|
Banned
|
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Rogue Element
An interesting, if misleading article you quoted there by Ruth Wise. I have to wonder if she has actually read Meirsheamer and Walt at all (not just this book, though it would be helpful). What they say is that the 'Israel Lobby' is in fact made up both of Jewish Americans, dual American/Israeli citizens and, the most overlooked and important faction, Christian Zionists....
|
Welcome, Rogue Element. I agree with the points you have posted. I've quoted Mearsheimer and Walt extensively in this post because they offer a rare and prolific view from the "other side", and a recent series of follow up interviews. Are you Tajikistani?
I thought Wisse's article was over the top. It makes arguments exactly opposite the accurate state of influence American Jews sympathetic to Zionist policies of the Israeli government, actually exert on the American media, legislature, and on the US president.
<h3>What principles do we in the U.S. consistently stand for?</h3>
I asked my Turkish friend, a naturalized US citizen, a muslim who is intensely proud of the Turkish military's commitment to defending Turkey's constitutional description of separation of church and state, what the US could do to improve his opinion of it's (in his view) distrurbingly one sided foreign policy. He said that the most important change would be a truly even handed treatment of Israel and the Palestinian state.
My sole Iranian friend, a man with no religious interest, a 35 year US resident, experienced his sister's five year imprisonment, back in Iran, beginning at the age of 14, because she had visited him for a summer, in the US, and, upon returning to Iran in the early days of the late '70's Iranian revolution, refused to wear the head scarf, the hajib, at her school. My friend told me that his mother visited his sister every day during her 5 year imprisonment.
He walked up to me on friday, and said, "hey host...did you know that Israel has a law against Palestinians owning land in Israeli occupied Palestinian areas, unless the Palestinian grows crops on the land, but there is also a law against Palestinians growing crops?"
I don't know his source for this, and, in searching I haven't found it yet. This long time US resident is now so committed to returning to Iran to live (he hasn't been there since 1975...), that he is researching prices of everything from a cell phone, sound system speakers, and laptop computers, even wall outlet power adapters, comparing the costs of purchase in the US, vs. in Iran to decide when/where to buy, before his planned departure from the US, in about a year.
I'm guessing, considering their reactions to the thread OP, that Ustwo and Cynthetique are not engaged in conversations with reasonable American muslims from the middle east. Ustwo, do you reckon that you are perceived as approachable, in the eyes of an Iranian American, to be given the unsolicited "news" of the contradictory requirments of Palestinian land ownership, my friend described to me?
I think that we are in a crisis. The US foreign policy has effected the loss of the hearts and minds of my two muslim friends. Who will replace them in support of the US government, from among muslims of the world?
We puzzle about the silence of moderate American muslims. They are silent because they are shocked and disgusted. If we've lost even them, the folks closest and most sympathetic to us, what does that say about our prospects for dimninishing muslim militancy?
Even if my American Iranian friend had it wrong, considering the following, how wrong is he in believing that US support preference for Israel is unreasonable?
Quote:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/11/21/news/map.php
Israeli map concedes Palestinians own land
By Steven Erlanger
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
JERUSALEM: An Israeli advocacy group, using maps and figures leaked from inside the government, says that 39 percent of the land held by Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank is privately owned by Palestinians.
Israel has long asserted that it fully respects Palestinian private property in the West Bank and only takes land there legally or, for security reasons, temporarily.
If big sections of those settlements are indeed privately held Palestinian land, that is bound to create embarrassment for Israel and further complicate the already distant prospect of a negotiated peace when the two sides finally sit down to settle their unfinished war.
The data indicate that 40 percent of the land that Israel plans to keep in any future deal with the Palestinians is private.
The new claims regarding Palestinian property are said to come from the 2004 database of the Civil Administration, which controls the civilian aspects of Israel's presence in the West Bank. Peace Now, an Israeli group that advocates Palestinian self-determination in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, planned to publish the information on Tuesday.
An advance copy was made available to The New York Times.
The data - maps that show the government's registry of the land by category - was given to Peace Now by someone who obtained it from an official inside the Civil Administration. The New York Times spoke to the person who received it from the Civil Administration official and agreed not to identify him because of the delicate nature of the material.
The source, who has frequent contact with the Civil Administration, said he and the official wanted to expose what they consider to be wide-scale violations of private Palestinian property rights by the government and settlers. The government has refused to hand over the material directly to Peace Now, which requested it under Israel's freedom of information law.
Shlomo Dror, spokesman for the Civil Administration, said that he could not comment on the data without studying them. He said that there is a committee, called the blue line committee, that has been investigating these issues of land ownership for three years. "We haven't finished checking everything," he said.
Dror also noted that sometimes Palestinians will sell land to Israelis but be unwilling to admit to the sale publicly because they fear retribution as a
collaborator click to show
Within prominent settlements that Israel has said it plans to keep in any final border agreement, the data show, for example, that some 86.4 percent of Maale Adumim, a large Jerusalem suburb, is private; and 35.1 percent of Ariel is.
The maps indicate that beyond the private land, 5.8 percent is so-called survey land, meaning of unclear ownership, and 1.3 percent private Jewish land. The rest, about 54 percent, is considered "state land" or has no designation, though Palestinians say that at least some of it represents agricultural land expropriated by the state.
The figures, together with detailed maps of the land distribution in every Israeli settlement in the West Bank, were put together by Peace Now's Settlement Watch Project, led by Dror Etkes and Hagit Ofran, which has a record of careful and accurate reporting on settlement growth.
The report does not include Jerusalem, which Israel has annexed and does not consider part of the West Bank, although much of the world regards East Jerusalem as occupied. Much of the world also considers Israeli settlements on occupied land to be illegal under international law. International law requires an occupying power to protect private property, and Israel has always asserted that it does not take land without legal justification. While Israel does not officially acknowledge that it is occupying the West Bank, which it considers to be in dispute, it says it conducts itself by the laws of occupation.
One case in a settlement Israel intends to keep is in Givat Zeev, barely eight kilometers, or five miles, north of Jerusalem. At the southern edge is the Ayelet Hashachar synagogue. Rabah Abdellatif, a Palestinian who lives in the nearby village of Al Jib, says the land belongs to him.
Papers he has filed with the Israeli military court, which runs the West Bank, seem to favor Abdellatif. In 1999, Israeli officials confirmed, he was even granted a judgment ordering the demolition of the synagogue because it had been built without permits. But for the last seven years, the Israeli system has done little to enforce its legal judgments. The synagogue stands, and Abdellatif has no access to his land.
Ram Kovarsky, the town council secretary, said that the synagogue is outside the boundaries of Givat Zeev, although there is no obvious separation. Israeli officials confirmed that the land is privately owned, though they refuse to say by whom.
Abdellatif, 65, said: "I feel stuck, angry. Why would they do that? I don't know who to go to anymore."
According to the Peace Now figures, 44.3 percent of Givat Zeev is on private Palestinian land.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert says Israel will keep some 10 percent of the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, possibly in a swap for land elsewhere.
The area Israel intends to keep is roughly marked by the route of the unfinished separation barrier, which cuts through the West Bank and is intended, Israel says, to stop suicide bombers. Olmert, however, describes it as a putative border. Nearly 80,000 Jews live in settlements beyond the route of the barrier, but some 180,000 live in settlements within the barrier, while another 200,000 live in East Jerusalem.
But these land-ownership figures show that even in the settlements Israel intends to keep, there will be a considerable problem of restitution that goes beyond the issue of refugee return.
Olmert was elected on a pledge to withdraw Israeli settlers living east of the barrier. But after the war with Hezbollah and with fighting ongoing in Gaza, from which Israel withdrew its settlers in the summer of 2005, his withdrawal plan has been suspended.
Cluster-bomb investigation
The Israeli military chief of staff, Lieutenant General Dan Halutz, has ordered an inquiry to determine whether the military had followed his orders when it used large numbers of cluster bombs during the monthlong war with Hezbollah in Lebanon this summer, The New York Times reported from Jerusalem.
Several human rights groups have criticized Israel's use of cluster bombs in the fighting, saying they were dropped in or near populated areas.
Halutz visited an army base on Monday and told Army Radio that "one of the things that must be investigated is the way in which the orders were given and implemented."
|
Is this "finding", even coherent? If our foreign policy is counter-productive, how could it be "right", if to be "right", includes developing/promoting policy in our best national interest? Should we have any relations with the saudi Royal family, or is the only consistent policy stance, one of condemnation of their absolute, and dictatorial rule?
Quote:
http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report_Ch12.htm
....The setting is difficult. The combined gross domestic product of the 22 countries in the Arab League is less than the GDP of Spain. Forty percent of adult Arabs are illiterate, two-thirds of them women. One-third of the broader Middle East lives on less than two dollars a day. Less than 2 percent of the population has access to the Internet. The majority of older Arab youths have expressed a desire to emigrate to other countries, particularly those in Europe.26
In short, the United States has to help defeat an ideology, not just a group of people, and we must do so under difficult circumstances. How can the United States and its friends help moderate Muslims combat the extremist ideas?
Recommendation: The U.S. government must define what the message is, what it stands for. We should offer an example of moral leadership in the world, committed to treat people humanely, abide by the rule of law, and be generous and caring to our neighbors. America and Muslim friends can agree on respect for human dignity and opportunity. To Muslim parents, terrorists like Bin Ladin have nothing to offer their children but visions of violence and death. America and its friends have a crucial advantage-we can offer these parents a vision that might give their children a better future. If we heed the views of thoughtful leaders in the Arab and Muslim world, a moderate consensus can be found.
That vision of the future should stress life over death: individual educational and economic opportunity. This vision includes widespread political participation and contempt for indiscriminate violence. It includes respect for the rule of law, openness in discussing differences, and tolerance for opposing points of view.
Recommendation: Where Muslim governments, even those who are friends, do not respect these principles, the United States must stand for a better future. One of the lessons of the long Cold War was that short-term gains in cooperating with the most repressive and brutal governments were too often outweighed by long-term setbacks for America's stature and interests.
American foreign policy is part of the message. <h3>America's policy choices have consequences. Right or wrong, it is simply a fact that American policy regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and American actions in Iraq are dominant staples of popular commentary across the Arab and Muslim world.</h3> That does not mean U.S. choices have been wrong. It means those choices must be integrated with America's message of opportunity to the Arab and Muslim world. Neither Israel nor the new Iraq will be safer if worldwide Islamist terrorism grows stronger.
The United States must do more to communicate its message. ..
|
Quote:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n09/letters.html
Letters
Vol. 28 No. 9 · Cover date: 11 May 2006
The Israel Lobby
From John Mearsheimer & Stephen Walt
.....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. But we believe this popularity is substantially due to the lobby’s success at portraying Israel in a favourable light and effectively limiting public awareness and discussion of Israel’s less savoury actions. Diplomats and military officers are also affected by this distorted public discourse, but many of them can see through the rhetoric. They keep silent, however, because they fear that groups like AIPAC will damage their careers if they speak out. 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.
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). He does not mention, however, that these other relationships did not depend on strong domestic lobbies. The reason is simple: these countries did not need a lobby because close ties with each of them were in America’s strategic interest. By contrast, as Israel has become a strategic burden for the US, its American backers have had to work even harder to preserve the ‘special relationship’.....
....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. There is no question that access to that region’s oil is a vital US strategic interest. Washington is also deeply committed to supporting Israel. Thus, the relevant question is, how does each of those interests affect US policy? We maintain that US policy in the Middle East is driven primarily by the commitment to Israel, not oil interests. If the oil companies or the oil-producing countries were driving policy, Washington would be tempted to favour the Palestinians instead of Israel. Moreover, the United States would almost certainly not have gone to war against Iraq in March 2003, and the Bush administration would not be threatening to use military force against Iran. Although many claim that the Iraq war was all about oil, there is hardly any evidence to support that supposition, and much evidence of the lobby’s influence. Oil is clearly an important concern for US policymakers, but with the exception of episodes like the 1973 Opec oil embargo, the US commitment to Israel has yet to threaten access to oil. It does, however, contribute to America’s terrorism problem, complicates its efforts to halt nuclear proliferation, and helped get the United States involved in wars like Iraq.....
....We close with a final comment about the controversy surrounding our article. Although we are not surprised by the hostility directed at us, we are still disappointed that more attention has not been paid to the substance of the piece. The fact remains that the United States is in deep trouble in the Middle East, and it will not be able to develop effective policies if it is impossible to have a civilised discussion about the role of Israel in American foreign policy.
John Mearsheimer & Stephen Walt
University of Chicago & Harvard University
|
You claim to want middle east peace and stable oil prices, but your policy is near unconditional policy preference towards Israel's conservative aggressive likud political party, contributing to near constant political tension, manifested in violence in Iraq, Palestine, and Lebanon, for the last five years.
You claim that support preferences for Israel are due to it's democratic principles, while US support for the Saudi dictatorial royalist government is necessitated by the Saudi position of world' largest oil producer. Do our democratic principles trump the expediency of the need for middle east oil, or do they stand above them?
-
Quote:
http://www.time.com/time/world/artic...,00.html?imw=Y
Oil Prices: Don't Blame OPEC
Tuesday, Oct. 30, 2007 By SCOTT MACLEOD/DOHA
....Attiya says that rising prices are the end result of crises in places like Iraq, Iran, Venezuela and Nigeria, which "create more fears, and speculators are very smart. They jump into the market and take this factor and create it as fear. They try to frighten the world. 'Oh, maybe the oil will be disappear. Oh, maybe there will be a war.' But with all the fears of the world, still the supply is very efficient."
Attiya told TIME that prices would rise further if the Bush Administration ever carries out a military strike on Iran, his Persian Gulf neighbor. "I hope and am confident that we will not see any war between America and Iran, and that all these negotiations will settle things amicably," Attiya said. But in the event of further conflict in the region, such as a threatened U.S. attack on Iran's nuclear installations, Attiya said, "I think there will be a big jump [in oil prices]." War would cause an actual drop in global oil supplies which, he explained, "will create a panic, a shortage in the market." ....
|
Quote:
http://www.motherjones.com/interview...arsheimer.html
Grabbing the Third Rail
Interview: Two professors respond to the backlash over their controversial paper on the Israel Lobby.
Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer
By Paige Austin
July 18, 2006
Every piece of scholarship carries risks. But for Harvard Professor Stephen Walt and University of Chicago Professor John Mearsheimer, the potential fallout from their paper "The Israel Lobby," published in the March 23 edition of the London Review of Books, was more dangerous than most. Declaring that the extent of the U.S.-Israel alliance had "no equal in American political history," the professors posed a distinctly uncomfortable question: "Why has the U.S. been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another state?"
The United States support for Israel, the authors argued, was motivated neither by strategic concern nor moral imperative. Instead, they identify the Israel lobby as the primary driver of this support. Were it not for the power of this community of pro-Israel advocates, the argument goes, the U.S. wouldn't cling so tightly to an alliance that is, in the authors' view, detrimental to American interests abroad. The professors, who were both early opponents of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, hold the Israel lobby partly responsible for that debacle as well: "Pressure from Israel and the Lobby was not the only factor behind the decision to attack Iraq in March 2003, but it was critical,” they wrote. “[T]he war was motivated in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure.".....
....MJ: What makes the pro-Israeli lobby different from other interest groups promoting their own agendas?
SW: There is not much that the Israel lobby does that isn't done by other groups like the Cuban-American lobby or other special interest groups. What is different is how effective they are. They've been widely evaluated as one of the most effective and influential interest groups in Washington. That's certainly what politicians like Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich—who don't agree on very much, but agree on that—have said. So it's not that their activities are different, it's how effective they are: it's not what they do, it's how well they do it.....
....MJ: Couldn't America's historical affinity for Israel, or its sympathy with the country as a fellow democracy, also explain its support?
JM: The main reason there is a powerful affinity between Israel and the United States in our body politic is because we are not allowed to have an open and free-wheeling discussion about either Israeli policy or the relationship between the United States and Israel. For example, if we were to have an open and candid discussion about what the Israelis are doing in the Occupied Territories, there would be much less sympathy for Israel in the American public. And of course this is the principle reason why Israel's supporters go to great lengths to silence critics of Israeli policy towards the Palestinians. In essence, America's present relationship with Israel could not withstand public scrutiny.
SW: It's not that the Israel lobby is the only thing that shapes American support and American sympathy for Israel. But it shapes the unconditional nature of American support—the fact that our support continues independent of what Israel's policies are. There are a variety of reasons why Americans tend to look favorably on the Jewish state and many of them are ones that I would agree with myself. John and I clearly state that we support Israel's right to exist and we also think that there are admirable features in Israeli society, so that's not really the issue. The point of the lobby is it drives those aspects of U.S. support that aren't in American interests. .....
....MJ: In the Foreign Policy <a href="http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3501">roundtable</a> on your paper, Shlomo Ben-Ami criticizes your argument for the lobby's primacy by citing examples of times when U.S. administrations have acted contrary to Israel's wishes. He mentions Madrid; Reagan's recognition of the PLO; Clinton's decision to hold Camp David. How do you account for what appear to be these occasional failures of the lobby?
JM: There are a handful of cases in the past where the lobby lost, but almost all of those cases date from the 1980s and the early 1990s. The lobby has grown increasingly powerful with time and it rarely loses nowadays.
SW: We never said that the lobby was all-powerful, or that it dictated every single thing that American presidents do. There are a number of situations that you can point to where the lobby has pushed on a particular issue and didn't get its way. But these issues often tend be pretty peripheral: they're not central, critical issues for Israel and they are ones where it's fairly obvious where the American interest lies.
The key thing to observe is that no matter what Israel does the United States continues to back them. They continue to build settlements even though every president since Lyndon Johnson has thought that was a bad idea. They spy on us routinely. They've given or sold American military technology to other countries. Also, according to Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and B'Tselem, they have conducted a wide variety of human rights violations, and yet none of those activities ever slow down American support.
MJ: You write in the report that the U.S. has a terrorism problem "in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel" and that U.S. support for Israel is a major cause of anti-Americanism abroad, especially in the Middle East. To what extent do you think that those problems would be alleviated by a diminishment in our support for Israel?
JM: There is no question that American support for Israeli policy in the Occupied Territories is a principle source of our terrorism problem, but it's hardly the only one. If the United States were able to put pressure on Israel and the Palestinians and actually solve the Arab-Israeli conflict, we would still have a terrorism problem—although we would have much less of one. The 9/11 Commission report, for instance, makes clear that Osama bin Laden's thinking about the attack was influenced by Israel's behavior towards the Palestinians. He even considered moving up the date of the attack to coincide with a visit to Washington by Ariel Sharon, and he wanted to ensure that Congress was targeted, because he believed that Israel's staunchest support came from Capitol Hill.
And it's not just bin Laden—people in the Islamic world more generally are deeply hostile to the United States because we support Israel at the expense of the Palestinians. As a consequence, huge numbers of people in the Middle East tend to be more sympathetic to bin Laden than would otherwise be the case. As long as the United States continues to support Israeli policy vis-à-vis the Palestinians, it will be impossible to win hearts and minds in the Arab and Islamic world and solve the terrorism problem.....
|
Quote:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/c...?story_id=3975
Current Article
Seven Questions: The Israel Lobby Revisited
Page 1 of 2
Posted September 2007
John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt made waves in 2006 when they argued that a powerful “Israel lobby” distorts U.S. policies in the Middle East. Back with a new book expanding on the same topic, these noted realist scholars sat down with FP to explain why they are speaking out.
Greg Martin; courtesy of Mearsheimer and Walt
Real controversial: Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer have taken a lot of heat for their views on what they call the “Israel lobby”.
JM: Furthermore, watching what happened to Jimmy Carter after his book was published last year confirmed in large part many of the arguments that we made in the original article about how the lobby reacts when anyone criticizes Israel or the U.S.-Israeli relationship. Carter, who is a fundamentally decent man, a philo-Semite, and a staunch defender of Israel’s existence, was nevertheless called a Jew hater, accused of being sympathetic to Nazis and terrorists, and accused of plagiarism, all because he wrote a book that was critical of Israeli policy in the occupied territories.
|
Last edited by host; 11-04-2007 at 01:39 PM..
|