Might the 'Celebration' also be a way to throw a bone to the religious-right-rapture crowd? "Jerusalem must remain the undivided capitol of Israel" implies as much.

The 40 years following the 'victory' have seen the Palestinians suffer "terrible privations, physical isolation, and psychological disfigurement...For the Israelis, occupation has been...a grave security hazard and source of moral corrosion." 'The New Yorker' May 28. (Have to wonder what Iraq will look like in 40 years.)

As the Duke of Wellington said, the only thing worse than a great victory is a great defeat.

What this actually has to do with the Middle East escapes me but it has a lot to do with terrible legislating. For too long the Congress has passed bills that written in the most broad terms and have allowed to bureaucracy not just to carry out mandated policy but in effect to make policy. This is not something bureaucracies are intended for nor good at.

Meanwhile the Congress passes these endless commemorative or praise bills such as the one M.J. mentions but the Cheese week, etc ect. Congress, and the nation, would be much better off if the Congress legislated a lot less but in more detail.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

I wonder if Congress is going to pass a resolution condemning Israel on the 40th anniversary of their deliberate attempt to sink the U.S.S. Liberty, an American ship operating as a listening post in international waters. They failed to sink the ship, but they did manage to kill 34 Americans.

Doesn't the term referring to Jerusalem as the "undivided capitol of Israel," often imply an exclusively Israeli capitol of Israel? The Palestinians are being encouraged by the Israelis to move elsewhere through a variety of means of questionably legality, such as the imposition of checkpoints, making travel in and out of the Palestinian portion of the city extremely hard, and the difficult rules and laws, capriciously applied, for obtaining (and keeping) residency papers. And the illegal Israeli settlement activity in and around Jerusalem has been proceeding at a fever pace. B'Tselem, The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, wrote a report on this phenomena in 1997, entitled "Quiet Deportation," and in the 10-year period since the report was published, the situation has deteriorated even further.

Whether or not they realize it (or care), it appears that deportation of Palestinians from Jerusalem what our Congress is endorsing in this bill. Maybe we should make passing a test on basic knowledge of the Israeli-Palestine conflict a mandatory requirement for office.

Know your enemy well, for in the end that is who you become. ~~Old Chinese Proverb

I would have no particular problem if you referred to the Liberty incident as Israeli-hating. My own reading suggests that it was not authorized at the high command levels, although both the US and Israeli commands were derelict in preventing the incident. In the Gulf of Tonkin, the comparable DESOTO patrols were done by fully armed warships in pairs, one with a portable electronics van.

I object strenuously, however, to any argument that Israel speaks for Jews that do not live in Israel, have no desire to live in Israel, and consider themselves represented and defended by their own countries, not Israel. It's really easy to throw around "Jew-hating" whenever Israel is criticized -- and perhaps unfairly criticized in this incident.

Had the SIGINT patrol been done by ships of the type used in the DESOTO patrols, there would have been no question of misidentification -- and also no question that the ships could defend themselves.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

Okay: Yes, Jerry Nadler et. al. will be engaged in Arab-bashing, and in kowtowing to the more neanderthal segments of a Jewish lobby that, for the past 20 years, has not known what is good for it.

People like MJ may have less credibility on Capitol Hill today than the dinosaurs who dominate the AJC and ADL. But those guys -- and you, from the sound of you -- are dying off. Your brand of rhetoric already sounds fossilized to me, and I'm in my late 30s. There's a generational shift going on in American Jewish politics, and you are either going to have to move with it, or you will start to find yourself ignored and marginalized by the younger Jewish mainstream.

Accumulating Peripherals

Congress is celebrating the fact that the arabs failed to anihilate Israel. They are celebrating the 40th anniversary of Israel's defeat of her genocidal enemies. Not surprisingly, you would find something sinister in that, since I'm sure you and the rest of the people on this board wish Israel had lost that war and thus no longer existed.

You are a sick puppy. Especially now with Iraq, Lebanon, Al-Qaida and Hamas any talk about the I-P conflict looks totally insignificant. The I-P being the center of the universe is as valid as the flat earth; good luck and be careful not to fall of at the edge.

. . . passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others, which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained, and by exciting jealousy, ill will, and a disposition to retaliate in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld; and it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite nation) facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country without odium, sometimes even with popularity . . .

George Washington, Farewell Address

Says Genius Emet, man of G-d:
"Go to Borough Park in Brooklyn or Monsey, NY or Teaneck, N.J. or Waterbury, Ct.--thousands and thousands of Jewish voters under 40 whose views about what to do with the Palestinians make mine look like Kucinch's. Those Jews vote in every election, more of them vote in every election becaue they have lots of siblings, and they vote on one issue and only one issue, unlike you and your friends."
Wow. He's bragging about traitors, people who "vote on one issue and only one issue," Israel.
They live here, use all the benefits of the US and vote on the basis of a foreign country.
They should get the hell out.
Fortunately 90% of American Jews vote on the basis of what is good for America.
AS for all those candidates who profess to love Israel.
Right! They love Israel and will until we put in public financing of campaigns and discover that the leftwing get-out-of-West Bank and East Jerusalem position is shared by virtually every member of Congress.
Emet, you don't give a flying damn about this country except as Israel's arsenal. As Tom Tancredo would say, about people who love this country but are "illegal" and have no dual loyalties, go back where you came from.
You are a true shonde fur de goyim.

There is no doubt that the Leftwingers, who mouth the usual anti-Semitic tripe or the most modernists who give a pass to every murdering group so long as they aren't American or Jewish, speak for every few people. They come to Cafe and find their fellow travels who also speak for no one.

The irony of their sanctimony is that they support the least democratic elements in the world who oppress their own people particularly women and whose regimes are some of the most illiberal in the world.

What the people here will not perhaps cannot admit is that AIPAC is not just a rightwing luny group but they like the AJC B'Nai Brith speak for most Jews and indeed most American who may disagree with Israel on particular policies but don't believe unilateral surrender will result in anything other than a lot of dead Jews.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

J. McCutchen

The Right Wing's Israel Lobby: Purveyors to the Booboisie

'Wiped off the Map' – The Rumor of the Century Across the world, a dangerous rumor has spread that could have catastrophic implications. According to legend, Iran's president has threatened to destroy Israel, or, to quote the misquote, "Israel must be wiped off the map." Contrary to popular belief, this statement was never made

Those Jews vote in every election, more of them vote in every election becaue they have lots of siblings, and they vote on one issue and only one issue, unlike you and your friends.

I'm not sure the second part of your sentence here constitutes a semantically meaningful statement, but leaving that aside: you're bragging that the people you associate with are fanatical zealots who don't care about the environment, education, the health care system, moral values, abortion, or anything else in American political life other than supporting the settler line in Israeli politics? Way to make the Jews look good.

I hang out with Jews all over the world. You appear to hang out with Jews in certain conservative neighborhoods in the tri-state area.

Accumulating Peripherals

You are right Matt. I worked for AIPAC as a volunteer from '73-'75 and then as editor of Near East Report, its publication from '82-'86.
Back then we claimed 60,000 Members when we had 40,000.
But even if AIPAC has 100,000 members, that is a small percentage of American Jews.
In fact, all the Jewish organizations put together only add up to a few hundred thousand in membership.
So how do we find out what Jews think? Polls. And they all show Jews are overwhelming liberal, Democratic, strongly pro-Israel and in favor of the Rabin-Peres Oslo approach, not the ZOA hardline. The hardliners are the Jewish Republicans who garner 18% of the overall Jewish vote and 90% of the tiny Orthodox vote.
It's like the gun issue. The NRA claims to speak for all gunowners but polls show a healthy majority of gunowners favor gun registration and other restrictions on firearms. Who is heard? NRA.
Fact is, we don't live in a real democracy. We live in one in which special interests can claim to speak for majorities which they do not reflect.
The answer, of course, is campaign public financing.

I think we can pretty much take it for granted that America's role with anyone as an honest broker for anything is long over and gone.

Mr. Rosenberg, you are absolutely right about one thing: every poll of American Jewry shows overwhelming majorities who are stronly pro-Israel. Does that mean they favor the Avigdor Lieberman-Bibi Netanyhu expansionist approach? No, and on that we also agree.

But just as clearly those strongly pro-Israel Jews do not accept as truth the condemnations and calumnies against Israel that are a daily occurrence here, or the canard that supporting Israel's government's policies is traitorious to American citizenship, or the notion that peace can come if only the Israeli Government would just disapear and let Palestinians control what the international community granted to Israel in 1947-48, or the idea that it is illegitimate for
American Jews to participate fully in the political process, through organizing, voting and contributing, exactly to the same extent as Catholic Americans, evangelical Americans, Greek-Americans, and, for sure, Arab-Americans are free to do under the First Amendment.

I don't disagree that the Clinton-Barak plan has a reasonable chance. There are details that are not completely clear, as exactly how the West Bank and Gaza would be made contiguous in order to be exchanged for settlements in the OT. I note that the agreement does speak to resolving the sale of the Phalcon AWACS radar and electronics system, which, with a close ally, should never have risen to head-of-government level.

Syria, as far as those agreements, is a big question mark. Are they trying serious negotiations? Unknown, and, quite probably, necessary to be under the radar before diplomacy has to be conducted in news conferences.

Where I have the problems with Israeli acts and rhetoric starts with things such as the militarily disproportionate response in Lebanon, and the continued barrier and settlement expansion. I also have problems with rhetoric that the Palestinian question is insoluble, but not having the audacity to call for Endloesung.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

Again the evidence, please. Show me one instance where anyone at AIPAC told a Member of Congress or an Administration official that AIPAC speaks for 6 million American Jews. AIPAC doesn't do that and doesn't have to do that. When its officials talk, the listeners know that it speaks for 100,000 dues paying members who are among the most politically active citizens in the country and within every state and every Congressional district. You got a problem with that? Take it up with Johnny Jay, Alex Hamilton and Jimmy Madison who encouraged as many factions as could be conceived--just like NARAL ProChoice America, the Sierra Club, Emily's List, the NAACP, and AIPAC two centuries later-- to do exactly that.

Determined to _REFUSE_ to learn even from the hard way.

When will Israel fulfill its obligations under the several UN resolutions ordering it to cease its illegal occupation of Palestinian lands, which any reasonable person recognizes as a provocation -- deliberate or otherwise?

No rhetoric, excuses, or ideological claptrap: Answer the question.

A message from Jimmy Madison to Emet:
"There is no comparison between NARAL, NRA, Sierra Club, NAACP, etc, because all those groups lobby for Americans and not for a relationship with a foreign government. AIPAC should be a registered lobby as are the lobbies for UK, Canada, Saudi Arabia, etc."
Also, "I hate dual loyalty. I had my differences with George Washington but when he said that America should avoid entangling alliances, the old man was talking about Israel."
Then he said you are a dickweed (18th century term for a person who knows little but talks alot).

People who claim U.S. citizenship and who are members or supporters of AIPAC or ADL are practicing sedition and should be treated as such.

I also have problems with rhetoric that the Palestinian question is insoluble, but not having the audacity to call for Endloesung.

Don't quite get your meaning. Are you saying you have a problem with NOT calling for genocide??
I know you don't mean that.
I would point out that there are more than the two options of "unsolvable" and "genocide", as for example, "live with conflict" in perpetuity, if that's what it takes. So to say that those are the only two options falls victim to FALSE DILEMMA, which seems to be at epidemic proportions in public discourse.

Sometimes it helps to review thing we already know implicitly but fail to take into account when making a particular point.

We often assume that various groups --more or less--hold political sway over our government and that our government is a sort of tree which gets blown this or that way depending on the net forces that impinge on it. We want to believe this because it appeals to an idealized version of democracy that never really obtains in reality.

The truth of the matter is that those in government have a powerful tool at their disposal. They can shape and empower groups at will. So for example we hear that Bush has forked over BILLIONS of dollars to the religious right with his Faith Based initiative. So those in government shape what groups will be in the ascendancy and which will be allowed to wither in the vine.

A complicating factor in this symbiotic relationship is that opinion-makers---i.e. the media--often are responsible to some degree as to who gets elected to office and who not.

So it is a system of interlocking relationships that is at work here.

Given this picture, it turns out that it is quite possible that the system will favor a course of action for the nation that might not exactly be the best course of action to take. Iraq is an example that comes to mind.

Unless we find a way to rectify this method of allocating power, we run the risk of getting involved in things that are not in the best interests of the nation as a whole.

One final problem: when we talk about the best interests of our nation, we seem to get a warm and fuzzy feeling about some kind of "family". But the reality is that there is no "our nation". There are irreconcilable factions that vie for power all the time.
This makes it all the more difficult to determine what we mean when we say that a certain policy is "good for our nation". Who's national interest are we talking about? The Middle Class, the poor, the upper 1%, Catholics...etc. Hardly anything is going to be good for each and every one of us who are Americans.

Utilitarians opt for defining the "good" as that which results in the maximum benefit for the maximum number of people.

Rawls has other ideas.

Libertarians embrace the implied anarchy.

Our system suffers from lack of transparency as to what is to count as the national interest. It is no consolation that other systems tend to be even worse. But here is where I think there needs to be more discussion.

The Jewish communities in Judea/Samaria are not "illegal". The pre-1967 borders that MJ and so many in this group view as sacrosanct were never recognized by anyone as an international border. Judea/Samaria are viewed as "disputed territories". Someone claimed the World Court said they are "illegal", but I have no idea whether its rulings are viewed as obligatory.
The US State Department and Israeli Supreme Court have ruled they are not "illegal".
In any event all (and I mean ALL) Jews resident in Judea/Samaria/Gaza and eastern Jerusalem before 1948 were ethnically cleansed from the area. Who said that is "legal"?
UN Security Council Resolution 242 which was passed after the Six-Day War does not require a full Israeli withdrawal to the pre-1967 lines.

I wasn't aware that it is "against the law" for US Citizens, who live under a Constitution that guarantees freedom of speech and assembly are forbidden to lobby for the interests of another country they feel a connection to. What about the Saudis, Kuwaitis and others who are pouring millions of dollars into various politicians pockets? Did you hear about the Jaguar car Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia gave to Former Secretary of State Colin Powell? The US has never sent its soldiers to fight for Israel, but they have fought in Kuwait and Iraq. What do you say about that? What about the official Greek Lobby in the US that has played a major role in pressuring the US to adopt policies friendly to the Greek Cypriots which led to strains the US relationship with NATO-ally Turkey? What about the Irish Lobby in the US which interfered with the traditional US/UK relationship? Why don't you get worked up over these US Citizens lobbying in behalf of other countries supposedly to the "detriment" of US foreign policy. Or is in only the Jews who have to be held up to your high standards?

Here is your answer!

Once again, you're promoting the now totally discredited racist Zionist lie about how the Palestinians are new comers in order to justify ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinians by Israelis.

Jews were NEVER a majority there, and NEVER in total political control. Even according to the best Zionist historiography, the Jews ruled the area for only 600 out of 6000 years of its history. And even that does not give any superior rights to land today to a bunch of racist occupiers from Russia or Brooklyn.

As Rabbis Face Facts, Bible Tales Are Wilting
Michael Massing
The New York Times
March 9, 2002

Abraham, the Jewish patriarch, probably never existed. Nor did Moses. The entire Exodus story as recounted in the Bible probably never occurred. The same is true of the tumbling of the walls of Jericho. And David, far from being the fearless king who built Jerusalem into a mighty capital, was more likely a provincial leader whose reputation was later magnified to provide a rallying point for a fledgling nation.

Such startling propositions — the product of findings by archaeologists digging in Israel and its environs over the last 25 years — have gained wide acceptance among non- Orthodox rabbis. But there has been no attempt to disseminate these ideas or to discuss them with the laity — until now.

The United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, which represents the 1.5 million Conservative Jews in the United States, has just issued a new Torah and commentary, the first for Conservatives in more than 60 years. Called "Etz Hayim" ("Tree of Life" in Hebrew), it offers an interpretation that incorporates the latest findings from archaeology, philology, anthropology and the study of ancient cultures...

Jerry Nadler is, in fact, my congressman, and a very good congressman he is. There may be a fair number of misguided young Jews in Borough Park who have Avigdor Libermanish pro-ethnic-cleansing attitudes on "what to do with the Palestinians", in your revealing formulation. On the West Side of Manhattan...not so many. There, people tend to think that persecution and dispossession of another people is unlikely to be "good for the Jews".

Accumulating Peripherals

Well, well, well, there you have it! We have a newspaper article (which you have repeatedly posted, apparently you have no other material) that "proves" the Jewish Patriarchs never existed. Who are these "rabbis" who have granted "wide acceptance" of this nonsense?
I attended a conference of Biblical archaeologists who completely reject this point of view, but you don't seem to quote them. I guess the New York Times is more reputable in "scholarly circles" than the archaeologists I heard.
The United Synagogue only represents a small percentage of world Jewry and even if they adopt these ideas it doesn't grant any legitimacy to your point of view. I can also quote articles, even from the New York Times, saying there is no such thing as a Palestinian people, so you had better start accepting that idea!

Lieberman is in favor of transferring sovereignity of Arab towns in villages to Palestinian Authority control and sovereignity. How is that "ethnic cleansing"? Amos Shocken, the post-Zionist publisher of Ha'aretz (do you read his web site www.haaretz.com ?) recently also said Lieberman was a "racist" for advocating this transfer of sovereignity, but then in a separate editorial, he wrote that the Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem, which are also under Israeli sovereignity, just like the places Lieberman is talking about, should be transferred to Palestinian control! Why is it "racist" to transfer Um-el-Fahem to the Palestinians, but praiseworthy to transfer east Jerusalem?

ISRAEL TO DECIDE 2008 US PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES

In the run-up to the 2008 US presidential elections, The Jerusalem Post Internet Edition JPost.com has invited central presidential contenders to respond to questions on matters of importance to Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world.

We will be sending out questions to the candidates every two weeks or so. We started out with a relatively general inquiry about the importance they attach to the US's strategic alliance with Israel and how, if elected, they would work to foster that alliance (see below). The questions will get more specific as the campaign heats up.

The first question was sent to John McCain, Hillary Clinton, Rudy Giuliani, Barack Obama, John Edwards, Mitt Romney, Joe Biden, Bill Richardson and Sam Brownback.

http://blogcentral.jpost.com/index.php?cat_id=4&blog_id=73&blog_post_id=1145

Ever write your one of your reps in the US Congress and wonder why they never have time to write back? That's because they're too busy sucking up to Israel. The presidential candidates are putting on a show for the big money interests, like AIPAC and don't have time for us peons.

greg bacon
ava, mo

bar - You are being cute again. You know very well that there is a major difference bewteen East Jerusalem and the territories Lieberman wants transferred. In the latter case, these arabs have Israeli citizenship that they would lose. In East Jerusalem very few arabs have Israeli citizenship because it was not given when Israel annexed the territory. Because of that most East Jerusalem arabs never undertook the onerous and obstacle ridden path to naturalization. That is the reason the Lieberman transfer and East Jerusalem are treated differently by many of us.

All east Jerusalem Arabs are entitled to all government benefits. They are entitled to automatic Israeli citizenship, if they want it. They do not have to go through a "naturalization" process. Even though they do not vote in national elections if they don't have the full citizenship, they can vote in municipal elections, but they don't, in general.
Again, as I have pointed out, Arabs are rushing to get Jerusalem residency status, and none are leaving ot live in the "liberated Palestinian territories". There must be some reason for this.

MJ and others love quoting polls. "Polls showed that a majority of Israelis supported destroying Gush Katif" and Sharon and Peres used that as an excuse to avoid calling an election or national referendum to get true legitimacy for their act. Polls, especially on complex issues don't mean anything. So what if "most American Jews" supposedly supported the Oslo disaster? Sharon called a Likud party referendum on the Gush Katif destruction proposal (he at first promised to honor the results, but when he lost overwhelmingly, he said he made a mistake in calling it and then ignored it). I worked as a volunteer
in the "NO" campaign. I was able to convince several people who at first said they were for it to change their mind, once I explained the facts. This is why Peres once said "elections are undemocratic(!)", since it gives his opponents a chance to make their case.
Most American Jews are not very well informed about what is going on in Israel and they are not on the front line of facing the consequences if everything goes sour, just as what happened with the Oslo and Sharon's "Disengagement" fiascos.
If MJ were to call some American Jew who has never been to Israel, and asks the following question : "Are you in favor of the agreement Rabin signed with Arafat in order to bring peace and an end to the Arab/Israeli conflict?" you will get a VERY different result than if MJ asked "Do you favor the Oslo agreement plan which brings well-know terrorist Arafat to Israel, arms him and gives him money, knowing he has broken every agreement he has every signed, leading to bloody wars in Lebanon and Jordan, and realizing he will likely do the same in Israel"? (which is, of course, what happened).
The fact is that more knowledgable Jews in America, who have stronger connections to Israel, such as the Orthodox community whom MJ dismisses as being a marginal group, are more "right-wing". The majority of Israelis are also "center-right". So please stop boring us with these meaningless polls.

bar - You are full of it. Automatic citizenship?????? You've got to be kidding. My niece works in the Ministry of Interior and she has seen exactly zero citizenship applications by East Jerusalem arabs approved since 1998 when she started working there.

Arabs are rushing to East Jerusalem to preserve their status as residents. It's the only place where there still is an economy and a way to earn a decent living. Entitled to all government benefits??????? Have you seen the disparity between arab and Jewish schools in East Jerusalem???? It's even worse than in places like Haifa. Stop drinking the kool-aid. Israel isn't perfect and you lose credibility when your responses are pure propaganda.

From June 7 ECONOMIST:
Israel's 40 Wasted Years

ON THE seventh day Jews everywhere celebrated Israel's deliverance from danger. But 40 years after that tumultuous June of 1967, the six-day war has come to look like one of history's pyrrhic v