Israel Lobby Watch

The U.S. blanket support for the Israeli war on Hezbollah can be laid at the feet of the Israel Lobby, concluded Professor Stephen Walt and Prof. John Mearsheimer in an analysis they presented at the National Press Club in Washington on August 28. Their presentation, which was sponsored by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, was a widening of their critique of the lobby and focused on the role it played in the recent Israel-Hezbollah war. It showed once again how the lobby works against both Israel’s and the United States’ national interests.

If you are confused and puzzled by the recent scramble by the United States and the UN to bring peace to Lebanon, perhaps we can help a little bit with a short read of what we think this all means. In fact, you may be able to write your own resolution, which may make more sense and have more real wisdom than UN Security Council Resolution 1701, passed a week ago. There is a story going around Washington, DC, that three wise men approached the President a fortnight ago with a very strong message that he had to move to a ceasefire as quickly as possible. American interests were being undermined throughout the world.

I don’t know for sure what Hezbollah’s real political calculation has been, but they certainly expected a large-scale reaction on the part of Israel, which has already invaded Lebanon several times before. For this reason, it seems to me that their action entailed an important element of “adventurism,” all the more that the risk they have taken involves the whole population. They have actually taken a very big risk in initiating an attack on Israel, knowing its huge military power and brutality, and the population could hold them responsible for a new war and a new invasion, the cost of which the Lebanese people will have to bear.

There are real issues between Lebanon and Israel that should have been settled with the help of the United States long ago. Israel failed to keep her promise to make available maps of the 140,000 mines she left behind in Lebanon. Three small sectors of land overlooking the Litani River were retained by Israel and were the cause of complaints from the government of Prime Minister Fuad Siniora, not just Hezbollah. The three Lebanese prisoners that were moved by Israel, contrary to the Geneva Convention prohibition against an occupying power transporting prisoners into its own territory, should have been returned long ago.

The capture of a French-Israeli gunner on a tank during military operations on Palestinian territory triggered an extreme and illegal response from the Israeli government. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza are paying an unacceptably high price as a consequence of Israel’s ongoing attacks and border closures. Israel’s performance shows a total disregard for the rules of international humanitarian law. They have lost sight of the human value and dignity of the Palestinian people. If Europe recognises that the lives of Palestinians are as valuable as the life of the French-Israeli soldier, it should act immediately to stop the tragedy that is unfolding.

The Bush Administration has been A.W.O.L. when it comes to being an effective peacemaker between 4 million Palestinians and 6 million Israelis. Having locked itself into the untenable position of rejecting the results of the Hamas election six months ago in Palestine, the administration and Israel now find themselves facing a full-scale insurgency. Both countries have only a military solution. Several times in the past five years spokespersons for the administration have said that there is no military solution to the confrontation between Israel and Palestine.

When elections were imposed on the Palestinian people, while still under occupation, we questioned and suspected the whole process. We wondered how a free election could be conducted while the whole nation lives under a military occupation, especially in light of the undeniable correlation between freedom and democracy, as stated on the US Department of State’s website: “Freedom and democracy are often used interchangeably, but the two are not synonymous. Democracy is indeed a set of ideas and principles about freedom, but it also consists of a set of practices and procedures that have been molded through a long, often tortuous history. In short, democracy is the institutionalisation of freedom”.

Three weeks ago, U.S. Congressmen Michael McCaul (R-Tex.) and Joseph Crowley (D-NY) solicited a bill concerning the “persecution” of Palestine’s Christian communities. The initiative attempts to intervene in Palestinian-Israeli politics by presuming that the Palestinian Christian minority in the West Bank and Gaza is “systematically” oppressed by the Muslim majority-and that punitive sanctions should apply. It is founded on the sweeping assumption that because Muslims outnumber Christians in the Palestinian territories, and because the Muslim fundamentalist Hamas party now dominates the Palestinian National Authority, Palestinian Christians are necessarily under threat.