the USA, Israel, and national interest

When does it become 'wise' to backdate to? After the morally problematic stuff like the Stern and Orgun gangs had packed it in?

Anyway, here is a view from Israel: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/698302.html

Anyway, I'm not a big fan of the idea of political "realism" either. On one hand, it presumes that there is such a thing as an objective national interest and that the government can know what it is.

"Harvard to remove official seal from anti-AIPAC 'working paper'"

The study also accused the pro-Israel lobby of monitoring academics to ensure that they do not diverge from the pro-Israel line. They will undoubtedly see proof of this contention in Harvard's decision to distance itself from the study due to pressure applied by pro-Israel donors. According to the New York Sun, Robert Belfer - who gave the Kennedy School $7.5 million in 1997 in order, among other things, to endow the chair that Walt now occupies - called the university and asked that Walt be forbidden to use his title in publicity for the study.

Oil is the single most important strategic concern of the 21st century. Everyone knows that. And the Middle East is mainly important because of its oil. Therefore any country in the region perceived to be a threat to the U.S.'s access to oil is perceived to be a threat to the US, and having a foothold in the region is perceived to be crucial to US interests.

Now the article establishes two things about Israel and the Iraq war -- that the Israel lobby is influential in the United States, and that Israel wanted the war, and then concludes from this that the U.S. went to war mainly because of Israel.

But that conclusion does not follow logically from the evidence given. It's possible, indeed I'd say it's much more likely that Israel only helped the Bush administration push toward something it wanted to do anyway, which is to make an attempt at protecting its oil interests. Whether that attempt was well-considered and whether it was successful are other matters.

After all, no one assumes that the AARP dictates domestic policy, though I'm sure it has considerable influence.

And I'm not enough of a scholar to give a thorough answer, but I'm sure one of the main reasons is that the Arab nations sided with the USSR during the cold war, so obviously they were out of the question during the time when we began supporting Israel so heavily (which was really post-1967, from what I understand.)

-- Abbadavid Berman (Hurtingchie...), March 22nd, 2006.

Is it realist to think that if we stop supporting Israel completely that it will no longer be "our problem," or that fundamentalist Islam will stop spreading?

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=American_Israel_Public_Affairs_Committee

A couple of noteworthy paragraphs:

"In 2002, the pro-Israel lobby successfully targeted African-American representatives Earl Hilliard (D-AL) and Cynthia McKinney (D-GA) for defeat in Democratic primaries. Hilliard and McKinney were both vulnerable for reasons unrelated to Israel. McKinney, for instance, was defeated in part because the open primary allowed Republicans angered over her comments about the September 11 attacks to cross over and vote against her in the Democratic primary. Nonetheless, their defeat enhanced the impression that the pro-Israel lobby wields great power in electoral politics," Beinin wrote.

The AIPAC conference of 2005, billed as its "biggest ever," ended a week earlier. Despite all the claims of undiminished power, it's two conference goals were rejected by the White House within days. Bush met with Pres. Abu Mazen at the White House and offered him $50 million in direct aid. This despite AIPAC "talking point" that aid be linked to dismantling of Hamas (Bush did not even mention the dismantling issue). And, Bush approved Iranian entrance into WTO despite AIPAC "talking point" calling on US to apply new sanctions or go to war with Iran.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=21749

It clearly goes too far ("Sharon's actually a great guy!" "The Barak peace offer was flawless!"), and some of its arguments are shoddy, but there are some good points in there as well.

Is it realist to think that if we stop supporting Israel completely that it will no longer be "our problem," or that fundamentalist Islam will stop spreading?

The "peace process" is a sham anyway, so it's actually not in our interest at all to broker a solution that either side is going to be unhappy with. And until both sides are satisfied with their outcome (which will *never* happen), it's a waste of resources to even care. Let someone else deal with it (like the Brits or the UN, as you say above).

The recuriting effort loves videos of Palestinian women getting gunned down, etc. This is well-documented. It's ridiculous to think that the absence of those images would make their jobs any easier.

i) Mearsheimer & Walt are International Relations experts. It's odd that in this article they primarily apply themselves to domestic US politics. It might have been better if they had written a long article outlining why they feel the US-Israel alliance is not in the USA's interests, and then left it to others (like people whose specialities are the process of government policy formulation or interest group action or that kind of stuff) to analyse why this apparently dysfunctional policy had been adopted.

ii) Mearsheimer & Walt are Realists, whose views can be simplified as meaning that they believe states in the long run always act in their own interest. Yet in their article they are talking about how a state has adopted a policy inimical to its own interests for internal political reasons. This is odd, and it suggests that Mearsheimer & Walt's views are evolving towards those of the Social Constructivists, who see states as evolving "interests" through interaction with the world, rather than their having actual objective interests per se. Arguably the giving of unequivocal support to whatever Israel fancies doing is a core interest of the United States, simply because all its policy makers think it is.

iii) The emerging campaign against the two is entertaining, given that it seems to amount to saying "They say X, as do certain bad people, therefore they are bad". The removal of the Harvard logo from a study by one of their star academics is probably a better testimony to the strength of the pro-Israel lobby in the USA than anything in their article.

Specifically he rebuts the idea that the Israel Lobby is really as powerful as the paper alleges. He also questions the view that Al-Qaeda would not have attacked the US if it were not for its ties with Israel.

He also points to the example of other countries that enjoy close military ties with the US, such as Turkey and Pakistan, which have both "carried out appalling internal repression and even more appalling external aggression". He argues that the fact that US ties to these countries do not invite the same level of criticism as its ties with Israel has more to do with the "eternal fascination that attaches to the Jewish question" than the relative moral or political merits of the alliances.

http://www.chomsky.info/articles/20060328.htm

-- o. nate (syne_wav...), April 7th, 2006.

That's not irony at all. First of all, it makes logical sense that a lobbying group would exaggerate its influence to a private donors. Second, the "defenders" who "rally around it" (me and other people on this thread) are not AIPAC supporters at all. At least I'm not (and neither is Chomsky, obv.) I just don't really believe that they're as influential as that article claims. In fact I think the article comes off a bit paranoid.

Those without experience in critical analysis of conventional doctrine can be very seriously misled by the particular case of the Middle East(ME).

i first i thort that chomsky was like "i.e. people like myself!"

I think the paranoia of the authors (if that's what it is) is a natural result of attempts by defenders of Israel & its policies to intimidate academics. Perhaps the "Lobby" does not have the power to single-handedly move American foreign policy, but it does have the power to threaten academics. Universities have come under pressure for hiring Middle Eastern professors with pro-Palestinian views. There have been accusations of anti-Semitism against those professors who advocate these views in their classrooms at Columbia and other schools. It would only be natural for professors who are faced with these kinds of intimidation to over-estimate the influence of their attackers, especially when their views seem so disenfrachised from the political mainstream.

The title puns on one of Walt or Mearsheimers celebrated works.

The Storm over the Israel Lobby

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/12/AR2006071201627.html
(free registration required)

And an online discussion with the author of the piece:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2006/07/14/DI2006071400780.html

I wish I knew a way I could specifically contribute money against AIPAC.

http://www.tikkun.org/

Yes, that's true- I think it's important to remember that AIPAC is no more secretive or conspiratorial than any other lobbying organization. They make no effort to conceal their aims and activities. To call them a conspiracy would be improper, and -- due to the unfortunate history of anti-Semitic myths about Jewish international conspiracies -- anything that even hints of a conspiracy theory is sure to get some hackles up, and rightly so.

Does that make sense? Like the bottom line is that even if Putin is snuggling up to Iran, and the US is now going to have a more favorable relationship with Russia, that doesn't mean that either Russia or the US suddenly care about the same things that Iran cares about. From a realpolitik perspective Israel doesn't want the war in Syria to end since that'll give Iran and Hezbollah enough breathing room to start fucking w/ Israel again, but even there they might stand to gain more from having tighter connection to Russia (and therefore some potential leverage on Iran/etc). Even before Trump's election Bibi has been sidling up to Putin - so you could reframe the question as "How can Israel gain from a closer relationship to Russia despite Russia's ties to Iran/Syria" but that question kinda answers itself I think?

I don't get the impression that the Israel lobby is on the Trump administration's radar at all. Isn't Bannon buddies w/ like Horowitz and Geller and Caroline Glick, etc? He seems like the kind of white supremacist that is pro-Israel (maybe bc he sees it as a model of an ethnosupremecist State he'd like to establish in the US). Here's a comment I wrote on fb this week explaining this particular peculiar phenomenon to a friend:

Maybe. There's a strain of white supremacism that chides liberal Western Judaism (generally metonymically represented by the Frankfurt School) for trying to dominate gentiles by diluting the white gene pool through massive migration. This strain 'calls out' Zionism as hypocrisy because Jews support an ethnosupremecist State when it is Jewish but not when it is white. It is not entirely incompatible for them to say (and this is a rarer ideology but one I have definitely seen expressed) that Jews should live in Israel and whites should live in the US and that's the best for each. (iirc this was not an entirely unknown ideological current in pre-Final Solution Nazism.) In that case they might even respect Bibi for so strongly supporting the needs of his ethnic community while disdaining American Jews for undermining their own.

Yes, that does make sense. xp