Selves and Others

BUENOS AIRES, Mar 24 (IPS) - On Mar. 24, 1976, a military coup in Argentina burned an indelible mark on the history of the country’s democratic institutions. Thousands of people were kidnapped and ’disappeared.’ After the 1976-1983 military regime, nothing was ever the same again. But democracy acquired a renewed value and widened its base.

Political parties and trade unions, which dominated the scene before the coup, are today only secondary channels for social participation. The guerrilla groups that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, drawing in rebellious youngsters, have ceased to exist, and their violent methods would find few champions today.

A wide spectrum of civil society organisations has taken the place of the forms of representation that were traditional before the dictatorship. They are articulate in expressing their demands and proposals, and exert considerable influence on the outcome of a number of issues on the public agenda. (...)

In the United States, one hardly hears a peep about the Mearsheimer and Walt paper on the Israel "Lobby", except among readers of the London Review of Books and avid followers of Middle East politics. Alan Dershowitz, Israel’s unofficial ambassador to Cambridge, Massachusetts, predictably denounced the paper as anti-Semitic, but then he would probably find the rumblings of a pogrom in a negative review of his favorite deli.

To me what’s most interesting about the reaction is how muted it is, especially given that neither author is known as a critic of Israel, and that both are members in good standing - or were until this paper appeared! - of the American foreign policy establishment. The lack of debate is, of course, a measure of the power of the Israel lobby to suppress discussion of its role, and the fear the lobby stirs among American writers, especially non-Jewish liberals who cannot afford to be tarred as anti-Semites, a death sentence in the profession. (...)

Norman Kember, the British peace activist kidnapped in Iraq, is expected home in two days after being freed with two fellow hostages following an operation by international forces.

It is believed that the location where the three men were held in west Baghdad was traced after information was supplied by Iraqi go-betweens who had established contact with the kidnappers. (...)

Translated by Barry Smerin

An adviser to Israel’s prime minister, summing up its strategy after the Hamas election win, said the Palestinians should be ’put on a diet but not starved to death’. They will be punished for practising democracy, and both the United States and the European Union endorse that punishment. Western double-talk about democracy and justice has provoked outrage in Muslim countries and encouraged resistance to foreign intervention.

Although the world’s political observers were surprised by the landslide victory of Hamas in the Palestinian parliamentary elections in January, it should have been foreseen as inevitable given the disregard for international law and human rights in the Palestinian territories that have been occupied by Israel since 1967.

The inhabitants of East Timor have wrested independence from Indonesia, and Bosnia and Kosovo have benefited from major international action to protect their peoples and grant autonomy as a prelude to independence. Meanwhile the Palestinians have seen what is left of their territory consumed by expanding settlements, and the illegal construction of the wall that is turning the West Bank into a huge collective prison (1). Gaza was evacuated ceremoniously by its 8,000 settlers and the Israeli army, but security has still not been restored: every day Israeli air strikes cause more civilian casualties. (...)

The Israel lobby seems to have no better friends than certain Palestinian and other Arab academics who have rushed to dismiss the power of the Zionist lobby over US Middle East policy

when it is under a rare attack in the mainstream such as we see today in the case of the monograph on the lobby by Professors John Mearesheimer and Steven Walt. That they do so even as the

heavy-hitters of the lobby itself are attempting to censor their work makes it even more disturbing. They totally ignore or undervalue the manifest evidence that the lobby does, as former State Dept.

aide Stephen Green wrote in Taking Sides, US and Militant Israel, determine the parameters in which an American president can make decisions in the region and by ignoring the serious conflicts that

occurred between the lobby and the Carter, Ford and Senior Bush administrations that ended in victories for the lobby and by insisting that those who blame the lobby are absolving the US of its own

responsibilities as if it’s an either/or situation. Professor Massad and the others should hark to the comments of the sorely missed Prof. Edward Said who did not mince words on the issue. In his

contribution to The New Intifada, entitled, appropriately, "America’s Last Taboo," he wrote:

(...)

Unless the Jewish lobby loosens its grip on Washington’s foreign policy, the US should expect a change in its standing among Arabs, writes Joseph Massad

In the last 25 years, many Palestinians and other Arabs, in the United States and in the Arab world, have been so awed by the power of the US pro-Israel lobby that any study, book, or journalistic article that exposes the inner workings, the substantial influence, and the financial and political power of this lobby have been greeted with ecstatic sighs of relief that Americans finally can see the "truth" and the "error" of their ways.

The underlying argument has been simple and has been told time and again by Washington’s regime allies in the Arab world, pro-US liberal and Arab intellectuals, conservative and liberal US intellectuals and former politicians, and even leftist Arab and American activists who support Palestinian rights, namely, that absent the pro- Israel lobby, America would at worst no longer contribute to the oppression of Arabs and Palestinians and at best it would be the Arabs’ and the Palestinians’ best ally and friend. What makes this argument persuasive and effective to Arabs? Indeed, why are its claims constantly brandished by Washington’s Arab friends to Arab and American audiences as a persuasive argument? I contend that the attraction of this argument is that it exonerates the United States’ government from all the responsibility and guilt that it deserves for its policies in the Arab world and gives false hope to many Arabs and Palestinians who wish America would be on their side instead of on the side of their enemies. (...)

[23 - 29 March 2006 | Issue No. 787]

WASHINGTON, Mar 22 (IPS) - The pro-Israel lobby in the United States has manipulated Washington’s policies in the Middle East to the point where it is the U.S. that does most of the fighting, dying and rebuilding while Israel reaps most of the security benefits, argues a new study by two U.S. scholars.

"This situation has no equal in American political history," says the 83-page study, "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy".

"Why has the United States been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another state?" ask authors John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

The answer, according to the paper, which is already stirring debate in academic circles and fury among pro-Israel groups, is the influence of the pro-Israel lobby. (...)