Email this article | Print this article | Link to this Article
4 May 2006
Free
|
www.MiddleEast.Org
|
News,
Views, &
Analysis Governments,
Lobbies, & the
Corporate Media Don't Want You To Know
|
|
Israel's very own Naqba ('Disaster' in Arabic) -
The 1967 war and the Occupation
"From one perspective
Israel's future is bleak. Not for the
first time, a Jewish state has
found itself on the vulnerable
periphery of someone else's empire:
overconfident in its
own righteousness, willfully blind to the danger
that its indulgent
excesses might ultimately provoke its imperial
mentor to the point
of irritation and beyond, and heedless of its own
failure to make
any other friends. To be sure, the modern Israeli state
has big
weapons - very big weapons. But can it do with them except
make
more enemies? However, modern Israel also has options."
|
MER -
MiddleEast.Org - Washington - 4 May 2006: Finally,
with regard to Israel and the unique U.S.-Israeli connection, expert
Academics in the U.S. are doing something more than just mildly
commenting on history or just droning on in long-winded heavily-footed
academic journals that only their colleagues can manage to deal with.
In March Professors Stephen Walt at Harvard and John Mearsheimer
at the University of Chicago unleashed a serious and important debate
about 'The Israel Lobby'...and it is not going away. Professor Tony
Judt at NYU followed up last month with an important Op Ed about 'The
Israel Lobby' in the NYTimes, and today he does so again in this article about Israel, past and future, published in Israel's leading newspaper, Ha'aretz.
Finally top American academics from leading American universities have
joined the contemporary political scene. If their insights and
concerns are brushed aside -- as the politicians and the special
interest groups keep attempting -- the perils we all now face partly
because of their long past absence from the real-time policy debate
will only increase. Credit the Iraq war for stirring things up
so....credit a backlash against the hardline Zionist Neocons and the
far-out Christian Evangelicals...credit a new sense of involvement and
'activisim' from segments of the intellectual community. But whether
this is truly a new day is yet to be seen.
|
|
|
|
The country that wouldn't grow up |
|
By Tony Judt* |
|
By
the age of 58 a country - like a man - should have achieved a certain
maturity. After nearly six decades of existence we know, for good and
for bad, who we are, what we have done and how we appear to others,
warts and all. We acknowledge, however reluctantly and privately, our
mistakes and our shortcomings. And though we still harbor the
occasional illusion about ourselves and our prospects, we are wise
enough to recognize that these are indeed for the most part just that:
illusions. In short, we are adults.
But the State of Israel
remains curiously (and among Western-style democracies, uniquely)
immature. The social transformations of the country - and its many
economic achievements - have not brought the political wisdom that
usually accompanies age. Seen from the outside, Israel still comports
itself like an adolescent: consumed by a brittle confidence in its own
uniqueness; certain that no one "understands" it and everyone is
"against" it; full of wounded self-esteem, quick to take offense and
quick to give it. Like many adolescents Israel is convinced - and makes
a point of aggressively and repeatedly asserting - that it can do as it
wishes, that its actions carry no consequences and that it is immortal.
Appropriately enough, this country that has somehow failed to grow up
was until very recently still in the hands of a generation of men who
were prominent in its public affairs 40 years ago: an Israeli Rip Van
Winkle who fell asleep in, say, 1967 would be surprised indeed to awake
in 2006 and find Shimon Peres and General Ariel Sharon still hovering
over the affairs of the country - the latter albeit only in spirit.
But
that, Israeli readers will tell me, is the prejudiced view of the
outsider. What looks from abroad like a self-indulgent, wayward country
- delinquent in its international obligations and resentfully
indifferent to world opinion - is simply an independent little state
doing what it has always done: looking after its own interests in an
inhospitable part of the globe. Why should embattled Israel even
acknowledge such foreign criticism, much less act upon it? They -
gentiles, Muslims, leftists - have reasons of their own for disliking
Israel. They - Europeans, Arabs, fascists - have always singled out
Israel for special criticism. Their motives are timeless. They haven't
changed. Why should Israel change?
|
|
But
they have changed. And it is this change, which has passed largely
unrecognized within Israel, to which I want to draw attention here.
Before 1967 the State of Israel may have been tiny and embattled, but
it was not typically hated: certainly not in the West. Official
Soviet-bloc communism was anti-Zionist of course, but for just that
reason Israel was rather well regarded by everyone else, including the
non-communist left. The romantic image of the kibbutz and the
kibbutznik had a broad foreign appeal in the first two decades of
Israel's existence. Most admirers of Israel (Jews and non-Jews) knew
little about the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948. They
preferred to see in the Jewish state the last surviving incarnation of
the 19th century idyll of agrarian socialism - or else a paragon of
modernizing energy "making the desert bloom."
I remember well,
in the spring of 1967, how the balance of student opinion at Cambridge
University was overwhelmingly pro-Israel in the weeks leading up to the
Six-Day War - and how little attention anyone paid either to the
condition of the Palestinians or to Israel's earlier collusion with
France and Britain in the disastrous Suez adventure of 1956. In
politics and in policy-making circles only old-fashioned conservative
Arabists expressed any criticism of the Jewish state; even neo-Fascists
rather favored Zionism, on traditional anti-Semitic grounds.
For
a while after the 1967 war these sentiments continued unaltered. The
pro-Palestinian enthusiasms of post-1960s radical groups and
nationalist movements, reflected in joint training camps and shared
projects for terrorist attacks, were offset by the growing
international acknowledgment of the Holocaust in education and the
media: What Israel lost by its continuing occupation of Arab lands it
gained through its close identification with the recovered memory of
Europe's dead Jews. Even the inauguration of the illegal settlements
and the disastrous invasion of Lebanon, while they strengthened the
arguments of Israel's critics, did not yet shift the international
balance of opinion. As recently as the early 1990s, most people in the
world were only vaguely aware of the "West Bank" and what was happening
there. Even those who pressed the Palestinians' case in international
forums conceded that almost no one was listening. Israel could still do
as it wished.
The Israeli nakba
But today
everything is different. We can see, in retrospect, that the victory of
Israel in June 1967 and its continuing occupation of the territories it
conquered then have been the Jewish state's very own nakba: a moral and
political catastrophe. Israel's actions in the West Bank and Gaza have
magnified and publicized the country's shortcomings and displayed them
to a watching world. Curfews, checkpoints, bulldozers, public
humiliations, home destructions, land seizures, shootings, "targeted
assassinations," the separation fence: All of these routines of
occupation and repression were once familiar only to an informed
minority of specialists and activists. Today they can be watched, in
real time, by anyone with a computer or a satellite dish - which means
that Israel's behavior is under daily scrutiny by hundreds of millions
of people worldwide. The result has been a complete transformation in
the international view of Israel. Until very recently the carefully
burnished image of an ultra-modern society - built by survivors and
pioneers and peopled by peace-loving democrats - still held sway over
international opinion. But today? What is the universal shorthand
symbol for Israel, reproduced worldwide in thousands of newspaper
editorials and political cartoons? The Star of David emblazoned upon a
tank.
Today only a tiny minority of outsiders see Israelis as
victims. The true victims, it is now widely accepted, are the
Palestinians. Indeed, Palestinians have now displaced Jews as the
emblematic persecuted minority: vulnerable, humiliated and stateless.
This unsought distinction does little to advance the Palestinian case
any more than it ever helped Jews, but it has redefined Israel forever.
It has become commonplace to compare Israel at best to an occupying
colonizer, at worst to the South Africa of race laws and Bantustans. In
this capacity Israel elicits scant sympathy even when its own citizens
suffer: Dead Israelis - like the occasional assassinated white South
African in the apartheid era, or British colonists hacked to death by
native insurgents - are typically perceived abroad not as the victims
of terrorism but as the collateral damage of their own government's
mistaken policies.
Such comparisons are lethal to Israel's
moral credibility. They strike at what was once its strongest suit: the
claim of being a vulnerable island of democracy and decency in a sea of
authoritarianism and cruelty; an oasis of rights and freedoms
surrounded by a desert of repression. But democrats don't fence into
Bantustans helpless people whose land they have conquered, and free men
don't ignore international law and steal other men's homes. The
contradictions of Israeli self-presentation - "we are very strong/we
are very vulnerable"; "we are in control of our fate/we are the
victims"; "we are a normal state/we demand special treatment" - are not
new: they have been part of the country's peculiar identity almost from
the outset. And Israel's insistent emphasis upon its isolation and
uniqueness, its claim to be both victim and hero, were once part of its
David versus Goliath appeal.
Collective cognitive dysfunction
But
today the country's national narrative of macho victimhood appears to
the rest of the world as simply bizarre: evidence of a sort of
collective cognitive dysfunction that has gripped Israel's political
culture. And the long cultivated persecution mania - "everyone's out to
get us" - no longer elicits sympathy. Instead it attracts some very
unappetizing comparisons: At a recent international meeting I heard one
speaker, by analogy with Helmut Schmidt's famous dismissal of the
Soviet Union as "Upper Volta with Missiles," describe Israel as "Serbia
with nukes."
Israel has stayed the same, but the world - as I
noted above - has changed. Whatever purchase Israel's self-description
still has upon the imagination of Israelis themselves, it no longer
operates beyond the country's frontiers. Even the Holocaust can no
longer be instrumentalized to excuse Israel's behavior. Thanks to the
passage of time, most Western European states have now come to terms
with their part in the Holocaust, something that was not true a quarter
century ago. From Israel's point of view, this has had paradoxical
consequences: Until the end of the Cold War Israeli governments could
still play upon the guilt of Germans and other Europeans, exploiting
their failure to acknowledge fully what was done to Jews on their
territory. Today, now that the history of World War II is retreating
from the public square into the classroom and from the classroom into
the history books, a growing majority of voters in Europe and elsewhere
(young voters above all) simply cannot understand how the horrors of
the last European war can be invoked to license or condone unacceptable
behavior in another time and place. In the eyes of a watching world,
the fact that the great-grandmother of an Israeli soldier died in
Treblinka is no excuse for his own abusive treatment of a Palestinian
woman waiting to cross a checkpoint. "Remember Auschwitz" is not an
acceptable response.
In short: Israel, in the world's eyes, is
a normal state, but one behaving in abnormal ways. It is in control of
its fate, but the victims are someone else. It is strong, very strong,
but its behavior is making everyone else vulnerable. And so, shorn of
all other justifications for its behavior, Israel and its supporters
today fall back with increasing shrillness upon the oldest claim of
all: Israel is a Jewish state and that is why people criticize it. This
- the charge that criticism of Israel is implicitly anti-Semitic - is
regarded in Israel and the United States as Israel's trump card. If it
has been played more insistently and aggressively in recent years, that
is because it is now the only card left.
The habit of tarring
any foreign criticism with the brush of anti-Semitism is deeply
engrained in Israeli political instincts: Ariel Sharon used it with
characteristic excess but he was only the latest in a long line of
Israeli leaders to exploit the claim. David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir
did no different. But Jews outside of Israel pay a high price for this
tactic. Not only does it inhibit their own criticisms of Israel for
fear of appearing to associate with bad company, but it encourages
others to look upon Jews everywhere as de facto collaborators in
Israel's misbehavior. When Israel breaks international law in the
occupied territories, when Israel publicly humiliates the subject
populations whose land it has seized - but then responds to its critics
with loud cries of "anti-Semitism" - it is in effect saying that these
acts are not Israeli acts, they are Jewish acts: The occupation is not
an Israeli occupation, it is a Jewish occupation, and if you don't like
these things it is because you don't like Jews.
In many parts
of the world this is in danger of becoming a self-fulfilling assertion:
Israel's reckless behavior and insistent identification of all
criticism with anti-Semitism is now the leading source of anti-Jewish
sentiment in Western Europe and much of Asia. But the traditional
corollary - if anti-Jewish feeling is linked to dislike of Israel then
right-thinking people should rush to Israel's defense - no longer
applies. Instead, the ironies of the Zionist dream have come full
circle: For tens of millions of people in the world today, Israel is
indeed the state of all the Jews. And thus, reasonably enough, many
observers believe that one way to take the sting out of rising
anti-Semitism in the suburbs of Paris or the streets of Jakarta would
be for Israel to give the Palestinians back their land.
Israel's undoing
If
Israel's leaders have been able to ignore such developments it is in
large measure because they have hitherto counted upon the unquestioning
support of the United States - the one country in the world where the
claim that anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism is still echoed not only
in the opinions of many Jews but also in the public pronouncements of
mainstream politicians and the mass media. But this lazy, ingrained
confidence in unconditional American approval - and the moral, military
and financial support that accompanies it - may prove to be Israel's
undoing.
Something is changing in the United States. To be
sure, it was only a few short years ago that prime minister Sharon's
advisers could gleefully celebrate their success in dictating to U.S.
President George W. Bush the terms of a public statement approving
Israel's illegal settlements. No U.S. Congressman has yet proposed
reducing or rescinding the $3 billion in aid Israel receives annually -
20 percent of the total U.S. foreign aid budget - which has helped
sustain the Israeli defense budget and the cost of settlement
construction in the West Bank. And Israel and the United States appear
increasingly bound together in a symbiotic embrace whereby the actions
of each party exacerbate their common unpopularity abroad - and thus
their ever-closer association in the eyes of critics.
But
whereas Israel has no choice but to look to America - it has no other
friends, at best only the conditional affection of the enemies of its
enemies, such as India - the United States is a great power; and great
powers have interests that sooner or later transcend the local
obsessions of even the closest of their client states and satellites.
It seems to me of no small significance that the recent essay on "The
Israel Lobby" by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt has aroused so much
public interest and debate. Mearsheimer and Walt are prominent senior
academics of impeccable conservative credentials. It is true that - by
their own account - they could still not have published their damning
indictment of the influence of the Israel lobby on U.S. foreign policy
in a major U.S.-based journal (it appeared in the London Review of
Books), but the point is that 10 years ago they would not - and
probably could not - have published it at all. And while the debate
that has ensued may generate more heat than light, it is of great
significance: As Dr. Johnson said of female preachers, it is not well
done but one is amazed to see it done at all.
The fact is that
the disastrous Iraq invasion and its aftermath are beginning to
engineer a sea-change in foreign policy debate here in the U.S. It is
becoming clear to prominent thinkers across the political spectrum -
from erstwhile neo-conservative interventionists like Francis Fukuyama
to hard-nosed realists like Mearsheimer - that in recent years the
United States has suffered a catastrophic loss of international
political influence and an unprecedented degradation of its moral
image. The country's foreign undertakings have been self-defeating and
even irrational. There is going to be a long job of repair ahead, above
all in Washington's dealings with economically and strategically vital
communities and regions from the Middle East to Southeast Asia. And
this reconstruction of the country's foreign image and influence cannot
hope to succeed while U.S. foreign policy is tied by an umbilical cord
to the needs and interests (if that is what they are) of one small
Middle Eastern country of very little relevance to America's long-term
concerns - a country that is, in the words of the Mearsheimer/Walt
essay, a strategic burden: "A liability in the war on terror and the
broader effort to deal with rogue states."
That essay is thus
a straw in the wind - an indication of the likely direction of future
domestic debate here in the U.S. about the country's peculiar ties to
Israel. Of course it has been met by a firestorm of criticism from the
usual suspects - and, just as they anticipated, the authors have been
charged with anti-Semitism (or with advancing the interests of
anti-Semitism: "objective anti-Semitism," as it might be). But it is
striking to me how few people with whom I have spoken take that
accusation seriously, so predictable has it become. This is bad for
Jews - since it means that genuine anti-Semitism may also in time cease
to be taken seriously, thanks to the Israel lobby's abuse of the term.
But it is worse for Israel.
This new willingness to take one's
distance from Israel is not confined to foreign policy specialists. As
a teacher I have also been struck in recent years by a sea-change in
the attitude of students. One example among many: Here at New York
University I was teaching this past month a class on post-war Europe. I
was trying to explain to young Americans the importance of the Spanish
Civil War in the political memory of Europeans and why Franco's Spain
has such a special place in our moral imagination: as a reminder of
lost struggles, a symbol of oppression in an age of liberalism and
freedom, and a land of shame that people boycotted for its crimes and
repression. I cannot think, I told the students, of any country that
occupies such a pejorative space in democratic public consciousness
today. You are wrong, one young woman replied: What about Israel? To my
great surprise most of the class - including many of the sizable Jewish
contingent - nodded approval. The times they are indeed a-changing.
That
Israel can now stand in comparison with the Spain of General Franco in
the eyes of young Americans ought to come as a shock and an
eleventh-hour wake-up call to Israelis. Nothing lasts forever, and it
seems likely to me that we shall look back upon the years 1973-2003 as
an era of tragic illusion for Israel: years that the locust ate,
consumed by the bizarre notion that, whatever it chose to do or demand,
Israel could count indefinitely upon the unquestioning support of the
United States and would never risk encountering a backlash. This
blinkered arrogance is tragically summed up in an assertion by Shimon
Peres on the very eve of the calamitous war that will in retrospect be
seen, I believe, to have precipitated the onset of America's alienation
from its Israeli ally: "The campaign against Saddam Hussein is a must."
The future of Israel
From one perspective
Israel's future is bleak. Not for the first time, a Jewish state has
found itself on the vulnerable periphery of someone else's empire:
overconfident in its own righteousness, willfully blind to the danger
that its indulgent excesses might ultimately provoke its imperial
mentor to the point of irritation and beyond, and heedless of its own
failure to make any other friends. To be sure, the modern Israeli state
has big weapons - very big weapons. But can it do with them except make
more enemies? However, modern Israel also has options. Precisely
because the country is an object of such universal mistrust and
resentment - because people expect so little from Israel today - a
truly statesmanlike shift in its policies (dismantling of major
settlements, opening unconditional negotiations with Palestinians,
calling Hamas' bluff by offering the movement's leaders something
serious in return for recognition of Israel and a cease-fire) could
have disproportionately beneficial effects.
But such a radical
realignment of Israeli strategy would entail a difficult reappraisal of
every cliche and illusion under which the country and its political
elite have nestled for most of their life. It would entail
acknowledging that Israel no longer has any special claim upon
international sympathy or indulgence; that the United States won't
always be there; that weapons and walls can no more preserve Israel
forever than they preserved the German Democratic Republic or white
South Africa; that colonies are always doomed unless you are willing to
expel or exterminate the indigenous population. Other countries and
their leaders have understood this and managed comparable realignments:
Charles De Gaulle realized that France's settlement in Algeria, which
was far older and better established than Israel's West Bank colonies,
was a military and moral disaster for his country. In an exercise of
outstanding political courage, he acted upon that insight and withdrew.
But when De Gaulle came to that realization he was a mature statesman,
nearly 70 years old. Israel cannot afford to wait that long. At the age
of 58 the time has come for it to grow up.
* Tony Judt is a
professor and the director of the Remarque Institute at New York
University, and his book "Postwar: The History of Europe Since 1945"
was published in 2005. |
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/711997.html
|
FORUM -
CHAT
- YOUR COMMENTS
-
NEW MER
MID-EAST
REALITIES - www.MiddleEast.Org
Phone:
(202)
362-5266 Fax:
(815) 366-0800
Email:
MER@MiddleEast.Org
Copyright ©
2006 MiddleEast.Org Mid-East Realities,
All Rights Rreserved
Free
|
|
|
|
The most honest, most
comprehensive, and most
mobilizing news and
analysis on the Middle
East always comes from
MER. It is
indispensable!"
Robert
Silverman - Salamanca, Spain
|
May 2006
TARGET IRAN! (May 31, 2006)
BUT using the newest high-tech precision bombing to destroy Iran's growing capabilities and subverting/infiltrating the country to either take it over or neutralize it one way or another...now that's another matter. And that in fact is what Bush/Cheney and the Neocon/Evangelicals have the Pentagon and CIA working overtime to undertake. And that is why the Israeli Ambassador at the United Nations actually proclaimed in public yesterday that World War III has already started.
The Neoconization of America (May 30, 2006)
This column from the pages of the LATimes over the weekend at least begins to examine what has happened to the collective USA and both of the major parties in what let's charitably call 'world outlook'. And those with an all-important Washington memory can recall that the 'Prince of Darkness' himsself, Richard Perle, got his start on Capitol Hill as foreign policy assistant to one of the most prominent Democrats of yesteryear, 'Scoop' Jackson.
Apocalypse Now - 2006 (May 29, 2006)
How appropriate on the American Memorial Day to loudly and eloquently be warned that all so many have fought and died for is now terribly endangered -- put at risk in fact as never before by the very officials with the flags in their lapels ad nauseum proclaiming their patriotism while more than ever endangering their countries future and indeed the entire world.
Pushing and Preparing the Palestinians for Civil War (May 28, 2006)
The goal now is Plan B -- to foment a Palestinian civil war attempting to mask the imposition of worse-than-Apartheid realities on the now seriously fragmented and far more destitute Palestinians. In the process the Hamas Palestinians have been pushed into alignment with Iran and Syria along with the Arab nationalist and Islamic forces that continue to hold out against U.S.-Israeli hegemony -- the 'new world order' promoted by the Zionist Neocon minions who still hold Washington in their grip, albeit less firmly than before the Iraqi debacle.
'The Israel Problem' - Dangerously Out Of Control More Than Ever (May 27, 2006)
Largely because of powerful 'Israel Lobby' efforts by Kissinger and subsequent Administrations have all failed and 'The Israel Problem' has not only horribly metasticized but is more negatively consequential and more dangerously out of control than ever.
ISRAELIS Further Expand, Wall In, Divide and Rule (May 23, 2006)
This is the map experts now believe the Israelis are trying to create. By doing so they not only expand considerably beyond the 1967 boundaries but they keep and fortify the bulk of settlements built since '67 and at the same time they institutionalize a novel kind of Middle East militarily-controlled apartheid upon the Palestinians -- a situation unknown anywhere else in the Middle East or indeed in the world.
Propaganda War - US and Israel still far in lead (May 20, 2006)
The PROPAGANDA WAR is a major aspect of what may yet prove to be only the opening phases of the 'Clash of Civilizations' -- one the Israelis are more responsible for than any other party other than the Americans.
Palestinian Civil War Looms Closer Than Ever (May 18, 2006)
Mahmoud Abbas is traveling here and there around the world essentially lining up money, guns, and clandestine support his largely corrupt and discredited 'Fateh' faction of the Palestinian movement. This as the Israelis, always of course with considerable American help and involvement, are pushing hard for the Palestinian civil war they have wanted, but failed until now, to be able to ignite.
TARGET IRAN - READY AND WAITING (May 17, 2006)
U.S. and Israeli military 'exercises' have been underway, both announced and no doubt unannounced. Clandestine U.S. and Israel special forces, along with CIA and Mossad operatives, are on both sides of Iran in Afghanistan and Iraq, and probably operating clandestinely in Iran as well. Top Jewish American Neocons long associated with Israel have publicly proclaimed Iran could be successful bombed 'in just one night'. Last week Israel's senior 'statesman', Shimon Peres, proclaimed that 'Iran too can be wiped off the map'. And yesterday this from The Herald in Scotland:
WORLD JIHAD 'TSUNAMI' HYPED BY ISRAELIS (May 16, 2006)
"An impending world jihad 'tsunami'... may
soon descend on the entire Middle East."
US Readies for Iran (May 13, 2006)
"Let us face the truth, Just like Iraq, all the talk about Iranian nuclear activities is a smoke screen for something else. The most likely answer is a combination of the United States strategic interest in oil, containment of China and Israeli interest. But in 2006 governments are understandably shy about mentioning neo-colonialism and greed as the reasons for invading other countries."
Jewish-Israeli Lobby Nervous in Washington (May 12, 2006)
The Jewish-Israel Lobby is showing increased signs of nervousness and insecurity in Washington, as this article from THE FORWARD demonstrates. This in the aftermath of the spy scandal in which two of the most senior AIPAC personnel are no trial and 'The Israel Lobby' paper published by Professors John Mearshimer at the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt at Harvard in The London Review of Books.
Israeli-Jewish Lobby Increasingly Nervous in Washington (May 12, 2006)
The Jewish-Israel Lobby is showing increased signs of nervousness and insecurity in Washington, as this article from THE FORWARD demonstrates. This in the aftermath of the spy scandal in which two of the most senior AIPAC personnel are no trial and 'The Israel Lobby' paper published by Professors John Mearshimer at the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt at Harvard in The London Review of Books.
Israelis With U.S. Help Slaughter Hundreds of Iraqi Scientists and Professors (May 10, 2006)
Numerous reports for many months have stated that with collaboration from American occupation forces, Israel’s espionage apparatus, Mossad, slaughtered at least 530 Iraqi scientists and academic professors.
Assassination Plot of Palestinian President Say Israelis (May 7, 2006)
Whether true or not, the Israelis have long wanted to provoke a Palestinian civil war, and now they are closer to their goal than ever, especially with the White House and Congress on board in the USA more than ever, and the confused and insecure CIA in chaos. This report should be taken with extra skepticism in view of how quickly the Israelis rushed it into the headlines.
'The Israel Lobby' - Part II (May 5, 2006)
They unleashed a most unusual political, as well as academic and intellectual, firestory with their 'The Israel Lobby' article published in March in The London Review of Books. And we now know that the article was actually commissioned by and then rejected for publication in New York by The Atlantic -- formerly The Atlantic Monthly before the cut-back in publishing schedule. Rather hypocritically for a magazine supposed to stand for serious journalism, open debate and freedom of the press The Atlantic has nevertheless clamped a 'No Comment Top Secret' stamp on this whole episode and somehow convinced the Professors to do so as well. But the issue and the debate, so vital actually to Americans, does non-the-less continue in The London Review of Books where this follow-up letter appears in the current just published issue:
Israel's Disaster - Past and Present (May 4, 2006)
Finally top American academics from leading American universities have joined the contemporary political scene. If their insights and concerns are brushed aside -- as the politicians and the special interest groups keep attempting -- the perils we all now face partly because of their long past absence from the real-time policy debate will only increase. Credit the Iraq war for stirring things up so....credit a backlash against the hardline Zionist Neocons and the far-out Christian Evangelicals...credit a new sense of involvement and 'activisim' from segments of the intellectual community. But whether this is truly a new day is yet to be seen.
"Saudi Arabia could topple tonight..." (May 1, 2006)
"Saudi Arabia could topple tonight and we wouldn't be surprised."
|