Posts Tagged ‘Israel Lobby’
Interview with Noam Chomsky: “Israeli intervention in US elections ‘vastly overwhelms’ anything Russia has done,
Posted on: August 4, 2018
Israeli intervention in US elections ‘vastly overwhelms’ anything Russia has done, claims Noam Chomsky
Veteran activist Noam Chomsky has accused Israel of “brazenly” interfering in US electoral politics in a way that vastly outweighs any efforts that may have been carried out by Russia.
In comments in which he accused much of the media of concentrating on stories he considered marginal and ignoring issues such as the “existential threat” of climate change, the 89-year-old linguist said in much of the world, the US media’s focus with Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 was “a joke”.
“First of all, if you’re interested in foreign interference in our elections, whatever the Russians may have done barely counts or weighs in the balance as compared with what another state does, openly, brazenly and with enormous support,” he said.
Speaking to Democracy Now, Mr Chomsky added: “Israeli intervention in US elections vastly overwhelms anything the Russians may have done, I mean, even to the point where the prime minister of Israel, Netanyahu, goes directly to Congress, without even informing the president, and speaks to Congress, with overwhelming applause, to try to undermine the president’s policies – what happened with Obama and Netanyahu in 2015.”
In March 2015, at the invitation of then Republican House Speaker John Boehner, and assisted by Israel’s Ambassador to the US, Ron Dermer, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the joint houses of Congress about the yet to be signed Iran nuclear deal.
He did so without formally informing the White House, something said to have infuriated Barack Obama, whose administration would the following month join a seven-party agreement to limit Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons ambitions.
In a speech to Congress that was boycotted by more than 50 Democrats, Mr Netanyahu made clear his opposition to the deal.
“This deal won’t be a farewell to arms,” said Mr Netanyahu, to loud applause. “It would be a farewell to arms control. And the Middle East would soon be crisscrossed by nuclear tripwires. A region where small skirmishes can trigger big wars would turn into a nuclear tinderbox.”
Attacking Mr Obama proposal of dealing with Iran, he added: “We must all stand together to stop Iran’s march of conquest, subjugation and terror.”
Mr Chomsky said Mr Putin had never made such a speech to Congress, which political observers said was unique in the way a foreign leader so acidly attacked the policy of the US government.
“Did Putin come to give an address to the joint sessions of Congress trying to…calling on them to reverse US policy, without even informing the president,” he said.
“And that’s just a tiny bit of this overwhelming influence. So if you happen to be interested in influence of- foreign influence on elections, there are places to look. But even that is a joke.”
The power of the pro-Israel lobby has long been one of the contentious, and disputed, issues in Washington.
In 2007, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, published The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, which described the lobby as “loose coalition of individuals and organisations who actively work to steer US foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction”.
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The coalition includes groups such as the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) a US-based pro-Israel lobbying group this year has spent $1.75m to promote pro-Israel policies.
The group’s annual convention is a frequent stopping off point for politicians seeking election or reelection, and Mr Netanyahu has addressed it several times.
In 2016, top speakers included Vice President Joe Biden, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, Governor John Kasich, Senator Ted Cruz, and Speaker Paul Ryan.
The group’s website says: “The mission of AIPAC is to strengthen, protect and promote the US-Israel relationship in ways that enhance the security of the United States and Israel.”
Neither the Israeli Embassy in Washington or AIPAC immediately responded to enquiries about Mr Chomsky’s claim.
In his comments to Democracy Now, Mr Chomsky said the media was “focusing on issues which are pretty marginal. There are much more serious issues that are being put to the side”.
“Of all Trump’s policies, the one that is the most dangerous and destructive, in fact poses an existential threat, is his policies on climate change, on global warming,” he said.
“That’s really destructive. And we’re facing an imminent threat, not far removed, of enormous damage. The effects are already visible but nothing like what’s going to come.”
He added: “These are the kinds of issues that should be under discussion. Instead…here is a focus on what I believe are marginalia.”
End of Israel Lobby? Iran deal passed, but Reports of death is greatly exaggerated
Posted on: September 10, 2015
End of Israel Lobby?
Iran deal passed, but Reports of death of Israel Lobby is greatly exaggerated
The pro-Israel lobby was never the shadowy, government-controlling entity portrayed by its most paranoid critics. It was, however, an important influence on American politics.
Zionism is to Jews what the civil-rights movement is to African-Americans, a political program organized to protect basic survivalist concerns.
Jews participate disproportionately in political life in every way: voting, intellectual debate, donating, and organizing. The pro-Israel lobby organized an important constituency in American politics that shared a relatively unified understanding of its collective self-interest.
A month ago, that lobby was gearing up for a massive national campaign to block the Iran nuclear deal, using every medium at its disposal: television ads, face-to-face lobbying, impassioned pleas from the bimah and in the Jewish press.
The campaign has not only failed, it has appeared almost completely ineffectual, and its failure has left its members stupefied. The deal’s anticlimactic success shows that the world has moved beyond them, and they fail to understand how or why this happened.
The miscalculations by opponents of the Iran deal began with a poor grasp of public opinion.
They imagined they could foment a broad public backlash, and opponents frequently, and triumphantly, cited opinion polls showing more respondents disapproved than approved of the Iran deal. But the results of these polls varied widely.
Small changes in wording produced wildly varying results, reflecting the fact that few people knew or cared much about the issue.
Turning a foreign-policy issue with no immediate salience to American security — even a nuclear-armed Iran, a worst-case scenario, would not involve an attack on Americans at home or abroad — into an issue Americans would actively care about was never realistic.
A Republican leadership aide, speaking to the Los Angeles Times, blamed Donald Trump’s candidacy for distracting the public. (“The GOP leadership aide, granted anonymity to discuss the setback, said billionaire Donald Trump’s attention-grabbing presidential campaign, along with scrutiny of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s email server, overshadowed all other issues this summer, making it harder for the Republicans’ message to attract attention.”)
Their plan could have worked! If only the atmosphere had been, as they apparently assumed it would be, completely devoid of a presidential campaign or other news. (Was the deal signing postponed to fit into this campaign period?)
The deal’s opponents not only misjudged public opinion as a whole, but more astonishingly, they misjudged the state of American Jewish opinion in particular.
Congress might have been moved to oppose the Iran deal if the American Jewish community had viewed it as an existential threat to Israel. But Jews did not, on the whole, take that view.
A detailed survey of American Jewish opinion by The Jewish Journal found that American Jews support the deal, 53 percent to 35 percent. How could that be? Well, this chart shows how Jewish opinion breaks down:
Liberals like the deal, and conservatives don’t, by roughly equal margins. But most Jews are liberals. Rising polarization of American life has cleaved in two everything in its path. There is no more “Israel lobby”; there is a red Israel lobby and a blue one.
The implications of this cleavage made blocking the Iran deal hopeless from the outset.
As a simple matter of political mechanics, acquiring a veto-proof majority in both houses of Congress meant hawks needed liberal Democrats to take their side. But they did not have arguments that could appeal to liberals — even liberals with a deep emotional connection to Israel.
Non-proliferation experts strongly supported the agreement as the best way out of a difficult circumstance.
Even Israel’s security establishment disagreed with Benjamin Netanyahu and the pro-Israel right. The technical case for the strength of the inspections and the enforcement mechanism was strong; the case against leaned heavily on apocalypticism.
And this underscores the most important tectonic forces moving beneath the Israel lobby’s feet.
Over the last 15 years, the foreign-policy debate in Israel has moved steadily rightward. (In the last election, left-of-center Israeli parties relied on domestic issues, rather than appealing for territorial compromise.)
The Israeli right favors either permanent occupation of the West Bank, or an occupation that lasts until such time as the Palestinians produce a pro-Zionist government, which is functionally the same thing.
That perspective has become increasingly coterminous with the American “pro-Israel” view.
At last year’s AIPAC conference, some 65 percent of the attendees were Republican. That skewed perspective has pushed the American Jewish establishment to the right of American Jewry as a whole.
Jewish Republicans have always believed that forcing Jews to pick sides between a conservative Israeli government and a liberal American one would leave them with the larger share.
Elliott Abrams, a former Bush administration Middle East adviser, today defends the Israel lobby’s choice to launch an existential fight it could not win.
“If AIPAC would not fight on this issue,” he concludes, “many of its supporters would wonder why it even exists.”
Launching unwinnable fights — and then retroactively justifying the decision in spite of failure — is, of course, an ingrained neoconservative tactic. This is a movement that has no language to express the concept of a counterproductive fight on behalf of a worthy cause.
But there is more at work than simple pigheadedness or habitual aggression. Many conservative supporters of Israel do not necessarily regard the crack-up of American Jewish opinion as a problem.
In their view, diplomacy with Iran is the prelude to Israel’s annihilation, and support for Netanyahu’s permanent occupation is the sine qua non of genuine support for Israel.
It follows that the Iran debate essentially succeeded, by smoking out the fake Israel supporters. An almost giddy Jennifer Rubin concludes that the deal’s victory destroys “the myth of bipartisan support for Israel.”
The crack-up of the Israel lobby is, for its most conservative members, not a failure at all but the fulfillment of a longtime dream.
(I failed to comprehend the conclusion. What is the long-time dream of the conservative members?)
Josh Ruebner shared and commented
I sure hope that Jonathan Chait is right that the Israel’s lobby’s loss on the Iran deal signifies its demise. However, I’m also reminded of Mark Twain’s quip: “The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”
