[Peace-discuss] FW: AIPAC is suddenly getting a lot of bad press, in Jewish papers and ‘Washington Post’

[David Green]

Both the Weiss article and the WP Rossinow article linked to  in the Weiss
article are worth reading. Since Jeff Bezos is of Lebanese origin, there
may be some sort of underlying tolerance of dissidence there, I don't know.

The difference between 1953, when there was a backlash against Israel's
raid into what was then Jordan, and the present, is important to note.
Until 1967, the U.S. was trying to secure its alliance with Saudi Arabia
(post-British) in the midst of Arab nationalism, and Israel was seen as a
disruptive force in that regard. In addition, Jewish-Americans were wary of
being accused of disloyalty in the midst of the Cold War, and "socialist"
Israel (which even had a Communist Party) was kept at a modest distance by
liberal American Jews. Thus the origins of the Israel Lobby at this time.

Presently, a half-century after the demise of Arab nationalism, Israel and
the KSA are the primary U.S. allies in the post-Cold War, neoliberal era,
in opposition to the Shi'a axis of evil.

Whatever the support for the Palestinian cause, which has been growing for
the past decade or more, the strategic partnership with Israel is likely
stronger than ever at fundamental levels, including the relationship of the
U of I with Israeli universities.

Thus, for this support for Palestinian rights to result in anything, it
will have to challenge the basic tenets of U.S. strategy in the Middle
East, rather than just the Lobby itself; obviously not a small order.

DG

On Sun, Mar 18, 2018 at 7:30 AM, David Johnson via Peace-discuss <
peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote:

>
>
>
>
> *From:* David Sladky [mailto:tanstl at hotmail.com]
> *Sent:* Saturday, March 17, 2018 6:47 PM
> *Subject:* AIPAC is suddenly getting a lot of bad press, in Jewish papers
> and ‘Washington Post’
>
>
> AIPAC is suddenly getting a lot of bad press, in Jewish papers and
> ‘Washington Post’
>
>
>
> http://mondoweiss.net/2018/03/getting-jewish-washington/
>
> [image: Image removed by sender.]
> <http://mondoweiss.net/2018/03/getting-jewish-washington/>
>
> AIPAC is suddenly getting a lot of bad press, in Jewish papers and
> ‘Washington Post’
> <http://mondoweiss.net/2018/03/getting-jewish-washington/>
>
> mondoweiss.net
>
> In a sign of growing establishment distrust of the Israel lobby group
> AIPAC, several writers liken it to the NRA, and the Washington Post
> publishes an important article by Doug Rossinow saying that…
>
>
>
>
>
> US Politics <http://mondoweiss.net/us-politics/>
>
> Philip Weiss <http://mondoweiss.net/author/philweiss/> on March 16, 2018 39
> Comments
> <http://mondoweiss.net/2018/03/getting-jewish-washington/#comments>
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> Doug Rossinow
>
> 
>
> One pleasurable surprise of the AIPAC policy conference in early March —
> the leading Israel lobby group, the American Israel Public Affairs
> Committee — was how much bad press the organization got. It’s becoming
> almost fashionable to criticize the lobby for its enforcement of lockstep
> political support for Israel in Washington, and for its Soviet-style policy
> on access to the press.
>
> These criticisms are finally showing up in the mainstream press. Reporters
> have been licensed by the injury mere high school students have done to
> another powerful lobby, the National Rifle Association. So maybe AIPAC is
> on the same path-to-pariah status, more than a decade after Walt and
> Mearsheimer published their book *The Israel Lobby*.
>
> Here are a few items. Notable among them is a report in the Washington
> Post of all places saying that AIPAC was born to rally American Jews to
> stand shoulder to shoulder behind Israeli “lies” about a massacre of
> Palestinians, back in 1953. And two angry pieces in the Jewish press
> decrying AIPAC’s blackout policy on coverage of its gatherings.
>
> First off, Gershon Baskin reports in the Jerusalem Post
> <http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/In-Maryland-taking-on-AIPAC-545138>that a
> Maryland insurgent Democrat, Dr. Jerome Segal
> <https://www.segalforsenate.org/>, is taking on Senator Ben Cardin, who
> voted against the Iran deal, because he is so pro-AIPAC. Baskin paints
> AIPAC as the NRA.
>
> *An interesting aspect of [Jerome] Segal’s candidacy is not only that he
> is challenging Senator Cardin, but that he is taking on AIPAC. Cardin is a
> kind of AIPAC “poster boy,” not only representing what AIPAC wants, but
> being on the front line of acting on behalf of AIPAC in the Senate. Segal
> believes that he will take the votes that supported Bernie Sanders (35% of
> the Democratic voters) and gain many other votes because the broad flow of
> American Jewish opinion is toward his Jewish Peace Lobby’s ideas and away
> from AIPAC’s blind support of Israel….*
>
> *Segal presents himself as David to Cardin and AIPAC’s Goliath. Segal’s
> slogan is “if we beat AIPAC in Maryland, we can beat the NRA [National
> Rifle Association] in America.”..*
>
> Baskin is frank about AIPAC’s power (though he says, mistakenly imho, that
> the NRA is more powerful (Dems run against the NRA)):
>
> *Many members of Congress are simply afraid to ever challenge AIPAC, not
> because AIPAC puts so much money in the campaigns of everyone it supports,
> but because AIPAC’s strategy is also to target candidates that it doesn’t
> like and put huge amounts of money into their challengers’ campaigns. The
> candidates that AIPAC wants out usually don’t stand a chance.*
>
> And AIPAC is vulnerable because it has become the Trump lobby.
>
> *The AIPAC show of last week does not reflect the majority view of
> American Jewry. I believe that most of the thousands of participants at
> AIPAC were in fact Trump supporters.*
>
> Peter Beinart also says AIPAC is vulnerable, in a piece at the Atlantic
> site
> <https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/03/aipacs-struggle-to-avoid-becoming-the-nra/554999/> saying
> that AIPAC faces a “struggle to avoid the fate of the NRA.” Beinart says
> young Dems are alienated by AIPAC’s achievement: blocking criticism of the
> occupation. While rightwing Republicans are alienated by its lip service to
> the two-state solution.
>
> *AIPAC is conducting a remarkable experiment. It’s doubling down on
> bipartisanship and ideological diversity even as tectonic shifts in
> American politics and culture make that harder and harder…*
>
> *It’s fascinating to watch, and it’s likely to fail…. It will fail because
> the thing about Israel that young liberals admire least is its half-century
> long policy of denying Palestinians in the West Bank basic rights like free
> movement, due process, and citizenship in the country in which they
> live—and entrenching that denial by building settlements where Jews enjoy
> rights that their Palestinian neighbors are denied. [AIPAC CEO Howard]
> Kohr’s endorsement of the two-state solution notwithstanding, AIPAC remains
> the most powerful force in American politics opposing pressure on Israel to
> end the occupation. Thus, young liberals can only embrace AIPAC if they
> place their support for Israel ahead of their opposition to its occupation.*
>
> There’s more of the NRA theme at Truthdig. Maj. Danny Sjursen, a former
> West Point instructor, laments
> <https://www.truthdig.com/articles/gone-george-mcgovern/> on the death of
> the antiwar Democratic liberal congressperson, and rightly sees the lobby’s
> role in that transformation.
>
> *I nearly spit up my food the other day. Watching on C-SPAN as Sen. Amy
> Klobuchar, D-Minn., gleefully attended a panel
> <https://www.c-span.org/video/?442006-3/aipac-conference-senator-amy-klobuchar> at
> the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) conference, I
> couldn’t help but wonder what has happened to the Democratic Party. The
> worst part is I like her, mostly. Look, I agree with Sen. Klobuchar on most
> domestic issues: health care, taxes and more. But she—a supposed
> liberal—and her mainstream Democratic colleagues are complicit in the
> perpetuation of America’s warfare state and neo-imperial interventionism.
> Sen. Klobuchar and other Democrats’ reflexive support for Israel is but a
> symptom of a larger disease in the party—tacit militarism.*
>
> *AIPAC is a lobbying clique almost as savvy and definitely as effective as
> the NRA. Its meetings—well attended by mainstream Democrats and Republicans
> alike—serve as little more than an opportunity for Washington pols to kiss
> Benjamin Netanyahu’s ring and swear fealty to Israel. Most of the time,
> participants don’t dare utter the word “Palestinian.” That’d be
> untoward—Palestinians are the unacknowledged elephants in the room
> <http://www.dw.com/en/at-aipac-hardly-a-mention-of-a-future-palestinian-state/a-38150701>.*
>
> Sjursen laments Israel’s shadow over the U.S. image in the world.
>
> *The far right-wing Israeli government of Netanyahu, who is little more
> than a co-conspirator and enabler for America’s failed project in the
> Middle East, should be the last group “liberals” pander to…. For 50 years
> now, the Israeli military has divided, occupied and enabled the illegal
> settlement of sovereign Palestinian territory
> <https://www.un.org/press/en/2016/sc12657.doc.htm>, keeping Arabs in limbo
> without citizenship or meaningful civil rights.*
>
> *This is, so far as international law is concerned, a war crime. As such,
> unflinching American support for Israeli policy irreversibly damages the
> U.S. military’s reputation on the “Arab street.” I’ve seen it firsthand. In
> Iraq and Afghanistan, hundreds and thousands of miles away from Jerusalem,
> captured prisoners and hospitable families alike constantly pointed to
> unfettered U.S. support for Israel and the plight of Palestinians when
> answering that naive and ubiquitous American question: “Why do they hate
> us?”*
>
> Speaking of war crimes, The Washington Post published an important piece
> on “The dark roots”
> <https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/made-by-history/wp/2018/03/06/the-dark-roots-of-aipac-americas-pro-israel-lobby/?utm_term=.45206ab88a78&__twitter_impression=true> of
> AIPAC, by Doug Rossinow, a teacher of history at the University of Oslo.
> Rossinow says that AIPAC has its origins in the 1953 effort by American
> Jews to explain away a massacre of Palestinians.
>
> Rossinow describes AIPAC as “a huge factor in U.S. policy” and endorses
> Gideon Levy’s picture of the group as a “Jewish lobby” — it “welded a
> united front of American Jews in support of Israel, a unity that
> politicians have had to respect.”
>
> The original leader of the lobby group, I.L. “Si” Kenen, found most of his
> political friends among liberal Democrats, Rossinow writes. Truman had of
> course endorsed the Jewish state, pushed by major Zionist donors
> <http://mondoweiss.net/2014/04/judiss-landmark-zionism/>; but Eisenhower
> bucked Israel on several occasions, including during the famous Qibya
> massacre in the West Bank in 1953 — when Ariel Sharon’s troops killed “more
> than 60 civilians indiscriminately in retaliation for the murder of a
> Jewish woman and her two children in Israel.”
>
> Back then, Israel didn’t get away with human rights violations.
>
> *The outcry was sharp and wide.*
>
> *Time magazine carried a shocking account of deliberate, even casual mass
> murder by Israeli soldiers at Qibya — “slouching . . . smoking and joking.”
> The New York Times ran extensive excerpts from a U.N. commission that
> refuted Israeli lies about the incident.*
>
> Qibya was the genesis of AIPAC, Rossinow asserts, as Israel supporters
> prepared “for any future shocks coming out of Israel.”
>
> *Aware Israel’s reputation in the United States had been tarnished,
> American Jewish supporters of Israel scrambled to mount a damage-control
> effort in late 1953 and early 1954.*
>
> And Jewish solidarity was key. Stalinist orthodoxy needed to be enforced.
> AIPAC’s predecessor did what the lobby does today, redlines the Jewish
> community (and even Americans for Peace Now marches along
> <http://mondoweiss.net/2018/01/fearing-breakup-zionists/> with its mouth
> shut).
>
> *Even before AZCPA [AIPAC predecessor, American Zionist Council for Public
> Affairs] appeared, Kenen and others labored to construct a united front
> among American Jewish groups in support of Israel amid the Qibya
> controversy. AZCPA strengthened that Jewish united front, which was
> impressively broad. ..*
>
> *It showed that there was nothing Israel might do that would jeopardize
> American Jewish support. Indeed, to some in the Jewish community, the more
> disturbing Israeli behavior was, the more Israel needed their ardent
> advocacy….*
>
> *The perception that AIPAC represents a consensus among American Jews has
> always been a key to its political influence, which explains the group’s
> sometimes seemingly outsized opposition to Jewish dissent from its line.
> “America’s Pro-Israel Lobby,” born in awful knowledge, has always existed
> to make Israeli realities and priorities palatable to Americans.*
>
> The worse things got, the louder were the Jewish voices. Denying “awful
> knowledge.” Imagine, that was in the Washington Post!
>
> More dissent. The editors of the Jewish Week,
> <http://jewishweek.timesofisrael.com/why-we-wont-be-at-the-aipac-conference/>angered
> by AIPAC’s stiffnecked policy on the press attending the most interesting
> sessions at the policy conference, refused to attend the conference.
> From “Why We Won’t Be at the AIPAC conference.”
>
> *Lobby leaders said that speakers and panelists at the conference may feel
> inhibited in expressing their views if members of the press were in the
> room. We countered that a conference with 20,000 attendees, and dozens of
> sessions with many hundreds of delegates, is by nature not conducive to
> keeping secrets, especially in the age of instant tweets and texts. If
> members of the press agreed to the ground rules of attending “off the
> record” sessions, it would allow the media to get a sense of the important
> give-and-take that takes place in these informative sessions without
> violating journalistic or AIPAC boundaries….*
>
> *AIPAC has a long history of being wary of and less than friendly toward
> the press. Members of the press enter the AIPAC convention through a
> separate entrance and must be accompanied by staff to proceed to the main
> area where sessions are held — and even accompanied to the rest rooms at
> times. Such treatment doesn’t foster trust and mutual respect. AIPAC
> officials say the press is overly critical in its coverage of the lobby….*
>
> The editors also say that Israel is under fire, and so “AIPAC’s mandate of
> promoting bipartisan support for Israel is more vital than ever.” But the
> press policies are hurting that goal.
>
> The *Atlanta Jewish Times* chimes in, deploring AIPAC’s policy
> <http://atlantajewishtimes.timesofisrael.com/our-view-open-up-aipac/> and
> saying it was unable to cover an AIPAC gathering in Atlanta because it was
> off the record.
>
> *The perfect image of AIPAC’s wrongheaded attitude emerged Sunday, March
> 4, the first day of the Washington conference. Outside a session titled
> “Free Speech and Freedom of the Press in Israel” was this sign: “THIS
> SESSION IS OFF THE RECORD AND CLOSED TO THE PRESS.”*
>
> *[image: Image removed by sender.]*
>
> *Sign outside a panel on press freedom at AIPAC, foto in Atlanta Jewish
> Week.*
>
> *…AIPAC recently held its annual Atlanta community event at Mercedes-Benz
> Stadium with Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Bret Stephens of The New York
> Times speaking. But you didn’t see any coverage in the AJT because
> everything AIPAC does locally is off the record.*
>
> *It’s particularly aggravating when the speaker is a fellow member of the
> press, such as Stephens…*
>
> *We suspect AIPAC just likes to maintain a sense of mystery that brings an
> aura of power and perhaps increases people’s desire to pay to see what’s
> inside.*
>
> In sum, the atmosphere is changing for AIPAC. People are more willing to
> criticize it in the press. A sea change in establishment attitudes is under
> way, I believe, though it will take a while…
>
> *Thanks to Donald Johnson, Todd Pierce, Adam Horowitz, John Whitbeck. *
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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>
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