Excellent piece on Tom Dispatch by Tony Karon on the evolving views of most American Jews toward present-day Israel. Karon, a senior editor at Time editor and a veteran of the anti-apartheid struggles in South Africa, bears out what my own statistically meaningless experience has been.
Not a single one of the Jews I know well shares the Joe Lieberman view — that Israel’s and America’s interests are always identical, and anybody who thinks different is a dirty rotten antisemite. Karon shows convincingly that my friends are in the mainstream, while Low Blow Joe is a deviant. Excerpts:
If you want to bludgeon Jewish critics with the charge of “anti-Semitism” when they challenge Israel’s actions, then it’s hardly helpful to have other Jews standing up and expressing the same thoughts. It undermines the sense, treasured by Israel’s most fervent advocates, that they represent a cast-iron consensus among American Jews in particular.
That much has been clear in the response to the publication of John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt’s controversial new book The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, which challenges the wisdom and morality of the unashamed and absolute bias in U.S. foreign policy towards Israel.
In an exchange on the NPR show Fresh Air, Walt was at pains to stress, as in his book, that the Israel Lobby, as he sees it, is not a Jewish lobby, but rather an association of groupings with a right-wing political agenda often at odds with majority American-Jewish opinion,
Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, argued exactly the opposite: Walt and Mearsheimer, he claimed, were effectively promoting anti-Semitism, because the Israel lobby is nothing more (or less) than the collective will of the American Jewish community. Which, of course, it isn’t. In fact, in the American Jewish community you can increasingly hear open echoes of Mearsheimer and Walt’s skepticism over whether the lobby’s efforts are good for Israel.
Clearly, The Old Testament always takes priority. Too bad Lieberman and his ilk (including many "Christians") cannot encompass a similarly strong loyalty to "their" (?) United States of America.
Posted by: on September 15, 2007 11:21 PMTo the person commenting as "" (i.e., no name), I assume that many people, possibly including Lieberman, consider that there's a higher ideal than the US, which is a tool to achieve what they hope will at some point become theirs, right?
Not only are the interests of the US and Israel not identical, the interests of the Netanyahu wing of Likud are no more identical to the interests of Israel than the interests of the neo-cons are identical with those of the US. As it turns out, it's the same people making the same bad assumptions and mistakes in different situations.
OK, Chuck, let's spell it out for any who might need it (that won't include any regular on this blog.)
The "major" (Establishment) Western religions were established (or shortly thereafter perverted to), and continue to operate on, the premise of their initial, immediate and everlasting primacy over All Things: thus "religious" encompasses "secular." For these "religious", a mere "politically agreed" secular state, democracy or not, can have no inherent moral or philosophical standing--it is a practical short-term tool [code word: compromise], available to employ by the energetic for proselytizing "The Word", "obtaining" or retaining assets, whatever God goals are believed by the followers.