In America, the power of the Israel lobby is much greater than at any time in the past, and certainly since the 1967 war. We are faced, here in this country, with the extraordinary spectacle of a US President confronting a foreign leader with a list of reasonable requests – negotiation in good faith, the abandonment of encroaching “settlements,” an end to the arbitrary humiliations endured by a people under occupation – and the leaders of the opposition are taking the side of the foreign leader. This from a party that revels in its alleged super-“patriotism”! Romney, Huckabee, and the whole Fox network team went into overdrive, following the President’s Mideast speech, flaying him for “betraying” Israel. Fox News even ran a story warning that “Jewish donors” would not back the President’s reelection campaign on account of his supposedly “new” stance.
In his “make up” speech to AIPAC, Obama once again reiterated this commitment and boasted about all the money we’re shoveling over there so Bibi can build “settlements” and keep the Palestinians in subjection. US “aid” built the wall that separates the Israeli green belt from the great prison-house of the occupied territories, and which makes permanent a land grab on a vast scale. Without that aid, both military and economic, Israel would sink like a stone beneath the demographic waves.
In short, we have the Israelis in a complete state of military and economic dependency – and yet they are calling the tune, and not Washington. What’s up with that?
The reason, in short, is the pro-Israel movement in the United States, a well-organized and inordinately wealthy political machine that operates as the Israeli government’s agent in America. Here is a lobby – in effect, a fifth column in league with a foreign government – so powerful that it has become the decisive factor in determining US policy in a region of the world vital to US national interests. It has succeeded in subordinating those interests to Israeli objectives, and it has done so by creating a political apparatus in the US that politicians defy at their peril. Apologists for the Israel lobby constantly maintain that they have done nothing wrong, that their activities are carried out in full public view and in accordance with the principles of American democracy – and in this they are absolutely correct.
