[lbo-talk] The Banality of anti-Israel Lobby Doctrine

C. G. Estabrook galliher at illinois.edu
Mon Aug 9 12:47:01 PDT 2010


I don't see any insinuations here, Joe: I thought it was a straight-out description of a serious analytic mistake.

You recall the famous remark by August Bebel more than a century ago that "Antisemitism is the socialism of fools." I take that to mean that some of Bebel's contemporaries rightly recognized that there was something seriously wrong with the politics and economy of pre-WWI Europe, but they misascribed the cause: they thought it was the Jews, when it was the capitalists.

It seems similarly foolish to see the US invasions and occupations in the Mideast as caused by the Jews (and others) who make up the Israel Lobby. The formation of US foreign policy certainly involves the interplay of dominant social groups in the US, but they are not noticeably misled about where their own (nefarious) interests lie. In the Mideast, they're notably a matter of control of energy resources - and have been since WWII

Chomsky has noted that the idea that the Israel Lobby has an overwhelming influence on the formation of US foreign policy would be "a very hopeful conclusion. It would mean that U.S. policy could easily be reversed. It would simply be necessary to explain to the major centers of power, like the energy corporations, high-tech industry and arms producers and so on, that their interests are being harmed by this small lobby that screams anti-Semitism and funds congressmen, and so on. Surely those institutions can utterly overwhelm the lobby in political influence, in finance, and so on, so that ought to reverse the policy."

On 8/9/10 1:15 PM, Joseph Catron wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 9, 2010 at 9:48 AM, David Green <davegreen84 at yahoo.com>
> wrote:
>
> But like Carl Estabrook has said on this list, there is a "higher
> > anti-Semitism" involved here when people like Mearsheimer and Walt
> > attribute U.S. foreign policy failures to the Israel Lobby. I'd
> > actually be more comfortable with an overt anti-Semite than someone
> > who "blames the Jews" with an academic cover.
> >
>
> It takes a lot of balls for someone who trafficks in toxic
> insinuations like that to accuse anyone else of poisoning a debate.
>



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