commitment of the Administration and Congress…to a peace process predicated on direct negotiation between Israel and her neighbors.” It insists that “it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations” between Israel and its Arab neighbors, “will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949.” So far so good. But realism is thrown out the window the moment AIPAC addresses other hot button issues. AIPAC next pledges that it will promote a secure peace by “ensuring that Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount, remains united as the capital only of Israel.”

Now let’s get real, AIPAC. There can be no agreed solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict without a two-state solution, which AIPAC professes to support. But every schoolchild knows that there can be no agreed two-state solution without Jerusalem becoming the capital of both Israel and a Palestinian state—with Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem becoming part of Palestine, and Jewish neighborhoods in West and East Jerusalem remaining part of Israel. Nor is an accord possible without some formula for shared or divided sovereignty over the holy sites there, including the Temple Mount. But when it comes to what grade school kids know, AIPAC pretends ignorance.

Next AIPAC promises to work to “secure the move of the US embassy to Jerusalem without delay,” before an Israeli government has the chance to negotiate an agreement with its Arab neighbors on the status of the city. AIPAC once opposed Israel’s Prime Minister Rabin on this very issue, when he sought to work out a solution on Jerusalem with the Palestinians in the mid-nineties. It continues to pander and posture with unrealistic, crowd-pleasing mantras.

When all is said and done, AIPAC is unconcerned with what it will take to negotiate a mutually agreeable two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. After all, it’s enough if you pay lip service to the slogan, isn’t it? Doesn’t it suffice if you spend gobs of cash to mount a fabulous show, and then advocate positions which do not have a snowball’s chance in hell of leading to a peace accord? Who, after all, will pay attention? The delegates will leave Washington fired up with self-righteous pro-Israeli fever, convinced they are doing good for the Jews and their state. Their eyes blinded by the glitz of AIPAC’s big screen magic, their shoulders freshly rubbed with power, how many will take the time to read the fine print? And those who do, won’t object. They blissfully live in AIPAC’s fantasyland of Jewish breast-beating.

The selection of Pastor John Hagee as the keynote speaker of the conference’s opening night was no accident. And if Dick Cheney hadn’t been Vice President and the confab’s star act, AIPAC would have had to invent him.

AIPAC vs. Israel

Finally, AIPAC’s 2007 Action Agenda adopted radical hawkish positions on the Palestinians which would quash current Palestinian-Israeli peace efforts, placing AIPAC in sharp opposition to both the Bush Administration, the Israeli Government and the Israeli public. Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim Sneh’s remarks at the AIPAC conference testified to this clash. AIPAC’s hawkish shift on US policy towards the Palestinians, which would sever all US contact with moderate Palestinian leaders like Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas or incoming Finance Minister Salam Fayyad, is mirrored in a letter to Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, initiated by Senators Bill Nelson (D-FL) and John Ensign (R-NV), which AIPAC is now urging senators to sign. AIPAC’s new demand is contained in the “Talking Points” it distributed to supporters who lobbied their Members of Congress on Capitol Hill.

What’s worse, the ‘Talking Points’ disguised AIPAC’s new position, leading many conference attendees to naively believe that in asking their senators to sign on to the Nelson-Ensign letter, they are merely “‘holding firm and insisting’ that no aid or recognition should be granted to the PA until it recognizes Israel, renounces violence and accepts previous Israeli-Palestinian agreements,” as the Talking Points memo claims. In fact, the Nelson-Ensign letter, and AIPAC’s new 2007 Agenda, go much further.

AIPAC’s new 2007 Agenda calls for:

• “Urging the US government to vigorously enforce the Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act,” and “Urging the US government and other parties of the ‘Quartet’ to adhere to the position that they will not have contact with or provide funds to a Palestinian Authority that includes Hamas until Hamas” meets the three international conditions (recognizing Israel, renouncing violence and accepting previous agreements).
  
• The Nelson-Ensign letter which AIPAC supporters are calling on their senators to endorse also urges senators to “continue to hold firm and insist that these very basic international principles do not change—no direct aid and no contacts with any members of a Palestinian Authority that does not” meet the three conditions. (Emphasis added.) Thanks to our and our allies’ public protests and the work of progressive pro-Israel groups on the Hill, the letter has just been improved, but still implies that the US should boycott moderate Palestinian leaders.

In fact, the Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act does not bar the US from maintaining contact with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas until the PA meets the three international conditions. Both Israeli Prime Minister Olmert and US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice have conducted recent meetings with President Abbas, who has long met the conditions. As Israel's Deputy Defense Minister and Labor Knesset Member Ephraim Sneh, the token centrist voice at the AIPAC Plenary, stressed in his remarks, strengthening President Abbas and other Palestinian moderates in the PA by providing them with political dividends and security assistance is critical to weakening Hamas and other rejectionists in Palestinian society. Such steps are essential to building hope among Palestinians and Israelis for the success of any new peace initiative and reaching a comprehensive and durable cease-fire.

The new AIPAC policy of cutting off contact with all Palestinian Authority officials also contradicts AIPAC’s own promise in its 2007 Action Agenda to “build on the commitment of the [Bush] Administration and Congress…to a peace process predicated on direct negotiations between Israel and her neighbors.” It brings AIPAC full circle back to the extreme version of the Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act it unsuccessfully sought to pass last year. AIPAC's new agenda, relying solely on economic sanctions against the Palestinian Authority and Iran, along with the implicit threat of possible preemptive military action against Iran in future, would now unwisely block all diplomatic bargaining between Israel and the Palestinians.

AIPAC, John Hagee and Dick Cheney are Israel’s best friends? With friends like these…


Gidon D. Remba is National Executive Director of Ameinu: Liberal Values, Progressive Israel (http://www.ameinu.net/). His commentary is available at http://tough-dove-israel.blogspot.com/

Ha'aretz: Wanted: A Moderate Pro-Israel Lobby

Wanted: A Moderate Pro-Israel Lobby

By

Gidon D. Remba

As published in Ha’aretz, November 17, 2006
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/789167.html

I am a member of AIPAC, the premier American pro-Israel lobby. AIPAC plays a vital role in bolstering America’s alliance with the Jewish state, from galvanizing Congressional backing for US military and economic aid to marshaling moral and political support for its right to self-defense. But AIPAC has not always defined “support for Israel” the way many American Jews and Israelis do.

AIPAC claims that it champions the policies of the elected Israeli government, whatever they may be. But it does not faithfully live up to this promise: over the past twenty years, it has supported right-wing governments in Israel whole-heartedly, while being half-hearted, or worse, about the policies of left-wing administrations. And when Israel is ruled from the right, AIPAC’s credo makes supporting Israel synonymous with lining up behind policies which many American Jews—and often the other half or more of the Israeli public—think baneful for Israel’s quest for peace and security.

Indeed, AIPAC sometimes tries to be more Israeli than the Israeli government, urging American Jews and their elected representatives in Washington to oppose moderate, responsible positions on Israel, while hewing to the hardest line on the Israeli and American Jewish political spectrum. Earlier this year, following the Hamas electoral earthquake in the Palestinian Authority, AIPAC wrote and championed a bill called the Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act of 2006, which fortunately failed to become the law of the land.

This bill called not only for sanctions against the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority, but for a sweeping and unprecedented boycott of Fatah and PLO officials like Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his allies in the Palestinian Legislative Council. In contrast to Hamas, Abbas advocates peace and negotiations with Israel and opposes terrorism and violence. He merits support, not sanctions.

Furthermore, the bill incorporated a laundry list of pie-in-the-sky conditions for removing the new sanctions that were unrelated to Hamas or to stopping terror. It would have blocked the US from aiding or dealing with any part of the Palestinian leadership even were Hamas sent packing. It deprived the President of a national security waiver (common to other sanctions legislation) for special circumstances when such flexibility is deemed essential for safeguarding American security interests. And after US intelligence agencies failed to predict Hamas’ electoral victory, the bill virtually barred the CIA from operating covertly in the Palestinian arena to gather intelligence on Islamic extremists, another blow to US and Israeli national security.

The bill was so blunt an instrument it might well have strengthened Hamas, spawning greater anarchy and chaos in the West Bank and Gaza, escalating the security threats facing both Israel and the U.S. in the region. Indeed, the Bush Administration itself strenuously opposed the AIPAC-backed House bill. It would have hamstrung U.S. efforts to ensure that Abbas “can fulfill his duties as president, prevent Hamas from taking over the rest of the P.A. and the PLO, and prevail in any confrontation with Hamas,” according to a memo sent by the Administration to Congress. Nor did the bill’s follies end there.

The saga of the bill’s demise has become the butt of a new controversy sparked by the initiative of three of America’s leading center-left Zionist groups—Americans for Peace Now, Israel Policy Forum and Brit Tzedek v’Shalom—and the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism to explore with philanthropist George Soros and others the possibility of forming a moderate, pro-Israel American Jewish lobby in Washington. These groups have worked to change the terms of AIPAC’s House bill, for which they now stand accused, by AIPAC partisans, of irresponsibly opposing “legislation penalizing the Palestinians for putting their government in the hands of terrorists.” They came together, charge the critics, “in an ad hoc coalition to shield the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority from Congressional sanctions.” In fact, all the groups supported sanctions against Hamas, but not the AIPAC bill’s more sweeping bid to ostracize all Palestinian leaders.

The Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act was not scuttled by a cabal of left-wing American Jewish Benedict Arnolds, but by AIPAC’s own overreaching ultra-hawkish House bill which was not amended along the lines requested by the Bush Administration. To no one’s surprise, it proved difficult to reconcile with the Senate legislation favored by the administration. Nor is the battle over; AIPAC is mobilizing still to pass the “anti-terrorism” act. Will it now encourage the US and Israel to seize the opening of a new Palestinian technocrat government to help Israel achieve a truce and progress towards a two-state solution? Or will it continue to throw unreasonable obstacles in the way? Few expect AIPAC to fight for a US-Israeli peace initiative with Syria or the Palestinians when it is needed most, creating incentives for curbing Hezbollah and Hamas militants and isolating Iran. We must, to prevent a new and more ruinous war.

A new pro-Israel umbrella group or resource center would likely work in tandem with AIPAC for the same robust American backing for Israel’s military, economic and diplomatic needs, as its constituent groups have long done. But when AIPAC sabotages the mission of dovish Israeli governments, or of a US president collaborating with them; when it flexes its political muscles to push Congress to adopt reckless legislation which jeopardizes the chance for a future Arab-Israeli peace; when it marches in lock step off the cliff with a pro-settlement Israeli coalition opposed even to the most cautious peace probes with Israel’s Arab neighbors, a new Israel lobby could actively work to give voice to the many American Jews who see eye-to-eye with the sensible and the sane.

I’m going to continue contributing to AIPAC, an indispensable bulwark for Israel. But that won’t stop me from helping other Jewish organizations and a pro-Israel American Jewish citizens’ lobby that is in better synch with my pragmatic Zionist outlook, my centrist American politics, my commitment to the progressive values of the Jewish tradition, and to the policies I am convinced Israel’s welfare and America’s own national security demand.


Gidon D. Remba, a veteran Chicago-based Israel activist, is co-author of the forthcoming The Great Rift: Arab-Israeli War and Peace in the New Middle East. He served as senior foreign press editor and translator in the Israel Prime Minister’s Office during the Egyptian-Israeli peace process from 1977-1978. His essays have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Nation, the Jerusalem Report, Tikkun, the Forward, the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, Chicago Jewish News, JUF News, and the Pittsburgh Chronicle, where he writes a column on Israel.

Judas and the "Israel Lobby", by Gidon D. Remba

Judas and the "Israel Lobby", Jerusalem Report
(Also published as "The 'Israel Lobby' and the Persian Gulf Wars")

JUF NEWS, May 2006
This essay also appeared in the Jerusalem Report as a Viewpoint column in the June 12, 2006 issue.

By Gidon D. Remba

http://www.juf.org/news_public_affairs/article.asp?key=6972

An Egyptian papyrus containing a lost gospel written some 1,700 years ago, The Gospel of Judas, was recently discovered offering an alternate version of the crucifixion of Jesus which, as told by the New Testament, helped fuel centuries of Christian persecution of Jews. Now we learn that when Judas Iscariot turned Jesus over to the Romans, he was acting on orders from Jesus, making Judas not the great traitor, but Jesus’ most favored disciple and his willing collaborator.

Judas had become emblematic of Judaism throughout history, of the Jew who would do anything for money, including betray Christians. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion refined the classical antisemitic image of the treacherous, evil, self-aggrandizing Jew into the modern agent of a conspiracy to subvert the great powers of the world to serve Jewish ends.

Now come two of the most distinguished political scientists in America, John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, and Stephen Walt of Harvard, to enlighten us in “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," a “working paper" posted on the website of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, excerpted in the London Review of Books. This new gospel bears the revelation that the US embarked on what is now widely viewed as a disastrous war in Iraq largely thanks to the perverse influence of a vast coalition they dub the “Israel Lobby. "The Lobby," we learn, succeeded in skewing the foreign policy of the United States to wage a war motivated mainly by the desire to make Israel more secure while willfully sacrificing America’s own national interests. It is this "Lobby," consisting of all the major Jewish organizations, pro-Israel media, Christian Zionists and others, the authors warn, which is now pushing America into an unnecessary and catastrophic clash with the fundamentalist Islamic, terrorist supporting and nuclear arming Iran.

But "the Lobby" could not have succeeded in its grand act of perfidy, we further learn, were it not for the presence in high places in the Bush Administration of a coterie of "fervent advocates of the Israeli cause" a small band of neoconservatives, many with ties to Likud," until recently Israel’s dominant right-wing political bloc. The Jewish neocons steered the US military into a Middle East morass out of loyalty to Israel and in betrayal of their sworn duty to serve the U.S. national interest, say these eminent scholars. Indeed, there are Jewish senators and congressmen who work to ensure that US foreign policy supports Israel’s interests," rather than America’s, they charge. The Jewish pro-Likud neocons, and Jewish organizations, left, right and center, have betrayed the United States and its interests. They are, for Mearsheimer and Walt, the Judases of America, who would drag their government into wars to serve their pro-Israel Jewish agenda.

But like the new Judas, the Jewish neocons are no traitors: their affinity to Israel is not the source of their scheme to transform the Middle East by force of arms. Nor is it their Jewishness which caused them, or their many non-Jewish superiors in the administration, from Bush to Cheney, Rumsfeld to Rice, to pursue their Mideast regime change agenda. Like the new Jesus of the Judas Gospel, who is the real prime mover of the action, the Jewish neocons’ Christian leaders have followed a long-standing American tradition of forcibly overthrowing regimes which are hostile to America. Theirs was a gambit to roll back the forces of radicalism and Islamic terrorism in the Arab world by forcibly implanting democracy or America-friendly rule. Their project may be delusional, dangerous and inimical to a clear-headed picture of our best interests, as many now have come to believe. But that same clarity requires us to see that their flawed perspective on America’s security stems from a time-honored worldview shared by Jewish and non-Jewish hawks alike, spawning a hundred years of American military interventions and coups d’etat in over a dozen countries, including oil-rich Iran in 1953.

Despite their reputation as “realists" in foreign policy, Mearsheimer and Walt give short shrift to an array of material interests which many observers see as heavily influencing US global conduct: the need to secure the flow of affordable oil from the Middle East, given the growing US dependence on imported petroleum as an energy source, and to curry favor with Arab states like Saudi Arabia whose oil production affects energy prices and the overall health of the US economy. Dismissing the leverage of the Saudi, US oil and defense industry lobbies on an administration led by a former Texas oilman and the ex-CEO of Halliburton–one of the world's largest providers of products and services to the oil and gas industries, which has reaped billions of dollars in no-bid government contracts for rebuilding Iraq’s oil refineries and other post-war reconstruction–is hardly realistic.

Consider: fully two-thirds of the world’s proven oil reserves lie in just seven Muslim-ruled Persian Gulf countries (Iran and 6 Arab states, with Saudi Arabia and Iraq the top two). Of the seven major Persian Gulf oil producing states, only two were not US allies, and instead were leaders of the radical anti-American front in the Arab and Muslim worlds: Iraq and Iran. Both have sought to dominate their Muslim Arab neighbors in the Persian Gulf, and Israel, as Mearsheimer’s own theory of regional hegemony predicts.

All this is swept under the rug by the new gospel of Mearsheimer and Walt, who prefer to exaggerate Jewish influence by largely blaming Israel and American Jewish leaders for snookering the US into war in Iraq–and next Iran–for Israel’s sake. Their polemic echoes antisemitic stereotypes and diverts our attention from the real motives driving our leaders down the perilous path on which America now finds itself.

___________________________________________________________________________________

Gidon D. Remba, a political analyst specializing in the Arab-Israel conflict, served as Senior Foreign Press Editor in the Israel Prime Minister's Office from 1977-1978 during the Egyptian-Israeli Camp David peace process. Co-author of a forthcoming volume, From Gaza to Jerusalem: A New Road to Middle East Peace?, his essays have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun Times, the New York Times, the Nation, the Jerusalem Report, Chicago Jewish News, the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles, JUF News and the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle, where he is a columnist on Israel and Jewish affairs.