Subject: The Israel Lobby and the Left: Uneasy Questions By Jeffrey Blankfort, a forward
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Extremely important essay by Jeff
Blankfort, must be read!
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Questions By Jeffrey
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Left Curve, No. 27 www.leftcurve.org
It was 1991 and Noam Chomsky had just
finished a lecture in Berkeley on the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict and was
taking questions from the audience. An
Arab-American asked him to explain his
position regarding the influence of
America’s Israel lobby.
Chomsky replied that its reputation was
generally exaggerated and like other
lobbies, it only appears to be powerful when its position lines up with that of the
"elites" who determine policy in Washington. Earlier in the evening, he had asserted
that Israel received support from the United States as a reward for the services it
provides as the US’s "cop-on-the -beat" in the Middle East.
Chomsky’s response drew a warm round of applause from members of the audience who were
no doubt pleased to have American Jews absolved from any blame for Israel’s oppression
of the Palestinians, then in the fourth year of their first intifada.
What is noteworthy is that Chomsky’s explanation for the financial and political
support that the U.S. has provided Israel over the years is shared by what is
generically known as the Israel lobby, and almost no one else.
Well, not quite "almost no one." Among the exceptions are the overwhelming majority of
both houses of Congress and the mainstream media, and what is equally noteworthy,
virtually the entire American Left, both ideological and idealistic, including the
organizations ostensibly in the forefront of the fight for Palestinian rights.
That there is a meeting of the minds on this issue between supporters of Israel and the
Left may help explain why the Palestine support movement within the United States has
been an utter failure.
Chomsky’s position on the lobby had been established well before that Berkeley evening.
In The Fateful Triangle, published in 1983, he assigned it little weight.
"The ‘special relationship’ is often attributed to domestic political pressures, in
particular, the effectiveness of the American Jewish community in political life and
influencing opinion. While there is some truth to this…it underestimates the scope of
the ‘support for Israel,’ and… it overestimates the role of political pressure groups
in decision making." (P.13)
A year earlier, Congress had applauded Israel’s devastating invasion of Lebanon, and
then appropriated millions in additional aid to pay for the shells the Israeli military
had expended. How much of this support was due to the legislators’ "support for Israel"
and how much was due to pressures from the Israel lobby? It was a question that should
have been examined by the Left at the time, but wasn’t. Twenty years later, Chomsky’s
view is still the "conventional wisdom."
In 2001, the midst of the second intifada, he went further, arguing that "it is
improper—particularly in the United States--to condemn ‘Israeli atrocities,’" and that
the "‘US/Israel-Palestine’ conflict" is the more correct term, comparable with placing
the proper responsibility for "Russian- backed crimes in Eastern Europe [and] US-backed
crimes in Central America." And, to emphasize the point, he wrote, "IDF helicopters are
US helicopters with Israeli pilots."
Prof. Stephen Zunes, who might be described as a Chomsky acolyte, would not only
relieve Israeli Jews from any responsibility for their actions, he would have us
believe they are the victims.
In "Tinderbox, his widely praised (by Chomsky and others) new book on the Middle East,
Zunes faults the Arabs for "blaming Israel, Zionism, or the Jews for their problems."
According to Zunes, the Israelis have been forced to assume a role similar to that
assigned to members of the Jewish ghettos of Eastern Europe who performed services,
mainly tax collection, as middlemen between the feudal lords and the serfs in earlier
times In fact, writes Zunes, "US policy today corresponds with this historic
anti-Semitism." Anyone comparing the relative power of the Jewish community in
centuries past with what we find in the US today will find that statement absurd.
Jewish power has, in fact, been trumpeted by a number of Jewish writers, including one,
J.J. Goldberg, editor of the Jewish weekly Forward, who wrote a book by that name in
1996. Any attempt, however, to explore the issue from a critical standpoint, inevitably
leads to accusations of anti-Semitism, as Bill and Kathy Christison pointed out in
their article on the role of right wing Jewish neo-cons in orchestrating US Middle East
policy, in Counterpunch (1/25/3):
"Anyone who has the temerity to suggest any Israeli instigation of, or even involvement
in, Bush administration war planning is inevitably labelled somewhere along the way as
an anti-Semite. Just whisper the word "domination" anywhere in the vicinity of the word
"Israel," as in "U.S.-Israeli domination of the Middle East" or "the U.S. drive to
assure global domination and guarantee security for Israel," and some Leftist who
otherwise opposes going to war against Iraq will trot out charges of promoting the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the old czarist forgery that asserted a Jewish plan
for world domination."
Presumably, this is what Zunes would call an example of the "latent anti-Semitism which
has come to the fore with wildly exaggerated claims of Jewish economic and political
power." And that it "is a na–øve assumption to believe that foreign policy decision
making in the US is pluralistic enough so that any one lobbying group…can have so much
influence."
This is hardly the first time that Jews have been in the upper echelons of power as
Benjamin Ginsberg points out in "The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State, but there has
never been a situation anything like the present. This was how Ginzberg began his book:
"Since the 1960s, Jews have come to wield considerable influence in American economic,
cultural, intellectual and political life. Jews played a central role in American
finance during the 1980s, and they were among the chief beneficiaries of that decade’s
corporate mergers and reorganizations. Today, though barely 2 % of the nation’s
population is Jewish, close to half its billionaires are Jews. The chief executive
officers of the three major television networks and the four largest film studios are
Jews, as are the owners of the nation’s largest newspaper chain and the most
influential single newspaper, the New York Times”.
That was written in 1993, Today, ten years later, ardently pro- Israel American Jews
are in positions of unprecedented influence within the United States and have assumed
or been given decision making positions over virtually every segment of our culture and
body politic. This is no secret conspiracy. Regular readers of the New York Times
business section, which reports the comings and goings of the media tycoons, are
certainly aware of it. Does this mean that each and every one is a pro-Israel zealot?
Not necessarily, but when one compares the US media with its European counterparts in
their respective coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict, the extreme bias in favour
of Israel on the part of the US media is immediately apparent.
This might explain Nation Columnist Eric Alterman’s discovery that "Europeans and
Americans… differ profoundly in their views of the Israel/Palestine issue at both the
elite and popular levels.. with Americans being far more sympathetic to Israel and the
Europeans to the Palestinian cause…" |
