> If the President of
> the US was pro-Palestinian, we would have already won the public debate
for
> that election to have occurred. The question is what to do when you have
a
> minority of public support? How do you expand it?
Let me pick a different bone. I don't think Israel has a majority of public support in the US. I think a tiny minority of Americans support Israel and a slightly smaller minority support the Palestinians.
But the vast, vast majority are so unaware and indifferent that their responses to poll questions are, if not random, then determined largely by half-remembered shards of last night's TV news story about suicide bombings.
I think politicians fear AIPAC, not so much because it is so autonomously powerful, but because its cause enjoys elite social cache. The media and the wider political classes are largely sympathetic to its campaigns against wayward congressmen. But the sympathy and cache don't come from superior Zionist grassroots on-the-ground organizing, or even money. They come from Israel's status as an American strategic asset.
In the 40's and 50's, Zionism had a certain socialist tinge, an un-American stigma, and therefore prominent Zionists had little political resonance in the US. After 67, the reverse was true. Suddenly the Palestinian cause had a leftish, anti-American color. And Zionism had prestige. The shift wasn't caused by better Zionist organizing - it was a change in strategic realities.
Seth