[Peace-discuss] The Lobby Again

Wed Jan 23 00:03:47 CST 2008

Of course, we could just as easily say "Americans unfortunately broadly support 
the policies of their elites, except when they fail, as in Iraq. So far, they've 
been getting away with murder and mayhem."  But that's a result of what Herman 
and Chomsky called long ago "The Manufacture of Consent," the strenuous and 
unprecedentedly successful effort of "marketing" by the media/political 
structure.

In fact, the regnant political parties of the US are in agreement on important 
issues and are substantially to the right of the populace's real views, which 
have to be suppressed -- not with the knout, as in primitive 20th century 
totalitarianisms, but by advertising...

That's the job of people like Obama, to cover over the yawning gap between the 
interests of the elites and those of the majority.  Why do you think we keep 
hearing such vacuous paeans to "unity," "change," and "hope"?

Obama knows quite well what he's doing, as do his rivals. In his book, The 
Mendacity of Hope, he writes "...perhaps the biggest casualty of [the Vietnam] 
war was the bond of trust between the American people and their government – and 
between American themselves ... Increasingly, many on the left voiced opposition 
not only to the Vietnam War but also to the broader aims of American foreign 
policy.  In their view, President Johnson, General Westmoreland, the CIA, the 
‘military industrial complex,’ and international institutions like the World 
Bank were all manifestations of American arrogance, jingoism, racism, capitalism 
and imperialism." Now, that's serious and has to be dealt with.

Obama and his co-conspirators know that those are the views that have to be put 
down (along with the incidental suggestion that "the biggest casualty of the 
war" was four million dead Asians).  Those were "the excesses of the 60s and 
70s" that he referred to last week, praising Reagan for "changing the trajectory 
of America."  (Nixon and Clinton didn't, he said, but Kennedy did -- ranking 
presidents on the success of their media-aided lies to the country.)

Israel, founded with much more advanced social ideals than those of the 
contemporary US, has been wrenched into an American pattern in 40 years of 
clientage.  Their original socialist ideals abandoned, their society has come to 
resemble an even more militarized version of ours -- appropriate perhaps for a 
"stationary US aircraft carrier," but with a high rate of social inequality 
(Mizrahim apparently often treated worse than Arab citizens) and their own 
manufacture of consent.  (Although from the Israeli press one could argue that 
debate is still a good bit healthier there.)

The Suez crisis of 1956 stands at the beginning of US/Israel relations as a 
warning of what happens when Israel is seen to cross US interests.  When Israel 
took on the status of principal client of the US a decade later, it became 
clearer whose interests would be served.  To call it a "mutual understanding" 
with such a disparity of wealth and power is not quite right.  "The answer was 
given a long time ago by Thucydides (the Melian dialogue, in The Peloponnesian 
War, Book 5): The strong do as they can, and the weak suffer as they must."

And both states are riven by competing interests, however suppressed, between 
elites and the majority. --CGE

Morton K. Brussel wrote:
> A couple of  comments follow.  --mkb
> 
> On Jan 18, 2008, at 10:17 AM, David Green wrote:
> 
>> Just in case myself and Carl haven't beaten this horse enough, I think 
>> it's important to understand that M/W (as referred to below) are wrong 
>> when they say that American politicians support policies that "are 
>> harmful to the Jewish state." They support policies that benefit 
>> elites in the Jewish state, and harm most Israelis. That reminds me of 
>> of our own country. Why should that be so hard for people on the left 
>> to understand (and shame on you, Perry Anderson in the New Left Review).
> 
> This [the distinction between the Jewish state and the élites of that 
> state] seems a mite too fastidious. Israelis unfortunately broadly 
> support the policies of their élites, except when they fail, as in 
> Lebanon. So far, they've been getting away with murder and mayhem.
>>  
>> When support for Israel proves to not be in the interest of American 
>> elites, whether the neocons or the "permanent government," then there 
>> will be a "change of course", that is, a change that admits no 
>> previous error and obliterates history. If in some wild scenario they 
>> decided that it would be geopolitcally correct for Israel and 
>> Palestine to be one secular democratic country, Jewish leaders in this 
>> country would support that idea within a week, because they cannot 
>> tolerate being out of step with establishment opinion. In another 
>> week, Israeli leadership would support it. A week after that, 
>> Jewish-American leaders would be saying that they had always supported 
>> a one-state solution. The following week, rabbis all around the 
>> country would be comparing Yassir Arafat to Martin Luther King.
> 
> I don't believe this hypothetical. It's too facile to imply that Israel 
> is an unwitting slave to U.S. interests. There is mutual understanding…
>>  
>> The major candidates positions reflect their general agreement with 
>> the goals of U.S. foreign policy: as Chomsky says, "we own the world." 
>> At this point, until further notice, owning the world means providing 
>> Israel with arms with which to threaten its neighbors, occupy 
>> Palestine, and keep the anti-Semitic pot boiling in the oil states and 
>> Egypt, so their authoritarian leaders can divert the attention of 
>> their subjects (make no mistake, Jewish elites love anti-Semitism, 
>> would be lost without it). But if we ever decide that there is a 
>> better way to control oil than state-sponsored violence, then Zionism 
>> as we now know it will be history. At that point, Jews and Arabs will 
>> be left with only their particular form of class struggle.
>>  
>> DG
>>  
>> Better Safe Than Sorry for Candidates on Israel
>> The Hour
>> By Leonard Fein
>> The Forward
>> Wed. Jan 16, 2008
>>
>> Let?s play make-believe: Imagine that the candidates for the 
>> presidential nomination, Democrat and Republican, are asked for their 
>> views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (So far, that hasn?t 
>> happened.) And imagine that in addition to the familiar formulas 
>> regarding Israel ? America?s valuable ally, the only democracy in the 
>> Middle East, entitled to live in security, and so forth ? they were to 
>> add that Israel?s occupation of the West Bank must end, that the 
>> illegal outposts must be removed, that all settlement expansion must 
>> ended, that Israel should help rather than hinder the modernization of 
>> the Palestinian security apparatus, that the status quo is simply not 
>> acceptable.
>>
>> Can you imagine that? If so, employment awaits you at the Fantasy 
>> Channel. As Howard Dean learned in September 2003, when he called for 
>> an ?even-handed? American policy in the conflict, even so parve a 
>> phrase as ?even-handed? crosses the no-no boundary. Dean?s call begat 
>> criticism from John Kerry, his principal rival for the Democratic 
>> presidential nomination, as also from Joe Lieberman, Nancy Pelosi and 
>> Abraham Foxman.
>>
>> To the consternation of Steve Grossman, co-chair of the Dean campaign 
>> and a past president of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, 
>> it generated accusations of apostasy that seriously challenged the 
>> campaign. (Dean, and his enemies, didn?t help his case when, several 
>> days later, trying to recover from his original no-no, he chose to 
>> defend Israel?s targeted killings in Gaza. His defense? ?There is a 
>> war going on in the Middle East and members of Hamas are soldiers in 
>> that war, and, therefore, it seems to me, that they are going to be 
>> casualties if they are going to make war.? Soldiers? Howard Dean 
>> called Hamas terrorists soldiers? Aiming for redemption, he hit his 
>> foot instead.)
>>
>> There are rules to America?s presidential campaign season. The Iowa 
>> caucus comes first and the New Hampshire primaries come next. The 
>> person with the most votes wins. And candidates, unless they are named 
>> Kucinich, Gravel or Paul, must stay put within the four walls of the 
>> house that Aipac built ? that is, within the walls of pro-Israel 
>> orthodoxy.
>>
>> Open a door to the outside of that house, and you?ll find yourself in 
>> never-never land, and not the fun kind either. Open just a window, and 
>> you will spend weeks, months, explaining, apologizing, repairing the 
>> damage. The Israeli-Arab conflict is to foreign policy what Social 
>> Security is to domestic policy ? a third rail.
>>
>> It is therefore of more than passing interest that all the suspect 
>> phrases listed in the first paragraph above were in fact spoken by 
>> President Bush during his trip to the region last week. And the sky 
>> did not fall in.
>>
>> The firmness of the firmament may be attributable to the fact that no 
>> one was really and truly listening to what Bush was saying, or to the 
>> fact that he is rapidly approaching the end of his tenure. More 
>> likely, however, it is clear that the issues he raised and the points 
>> he made are by now beyond serious controversy, are part of the 
>> conventional wisdom.
>>
>> Which raises the obvious question: If such implicitly critical remarks 
>> regarding Israel are part of the conventional wisdom, why do 
>> prospective nominees for the presidency avoid the subject as if it 
>> were avian flu?
>>
>> Search the Web sites of the major candidates, and you will find that 
>> the only one who has anything at all to say about Israel is Mike 
>> Huckabee, the erstwhile Baptist minister who has visited Israel nine 
>> times. Search their speeches that touch on the subject, and you will 
>> find the candidates tumbling over one another to prove their superior 
>> devotion to Israel.
>>
>> This troubles John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt greatly, as they made 
>> clear in an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times earlier this month: 
>> ??the presidential candidates are no friends of Israel. They are like 
>> most U.S. politicians, who reflexively mouth pro-Israel platitudes 
>> while continuing to endorse and subsidize policies that are in fact 
>> harmful to the Jewish state. A genuine friend would tell Israel that 
>> it was acting foolishly, and would do whatever he or she could to get 
>> Israel to change its misguided behavior.?
>>
>> It is not that Mearsheimer and Walt are ignorant of the consequences 
>> of the kind of ?true? friendship they champion. Their piece reviews 
>> those consequences in some detail. They mention the cautionary Dean 
>> precedent, and they acknowledge that ?even well-intentioned criticism 
>> of Israel?s policies may lead [pro-Israel] groups to turn against them 
>> and back their opponents instead?. Israel?s friends in the media would 
>> take aim at the candidate, and campaign contributions from pro-Israel 
>> individuals and political action committees would go elsewhere.?
>>
>> So they are aware of the hazards that await the candidate who violates 
>> the accepted ritual and speaks the truth to Israel ? the very same 
>> truth spoken by Bush, who is widely regarded as genuinely sympathetic 
>> to Israel, who was hailed by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in terms so 
>> glowing that press reports indicate Bush was embarrassed by the praise.
>>
>> They must then be aware that no candidate will accept their advice. 
>> The ritual will be honored. And they and the rest of us can relax: 
>> Whoever prevails in the 2008 presidential elections will inherit the 
>> received wisdom on the conflict, the commitment to the very things of 
>> which Bush spoke ? a two-state solution, a viable and independent 
>> Palestinian state with contiguous territory, an end to settlement 
>> expansion and all the rest.
>>
>> Our task ? that is, the task of those of us who seek a genuine 
>> resolution to the conflict ? is to see to it that the urgings of such 
>> conventional wisdom do not themselves become a new and equally empty 
>> ritual.
>> ______
>> http://www.forward. com/articles/ 12489/ 
>> <http://www.forward.com/articles/12489/>
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> Never miss a thing. Make Yahoo your homepage. 
>> <http://us.rd.yahoo.com/evt=51438/*http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Peace-discuss mailing list
>> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net <mailto:Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>
>> http://lists.chambana.net/cgi-bin/listinfo/peace-discuss
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Peace-discuss mailing list
> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
> http://lists.chambana.net/cgi-bin/listinfo/peace-discuss