By Philip Weiss
December 05, 202:
Information Clearing House
-- "Mondoweiss"
-- The news from the Middle East is that
negotiators in Vienna are trying to restart the Iran
deal, and Israel is doing all it can to throw a
wrench into the works. Its officials are leading a
“blitz” to end the talks: the Prime Minister
has called on the U.S. for an “immediate
cessation of talks,” while the Defense Minister will
travel to Washington this week to appeal to the
Biden administration that “there may be a point when
we will have
no choice but to act,’”
Al-Monitor reports.
The Israelis and their many rightwing friends in
the U.S.
are saying the U.S. must maintain crippling
sanctions on Iran and keep threatening war, and oh
yes, Israel has
“free rein” to attack Iran in Syria. And
Israel will bomb Iran if it deems it has crossed
a nuclear threshhold– which is always just six
months from now, forever. While anonymous Israeli
officials
tell pliable Israeli reporters that Tony Blinken
is the “biggest leftist” in the Biden administration
and he is stoking “tensions” between the U.S. and
Israel.
So much for the Biden-Bennett honeymoon. In
August, the Biden welcomed Bennett at the White
House, and announced that they were “close friends,”
and Israel’s friends in the U.S. rejoiced in the
fact that Israel was a bipartisan cause again,
because the divisive Netanyahu was gone, and
Democrats and a rightwing Prime Minister were on the
same page.
One tenet of that close bond is: If there are any
disagreements, they will be aired privately. Bennett
has now violated that understanding. He is trying to
embarrass Biden publicly, and tell the United States
what to do with Iran. Just as Netanyahu
embarrassed Biden very publicly and went to the
Congress to try to undermine the Iran deal in 2015.
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On that occasion, Barack Obama made perhaps the
bravest statement of his presidency,
saying, “As president of the United States, it
would be an abrogation of my constitutional duty to
act against my best judgment simply because it
causes temporary friction with a dear friend and
ally. ”
American leaders need to follow Obama’s example.
They should stop listening to Israel, they should
tell Israel to bug off. It’s in America’s interest
to restore the Iran deal, and also to get Israel to
stop stealing Palestinian land. Both of which aims
are completely counter to the new Israeli
government. It loves having a global cold war with
Iran to keep the world’s attention off apartheid.
This ought to be easy. When Russia occupies
territory, the American political establishment
supports the occupied people and cites international
law and morality. When the U.S. decides to screw
France to
make a deal with Australia, it screws France and
France recalls its ambassador, and a lot of quiet
diplomacy follows but the superpower has had its
way.
The superpower should have its way with Israel
too; but no, Israel is a spoiled brat that issues
ultimatums. The reason it gets away with this
behavior is obvious. There is a powerful Israel
lobby inside the United States (though our
mainstream press
claims it might not exist), and the lobby has
one overriding purpose, to make sure there is no
daylight between the U.S. political establishment
and Israel. The power of the lobby is the reason
that Netanyahu once told a hot mic that the U.S. is
a “thing that can be easily moved.” The power of the
lobby is why Trump trashed the Iran deal in 2018, to
keep the support of his biggest backer, Sheldon
Adelson. The power of the lobby is the reason
progressive Congressperson Jamaal Bowman goes and
meets with a rightwing Israeli prime minister, and
sells out Palestinian human rights organizations,
out of fear he will lose his seat in Congress if he
doesn’t defer to Israel.
It is really a pity, and a moral horror too, that
American leaders can’t tell Israel to fuck off. But
there are countless well-funded organizations,
telling these politicians to stand up and grin for
the “unwavering
special” relationship between the United States
and Israel. Donald Trump threatened the American
consensus by trying to politicize it, and say the
Democratic left was going off the reservation. But
then former members of AIPAC promptly started a new
branch of the lobby, the Democratic Majority for
Israel, to close rank in the Democratic Party. And
Nancy Pelosi banished the left by
saying that the Capitol would crumble and fall
before the U.S. abandoned its support for Israel, so
please ignore the leftwing critics in her party.
Now Joe Biden is afraid to take on the lobby
because the midterms are looming; and Tony Blinken
has to
cater to Israel’s new more-photogenic p.m. even
when he is insulting him. The clear message from
Vienna is that the Iran deal will not be restored
because Biden is
refusing to lift the sanctions that Donald Trump
reimposed on Iran. Obama’s point man Ben Rhodes says
it’s all about the lobby.
Biden is afraid to politicize the issue. He knows
that Adelson’s widow is
conducting the same sweepstakes her late husband
did: to see which Republican candidate for president
will be the most pro-Israel. He knows that AIPAC is
all over the Democratic Party.
The special relationship with Israel should be
politicized. It helped get us into the Iraq war,
with catastrophic consequences for many nations, and
is now endangering war with Iran. It has granted
endless immunity to apartheid, with desperate
consequences for the Palestinian people.
Fifteen years ago, Walt and Mearsheimer called
out the lobby’s influence in a landmark book on
American foreign policy, and as Mearsheimer said
often, “We just Israel to be treated like a normal
country.”
But that book can still only be read in brown
wrappers in Washington, and the intrusion in our
politics by Israel and its friends just keeps
getting deeper. Twenty-seven states adopt
legislation that would limit free speech rights by
penalizing those who boycott Israel. A Georgia
lawmaker
confesses that the Israeli government “asked me”
to introduce one of those bills. A dozen
attorneys-general seek divestment from Unilever
because one of its brands, Ben & Jerry’s, doesn’t
want to be foster the persecution of Palestinians by
selling ice cream in occupied territory. A
Republican congressman who voted against Iron Dome
says AIPAC’s effort to turn him out of office is
“foreign interference in our elections.” The
University of North Carolina
clamps down on a teacher who wants to tell the
true history of Palestine after the Israeli
consulate and a Democratic congressperson pressure
school officials. “[I]t is strange that the Israeli
consulate general was granted an audience,” the
instructor says. “If this was a class on Hungary or
Australia, would the university have permitted the
attempted interference of a foreign government? The
fact that this meeting happened at all is clearly a
threat to academic freedom.”
The American people want distance. Polling shows
that they are overwhelmingly for an evenhanded
approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict, that
young people are moving to the Palestinian side, and
that Democratic voters are for sanctions on Israel
over its settlement behavior.
It is time that our mainstream press surveys all
the damage and takes on the corruption in our
political process. It’s time our leaders stop
worrying about what the lobby and Israeli officials
want and channel Obama’s question of 2015. What is
the American interest?
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