POLITICS ~ UP CLOSE & PERSONAL!!!

American foreign policy has been weighed down for all too many years by an albatross hung round Uncle Sam's neck, one that distorts our stance especially vis-à-vis Middle Eastern issues and ultimately works against U.S. interests in the region and around the world: that albatross is unconditional support for the state of Israel.

Of course, saying this amounts to a hate crime in today's political atmosphere, and it is almost impossible to criticize the Jewish state without being accused of religious bigotry, which is just how Israel's partisans want it.

In the halls of Congress and the corridors of power, Israel is above criticism. But not anymore…

Of course, we've been criticizing Israel, and its inordinate influence over American foreign policy, in these pages for quite some time, and we are not alone. On the Right, some conservatives, such as Pat Buchanan and The American Conservative magazine, have broken the taboo, and on the Left, too, Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal, James Petras, and a host of others have refused to be a part of the Israel-can-do-no-wrong consensus.

In the intelligence community, Larry Johnson, Philip Giraldi, and James Bamford have been critical of Israel and its amen corner in the U.S., while among academics, Juan Cole has often provided a skeptical view of Israeli government actions and Israel's apologists in the U.S.

In the "mainstream" media, however, and certainly in Washington, D.C., the power of Israel's lobby is unchallenged.

This hegemony has now been thoroughly detailed and analyzed in an important study by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, published by Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Mearsheimer, the R. Wendell Harrison distinguished service professor of political science and a co-director of the Program on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago, is the leading advocate of the "realist" school of foreign policy.

Walt is academic dean of the Kennedy School. Their study, "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," [.pdf] starts out with a bang:

"The U.S. national interest should be the primary object of American foreign policy. For the past several decades, however, and especially since the Six Day War in 1967, the centerpiece of U.S. Middle East policy has been its relationship with Israel.

The combination of unwavering U.S. support for Israel and the related effort to spread democracy throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardized U.S. security.

This situation has no equal in American political history.

Why has the United States been willing to set aside its own security in order to advance the interests of another state?"

This situation, I would submit, has no equivalent in the history of the world. Nation-states are notorious for jealously guarding and pursuing their own interests. Why, then, would the most powerful state on earth abjectly subordinate itself to the influence and even direction of an ally, one that, furthermore, does not reciprocate this altruism?

Answer: the Lobby.

The reality, say Mearsheimer and Walt, is that Israel is a net liability in the worldwide struggle against terrorism and efforts by the U.S. to modify the behavior of so-called "rogue states."

The Israeli-centric policy pursued by Washington's warlords "exaggerates Israel's ability to help on these issues and ignores the ways that Israel's policies make U.S. efforts more difficult."

Aside from that, "Israel does not act like a loyal ally." In addition to ignoring pleas to modify their own behavior in the West Bank and Gaza, the Israelis sell arms to China and continue to spy on us – yes, even since Pollard.

Aside from the flaws in the practical case for an Israeli-centric policy, the moral case for elevating Israel's interests over our own is very weak.

Mearsheimer and Walt note that much of the sympathy for Israel has been based on its alleged status as the underdog: David standing alone against the demographic Goliath of the Arab world.

Yet this picture, strenuously promoted by the Israel lobby, is far from the truth. Israelis the underdogs? Give me a break! As the authors point out, Israel is the strongest military power in the region.

Okay, then, what about the fact that Arab regimes oppress their own people, while Israel is relatively free?  In the name of promoting "democracy," the Bush administration – and its predecessors – have tilted toward Tel Aviv and held Israel up as a model for the region.

But this is based on an incomplete analysis of Israel's internal regime. Israel a democracy? Not for the millions of Palestinian helots it rules. And what about the racist criteria for Israeli citizenship? If a Palestinian marries an Israeli, the former cannot [.pdf] be a citizen of Israel, nor even move there.

The authors even take on the widely held – although rarely expressed – view that unconditional support for Israel is deserved on account of the Holocaust: according to this logic, it's payback time.

But who is doing the paying? The Israelis victimized a group that had nothing to do with this crime, which was committed by Europeans. And the Zionists went on to commit their own crimes when they expelled "up to 700,000 Palestinians," according to the authors of this study, from 1947-48.

In detailing the crimes of the Israelis, Mearsheimer and Walt come to a conclusion that will outrage the Lobby, not because it is a lie but because it is indisputable: "In terms of actual behavior," they write, "Israel's conduct is not morally distinguishable from the actions of its opponents."

If the suicide bombers of Hamas and Islamic Jihad continue to plague innocent civilians who fall victim to terrorist attacks in Israel, then this kind of violence is a reflection of the activities of the organized Zionist terrorist outfits who fought in the war for independence.

These activities included mass expulsions, executions, and rapes by Jewish "settlers" in the early days of the Zionist state:

"Between 1949 and 1956, for example, Israeli security forces killed between 2,700 and 5,000 Arab infiltrators, the overwhelming majority of them unarmed. … The IDF also murdered hundreds of Egyptian prisoners-of-war in both the 1956 and 1967 wars.

In 1967, it expelled between 100,000 and 260,000 Palestinians from the newly-conquered West Bank, and drove 80,000 Syrians from the Golan Heights."

The Zionists say they are merely defending themselves against "terrorism," but they themselves utilized terrorism to establish their state, as the authors of this study document. They cite Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, then a member of an underground Zionist organization, as quite honestly advocating methods that one now associates with al-Qaeda:

"Indeed, Shamir openly argued that 'neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat.' Rather, terrorism has 'a great part to play … in our war against the occupier [Britain].'"

Israel's alleged moral superiority is a myth. Neither strategic nor moral arguments explain America's unconditional support for Israel: instead, "the explanation lies in the unmatched power of the Israel Lobby."

While it's true that there is no centralized leadership of "the Lobby," as the authors call it, and there are significant disagreements between various groups within the Jewish community over U.S. policy toward Israel, there is, however, a party line that is almost never crossed or contradicted. When it is, the response from the Amen Corner is virulent.

For him – and that goes for the American Congress, and even the president himself. The reason: again, the Lobby.

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