Israel’s amen corner ratchets up the rhetoric
by Justin Raimondo, May 23, 2011
"When the President of the United States reiterated longstanding American policy in the Middle East – that the borders of Israel and a Palestinian state must be based on the 1967 borders, give or take a few land swaps here and there – was he really “not surprised,” as he claimed in his speech to AIPAC a few days later, by the ensuing uproar? That’s what he says, but the reality is harder to discern: after all, this was the premise behind George W. Bush’s – and, before him, Bill Clinton’s – public statements on the issue, and the President had every reason to believe this time would be no different.
Yet it was indeed different, because – as I pointed out here – Israel is different, all these years later. And so is the United States. President Obama was caught flat-footed because he and his advisors failed to consider the full import of these changes.
In Israel, a right-wing government has as its relatively “moderate” element Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose Likud-led government is backed in a coalition government by a number of extreme right-wingers who make the hawkish Likudniks look reasonable. Israel’s foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, is a thuggish radical whose racist anti-Arab diatribes have even Israel’s hard-line partisans in the US desperate to keep him in the background. Lieberman’s party, Yisrael Beiteinu, is a neo-fascist outfit which advocates the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank and the creation of a “Greater Israel.” According to them, there are no Palestinians – only Jordanians who have infiltrated Israel.....
Why does the most powerful man on earth have to take Tel Aviv’s demands into account? Why is he not free to act and speak as he wills?
The reason, in short, is the pro-Israel movement in the United States, a well-organized and inordinately wealthy political machine that operates as the Israeli government’s agent in America. Here is a lobby – in effect, a fifth column in league with a foreign government – so powerful that it has become the decisive factor in determining US policy in a region of the world vital to US national interests. It has succeeded in subordinating those interests to Israeli objectives, and it has done so by creating a political apparatus in the US that politicians defy at their peril....."
by Justin Raimondo, May 23, 2011
"When the President of the United States reiterated longstanding American policy in the Middle East – that the borders of Israel and a Palestinian state must be based on the 1967 borders, give or take a few land swaps here and there – was he really “not surprised,” as he claimed in his speech to AIPAC a few days later, by the ensuing uproar? That’s what he says, but the reality is harder to discern: after all, this was the premise behind George W. Bush’s – and, before him, Bill Clinton’s – public statements on the issue, and the President had every reason to believe this time would be no different.
Yet it was indeed different, because – as I pointed out here – Israel is different, all these years later. And so is the United States. President Obama was caught flat-footed because he and his advisors failed to consider the full import of these changes.
In Israel, a right-wing government has as its relatively “moderate” element Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose Likud-led government is backed in a coalition government by a number of extreme right-wingers who make the hawkish Likudniks look reasonable. Israel’s foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, is a thuggish radical whose racist anti-Arab diatribes have even Israel’s hard-line partisans in the US desperate to keep him in the background. Lieberman’s party, Yisrael Beiteinu, is a neo-fascist outfit which advocates the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank and the creation of a “Greater Israel.” According to them, there are no Palestinians – only Jordanians who have infiltrated Israel.....
Why does the most powerful man on earth have to take Tel Aviv’s demands into account? Why is he not free to act and speak as he wills?
The reason, in short, is the pro-Israel movement in the United States, a well-organized and inordinately wealthy political machine that operates as the Israeli government’s agent in America. Here is a lobby – in effect, a fifth column in league with a foreign government – so powerful that it has become the decisive factor in determining US policy in a region of the world vital to US national interests. It has succeeded in subordinating those interests to Israeli objectives, and it has done so by creating a political apparatus in the US that politicians defy at their peril....."
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