Israel Lobby Watch

Until the advent of Zionism at the turn of the twentieth century, Jews for whom their Jewishness mattered believed either that their identity was of a strictly religious nature or, if they were secular, that it was a meaningful marker of their ethnicity. In other words, Jews who wanted to identify themselves as Jews were either Jews in that they practised a religion called Judaism or they were Jews in that they believed they belonged to a distinct ethnic group. But Zionism added a third possible category of Jewish identity. The new kind of Jewish identity was a strange hybrid from the outset.

”As usual, most of the American press docily followed the official line from Israel and Washington that the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier a week ago was unprovoked. The fact is that the assassination of a Hamas government official was the proximate cause of the kidnapping. The assassinated official, Jamal Abu Samhadana, was the head of the Popular Resistance Committees, an organization on the terrorist list of the United States and Israel. He was apparently brought into the Hamas-led Interior Ministry to head the police forces in Gaza.” Eugene H. Bird served with the United States Foreign Service for 23 years and is President of the Council for the National Interest.

Recently, the Hudson Institute, a prestigious, academic think-tank in the United States, with an impressive list of associates though strongly pro-Israel roots, released a surprisingly amateurish report through its project ‘Eye on the UN’. The report criticises the United Nations for granting consultative status to the internationally respected Palestinian NGO Badil. As Yacoub Kahlen writes, their flimsy critiques are strong indications of the growing desperation amongst elite supporters of Israel that the Zionist lobby is losing the moral argument, and just like the NGO Monitor, the ‘Eye on the UN’ should not be taken seriously by anyone interested in serious analysis and a human rights perspective.

Some weeks ago I heard Jan Wijenberg, a retired Dutch Ambassador, speak about what the International Community could do to break with its complicity to the ongoing violations of international law and human rights by the Israeli regime. Wijenberg served over a decade as an ambassador for the Dutch government in Jemen, Tanzania and Saudi Arabia. He regularly writes to Dutch ministers and politicians to remind them of the responsibility of the Dutch government and the EU to hold Israel accountable to international law. His views are expressed in this article.

The Palestinian ambassador Afif Safieh, since his arrival in Washington several months ago, has often used the line “We Palestinians have been unreasonably reasonable” in the approach to retrieving their land for achieving peace. Was Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in his appearance before a joint session of Congress unreasonably reasonable in suggesting that negotiations could go forward because he was willing to give up some of his dream of having all of the Holy Land? Well, maybe. Yesterday’s speech by Olmert was the sixth time that an Israeli head of government has been given the honor of appearing before a joint session of Congress in the last thirty years.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s address to both houses of Congress was perhaps the most skilled use of Newspeak since George Orwell invented the term in his novel 1984. Just as Orwell’s totalitarian propagandists proclaimed WAR IS PEACE and Israeli government signs placed at the Wall (sorry, fence) at the entrance to Bethlehem greet Palestinians with the blessing PEACE BE UNTO YOU, so Olmert declared in Washington: UNILATERAL REALIGNMENT IS PEACE.

Well, I think, to begin with, I don’t think that anyone believes that American coverage of the Israel/Palestine conflict is evenhanded. I don’t even think that journalists and editors who are responsible for that coverage believe it. The coverage in the American media of the Israel/Palestine conflict is, frankly, useless. I don’t read it at all, I’ll be perfectly honest, I stopped reading it. I don’t read the editorials, I don’t read the op-eds, and I don’t read the news columns. You learn absolutely nothing from it.