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Discover the true and beautiful Israel: Join FLAME’s Independence Day Mission to Israel: May 3-13, 2008 Come with us to Israel for FLAME’s “Truth in the
Promised Land” mission—we guarantee you’ll have the experience
of a lifetime. Of course you’ll visit the “must-see” sites—like
Masada, the Dead Sea, Nazareth, the Western Wall on Shabbat, and the Church
of the Holy Sepulcher. But you’ll also visit the people of Sderot,
target of many Hamas rocket attacks; Haifa and the Lebanese border; the Golan
Heights; and a controversial Zionist settlement in the Territories. Plus
you’ll meet personally with provocative scholars, journalists and politicians
and even talk to a representative of the Palestinian Authority. Best
of all, you’ll be in Jerusalem for the most joyous day of them all: Yom
Ha’Atzmaut—Israel’s Independence Day. To get all the
details, please send us an email with
your name, address and phone number. (Put "FLAME MISSION" in the subject line.)
October 3, 2007
Are pro-Israel activists un-American . . . or, by ignoring the Arab lobby, are Israel’s critics anti-Semitic? Dear Friend of FLAME: There has been much ado and public discourse about the supposedly nefarious role that pro-Israel Americans play in influencing American foreign policy. Those who allege this assert that such influence is damaging for our country because it tends to advance the interests of Israel in disregard of or even against the interests of the United States. This proposition was recently advanced by two prominent academics, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, who published their views earlier this year in a magazine article that generated great publicity, and in a scurrilous book by former president Jimmy Carter. The article by the academics has now been released in expanded form as a book and the two have been touring the talk-show circuit. The editorial page of The Wall Street Journal is one of the fairest and most evenhanded commentators on Israel and matters of the Middle East. The article that follows, by attorney Jeff Robbins, appeared in a recent issue of the paper. This piece is of great value in countering the arguments of those academics and of Jimmy Carter. It is also useful in clarifying the questionof whether those who single out Israel and the pro-Israel lobby are anti-Semitic. Most importantly, Robbins points out the often-hidden, but very aggressive pro-Palestinian lobbying done by Arab regimes, none of which receives the boisterous criticism reserved for supporters of Israel. Author Robbins was a U.S. delegate to the U.N. Human Rights Commission during the Clinton administration and works at the law firm Mintz, Levin in Boston. I think you’ll appreciate his cogent and factual analysis. Sincerely, Gerardo
Joffe
Anti-Semitism
and the Anti-Israel Lobby A crop of Israel's critics—most prominently Jimmy Carter and now Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, the authors of "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy"—have managed something of a feat: They express no concerns about the massive pro-Arab effort, funded in significant measure by foreign oil money, taking American Jews to task for participating in the American political process; meanwhile, they inoculate themselves against charges of anti-Jewish bias by preemptively predicting that "the Jewish lobby" will accuse them of it. Messrs. Walt and Mearsheimer, in particular, have been heralded by Israel's critics for their "courage" in attacking American Jews, who have allegedly "strangled" criticism of Israel . Their case seems one part laughable, and one part eyebrow-raising. An anecdote from my own experience with the anti-Israel lobby may shed some light on the absurdity of the Walt-Mearsheimer offensive. Not long after Sept. 11, 2001, I received a call from a major defense contractor asking for a favor. I was serving as president of the Boston chapter of the World Affairs Council, a national organization that debates foreign policy, and the defense contractor was one of the Council's principal sponsors. The Saudi Arabian government was sponsoring a national public relations campaign to cultivate American public opinion, and was sending Saudi emissaries around the country to make the case that Saudi Arabia was a tolerant, moderate nation worthy of American support. Would the Council organize a forum of Boston's community leaders so that the Saudis could make their case? While this was patently no more than a Saudi lobbying
effort, we organized the forum, and it was well-attended by precisely
the slice of Boston's
political and corporate elite that the Saudis and their defense contractor
benefactor had hoped for. The Saudis maintained that their kingdom
should be Saudi Arabia paid for the trip of its emissaries to Boston, for the Washington-based public relations and lobbying company that organized the trip, and for the Boston public relations and lobbying company that handled the Boston part of the visit. And it drew upon the resources and relationships of the defense contractor, which sells hundreds of millions of dollars of military equipment to Saudi Arabia, to support and orchestrate its public relations effort. The billions in petrodollars Arab states spend in the U.S. for defense, construction, engineering and consulting contracts position them nicely to win friends in high places, and friends are what they have. That is true all over the world, is true in this country, and has been true for quite some time. As Secretary of State Cordell Hull noted 60 years ago, "The oil of Saudi Arabia constitutes one of the world's great prizes." His successor, Edward Stettinius, opposed the creation of a Jewish state in the Middle East, stating, "It would seriously prejudice our ability to afford protection to American interests, economic and commercial. . . throughout the area." The Saudis and their allies have not been shy about supplementing their considerable leverage in the U.S. by targeting expenditures to affect the debate over Middle East policy by funding think tanks, Middle East studies programs, advocacy groups, community centers and other institutions. To take one obvious example, just last year Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal donated $20 million each to Harvard and Georgetown Universities for programs in Islamic studies. Prince Alwaleed, chairman of a Riyadh-based conglomerate, is the fellow whose $10 million donation to the Twin Towers Fund following the Sept. 11 attacks was rejected by then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani after the Saudi Prince suggested that the U.S. "re-examine its policies in the Middle East and adopt a more balanced stance toward the Palestinians." Georgetown and Harvard had no apparent qualms about accepting Prince Alwaleed's money. The director of Georgetown's newly-renamed Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center rejected any suggestion that the Saudi magnate was attempting to use Saudi oil wealth to influence American policy in the Middle East. "There is nothing wrong with [Prince Alwaleed] expressing his opinion on American foreign policy," he said. "Clearly, it was done in a constructive way." In other words, for those who accept the Arab line on the Israel-Arab conflict—namely, that it is the product of Israeli intransigence in some form or another—the increasing proliferation of Middle East-funded enterprises all across the country aimed at advancing the Arab view of the conflict constitute "nothing wrong." Nor are those hewing to the anti-Israel line troubled by the way in which the massive Islamic bloc of nations, by dint both of their number and their economic leverage over the rest of the world, are able to guarantee an incessantly anti-Israel agenda at the United Nations and other international forums. Although the aggressive deployment of petrodollars and oil-based influence from foreign sources aimed at advancing a pro-Arab line constitutes "nothing wrong" as far as Israel's critics are concerned, a new political fashion holds that there is something very wrong indeed about American Jews and other American backers of Israel expressing their support for Israel, and urging their political leaders to join them in that support. Our major newspapers and networks, with correspondents in Israel able to take advantage of an Israeli political system that is a free-for-all and an astonishingly vibrant and self-critical Israeli press, report daily on every twist and turn of the conflict and are very frequently critical of Israel . As for American campuses, most objective observers would have little difficulty concluding that far from being criticism-free, they are in fact dominated by critics of Israel. Clearly, as strangleholds on criticism go, whatever stranglehold the pro-Israel community has on debate in the U.S. is a very loose one indeed. If the charge that American Jews are able to stifle criticism of Israel is simply silly, the leveling of the charge that there is something nefarious about Jews urging support for the Jewish state raises questions about whether Messrs. Walt and Mearsheimer have descended into a certain ugliness. And the tactic of trying to neutralize those questions by loudly predicting that they will be asked, however clever a tactic it may be, does not neutralize them. It is apparently the authors' position that, even in the face of the overwhelming leverage of an Arab world swimming in petrodollars, with a lock on the U.N. and an unlimited ability to pay for pro-Arab public relations, American Jews are obliged to stay silent. In essence, Messrs. Walt and Mearsheimer have repackaged the "the-Jews-run-the-country" stuff which has long been the bread and butter of anti-Semites. Messrs. Walt
and Mearsheimer deny that they are anti-Semitic, and that
is certainly good news. But where they are apparently content with
foreign
oil money being used to advance a pro-Arab position on the Middle
East, but devote themselves to criticizing American Jews for lobbying
their
public officials in support of the Jewish state, one may legitimately
wonder what phrase would apply. Surely, one's denial that he is anti-Semitic,
while welcome, is hardly dispositive; after all, the marked increase
in anti-Semitism around the world is well-documented, and yet one
rarely hears But if anti-Semitism is too harsh a term, and if the word "bigoted" is also taken off the table, perhaps one can be forgiven for concluding that "anti-Jewish bias" fits the bill here. After all, where there is nothing wrong with foreign money from Arab countries advancing a pro-Arab agenda in Messrs. Walt's and Mearsheimer's world—but there is something very wrong with American citizens who are Jewish exercising their civic right to speak out on behalf of Israel and taking issue with the pro-Arab agenda—even the most vehement disclaimers of any bias against Jews lack a certain credibility. The potency of the Middle East-funded anti-Israel lobby around the world and in the U.S. is difficult to ignore. Yet, Messrs. Walt and Mearsheimer and others who adhere to an anti-Israel line ignore it. In and of itself, this is not surprising. When at the same time they portray American Jews' efforts to make the case for Israel as morally suspect, however, they open themselves up to reasonable charges of something far more troublesome than mere hypocrisy, and that is anti-Jewish bias, by whatever name. PRINTER FRIENDLY
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