MJ Rosenberg

LATEST TRIP SCANDAL UPDATE HERE

As Phil Weiss writes here, the media coverage of the Congressional skinny-dipping incident in the Sea of Galilee is being treated as a big joke, no different than Prince Harry’s naked romp in Las Vegas.

Unfortunately, the AIPAC free trips to Israel are no joke. They are serious business which is why AIPAC devised the exemption from the free travel ban Congress imposed on itself. See this Roll Call story on how AIPAC did it. And also today’s story in the Forward on the implications of these AIPAC junkets.

A few years ago, a Republican Congressman described one of these trips to me. He was newly-elected and happy to get the free trip (although he had been to Israel many times). He told me that the brainwashing was intense, so much so that any Congressman who disagreed with either the AIPAC “minder” or whichever Israeli official was doing the briefing was quickly shushed up. He especially resented that his dissent on the question of the ease of bombing Iran’s reactors was ridiculed, despite his extensive experience in the military.

The creepiest thing he told me was that the Congress people only felt safe expressing their differences with the Israeli/AIPAC position when they were on the bus and whispering among themselves,  away from the minder. Publicly, every member of the delegation cheered and applauded the AIPAC line, just as they did back in Washington. He specifically noted that no one wanted AIPAC or Eric Cantor getting on their case.

These trips should be banned. On the contrary, they are proliferating because the AIPAC-drafted exemption had to be broad enough so that it would not appear to apply only to AIPAC. Now the AIPAC-manufactured umbrella is covering other organizations as well. Nice. Corrupting Congress is what AIPAC does best, although, to be fair, doing so is not exactly heavy lifting.

For the record, the Democrats are more effective in getting AIPAC’s dirty work done than the GOP, including most of your favorite “progressives.” The Republicans bloviate but the Democrats get the job done!

Last week I posted a few tweets calling on the Guardian not to hire Josh Trevino, a far right ideologue and white supremacist as a columnist. I was far from the only progressive to do so. Ali Abunimah, the writer and Electronic Intifada founder and editor put out the best dossiers on Trevino, who he is, and why he should not be at the Guardian.  And he was the guy who caught the Guardian’s attention and, in my opinion, was primarily responsible for its decision to demote him even before he started at the Guardian.

But I was the one Commentary, National Review and David Frum at Daily Beast focused on as the monster who was thwarting their Likudnik comrade,

I would not, of course, expect these neocons to focus on Abunimah. He is an Arab and their sheer bigotry toward Arabs and Muslims prevents them from engaging seriously with one, even one with the clout and brainpower of Ali Abunimah.

And, of course, the neocons hate Jews who defect from the Likud cause even more than they hate Muslims and Arabs. All of us — from Mondoweiss to J Street to Max Blumenthal and Peter Beinart — put the lie to their claim that we Jews stand as one on Israel. Few believe that anymore and I think we are responsible for that.

But, I’m proud to say, they hold a special hate and contempt for me because I am the guy who popularized the term “Israel Firster” (that marvelously descriptive term first used in 1962 by the president of Brandeis University to describe uh, Israel Firsters).

That phrase drives them nuts because it hits them in their most sensitive spot: their fear that they will be exposed as being more loyal to Netanyahu’s Israel than to the United States. Especially at a time when they are working so hard to get the United States to either go to war with Iran or become embroiled in Israel’s war with Iran, the very worst thing for them  is that their loyalty is made suspect. The last thing these guys want is to be identified with the likes of Sheldon Adelson who while trying to buy the U.S. presidency states openly  that his country is Israel. 

And that is why I am being attacked for getting Trevino. I’ll always be the guy who brought back the I.F. term and who will do my best to keep it out there.

I’m proud of the small part I played in helping Abunimah and others get the Guardian to reconsider Josh Trevino, who nobody ever heard of anyway. But I’m even more proud of having accidentally brought back a label that scares the living daylights out of people who helped ensnare us in Iraq and now are trying to do the same in Iran.

They won’t succeed. Those two little words helped. Israel Firster, forever.

What Is The Point Of Netanyahu’s Iran Bluff

Perhaps the worst thing about Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s crusade to scare the world into believing that Israel is about to attack Iran is that he has no scruples about panicking the Israeli people as well. (The government has even sent out notices to the public urging that people make sure they have enough gas masks for the whole family). Fortunately, press reports like today’s excellent piece in the New York Times by Jodi Rudoren indicate that Israelis do not take the threats of an imminent attack any more seriously than the rest of the world, at least not yet.

Nor do they seem to be panicked by Iran’s nuclear program. After all, they have been told that Iran is on the brink of developing nuclear weapons for more than a decade. So they are not rushing to stock up on bread and milk, nor are they purchasing airline tickets to escape.

That is to their credit. The Israeli public is apparently less ready than Netanyahu or Defense Minister Ehud Barak to discard the primary teaching of the Zionist movement. That is that the establishment of a Jewish state secures the Jewish people against any repeat of the horrific acts taken against it during the 20^th century.

To Israelis (and even to diaspora Jews) the “Never Again” mantra means that given the existence of a strong Israel, with a powerful military force, the Jewish people are immune to threats of destruction (or, as immune as any of us in the post 9/11 world). The fact that Israel has a large nuclear weapon stockpile and the ability to deliver those weapons by air, sea or land also adds immeasurably to that sense of confidence. The Holocaust, simply put, cannot be repeated because any nation attempting a repeat would be destroyed.

That is not a pretty statement but it is true and everyone knows it, including any Iranians who might want war. It is not a difficult concept to understand, certainly not for Americans, who lived for decades believing that it was the threat of “Mutually Assured Destruction” that protected us from attack by Stalin and his successors in Moscow.

Of course, there are those who say that the Iranians, unlike the Soviets, are indifferent to the destruction of their own nation but that is patently ridiculous. Few governments in history have been as cavalier about the destruction of their own people as the Soviet government (it starved or executed 5-8 million citizens) but even they were not going to risk the state itself. Iran is, to put it mildly, considerably more protective of its own people.

No, the Israeli people are not scared. It will take more than the fear-mongering of the current government to make people who did not even flinch during the genuinely dangerous moments of the War of Independence and the Yom Kippur War to go into panic mode now. That is not the Israeli style and it is a credit to the success of the Israeli state which took a traumatized people and transformed it into a self-confident one.

Netanyahu and Barak will not change that – not with their fake cries of terror or their more genuine swagger. The unfortunate thing is that they would try.

Here is how Kadima party leader, retired general, and former chief of the IDF, Shaul Mofaz, describes Netanyahu’s game.

Mr. Prime Minister, you’re creating panic. You are trying to frighten us and terrify us. And in truth – we are scared: scared by your lack of judgment, scared that you both lead and don’t lead, scare that you are executing a dangerous and irresponsible policy.

The question arises: what are Netanyahu and Barak up to? To me, it is clear. Their entire game is to squeeze President Obama during the run-up to the presidential election. True, the tactic is not new but the urgency of the current campaign is unprecedented.

That is because the primary fear motivating Netanyahu and Barak is not of Iran. It is that President Obama will be re-elected and will, after November, be significantly more immune to their demands for more Iran sanctions, support for some future Israeli strike against Iran and even for U.S.-back-up should an Israeli strike not be able to finish the job. Then there is what former Prime Minister Golda Meir called the“shopping list” of whatever else the military and intelligence community wants from the United States at any given moment. Netanyahu and Barak know that the window to ask and to get could close in November so the name of the game is getting as much as possible now.

They may be right. President Obama will probably give Israel almost anything to prevent an attack on Iran during the election campaign, an attack that could quite conceivably crash the world economy and incidentally elect Israel’s preferred candidate, Mitt Romney. So now is the moment. Additionally, Netanyahu and Barak are smart enough to know that even if Romney is elected, he is not likely to want to start his presidency with another war in the Middle East (despite what he may tell Sheldon Adelson and his neoconservative advisors).

So here is my prediction. There will be no war any time soon. But Israel will be getting more and more goodies from President Obama between now and the election just to ensure it, and probably afterwards as well.

After all, Obama’s reluctance to abandon diplomacy in favor of war will not end with the election. It will intensify. So it is likely the U.S. taxpayer will continue to bear the cost of ever-increasing aid to Israel, our insurance policy against an Israeli attack on Iran. That is not ideal, but it is far better than a war that could cost lives, including Americans.

THIS WAS written before Tom Friedman eviscerated Romney, Adelson and AIPAC. Bravo, Tom.

Sheldon Adelson and Dan Senor may have done in Romney but they sure helped us bring down the lobby. 

*****

It’s difficult for me to address Mitt Romney’s blunders in Israel because I come at them from a different place than many in the pro-Israel community.

One, I do not share the view that Israel should not be an issue in American politics. For instance, an organization I support, Americans For Peace Now,spoke for most, if not all, pro-Israel organizations when it issued this statement:

It is deeply troubling that Governor Romney, his advisors, and some of his key supporters are seeking to exploit Israel as a partisan issue to score political points in this election campaign. This is a reckless and irresponsible tactic that comes at the expense of the best interests of both the U.S. and Israel.

Wrong.

Why shouldn’t Israel be a “partisan issue” in American elections? If Democrats and Republicans have differing views on an issue, why shouldn’t they try to “score political points” off of them?

That is what they do on every other issue. Why should Israel be above or beyond politics? U.S. taxpayers send more money to Israel than any other country and millions of Americans care deeply about Israel’s fate. What makes it not a legitimate issue?

Unfortunately, however, the two parties do not have differing views on Israel. Both candidates and both parties support the Netanyahu government’s positions on Iran, the Palestinians, Hamas and pretty much everything else. Sure, Mitt Romney went overboard in Jerusalem by saying that on critical matters like Iran we should defer to the wishes of Israel (rather than decide these issues exclusively based on U.S. interests) but that is what successive administrations have been doing for years. It is certainly what the Obama administration has done. Obama just doesn’t proclaim it while in Israel’s capital.

That is why Israel’s hawkish Minister of Defense Ehud Barak says that Obama has been the president most supportive of Israel in its 64 year history. President Shimon Peres, who has played a part in that history since the beginning, says pretty much the same thing.

There is no indication that Romney would be any different. Sure, his statements in Israel indicate an over-the-top quality that Obama’s lack. Nor would Obama have made that invidious comparison of Israeli and Palestinian cultures. But Romney isn’t president. If he should be elected, there is little doubt that his policies would be virtually identical to those of Obama, or Bush, or Clinton, etc., except for the Muslim-bashing elements that are the specialty of some of his neocon aides and his fundraiser Sheldon Adelson.

Romney can be no more “pro-Israel” than Obama because Obama simply does everything Israel asks for: from raising aid levels, to accepting Israeli settlements, to vetoing every resolution Israel wants vetoed at the United Nations, to piling Iran sanction on top of Iran sanction (while leaving the possibility of war on the table), to exempting Israel from budget cuts that will affect every other program in the budget. What more can Romney do? Move our capital to Jerusalem?

In short, the whole GOP argument that Obama is not pro-Israel enough is hogwash.

Where I differ from Americans For Peace Now and other pro-Israel organizations is that I wish candidates would make Israel a political issue, because the politically expedient status quo policies both parties endorse don’t advance U.S. interests or Israel’s.

I wish one of the two parties would say that the United States will do everything in its power to prevent Iran’s development of nuclear weapons through diplomacy — and not by means of a war that would result in needless deaths and crash the world economy. I wish one of the two parties would say that the United State will promote Israeli-Palestinian negotiations that include representatives of Israel, the Palestinian Authority and Gaza with only one condition: that all sides foreswear violence. I wish one of the two parties would commit our country to serving as an honest broker in the Middle East rather than as “Israel’s lawyer,” as former Clinton-era negotiator Aaron Miller memorably put it.

Of course, I don’t expect any of that to happen — not so long as both parties seem more dedicated to impressing some donors to defending U.S. interests or Israel’s. It certainly is not happening in this campaign, which has already become a race to demonstrate who can be more effusive about Binyamin Netanyahu’s policies.

Something’s got to give. Israel’s survival is at stake (whether Netanyahu understands that or not). The Palestinians are being squeezed to death, particularly in Gaza. And a war with Iran that would make the Iraq war look like a summer outing could be ignited at any time.

All these things should be issues in our presidential campaign, not simply opportunities for pandering. Unfortunately it won’t happen this year. On the Middle East, it’s tweedle dum and tweedle dee.

When Democrats say Romney is “anti-Israel” or Republicans say Obama is, don’t believe them. If “pro-Israel” means following Binyamin Netanyahu’s lead on all matters relating to the Middle East, they are one and the same. And that is the pity.