Congressional Liberals and Israel: Ignorance Combined With Cynicism

[Jefferson23]

MJ Rosenberg.Senior Foreign Policy Fellow, Media Matters Action Network
Posted: June 25, 2010 11:47 AM


It is becoming clearer every day that liberals in Congress, with a few exceptions, do not care a whole lot about Israel. (It's not news that they don't care a whit about the Palestinians.)

Think about it.

On other foreign policy issues they ask questions, try to discern whether a policy makes sense, and usually choose diplomacy over war. That has been true since the latter days of the Vietnam War (the Iraq war was the notable and tragic exception).

The last thing anyone expects congressional liberals to say is, "I trust the President's policy, no matter what it is. War works for me."

But, when it comes to the Middle East, the same liberals invariably salute, support, and rush to the House and Senate floors to express enthusiastic solidarity with the Israeli prime minister. (Check out these AIPAC letters, signed by 86 senators and, so far, 311 House members, endorsing without reservation Israel's blockade of Gaza and the attack on the flotilla.)

remainder in full: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mj-rosenberg/congressional-liberals-is_b_625606.html

[Ken Burch]

1. Indeed.

It's time that everyone realized that there's nothing progressive in defending what Israel does to Palestinians, and that that state no longer has any remnants of its social democratic past. It's now a right-wing libertarian paradise and that's never going to change, especially since none of the settler types will ever grow a social conscience or a soul.

[leveymg]

2. You're right. Israel has become the Right-wing regional empire described in "A Clean Break"

http://www.iasps.org/strat1.htm
A Clean Break:
A New Strategy for Securing the Realm

Following is a report prepared by The Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies’ "Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000." The main substantive ideas in this paper emerge from a discussion in which prominent opinion makers, including Richard Perle, James Colbert, Charles Fairbanks, Jr., Douglas Feith, Robert Loewenberg, David Wurmser, and Meyrav Wurmser participated. The report, entitled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," is the framework for a series of follow-up reports on strategy.

Israel has a large problem. Labor Zionism, which for 70 years has dominated the Zionist movement, has generated a stalled and shackled economy. Efforts to salvage Israel’s socialist institutions—which include pursuing supranational over national sovereignty and pursuing a peace process that embraces the slogan, "New Middle East"—undermine the legitimacy of the nation and lead Israel into strategic paralysis and the previous government’s "peace process." That peace process obscured the evidence of eroding national critical mass— including a palpable sense of national exhaustion—and forfeited strategic initiative. The loss of national critical mass was illustrated best by Israel’s efforts to draw in the United States to sell unpopular policies domestically, to agree to negotiate sovereignty over its capital, and to respond with resignation to a spate of terror so intense and tragic that it deterred Israelis from engaging in normal daily functions, such as commuting to work in buses.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s government comes in with a new set of ideas. While there are those who will counsel continuity, Israel has the opportunity to make a clean break; it can forge a peace process and strategy based on an entirely new intellectual foundation, one that restores strategic initiative and provides the nation the room to engage every possible energy on rebuilding Zionism, the starting point of which must be economic reform. To secure the nation’s streets and borders in the immediate future, Israel can:

* Work closely with Turkey and Jordan to contain, destabilize, and roll-back some of its most dangerous threats. This implies clean break from the slogan, "comprehensive peace" to a traditional concept of strategy based on balance of power.

* Change the nature of its relations with the Palestinians, including upholding the right of hot pursuit for self defense into all Palestinian areas and nurturing alternatives to Arafat’s exclusive grip on Palestinian society.

* Forge a new basis for relations with the United States—stressing self-reliance, maturity, strategic cooperation on areas of mutual concern, and furthering values inherent to the West. This can only be done if Israel takes serious steps to terminate aid, which prevents economic reform.

This report is written with key passages of a possible speech marked TEXT, that highlight the clean break which the new government has an opportunity to make. The body of the report is the commentary explaining the purpose and laying out the strategic context of the passages.

A New Approach to Peace

Early adoption of a bold, new perspective on peace and security is imperative for the new prime minister. While the previous government, and many abroad, may emphasize "land for peace"— which placed Israel in the position of cultural, economic, political, diplomatic, and military retreat — the new government can promote Western values and traditions. Such an approach, which will be well received in the United States, includes "peace for peace," "peace through strength" and self reliance: the balance of power.

A new strategy to seize the initiative can be introduced:

(etc.)

[Shaktimaan]

8. Wow.

The state no longer has ANY remnants of its social democratic past, it's a right wing libertarian PARADISE which will NEVER change and (my favorite), the settler types are not merely wrong, or even ethically bankrupt, but they lack and are in fact incapable of ever growing a conscience or a SOUL!

Now THAT'S a scathing criticism.

The most interesting part for me isn't your belief that Israel retains nothing from the rich socialist traditions of its past or that it is a right wing paradise, but that those things are now immutable national characteristics, immune to change. It is weird to me, because I still find Israel embraces many more European style social programs than a country like America. And so much of it's economic structure relies on concepts that most Americans would consider outright communism, (you can't buy property?!)

But considering that Israel really does have such a long history of embracing left-facing structures and so overwhelmingly supported ideas like "land for peace" I think an interesting question would be "why has it's political landscape changed so much so quickly?" rather than just decrying it as obviously broken and unfixable.

edit: I wanted to add that I find it really insane that you think that anyone could be described as lacking a soul merely because of their ideology, no matter how wrong it might be. I wonder how it would be received if I said that I thought that Maoists or supporters of Arafat or whatever lacked souls.

[Ken Burch]

9. By "a soul", a mean a semblance of common humanity.

If you are a settler, you've embraced, unquestioningly, the idea that you have the right to drive other people who've lived in a particular place for at least 14 centuries out of their homes because some of your ancestors may have lived their before that. How can THAT view coexist with any degree of compassion, kindness, openness of spirit? I just don't see how it could. You're almost certainly never going to see a group called "Settlers for Peace".

And one of the things that most terrifies me is that this reminds me of what people in my country did to Native Americans. It seems so Kit Carson sometimes. The fact that so many of the settlers are American(and thus had no personal reason to feel that they had no alternative but to move to Israel, reinforces that particular association in my mind). We even had a concept here that God wanted us to take the land. It was called Manifest Destiny.

And my beliefs on the immutability of the right-wing majority in current Israeli politics are based, among other things, on the fact that even the Labor party(the most conservative party of the Israeli left)is now down to 12% in the polls(and clearly can never recover from that status since it's now going to just stay in Bibi's coalition)and NOBODY there seems to be having any success building a left alternative. In every political cycle before this in Israel, this far into a government, the opposition parties almost always had large leads over the government of the day in the polls. There have been NO gains for any opposition parties in Israel in public support(to my knowledge)since Bibi came in. It's like the whole country is still cheering him on, no matter how blood-soaked and arrogant he gets.

(Oh, the not being able to buy land thing is a vestige that's inevitably going to be removed in the next few years and nobody will even try to fight it, the social services are just going to keep getting cut more and more deeply, and the privatizations aren't stopping and don't like they will. From what I can see, even the Histradut isn't doing anything to fight the austerity and the other ugliness.)

And if any of Israel's socialist past really survived in present political terms, wouldn't there be hundreds of thousands of people marching against Bibi from the left to fight the right-wing economic program, rather than the whole country cheering it on? This is the only time in Israeli history since 1977 in which the Left hasn't been fighting like hell to get the reactionaries out. It's just total surrender to the greedheads and the grifters there, from what I can see.

And the worst thing is, it looks like all Bibi has to do is keep saying "security, security, security", and that seems to shut everybody's minds and ears over there. Why does ANYBODY believe him on that or on anything else when Bibi proved, once and for all, that he was a total bullshit artist LAST time he was in?

The last two elections were nightmares over there. And I've never heard of a country going that far to the right and ever coming back. In this country, neither Nixon nor Reagan were as reactionary as Netanyahu.

I guess I'd ask you, Shakti...why SHOULDN'T I believe the story is over in Israel? Why shouldn't I believe that the progressive fighback, as a mass movement is simply never going to happen?

And on related question for you to consider...if the place does stay like this, will you feel any reason to still feel any positive feelings about it? It clearly no longer reflects anything that YOU believe in, from your posts on many subjects.

[Jim Sagle]

3. Israel RRRRRRAWWWWWXXXXXXXX!!!!!

[Chulanowa]

4. That sounds like the noise of someone vomiting after too much jäger

[IndianaGreen]

6. Or more like someone having a proctological examination

aboard a UFO.

[Chulanowa]

7. I think Christopher Walken would have sounded more dignified, truthfully

[azurnoir]

5. "supporting" Israel is good business for these guys

nothing more, nothing less

[Jim Sagle]

10. And prosemitism.

:headbang:

[Ken Burch]

11. You don't have to defend the Israeli government to be "prosemitic".

All decent people accept that.

Why do you defend a state that's going to be right-wing for the rest of eternity?

Why don't you defend the actual values of the Jewish moral tradition, all of which are affronted by the Occupation?

And the U.S. is never going to turn into Nazi Germany, so you don't even have the "someday I could HAVE to go there" argument anymore.

You know perfectly well that it's not antisemitic to criticize the Israeli government, or to support Palestinian self-determination.

Why do you continue to resort to emotional blackmail and spite, when you know both of those tactics are completely unjustified?