Terry Walz

The blinkered government of Israel continues to undermine normalcy in Palestine and the peace process as the world is slowly but surely reaching out to initiate a dialogue with a new unity government of Palestine still dominated by the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas). It is painfully obvious that Israel is no longer interested in a peace process leading to a two-state solution, and in any event won’t make a move in that direction without a push from the US. Meanwhile, the blurring of lines between legal and illegal foreign aid has been made clear for several years.

Last week the London Review of Books did a great service to free speech in this country by enabling Prof. John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago to have a debate on the Israel Lobby that he thought would never take place. The event was titled “The Israel Lobby - Does it Have Too Much Influence on U.S. Foreign Policy?” and its main purpose was to debate the pros and cons of a paper Mearsheimer wrote with Prof. Stephen Walt of Harvard University called “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.” It was a perfect opportunity for the much criticized national media to report on a key issue in our foreign policy.

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.

Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the pro-Israel chairman of the House International Relations Committee Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia, scheduled a hearing today to discuss the annual request for military and economic aid to Egypt, and those attending came away with the impression that the top Zionists of the subcommittee were changing their minds about the usefulness of promoting democracy in the Middle East. For the last several decades, the US has supported aid to Egypt as a way to promote democratization of its civil institutions.

Malaysia, a South East Asian Muslim state with a booming economy and a successful and peaceful multicultural, multireligious society, may soon establish a new center to spearhead and rejuvenate the global movement for Palestinian independence. This falls exactly fifty years after the birth in Bandung of the once-powerful anti-colonial bloc of non-aligned states that yielded a powerful influence on the international stage for many years. Under the sponsorship of Peace Malaysia, over 500 participants from 34 countries met March 28-30 in Putrajaya, the administrative capital of Malaysia, and unanimously adopted an action plan that called for the creation of a new International Center for Palestine Civil Societies in the South.