THE ISRAEL LOBBY
PHILIP WEISS, MONDOWEISS - Walt and Mearsheimer's book on the Israel Lobby is being published today. I finished it last night. I said before that it was historic, but I did not realize quite what it was till I put it down: a great work of American muckraking in the tradition of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (the meatpacking industry), Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (pesticides), and Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed (Detroit). An overkill moral beauty aimed at an outrage, some day this book will be legendary and dated. Young people will ask, What was all the fuss about? Were politicians really blacklisted for criticizing the settlements? You will tell them yes. Then they'll pull down a yellowed copy of this book from your shelf and find it mechanical and dated.
The reason it will seem dated is, it will have done its job. Ralph Nader once feared for his life; today carmakers advertise the safety of their cars, and Mike Kinsley calls Ralph "Saint Ralph." With this book, two great foreign-policy scholars have thrown their bodies down. What you see here is their life work. They are willing to sacrifice reputation and future-career-arc for this study, and by book's end, there is a tremendous sense of calm and achievement, when having made their case they restate their intellectual goal: to restore American foreign policy in the Middle East to its senses.
"Ending the [Palestinian/Israeli] conflict should be seen as a national security priority for the United States. But this will not happen as long as the lobby makes it impossible for American leaders to use the leverage at their disposal to pressure Israel into ending the occupation and creating a viable Palestinian state...One cannot fathom contemporary Palestinian nationalism without being aware of the events surrounding the 1948 war... al-Nakba, or 'the Catastrophe.'..Although we deplore the Palestinians' reliance on terrorism and are well aware of their own contribution to prolonging the conflict, we believe their grievances are genuine and must be addressed..."
Any civilian with the least moral sense will finish this book in agreement.
3 Comments:
"Ending the [Palestinian/Israeli] conflict should be seen as a national security priority for the United States. But this will not happen as long as the lobby makes it impossible for American leaders to use the leverage at their disposal to pressure Israel into ending the occupation and creating a viable Palestinian state...One cannot fathom contemporary Palestinian nationalism without being aware of the events surrounding the 1948 war... al-Nakba, or 'the Catastrophe.'..Although we deplore the Palestinians' reliance on terrorism and are well aware of their own contribution to prolonging the conflict, we believe their grievances are genuine and must be addressed..."
...fine and all, except they tag the Palestinian uprising with the epithet "terrorism". This is also to say that the WWII French Resistance fighters were "terrorists", and that the Warsaw Jewish Resistance fighters were "terrorists", and that the Viet Cong were "terrorists", and that the Algerian Resistance were "terrorists", and that the Sandanistas were "terrorists", and that the Mexican Zapatistas are "terrorists", and that the Iraqi Resistance fighers are "terrorists".
Surely, when these authors said "terrorists", what they really meant was "revolutionaries". I know that's what I do, mentally, whenever I tune in NPR and hear some mealy-mouthed liberal referring to a day in which no Israelis die as a "lull in the violence", and refer to the Palestinian Resistance as "terrorists" -- I mentally substitute the word "revolutionary" for "terrorist".
People under brutal foreign military occupation have a right to resist, to fight back and strike back, by any means necessary. Such people aren't "terrorists", but revolutionaries.
Close, but I think it would be more appropriate to characterise the Palestinian oppo as a resistance movement. They're trying to kick invaders/occupiers out and regain control of their country. Which is what Geronimo, Mangas Coloradas, Sitting Bull, et al. were trying to do, too, whereas the colonials were indeed revolutionaries, working to overthrow a government that they (being invaders and occupiers themselves) considered legitimate but outworn.
The Palestinian call for boycott of Israeli academic institutions, like the Palestinian civil society's widely endorsed call for boycott, divestment and sanctions, is based on the same moral principle embodied in the international civil society campaign against the apartheid regime in South Africa: that people of conscience must take a stand against oppression and use all the means of civil resistance available to bring it to an end.
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