Lobby ≠ cabal

An article by Juan Cole on Salon.com today, accessed via GlobalEcho.org, discusses the reaction to a paper by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in the last but one issue of the London Review of Books describing what it calls The Israel Lobby in the US.

From the Salon.com posting:

In "The Israel Lobby," Mearsheimer and Walt argue that U.S. policy toward the Middle East has been dangerously skewed by a powerful pro-Israel lobby, which inhibits free discussion of the issues and has made the pro-Israeli position a political sacred cow. Congress, they point out, virtually never criticizes Israel: It is an untouchable subject. And this taboo has had enormous consequences, which are themselves off limits for discussion. Because America's blank-check support for Israel arouses enormous Arab and Muslim rage, Israel is a strategic liability, not an asset."

The conclusion of the original paper at least contains some optimism:

There is a ray of hope, however. Although the Lobby remains a powerful force, the adverse effects of its influence are increasingly difficult to hide. Powerful states can maintain flawed policies for quite some time, but reality cannot be ignored for ever. What is needed is a candid discussion of the Lobby’s influence and a more open debate about US interests in this vital region. Israel’s well-being is one of those interests, but its continued occupation of the West Bank and its broader regional agenda are not. Open debate will expose the limits of the strategic and moral case for one-sided US support and could move the US to a position more consistent with its own national interest, with the interests of the other states in the region, and with Israel’s long-term interests as well."

There does seem to be a repeated, and surely often deliberate, confusion between taking a stance against the government of Israel and the continued fallout from Zionist movements, and actually being anti-Semitic.

An article by John Bunzl in the current Palestine-Israel Journal examines the nature and sources of this obfuscation.

The journal describes itself as "the only independent, non-profit quarterly publication co-published and produced by Israelis and Palestinians, as an explicitly joint venture promoting dialogue, in the search for peaceful relations."