New book on Israel lobby

Dan Fleshler has a new book that looks good. He posts some advance reviews from on his own blog. Excerpted from one, from Shlomo Ben-Ami:

This is a brilliant study of two intriguing contradictions pertaining to the story of America’s Israel lobby. One is the contradiction between the reality and limits of Jewish power, on the one hand, and the popular perception of that power, on the other. Another has to do with the yawning gap between the Israel lobby’s hawkish policies and the liberal views of the majority of American Jews.

Truth about AIPAC

Dan Fleshler has a good post on AIPAC:

Dismissing AIPAC as nothing but a support group or cheering section for Dick Cheney and Richard Perle feeds the hunger of those on the far left and far right for a bogeyman, an organization that can serve, along with Israel itself, as a kind of totemic hate object, a repository of all that is wrong. I am trying to write a book about the conventional Israel lobby and my task would be much easier if AIPAC could be summed up so glibly. But I’m afraid it can’t.

The inconvenient truth is that many of its members and board members are centrist Democrats; they are politically moderate, at least by American standards. They want the U.S. to keep Israel strong by giving it a qualitative military edge because they believe Israel’s neighbors still want to destroy it. They are deeply worried about Iran and the dangers they believe it poses to Israel and to the U.S., especially to American troops in Iraq, But they are not irresponsibly trigger happy. Even Philip Weiss, a hero of the cabal-watchers, was initially a bit perplexed when, in the first policy conference he attended, he found himself rubbing shoulders with attendees and listening to speakers who were moderate, temperate and as desirious of peace as he is (although they don’t care as much about Palestinian suffering or Palestinian rights as he does).

J street already "too Jewish"

Judeosphere notes that JStreet is already saying things "progressives" will hate. What will the moderates say when "more progressive" people start saying that they knew all along that it would just be another arm in the Zionist Lobby.

Vaguely related, since, as Judeosphere noted, J Street is concerned about Iran ("US policy towards Iran is not working. The threat of a nuclear Iran, its destabilizing regional influence and the vile rhetoric of its President are all real":) Seven ancient synagogues in the Iranian capital, Tehran, have been destroyed by local authorities

J Street

I'm still kind of skeptical about this J Street thing. Not because I disagree with any of it's stated aims, but because everything I've seen about J Street, up to this video, promotes the antisemitic framing of "the Israel lobby." There are a thousand dovish, pro-Israel groups already, like Meretz USA and Americans for Peace Now. (The apparent difference here is that those organizations are not registered as lobbies.) And people like Mearsheimer and Walt already know about them. I entirely expect that, as soon as Mearsheimer and Walt have some disagreement with this J Street project, they will conceive of the whole thing as just another head on the Jewish hydra.

You can listen to some more here.

Is "Israel" the same as "World Jewry"

Consider the statement, "World Jewry has a stranglehold on the American Congress." Most people with even a passing familiarity with antisemitism would consider that a typically antisemitic comment. On a scale of 1 to 100, it's pretty high up there. Keep in mind the idea of that scale and rate for yourself the following statements.

First, just a tiny, little change. "The international Jewish community has a stranglehold on the American Congress." It's really not much of a change in meaning, so, perhaps being generous we might call it a tiny bit less antisemitic.

"Zionists have a stranglehold on the US Congress." Probably worse than "The international Jewish community..."

"The Israel lobby has a stranglehold on the American Congress." It's not immediately clear to me (based on just the words themselves) that this statement is even meant to be any different in content than any of those above, except that it's meant to not be understood as antisemitic. But if it isn't immediately clear that the content is significantly different, shouldn't we be at least a little suspicious?

Yet, I think a lot of people would have immediately thought to themselves that the statement is fundamentally different. Mearsheimer and Walt put it this way in their famous article on the Israel lobby London Review of Books:

The bottom line is that AIPAC, a de facto agent for a foreign government, has a stranglehold on Congress, with the result that US policy towards Israel is not debated there, even though that policy has important consequences for the entire world.

Well, they say "AIPAC" rather than "the Israel Lobby," but I don't think that's really so important. At once it's a more concretely defined object, but obviously less powerful than "organized Jewry" could be. And if we recognize that we ought not to say that organized Jewry controls Congress, why would we think that it makes so much more sense to say that a less powerful group has that much power. Ultimately, M&W rely on the full "Israel lobby" to try to explain AIPAC's power, anyway, so it becomes the same with a simple, logical substitution. (The phrase "de facto agent for a foreign government" is also really problematic, but we'll save that for another time.) A lot of people wrote that no matter how much antisemites might enjoy and profit from Mearsheimer and Walt's work, it's clearly not antisemitic.

But how can this be clearly not antisemitic if the only difference is a (superficial?) substitution of a few words. In a world where Canadian can be used to mean "black", how can we ever think that substituting just a few words could change meaning so much as to render such a statement objectively and unquestionably not antisemitic? Instead, I think it would serve us well to recognize that Israel often functions in the same was as "World Jewry" used to within antisemitism. So, if substituting one for the other makes a statement blatantly conspiratorial, we should probably be especially aware of the possibility.