Finally, does the fact that Likud came third in the recent Israeli elections mean that the majority of Israelis are not in sympathy with all of the policies promoted in their name by the Lobby? AIPAC commands great resources, but its reputation for untrammelled dominance is grossly overstated. Finally, the Lobby's influence has been bad for Israel. I also welcome reasoned, contextual and comparative criticism of Israeli policies and actions. The story begins in late September 2001, when Bush began urging Sharon to show restraint in the Occupied Territories. At about the same time, JINSA gave Wolfowitz its Henry M. The US administration has supported Sharon's actions (and those of his successor, Ehud Olmert). The response to the second intifada has been even more violent, leading Ha'aretz to declare that ‘the IDF.. Israeli officials frequently ignore US requests and renege on promises (including pledges to stop building settlements and to refrain from ‘targeted assassinations' of Palestinian leaders). Sharon continued to develop his plan to impose a unilateral settlement on the Palestinians, based on ‘disengagement' from Gaza coupled with continued expansion on the West Bank. This was precisely what pro-Israel proponents of regime change wanted to hear. As for so-called rogue states in the Middle East, they are not a dire threat to vital US interests, except inasmuch as they are a threat to Israel. Yet, in a follow-up question, Ben-Gurion was asked whether he meant to achieve this ‘by force as well?' He responded in the negative: ‘Through mutual understanding and Jewish-Arab agreement.' Mearsheimer and Walt omit this important qualification. Pro-Israel officials in the vice-president's office and the Pentagon, as well as neo-conservative pundits like Robert Kagan and William Kristol, put the heat on Powell. Expert! Money is critical to US elections (as the scandal over the lobbyist Jack Abramoff's shady dealings reminds us), and AIPAC makes sure that its friends get strong financial support from the many pro-Israel political action committees. Back on Capitol Hill, Congressman Eliot Engel had reintroduced the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act. Thomas Dine, the head of AIPAC at the time, explained what happened: ‘All the Jews in America, from coast to coast, gathered to oust Percy. Money back guaranteed! You just need to include the write my essay online for cheap Can you write my paper online and make it plagiarism free? Below are excerpts from Zelikow's remarks about Iraq on 10 September 2002 (we have the full text). They even accused him of having ‘virtually obliterated the distinction between terrorists and those fighting terrorists'. Bush had very significant means of persuasion at his disposal. Today, Brookings's coverage is conducted through the Saban Center for Middle East Studies, which is financed by Haim Saban, an Israeli-American businessman and ardent Zionist. We are ‘getting to a point', the US ambassador to the EU said in early 2004, ‘where it is as bad as it was in the 1930s'. When asked by the New York Sun about Arab citizenship laws, Walt responded: ‘We were not writing on Saudi Arabia and Jordan.' Mearsheimer and Walt in fact compare Israel to its Arab neighbours on several occasions, finding - incredibly - that ‘in terms of actual behaviour, Israel's conduct is not morally distinguishable from the actions of its opponents.' Walt's evasive answer reminds me of a remark attributed to another Harvard administrator, A. Prince Bandar, a member of the Saudi royal family, was so astounded by the generosity of Israel's offer that he told Arafat: ‘If we lose this opportunity, it is not going to be a tragedy. It is totally false. In 2004, local reports of my September 2002 comments were discovered by the Inter Press Service.
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In case you want to invest your money wisely and pay for Using Custom Writing Service WriteMyPapers.org Is I usually don't use custom writing paper In September 2002, Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes, two passionately pro-Israel neo-conservatives, established a website (Campus Watch) that posted dossiers on suspect academics and encouraged students to report remarks or behaviour that might be considered hostile to Israel. It's interesting that Daniel Pipes does not think his ‘decision to establish Campus Watch' - a nasty anti-dissent echo of McCarthyism - might be the action of a member of the Israel Lobby because no ‘outside source' told him to set it up (Letters, 6 April). Jeffrey Herf and Andrei Markovits, for example, begin by noting that ‘accusations of powerful Jews behind the scenes are part of the most dangerous traditions of modern anti-semitism' (Letters, 6 April). Specifically, the events of that day led Bush and Cheney to reverse course and become strong proponents of a preventive war. We also referred to Golda Meir's famous statement that ‘there is no such thing as a Palestinian,' and Jeremy Schreiber reads us as saying that Meir was denying the existence of those people rather than simply denying Palestinian nationhood (20 April). But leaders of the Lobby's major organisations lent their voices to the campaign. A May 2003 poll reported that more than 60 per cent of Americans were willing to withhold aid if Israel resisted US pressure to settle the conflict, and that number rose to 70 per cent among the ‘politically active'. In other words, criticise Israeli policy and you are by definition an anti-semite. Here is one example: in the 1984 elections, AIPAC helped defeat Senator Charles Percy from Illinois, who, according to a prominent Lobby figure, had ‘displayed insensitivity and even hostility to our concerns'. As support, he cites a statement by former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and the memoirs of former US negotiator Dennis Ross. Wolfowitz declared that ‘there has got to be regime change in Syria,' and Richard Perle told a journalist that ‘a short message, a two-worded message' could be delivered to other hostile regimes in the Middle East: ‘You're next.' In early April, WINEP released a bipartisan report stating that Syria ‘should not miss the message that countries that pursue Saddam's reckless, irresponsible and defiant behaviour could end up sharing his fate'. When Campus Watch was launched, a year after the 11 September attacks, its website described its founders as a group of ‘highly qualified American academics that have banded together in defence of US interests on campus, which includes continued support for Israel'. Thus, we can easily believe that Daniel Pipes has never ‘taken orders' from the lobby, because the Leninist caricature of the lobby depicted in his letter is one that we clearly dismissed. 2. GAY MARRIAGE: This is not talked about by either candidate, but if you want to "go back" to the "good old days" and you have very conservative justices in the They present themselves as hard-headed realists dispassionately guarding America's national interest, which is surprisingly not compromised by nuclear weapons in North Korean or Iranian hands. I have written several letters about the plight of pension funds worldwide. I am gathering information on the situation with insurance companies, which my initial Mearsheimer and Walt will reply to the correspondence we've published and discuss the wider response to their article in the next issue. Who would fail to recognise such a project as destructive? Several writers chide us for making mono-causal arguments, accusing us of saying that Israel alone is responsible for anti-Americanism in the Arab and Islamic world (as one letter puts it, anti-Americanism ‘would exist if Israel was not there') or suggesting that the lobby bears sole responsibility for the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq. The letters accusing Mearsheimer and Walt of having written an ‘anti-semitic rant' and those congratulating them for having exposed a ‘secret Jewish' - or, as one individual felt the need to spell it, ‘J E W I S H' - ‘conspiracy' have something in common: they come from people who appear not to have read the piece, and who seem incapable of distinguishing between criticism of Israeli or US government policy and anti-semitism. By the mid-1990s there was considerable dissatisfaction with dual containment, because it made the United States the mortal enemy of two countries that hated each other, and forced Washington to bear the burden of containing both. The explanation is the unmatched power of the Israel Lobby. Difficulties arise because Israel, unlike many client states in the past, has a very strong agenda of its own: it wants to exist, preferably at peace with its neighbours, but within boundaries and with a population of its own choosing. We argued that neither argument is convincing: Israel's strategic value has declined since the end of the Cold War and Israel does not behave significantly better than most other states. Controlling the debate is essential to guaranteeing US support, because a candid discussion of US-Israeli relations might lead Americans to favour a different policy. The Israeli side also dominates the think tanks which play an important role in shaping public debate as well as actual policy. He wrote articles in the 1990s supporting the settlements and arguing that Israel should retain the Occupied Territories. In the 1930s, by contrast, anti-semitism was not only widespread among Europeans of all classes but considered quite acceptable. It blocks the efforts of Arab states to put Israel's nuclear arsenal on the IAEA's agenda. On 20 September, a group of prominent neo-conservatives and their allies published another open letter: ‘Even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack,' it read, ‘any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq.' The letter also reminded Bush that ‘Israel has been and remains America's staunchest ally against international terrorism.' In the 1 October issue of the Weekly Standard, Robert Kagan and William Kristol called for regime change in Iraq as soon as the Taliban was defeated. Most important, the Israel lobby is not a secret, clandestine cabal; on the contrary, it is openly engaged in interest-group politics and there is nothing conspiratorial or illicit about its behaviour. It is not surprising that Israel and its American supporters want the US to deal with any and all threats to Israel's security. Within the Pentagon, the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group was charged with finding links between al-Qaida and Iraq that the intelligence community had supposedly missed. Mearsheimer and Walt also write that ‘in 2003, the head of the French Jewish community said that France is not more anti-semitic than America.' The quotation is from an interview with Roger Cukierman in the magazine Forward, in which Cukierman differentiated between French anti-semitism of the traditional French/European variety, and ‘new' manifestations of anti-Jewish violence in France. Readers may find it interesting to know what I actually said and how Mearsheimer and Walt appear to have misused my comments. Neo-conservative gentiles such as John Bolton; Robert Bartley, the former Wall Street Journal editor; William Bennett, the former secretary of education; Jeane Kirkpatrick, the former UN ambassador; and the influential columnist George Will are also steadfast supporters. In May 2003, NYU announced the establishment of the Taub Center for Israel Studies; similar programmes have been set up at Berkeley, Brandeis and Emory. Bush was reportedly furious at being compared to Chamberlain, and the White House press secretary called Sharon's remarks ‘unacceptable'. Such countervailing forces do exist, but they are no match - either alone or in combination - for the lobby. Buy It Now & Get Free Bonus. Martin Kramer had no role in founding Campus Watch), but I write specifically to state that no ‘Lobby' told me to start Campus Watch. Charles Krauthammer describes this grand scheme as the brainchild of Natan Sharansky, but Israelis across the political spectrum believed that toppling Saddam would alter the Middle East to Israel's advantage. Finally, a brief word is in order about the neo-conservatives' prewar support of Ahmed Chalabi, the unscrupulous Iraqi exile who headed the Iraqi National Congress. British Jews are as well organised, well funded, almost as numerous relative to population and, understandably, just as pro-Israel as American Jews. The father of dual containment was none other than Martin Indyk, who first outlined the strategy in May 1993 at WINEP and then implemented it as director for Near East and South Asian Affairs at the National Security Council. Jordan River.' This wedge, which would bisect the West Bank, was essential to Israel's plan to retain control of the Jordan River Valley for another six to twenty years. Moreover, the US has provided Israel with nearly $3 billion to develop weapons systems, and given it access to such top-drawer weaponry as Blackhawk helicopters and F-16 jets. The Daily Muse is the daily publication of The Muse, offering expert career guidance for your career goals. It fails to explain anti-Western Islamicist movements in places as far from Israel as Algeria and the Philippines. Israel's backers should be free to make their case and to challenge those who disagree with them, but efforts to stifle debate by intimidation must be roundly condemned. He had merely suggested that to ‘bring the sides together', Washington should act as an honest broker.
He doesn't deny Mearsheimer and Walt's description of what Campus Watch is trying to get people to do. We have known and respected John Mearsheimer for over twenty years, which makes the essay all the more unsettling. According to Douglas Bloomfield, a former AIPAC staff member, ‘it is common for members of Congress and their staffs to turn to AIPAC first when they need information, before calling the Library of Congress, the Congressional Research Service, committee staff or administration experts.' More important, he notes that AIPAC is ‘often called on to draft speeches, work on legislation, advise on tactics, perform research, collect co-sponsors and marshal votes'. But in 2003, the head of the French Jewish community said that ‘France is not more anti-semitic than America.' According to a recent article in Ha'aretz, the French police have reported that anti-semitic incidents declined by almost 50 per cent in 2005; and this even though France has the largest Muslim population of any European country. We also explicitly stated that the lobby, by itself, could not convince either the Clinton or the Bush administration to invade Iraq. In a 2004 survey, for example, roughly 36 per cent of American Jews said they were either ‘not very' or ‘not at all' emotionally attached to Israel. He wrote that ‘it is impossible to imagine general evacuation' of the Arab population of Palestine ‘without compulsion, and brutal compulsion'. Obesity is one of the biggest drivers of preventable chronic diseases and associated healthcare costs in the United States. Currently, estimates for these costs range Lewis (‘Scooter') Libby, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and David Wurmser. Harry Truman recognised the state of Israel fifteen minutes after it declared itself a nation. And the American government doesn't want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it's not a popular sell. Buy It Now! This naivety is the reason that radical Islam and the enduring crises of modernisation in the region that produced it receive hardly a word in their long attack. One American participant at Camp David in 2000 later said: ‘Far too often, we functioned.. Israel's way of achieving these goals and dealing with regional opposition to them is, in many people's eyes - possibly including those of many Jewish Americans - morally repugnant.
Furthermore, he maintains that he ‘expressed no view' on ‘whether or when the US ought to go to war with Iraq'. Because Jews were persecuted for centuries and could feel safe only in a Jewish homeland, many people now believe that Israel deserves special treatment from the United States. Given the neo-conservatives' devotion to Israel, their obsession with Iraq, and their influence in the Bush administration, it isn't surprising that many Americans suspected that the war was designed to further Israeli interests. If the US concluded that it no longer had a vital interest in the continued survival of the only democracy in the Middle East, those now attacking Western modernity might conclude that the Americans could be convinced that the defence of Europe - and Britain - was also not in the American interest. Dershowitz is wrong. The idea was to play local powers off against each other - which is why the Reagan administration supported Saddam against revolutionary Iran during the Iran-Iraq War - in order to maintain a balance favourable to the US. Instead, the war was motivated in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure. As we shall see, these officials have consistently pushed for policies favoured by Israel and backed by organisations in the Lobby. Glantz is right that world hostility to American fundamentalism and domination can't be reduced to the issue of Israel, but suggests that through its alliance with an armed and expansionist Israel the US ‘may be purchasing world stability at a bargain price'. The fact is that if there were no AIPAC, Americans would have a more critical view of Israel and US policy in the Middle East would look different. The US has overthrown democratic governments in the past and supported dictators when this was thought to advance its interests - it has good relations with a number of dictatorships today. Video poker strategy card 4 x In a 2003 European Commission poll in 15 EU countries, 59 per cent of those who responded named Israel as a threat to world peace; significantly fewer named Iran, Iraq, North Korea or Afghanistan. In his words, America ‘has to follow through. On 16 August 2002, 11 days before Dick Cheney kicked off the campaign for war with a hardline speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Washington Post reported that ‘Israel is urging US officials not to delay a military strike against Iraq's Saddam Hussein.' By this point, according to Sharon, strategic co-ordination between Israel and the US had reached ‘unprecedented dimensions', and Israeli intelligence officials had given Washington a variety of alarming reports about Iraq's WMD programmes. And this is the threat that dare not speak its name, because the Europeans don't care deeply about that threat, I will tell you frankly. This led one correspondent to write: ‘Your obvious slant in the letters you have chosen to publish regarding the Israel Lobby establishes, once again, that Israeli apologists are alive and well and living at the London Review of Books.' It may be impossible to write or publish anything relating to Israel without provoking accusations of bias. Apparently not. Ask a Question or Create a PollHome Categories Questions Forums Blog NEW! Home / Questions / Arts / Books And Writing / Essays Today nothing less than dismantling his regime will do,' he declared. Josef Joffe argued in Foreign Policy last year that ‘far from creating tensions, Israel actually contains more antagonisms than it causes.' The USA may very well be purchasing world stability at a bargain through its alliance with Israel. Instead, we described the lobby as a loose coalition of individuals and organisations without a central headquarters. Just after the war started, Samuel Freedman reported that ‘a compilation of nationwide opinion polls by the Pew Research Center shows that Jews are less supportive of the Iraq war than the population at large, 52 per cent to 62 per cent.' Clearly, it would be wrong to blame the war in Iraq on ‘Jewish influence'. For the past several decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the centrepiece of US Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with Israel.
The bottom line,' they write, ‘is that AIPAC, a de facto agent for a foreign government, has a stranglehold on Congress, with the result that US policy towards Israel is not debated there.' Suppose AIPAC weren't there: would American policy in the Middle East be different? Emad Mekay, who wrote the Asia Times Online article we referenced, is a well-regarded journalist who worked for Reuters and the New York Times before moving to Inter Press Service, a legitimate news agency. Washington is also deeply committed to supporting Israel. As an advocate of free speech and an opponent of censorship based on political correctness, I welcome a serious, balanced, objective study of the influences of lobbies - including Israeli lobbies - on American foreign policy. The Lobby's influence causes trouble on several fronts. But this is a separate matter with little bearing on whether or not Europe today is like Europe in the 1930s. That help arrived with 9/11. Wolfowitz is equally committed to Israel. No one accepted my challenge, because no Jewish leader has made such a claim. Order essay. On a related point, Michael Szanto contrasts the US-Israeli relationship with the American military commitments to Western Europe, Japan and South Korea, to show that the United States has given substantial support to other states besides Israel (6 April). The Nixon administration protected it from the threat of Soviet intervention and resupplied it during the October War. It was headed by Abram Shulsky, a neo-conservative with long-standing ties to Wolfowitz, and its ranks included recruits from pro-Israel think tanks. And it may well have appeared to him, and to others, that that response was co-ordinated. Although they make up fewer than 3 per cent of the population, they make large campaign donations to candidates from both parties. In fact, approximately a quarter of Israel's citizens are not Jewish, a higher percentage of minority citizenry than nearly any other country. A more powerful explanation for the influence of the ‘Lobby' is that its values command genuine support among the American public. This argument rests on the belief that a small clique can achieve hegemony over an entity as complex as the US government. When she was prime minister, Golda Meir famously remarked that ‘there is no such thing as a Palestinian.' Pressure from extremist violence and Palestinian population growth has forced subsequent Israeli leaders to disengage from the Gaza Strip and consider other territorial compromises, but not even Yitzhak Rabin was willing to offer the Palestinians a viable state. Not surprisingly, American Jewish leaders often consult Israeli officials, to make sure that their actions advance Israeli goals. Another Pentagon group, the so-called Office of Special Plans, was given the task of uncovering evidence that could be used to sell the war. Israeli officials and Lobby representatives insisted that there was no real difference between Arafat and Osama bin Laden: the United States and Israel, they said, should isolate the Palestinians' elected leader and have nothing to do with him. This transparent attempt to blacklist and intimidate scholars provoked a harsh reaction and Pipes and Kramer later removed the dossiers, but the website still invites students to report ‘anti-Israel' activity.
This is not a perfect outcome from the Lobby's point of view, but it is obviously preferable to Washington distancing itself, or using its leverage to force Israel to make peace with the Palestinians. We agree that there is strong public support for Israel in America, in part because it is seen as compatible with America's Judaeo-Christian culture. Probably the most popular argument made about a countervailing force is Herf and Markovits's claim that the centrepiece of US Middle East policy is oil, not Israel. Unlike the US, where people are supposed to enjoy equal rights irrespective of race, religion or ethnicity, Israel was explicitly founded as a Jewish state and citizenship is based on the principle of blood kinship. The tragic history of the Jewish people does not obligate the US to help Israel today no matter what it does. In fact, Israel is a liability in the war on terror and the broader effort to deal with rogue states. Israel's well-being is one of those interests, but its continued occupation of the West Bank and its broader regional agenda are not. Subscribe Now! As Netanyahu suggested, however, the desire for war was not confined to Israel's leaders. This is not meant to suggest that ‘the Lobby' is a unified movement with a central leadership, or that individuals within it do not disagree on certain issues. John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's piece (LRB, 23 March) boils down to a simple argument, despite copious circumstantial detail and politically correct evasiveness. Furthermore, common sense says that there was no other way to achieve that goal, because the Palestinians were hardly likely to give up their homeland voluntarily. For example, Libby pressured CIA analysts to find evidence supporting the case for war and helped prepare Colin Powell's now discredited briefing to the UN Security Council. By early 2002 Cheney had persuaded Bush; and with Bush and Cheney on board, war was inevitable.
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