Obama versus the Israel Lobby

Israel Lobby, New Jewish Elite, Organized Jewish Community

by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)

 

On Jan. 28 & 29, Phil Weiss made the following two important blog entries at Mundoweiss respectively.

1. Obama vs. Clinton: Code for Anti-Israel Lobby vs. Pro?
2. Will Obama's 'Jewish Problem' Allow Media to Talk about Israel Lobby?

The second article makes the important point that "Obama's problem with Jewish voters" is simply code for "Obama's problem with Jewish donors," who worry that Obama just might sympathize with Palestinians and act upon that sympathy however much he swears fealty to the State of Israel, grovels before the Israel Lobby, and kisses the feet of the wealthiest Zionist Jewish campaign contributors.

 

The first article mentions Obama's groveling but then continues by discussing Israel Lobby attacks on Robert Malley and Samantha Power, who are members of Obama's policy team.

 

I was very slightly acquainted with Robert Malley at Yale. His father Simon Malley was a prominent Jewish Arab Francophone journalist. I believe his mother was an ethnic Ashkenazi American. Robert had no connection with the Yale Jewish community. Like his father he was a PLO supporter, but when he has spoken at MIT, he fully articulates the ahistorical American pragmatic approach that fails to acknowledge that in some cases basic issues of justice and principle cannot be ignored.

 

Phil makes the following comment about Samantha Power.

American Prospect reports that the Commentary crowd is going after author/adviser Samantha Powers for once uttering the words Israel and Iraq and "special interest" in the same breath. The quote from SamPo:

Another longstanding foreign policy flaw is the degree to which special interests dictate the way in which the "national interest" as a whole is defined and pursued . . . America's important historic relationship with Israel has often led foreign policy decision-makers to defer reflexively to Israeli security assessments, and to replicate Israeli tactics, which, as the war in Lebanon last summer demonstrated, can turn out to be counter-productive.... So greater regard for international institutions along with less automatic deference to special interests–especially when it comes to matters of life and death and war and peace–seem to be two take-aways from the war in Iraq. [Emphasis mine]

The American Prospect argues that Commentary is distorting Powers's meaning. She wasn't really talking about the Israel lobby. I hope she was. Aren't you sick of all the code here? Let the issue come out.

The attack on Power looks like poetic justice, for she has been prostituting herself to the Jewish media elite and organized Jewish community for a long time. Check out  Killing Muslims Under Humanitarian Cover.

 

Yet, just as the American Prospect argues, Power may not actually have been talking about the Israel Lobby.

The Israel Lobby as Walt & Mearsheimer framed it is a foreign policy issue.

Phil Weiss as often as not addresses the effects on American society of both the organized Jewish community and also the New Jewish Elite, which supplanted the old NY German Jewish Elite (sometimes called "Our Crowd").

The two starting points for analysis are intertwined, but they are distinct as I learned when I spent time in chatting with Jewish student activists at the Joint Massachusetts Legislative Hearing on Sudan Divestment. While I have found that the upper ranks of the JCPA (Jewish Council for Public Affairs) orchestrated the Save Darfur movement in conjunction with the Neocon leadership as a distraction from Israeli atrocities and the Neocon inspired disaster in Iraq, the Jewish students approached Darfur as a Jewish responsibility connected with remembering the Holocaust.

Holocaust promotion (or Holocaust Religion) represents a Jewish special activity separate from the Israel Lobby even though the Israel Lobby and Zionist apologists in general use the Holocaust to justify the theft of Palestine from the native population.

Holocaust Religion makes it possible for a wealthy powerful Jewish elite to shield itself from criticism under the cloak of victim status. Even if Israel did not exist, the organized Jewish community would still be devoted to a sort of secular Holocaust religion.

In addition, white conservatives can parade their support for Holocaust Museums and Holocaust shrines as proof of their opposition to racism and anti-Semitism even as they do away for the governmental programs that are trying to overcome the structural disadvantages from which African Americans suffer in the USA.

Herein lies one possible collision between special Jewish interests (and not special Israel Lobby interests) with Power's pet projects. The effort or act of Holocaust memorialization can distract from actually fighting ongoing genocides like the Holoexaleipsis (the Great Erasure of the native Palestinian population) that continues in Stolen and Occupied Palestine (pre-1967 Israel and the Occupied Territories).

Other non-Israel-related but important ongoing projects of the New Jewish Elite and the organized Jewish community include:

• Regendering American and global society according to feminist and gay liberation principles and
• Friedmanism (making the world safe for free markets and free trade, i.e., reinterpreting freedom as freedom of exploitation).

The first program could easily collide with Power's identification of genocides worthy of attention while the second makes no sense mathematically and can create or exacerbate conflicts that may become genocidal. 

The Israel Lobby often makes use of such projects, to wit, the argument that Americans should have no sympathy for Palestinians, Arabs or Muslims because they tend to be anti-feminist and anti-gay.

Likewise, the American Jewish Power elite occasionally uses Israel-related issues to achieve its goals. For example, an Israel-related crisis or catastrophe in the Arab or Muslim world creates the opportunity for Friedmanites to peddle their snake oil by means of tactics described in The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein.

The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy misses the big picture. Phil Weiss is closer to understanding, but his analytical framework needs refinement.

[BTW Power in her general hypocrisy denies that Zionists genocided and continue to genocide the native Palestinian population.]

 

Sphere: Related Content