This is something of a re-post from a comment I wrote on jewschool's post from my friend Kol Ra'ash Gadol regarding the NPR Terry Gross 'Fresh Air' point-counterpoint with Stephen Walt and Abe Foxman, which you can catch here.
I agree with Kol Ra'ash that Abe Foxman sounds like a douchebag. More importantly, by his tilting the ADL in the last 10 years away from focusing on defending the rights of all racial, ethnic and religious groups, and focusing instead on defending the Jews, he's really proven to be not only a douchebag, but also a really lousy leader for the Jewish people. Are we so helpless we need a 501c3 that exists solely to refute anti-semitic claims? I know the ADL still does defend the rights of other slandered minority groups, but all I hear about in the past few years is their impassioned defense of the Jews. I'd rather we continued to work in coalition with other minority groups and all work together to end racist hatred of all shapes and sizes.
BUT, more to Kol Ra'ash's point: Walt does make a good point that AIPAC exerts a lot of influence on Washington and that it may not be such a good thing. AIPAC doesn't represent a fair cross-section of US Jewish opinion on Israel and that leads me to feel that when they get criticized publicly for their influence, they deserve it. The US and Israel are both mostly righteous but flawed moral-political states. Their attitudes and relationship can serve sometimes as a system of checks and balances. When Bush I threatened to pull loan guarantees from Israel for building settlements, it was roundly attacked by the Jewish community and AIPAC. But it was an important act: an increase in settlements is detrimental to making peace with the Palestinians.
HOWEVER, Walt undoes any gains in his argument (or at least what I heard on Fresh Air) when he suggests the Israel lobby drove the US to invade Iraq. From day one of the administration the Bush government began to build a case for war in Iraq; the doctored up argument at the UN by Colin Powell, the flimsy CIA and NSA reports to Congress... AIPAC doesn't nearly have the money or power to get Bush II to pull all that stuff together. Bush saw Iraq as a threat, as his father's unfinished business, as a nice little profitable oil opportunity, and a chance to expand US influence in the Middle East by planting a pro-US regime. Pleasing the Israel lobby is an ancillary benefit, at best.
To miss the forest for the trees like that, Walt and Mearschlizzer's thesis comes off to me as pseudo-intellectual dreck at best and veiled anti-semitism at worst.
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Hey thar,
I'm behind on my reading, but jsut wanted to weigh in. First, thanks for the support; also, I must admit that I find it hard to conclude what Walt really means when he talks about the Israel lobby being behind the war in Iraq. I'm not quick to call it anti-Semitism because he did emphasize pretty strongly that the Jewish community as a whole was opposed to the war, and more so than the average American community.
OTOH, you're certainly correct that the Bushies were building the case from day one to invade. I think that perhaps where it gets confusing is that Walt may consider the Bushies to be the Israel lobby. He did say pretty much straightout that the Israel lobby is not equal to the Jewish community -- he said that there were Jews in it, but also named several prominent non-Jews and said that he wanted to be clear that he was NOT equating the Israel lobby with Jews.
THe hard part comes in beause I think that he doesn't realise that certailny for Jews who were raised under the sort of jews are victims mindset, and to be truthful, most everyone else. It doesn't really matter how you qualify your classification after the word "Israel." Once the word is in there, everyone reads the word "Jew" into it. SO I think what that ends up meaning is that he's guilty, not of anti-semitism, but of being an academic who is so used to being an academic that he doesn't think about how common usage and underlying prejudices affect our understanding of terms. Humpty Dumpty argued,
"When I use a word,it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less...The question is which is to be master -- that's all."
but in reality, outside of academia, we don't get to do that.
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