>There are plenty of bad things to say about Israel as a state without
>jumping to link it to Jews in American society. Even the issue of the
>"Jewish lobby" is pretty irrelevant-- most of the support for Israel comes
>from military hawks and Christian fundamentalists. Jews just don't have
>either the votes or the money to outbid oil interests who could easily go
>the other way if other concerns didn't exist.
-I can't agree with you about the power and significance of the -Israel lobby. It's full-funded, well-organized, and extremely effective, and -has the support of almost all of organzed, and I emphasize _organized_ -American Jewry...You know that votes count, but -organization decides, as we say in Chicago.
I'm sorry but there is a real historic amnesia about how recent the full-blooded support for Israel from the United States dates from. While the US supported Israel's founding in 1948, so did the Soviet Union, to an extent that much of the Israeli military then (which was dominated by the Israeli left) initially saw their interests more with the SU than with the United States. The Soviet Union rapidly decided that they were more interested in making alliances with the emerging left nationalisms of Nasser and the Baathists in Syria and Iraq, but then the US was also making its bid for support of those regimes, including confronting Britain and France and Israel over the Suez invasion planned by all three in 1956.Our orientation in that period was cultivating strong relationships with Arab states like Saudi Arabia by deals were possible and installing our allies in Iran by coup when necessary.
The 1967 war was fought largely with non-American weapons, since France was Israel's major military benefactor at that point and the US was supplying a rather small amount of loans (not grants) in any year. It was only with Nixon and the 1973 war that US support for Israel ramped up-- the modern support for Israel was the convergence of the pro-Israeli "Scoop Jackson" wing of Democrats with neo-realists in the Nixon camp and the new Jewish neoconservatives who were just moving into the Republican camp. It was not "organized Jewry" but organized neoconservative Jewry who figured out that a strategic alliance with fundamentalist Christians and military hawks could deliver the permanent support for Israel they desired.
It took a few years for full delivery of that alliance; Carter was supportive of Israel generally but denounced the West Bank settlements and pushed for return of the Sinai to Egypt in the Camp David negotiations. Note the article below on how many in Israel have less than a fond memory of Carter. It was only with Reagan's administration that full-throated unwavering support of Israel became the policy of the United States as the neoconservative Jewish, Christian fundamentalist, military hawk alliance took over US foreign policy.
Now I don't dispute that most Jews, especially organized Jewish groups, support Israel, but that is different from saying the "Jewish Lobby" runs US policy, especially when that is said without regard to the other non-Jewish groups, with a lot more influence, who have their own interests in Israel.
>And what "silence" of the left on Israel? Almost every major left
>organization condems Israel's policies. The National Lawyers Guild, the
>major left legal organization of which a number of folks on this list are
>members (who disagree on a hell of a lot), has been consistenty and rather
>harshly anti-Israel for many years, at some membership cost due to its
>principled position.
-It's not like the Guild is representative of a wide spectrum of opinion. DSA -is pretty wishy-washy at best on this.
First, the Guild had as large a membership in the 80s as DSA (both around 10,000 members), so while it's a professional slice of the left, I don't think it is necessarily unrepresentative. Yes, DSA was particularly wishy-washy, but they are not the only groups on the left and many progressives condemned Israeli's policies over the years. Remember that Jesse Jackson was rather prominently pro-Palestinian during his runs for the Presidency and many people supported him despite (or because of) those positions.
So what silence?
-- Nathan Newman
---
Get the word out Shmuel Katz
Jerusalem Post, 2001 (December 17) - When Menachem Begin paid his first visit to president Jimmy Carter as prime minister, Carter spent much of the time pressing Begin to "freeze the settlements."
Begin's reply was simple: "You, Mr. President, have in the United States a number of places with names like Bethlehem, Shiloh, and Hebron, and you haven't the right to tell prospective residents in those places that they are forbidden to live there. Just like you, I have no such right in my country. Every Jew is entitled to settle wherever he pleases."
Nevertheless the Carter administration launched a veritable propaganda campaign to spread the "ruling" that Jewish settlement in the West Bank - that is, Judea and Samaria - and in the Gaza Strip were illegal (in addition to being an "obstacle to peace").
Most of the media willingly fell into line. Following opposition and protest from various quarters, the Carter administration recognized that if one talks of illegality one must provide chapter and verse. Thus the State Department came up with the Fourth Geneva Convention as proof.
But the Fourth Geneva Convention proves nothing of the sort. It proves the opposite. The Fourth Geneva Convention does not apply to Israel and its presence in Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza district. The convention defines itself strictly in its second clause: "The present convention shall apply to cases of partial or total occupation of the territory of a High Contracting Party."
Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, which Israel occupied in 1967, were not territories of a High Contracting Party. Judea and Samaria did not belong to Trans-Jordan nor did Gaza belong to Egypt. In the war of Pan-Arab aggression in 1948, Trans-Jordan had invaded Judea and Samaria, occupied them and, in blatant illegality, annexed them. It then celebrated the annexation by changing its name to Jordan. Egypt had similarly annexed the Gaza district. The annexations of course gave Trans-Jordan and Egypt no rights of sovereignty. Israel's presence in the West Bank and Gaza is perfectly legal.
Indeed, the last sovereign of both areas was the Ottoman Turkish Empire. Defeated in World War I, it had relinquished sovereignty over vast areas including Palestine; Palestine was handed over to the British to govern as a trustee - a mandatory for the purpose of bringing about the "reconstitution of the Jewish National Home."
When Britain retired from the Mandate, Jewish historical rights which the Mandate had recognized were not canceled; and no new sovereign ever took over in Judea and Samaria or in Gaza.
The legal adviser of the State Department, called upon to defend the Carter claim that Jewish settlement in the West Bank and Gaza was illegal, got over the difficulty by simply ignoring Article 2 of the convention. In his opinion he didn't even mention it. He loftily declared that "the principles of the convention appear applicable whether or not Jordan and Egypt possessed legitimate sovereign rights in respect of the territories." No less.
Further on in his statement, he markedly avoided mentioning that in 1967 it was once again the aggressors of 1948 who attacked Israel (then confined to the narrow armistice lines of 1949). He did mention the Six Day War of 1967, but how? He wrote: "During the June 1967 war, Israeli forces occupied Gaza, the Sinai peninsula, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights." That was all. Not a word about who started the war or about its flaunted gruesome purpose: the destruction of Israel.
The continuing smear on Israel on the part of the government was brought to an end by the successor administration of Ronald Reagan, who personally had strongly and repeatedly denounced it. His administration issued a declaration that Israeli settlements were not illegal (though they were regarded as "an obstacle to peace").
A prominent member of the administration, law professor Eugene Rostow - himself a former assistant secretary of state - subsequently wrote: "Israel has a stronger claim to the West Bank than any other nation or would-be nationÉ [and] the same legal right to settle the West Bank, the Gaza strip and east Jerusalem as it has to settle Haifa or west Jerusalem."
But the damage was done; and never did Israel launch a counter-campaign to lay bare the monstrous falsity of Arab historical claims, their grave annihilatory intent towards Israel, the skewed misleading interpretation of the Fourth Geneva Convention and the effort to acquit the Arabs of their aggression. Never a serious reply to Arab fabrications point by point so as to combat the widespread ignorance among even our own people. Never an educational campaign to demonstrate the unique roots of our people in Eretz Yisrael.
The policies of government after government encouraged the Arabs to believe that we were weakening in the belief of the justice of our cause, and on the other hand played down the repeated declarations of Arab leaders, from Abdel Nasser to Yasser Arafat, that their objective was the demolition of Israel. Our leaders talked of compromise. The Arabs saw compromise as a station on the road to complete Israeli surrender - something which, but for the hardening of Arafat's heart, almost occurred last year.
But the change that has taken place in the international political climate since the US tragedy of September 11, which has helped people abroad to understand the unique nature of our place in the world, gives us a chance to meet squarely the bitter struggle ahead of us.
Moreover, a great majority of the people in Israel has been shocked into recognizing the Arabs' lethal purpose. The government however must realize that it is essential that the physical, the military struggle, be accompanied by a sane national policy of information - to tell our people, and the rest of the world, at every step of the way, the whys and the wherefores of our existence, our actions and our beliefs.