That's a good point. That Eric Alterman is a sharp one. Where's his review of the Boss' latest?

One of the virtues of Mearsheimer and Walt's book is the 108 pages of footnotes. Just reading the list of editorials and op eds in Israeli papers during the spring and summer of 2002 makes a very convincing case that the Israel heavily urged the US to war in Iraq. That remains a solid fact. The debate is over the importance of this pressure in moving the US toward war. To see a recently neocon rag like TNR proposing the restoration of Moran's reputation is a measure of how far the lobby book is influencing current discourse.

This is funny:

J'Accuse, Sort Of
You never know where you're going to find anti-Semitic propaganda.
By Michael Kinsley

http://www.slate.com/id/2175263/

I'm not Jeffrey.
I've copied the text from:
http://www.tnr.com/blog/openuniversity

Oops. It's getting like Russian dolls.

Why should anyone, other than MJ, care about the religion of somebody in the media? I can't think of a more boring subject. Okay, sports.

ecotourism
WeGoEco.com

Assuming that the Palestinians have thuggish leadership, that most Palestinians would not (at this time) want to live in peace side by side with Israel, your implicit assumption ( the nuanced position) is that we have to maintain the satus quo in the region because the only other alternative is to expose Israel to anarchial thugs next door.

I beg to differ. Israel--which has a stable government and the military and economic might--could help the Palestinian people evolve into a more structured, less corrupt entity. However that is not what Israel chooses to do.

I might add, if Israel did not impose the harsh conditions it imposes as occupiers, it would be easier for the Palestinian people to attain a more stable life. Let me suggest that it is because the Palestinians are brutalized by a harsh occupation, that they act as they do. The only other alternative explanation you might offer that comes to mind is that Palestinians (perhaps all Arabs) are thuggish by nature. which clearly is a racist view.

Brad, even granting your point about the dangerously violent and law-deficient character of Palestinian political society, you can't wave away the enormous extent to which Israel has created its own enemy, especially over the past 40 years.

Israel didn't retain the territories it occupied in '67 because Palestinians were inept at self-government. In fact, Palestinians weren't so inept at self-government, until the intifada ripped apart their more settled structures of village and town governance; and the intifada really was forced on them by 20 years of Israeli oppression. There is no excuse for what Israel did in the Territories from 1967 to 1987; it was based on a right-wing expansionist fantasy, built of historical-messianic claims to redemption (in both religious and secular versions) and a vague belief that the Palestinians would somehow go away (because they're really just Arabs and can move to Jordan, or something). I know what those myths were in the '80s, because I was living there.

The Israeli right poisoned its own country. When you visit Israel today, you still see a lovely, democratic country. But that zone of lovely democracy is maintained by a cordon of shock troops, who suppress the violent fury at the margins, which grows ever more furious year by year as the suppression continues with no solution in sight. This is not a sustainable system. Israel will either create a Palestinian state next door, or it will die a slow death. And Israel is not taking the painful steps it needs to take in order to survive. It is instead persisting in the same old instinctive reactions, refusing to deal with Hamas after the Palestinians elected them just as it once refused to deal with the PLO, retaliating with massive force against the launches of Qassams and killing hundreds of innocents and dozens of children, intervening to undermine and break up any nascent Palestinian political structure that threatens to become powerful and self-sustaining -- precisely the kinds of structures it needs to deal with, as a "partner".

People like Matthew Yglesias and Ezra Klein realize this. You should not wave this away as "youthful idealism". The supposedly hardened realism which has been the governing ideology of the Israeli right since the '70s has proven itself to be a fatuous and naive idealism of its own short, only far more selfish and self-destructive. You look at Shimon Peres and Bibi Netanyahu, and tell me who is the grown-up.

"All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out." - I.F. Stone

U hear you are Davai!

There is no excuse for what Israel did in the Territories from 1967 to 1987; it was based on a right-wing expansionist fantasy, built of historical-messianic claims to redemption (in both religious and secular versions) and a vague belief that the Palestinians would somehow go away (because they're really just Arabs and can move to Jordan, or something). I know what those myths were in the '80s, because I was living there.

Well you must have led a pretty sheltered life when you lived in Israel because if you had gotten out more you would have realized that rightwing messianism, which is supported by probably less than 20%, if that, of the population, was NEVER the full explanation for why Israel held on to the territories.  It's not even most of the explanation.  Most Israelis supported holding on to the West Bank because of the "strategic depth" issue - the idea that for a country surrounded by hostile neighbors bent on its destruction, it's not a good idea to be only 9 miles wide at the narrowest point.  That was always the more important consideration.  

Now this is not to say that there isn't a fanatic portion of Israeli society that will fight tooth and nail to keep every inch of the land.  But they are convenient bogeymen for right-thinking liberals.   Their views aren't that significant in the grand scheme of things.  What I mean by that is this: if the prospect of a real peace (and by real I mean not only in its terms but also whether it can be enforced) were in the cards, with BOTH the Palestinians and the larger Arab World, I am certain you'd quickly see people move to sideline the fanatics.  The mistake most on the left make is that they assume Israel needs to concede the land first and peace will follow.  In actuality, it's the other way around.  The only way Israel will ever give up land is if peace is already in place and Israelis can feel it.  Anwar Sadat understood this. Hell, even Arafat understood this, in his twisted way, seducing a good chunk of the Israeli public with grand talk of a "peace of the brave".  But no one else in the Arab World, or among their leftist enablers in the West, ever has.

You look at Shimon Peres and Bibi Netanyahu, and tell me who is the grown-up.

And I would tell you that neither are grown-ups.  Peres lost all credibility with most Israelis by pushing the Oslo process long past the point where it should have been obvious that it was a dead end and because he sucked up to the duplicitous criminal Arafat.  He was so enamored by his left wing fans in the salons of Paris and London that he became a naive fool.  Netanyahu is a silver-tongued demagogue who cynically plays on the fears of Israelis for political purposes. 

What's needed - and sorely lacking - is a leadership that understands that a long-term continued occupation of the Palestinians is harmful to Israeli society - Israel can't just wait around for the Arabs to reform themselves - but that also understands that Israel also cannot just concede its way to peace.  Israel needs to be constantly pushing and probing for new ideas but also making sure that it is consistent to its fundamental security objectives.

My simplified description of anti semitism; "Those who hate Jews and wish them harm simply because they're Jews."

Don Bacon,

What tangled webs we weave.

Indeed, you do....

Antisemitism:

the strong dislike or cruel and unfair treatment of Jewish people

hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as a religious, ethnic, or racial group

discrimination against or prejudice or hostility toward Jews.

Ilan Pappe's new book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.

I recommend it.

Herzl,

In particular, I found BradtheDad's concluding paragraph quite reasonable.

What's needed - and sorely lacking - is a[n Israeli] leadership that understands that a long-term continued occupation of the Palestinians is harmful to Israeli society....

Please indulge an honest question.  What is specifically hawkish about what BradtheDad (the only commenter among those you'd mentioned who has actually left any comment in this discussion, so far) wrote? 

A couple of points:

First, how one feels about the wars one's own country gets involved in, and what one feels about a complex faraway conflict like the I-P issue, are two totally separate questions.  The I-P issue, precisely because it is complex and has two competing narratives, seems particularly prone to naive analysis.  And I would say that is true of the uberhawks who think the only answer is more force as well as the doves.

Second, it seems clear that one legacy of the Vietnam era is a much greater suspicion of military service.  Young people indeed signed up to fight in droves for WWII, as they did for WWI or the Civil War.  Notions of proving one's manhood on the battlefield were common.  It was only after Vietnam that the anti-military social revolution happened.  So to compare the attitudes of young people today with their counterparts from the WWII generation seems a bit ridiculous. 

And it is complete nonsense that people with military service make "reluctant warriors", in contrast to trigger-happy non-veterans.  If that were the case, presumably you'd have seen veterans vote disproportionately Democratic in recent elections, whereas in fact the opposite was the case.

Brad, yes, the strategic depth argument was important in the '80s, but the people who made it also argued simultaneously that there was no need for a Palestinian state and no possibility of negotiation with the PLO. You had guys who were literally terrorists -- Begin and Shamir, who had both practiced terrorism against the British and the Palestinians in the '40s; Shamir assassinated a diplomat -- who were using the "no negotiations with terrorists" line to avoid having to cope with the reality of Palestinian political aspirations. The Israeli attitude has ALWAYS been: "You see the Arabs; peace is impossible with such people. What do expect us to do?" And then, under cover of this typical Israeli shrug, they allow the land seizures, the bulldozing of houses, the theft of water resources, the checkpoints, the lockdowns, the rubber bullets and F-16 strikes to go on and on.

The idea that the settler movement is "not really important" is a canard. There is now only one real reason why Israel can't simply pull out of the West Bank, and that is the over 250,000 settlers who live there. They were a rabid minority, tolerated by the majority and subsidized by the Army and infrastructure ministries. They got what they wanted.

Back in the '80s, I myself was susceptible to that shrug. How can we negotiate with the PLO, after all? Well, it became apparent that you have to negotiate with the PLO because if you don't, you get the intifada. And when you refuse to negotiate with them, or renege on your agreements, you get another intifada. And when you refuse to negotiate with the leaders of this second intifada, you will get Hamas. And in the '80s Israelis were still pretending that they themselves bore no responsibility for the existence of the PLO -- that the Palestinians had just up and left on their own! Look -- at this point, any sane Israeli would give half the Negev to go back in time and negotiate with the West Bank mayors of the 1970s over the future of those territories, instead of having to negotiate with Hamas. With every steadfast refusal on principle, Israel throws away another generation of its youth.

Israel has NEVER made the effort it needed to make for peace. It never followed through on Oslo. Israel never fulfilled the commitments it made in the 90s to hand over territory to the PA; after Rabin was assassinated, Netanyahu delayed and delayed and delayed, finding excuses, staging provocations to slow things down and give the settlers time to consolidate. Barak took power with a clear theory, which was that Israeli political dynamics allow the left only a limited time to make a deal with the Palestinians and follow through on it before the right-wing reaction sets in. That was the rationale behind his all-out push for a final settlement before the end of his term, and it wasn't a bad analysis. He fell short because Arafat was a schmuck. But to say "Arafat was a schmuck" says nothing about what Israel needs to do next. Israel needs to do exactly the same thing Rabin and Barak did, over and over again, until they get that deal. They need to negotiate with whoever is on the other side of the table. There is no other option. The current madhouse, where Israel sits behind its borders waiting for the Qassams to fall and pouring firepower across the fence when they do, is a recipe for slow death. It's not a matter of "the occupation is corrupting Israeli society". That's the language of ten, fifteen years ago. Today, the occupation has corrupted Israeli society. There is no time left for these political debates. There will be a Palestinian state within the next ten years, or Israel is finished.

"All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out." - I.F. Stone

From Brad: the "occupation" is all that stands between having violent anarchy a few miles away from Israel's major population centers. That there is no functioning Palestinian government that can actually sign a deal and enforce its terms. That Israel is a decent, tolerant society with Western values for all its faults whereas Palestine is a cesspool of thuggery, corruption and violence. That there is a large chunk of Arab society that will never truly accept Israel, even if it gives up everything the Arabs say they want. And that chunk is probably a majority and is probably growing, not shrinking. I can stop probably by simply noting the quotation marks around the word "occupation." That is what Holocaust deniers do with the "holocaust." It's a statement.
The rest is Brad's standard Aipac twaddle. I'll bet he has never been to Israel or, if he has, he was on a 10 day Zionist miracle tour. He's never seen the separation wall, the West Bank, Gaza or anything except what the propagandist guide shows him. I don't know if any of that is true. I don't know Brad from Shlomo down the block. But his writings indicate no personal knowledge of Israel or any kind of serious study either. He seems to be part of the herd.
I don't insult people this way usually. But I think that when we use fake names like "Herzl" or "Zionista" or "Bradthe Dad," we are not being personally insulted. So, in nother words, I don't despise some real guy named BradtheDad. Just a type all Israelis know all too well. Warriors from afar.

What's needed - and sorely lacking - is a leadership that understands that a long-term continued occupation of the Palestinians is harmful to Israeli society

There is nothing wrong with being a little bit humble.

Zionista,

Main Entry: 1harm
Function: noun
Pronunciation: 'härm
Etymology: Middle English, from Old English hearm; akin to Old High German harm injury, Old Church Slavonic sram? shame
1 : physical or mental damage : INJURY
2 : MISCHIEF , HURT

That says it better than I can. Take it for what its worth and please don't try to get me into an in depth meaning of the word as that kind of discussion can become endless and surreal if not downright metaphysical.

To paraphrase someone, a SCOTUS? I know harm when I see it'.

WAs war started before such declaration?
http://history001.tripod.com/id60.html
But Hitler thought otherwise. He was convinced that the United States would soon beat him to the punch and declare war on Germany. The U.S. Navy was already attacking German U-boats, and Hitler despised Roosevelt for his repeated verbal attacks against his Nazi ideology. He also believed that Japan was much stronger than it was, that once it had defeated the United States, it would turn and help Germany defeat Russia. So at 3:30 p.m. (Berlin time) on December 11, the German charge d'affaires in Washington handed American Secretary of State Cordell Hull a copy of the declaration of war.
That very same day, Hitler addressed the Reichstag to defend the declaration. The failure of the New Deal, argued Hitler, was the real cause of the war, as President Roosevelt, supported by plutocrats and Jews, attempted to cover up for the collapse of his economic agenda. "First he incites war, then falsifies the causes, then odiously wraps himself in a cloak of Christian hypocrisy and slowly but surely leads mankind to war," declared Hitler-and the Reichstag leaped to their feet in thunderous applause.

There is nothing wrong with MJ.
He has a very strong point of view, you can't blame him for that.
There is something wrong with tpmcafe.
On any other subject, there are several
contributers with DIFFERENT point of views.
On I/P confict there is a monopoly of MJ.
Monopolies are not good.

Herzl,

I don't insult people this way usually. But I think that when we use fake names like "Herzl" or "Zionista" or "Bradthe Dad," we are not being personally insulted. So, in nother words, I don't despise some real guy named BradtheDad. Just a type all Israelis know all too well. Warriors from afar.

Why should screennames even matter when we have real words beneath them that we can take issue with, or generally reply to?  BradtheDad and I have gotten into our share of disagreements over months and years here, and never has he reacted to my arguments as a "type."  Taking words out of context and responding to "type" are not arguments, but rather the Gingrich ethic: "When you run out of arguments, make it personal."  It may work if the intent is not to communicate, but rather to pile on and drown out inconvenient perspectives (as the Gingrich-led GOP House majority at its peak during the Clinton era arguably had) and it does absolutely nothing to advance a genuinely constructive discourse.

JohnW1141,

If we limit "harm" only to individual physical injury, then what happens when, say, AIPAC is conflated with all Zionist sympathies at every point along the political spectrum in our particular discourse?  Is that harmful?  If it is, then we are back in murky territory with respect to defining antisemitism. 

When Don Bacon dismisses antisemitism by resting the argument of its manifestations on the definition of "semitic," in its proper context as linguistic terminology, is there really no harm done (or at least mischief, per your definition of "harm")? 

Elsewhere and at other times, Howard and I have discussed ideas of race, and we have reached agreement on the questionable scientific soundness of the idea of race.  But I do not believe either of us would accept that "racism" does not exist simply because of the unscientific misuse of the word and its various forms.

This discussion may also go some length to address a question about "implications" that you had once asked of me, and as I recall you'd found my answer unsatisfactory.

To paraphrase someone, a SCOTUS? I know harm when I see it'.

Do I have the same privilege?

English is a living language, constantly evolving and changing. There's no reason why the term shouldn't change to reflect a more accurate meaning. It makes no sense that it would be used exclusively to refer to Jews, when there are clearly other Semitic ethnic groups, some of which arouse emotions in certain people which are undeniably "anti-."  

"If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail." ~~ Abraham Maslow

Oops, I was wrong--now you're very clearly showing your old self, davai. A new name won't do you any good if you don't change your ways of trolling questions and work on the syntax of your sentences before posting. Ever think of limiting yourself to 1 or 2 comments per thread, and really working on what you want to say in them, and leaving it at that, leaving some thoughtful words stand for what you think, rather than pestering others continually with poorly thought-out, knee-jerk adverserial questions?

Your arguments are not unreasonable in many respects, but you paint a typically one-sided picture of things.  Let's start from the top:

Brad, yes, the strategic depth argument was important in the '80s, but the people who made it also argued simultaneously that there was no need for a Palestinian state and no possibility of negotiation with the PLO.

In the first place, the strategic depth argument has never gone away.  And in the 1980's it was made by plenty of people, not just those who ruled out negotiation with the PLO.  Later on, the resistance to the Oslo process came from BOTH the messianic fanatics as well as those who just didn't trust the Arabs.

Let's also be clear that for most of the 1980's, it was not just Israeli right-wingers who couldn't see negotiating with the PLO, it was also the PLO who refused to make even elementary changes to allow negotiation with Israel.  It was only in 1988 that Arafat made his strategic shift from pistol-toting revolutionary to pseudo-statesman, declaring only then that Israel had a right to exist.  It took a couple of years (and the first Gulf War) but the Oslo process started soon after.

The Israeli attitude has ALWAYS been: "You see the Arabs; peace is impossible with such people. What do expect us to do?" And then, under cover of this typical Israeli shrug, they allow the land seizures, the bulldozing of houses, the theft of water resources, the checkpoints, the lockdowns, the rubber bullets and F-16 strikes to go on and on.

If you knew anything at all about Israel, you'd know that the "shrug" does not represent "the Israeli attitude", as if there is a single attitude that sums up the complexity of Israeli public opinion.  Furthermore, the proportion of Israelis who take the "shrug" attitude has waxed and waned over the years.  In the early 1990's the proportion of people who rejected the shrug reaches its apogee as peace seemed plausible.  The depredations of the Arafat government, primarily its refusal to confront Hamas, changed all that. 

Well, it became apparent that you have to negotiate with the PLO because if you don't, you get the intifada. And when you refuse to negotiate with them, or renege on your agreements, you get another intifada. And when you refuse to negotiate with the leaders of this second intifada, you will get Hamas.

This is a completely bizarre reading of the last 20 years.  It overlooks the fact that the first intifada had little or nothing to do with whether Israel negotiated or not with the PLO, most of whose leaders were in Tunis at the time.  It was a local uprising driven by local conditions.  It was only after 1993 that Arafat and his cronies returned to take over from the local leaders who started the violence back in 1987. 

Worst of all, you simply skip over the fact that the second intifada was started at the HEIGHT of the peace process, AFTER Ehud Barak had given away the store at Camp David a few months before.  The view among insiders is virtually unanimous that Arafat started the second intifada as a way of diverting attention from the fact that he had turned down a good deal (or, if you like, he turned down a good basis for negotiating a deal) and world opinion had swung against him. 

As for the canard that Israel "reneged on its agreements" I'm curious just which agreements you're referring to.  Israel never agreed to stop building in the territories, although if you ask me it was certainly unwise to continue doing so.  But let's assume they did, for the sake of argument.  Are you actually arguing that Israel ALONE was reneging?  That Arafat was fastidiously following the rules but Israel alone was the rogue actor?  Good luck with that argument.

You make one solid argument, which is that Israel has indeed indulged the settler and "Greater Israel" movements while also claiming that you can't make peace with the Pals, so why give back the land.  It's seriously myopic and is a function of the crazy way Israeli democracy is practiced. 

If the Palestinians didn't have a 50-year history of terorrism, if the Arab countries that use the I-P issue as an diversion from their own problems had made peace, if the Palestinians has used the autonomy that was granted them in the 1990's to build a real society instead of a corrupt, gangster-ridden satrapy, then you could argue that Israeli stubbornness on the settlements is the main obstacle to peace.  As it stands now, the settlers certainly don't help the cause of peace, but they a down the list of reasons why peace has been so elusive.

The current madhouse, where Israel sits behind its borders waiting for the Qassams to fall and pouring firepower across the fence when they do, is a recipe for slow death. It's not a matter of "the occupation is corrupting Israeli society". That's the language of ten, fifteen years ago. Today, the occupation has corrupted Israeli society. There is no time left for these political debates. There will be a Palestinian state within the next ten years, or Israel is finished.

This is the most curious argument of all.  I was just in Israel in August.  The last impression anyone gets is that this is a society facing "slow death".  On the contrary, the economy is reasonably vibrant, people are living their lives, Israelis are doing great things in science, business, art and culture and tourists are coming back in droves.  The apocalyptic langugage about Israel being "finished" is simply ridiculous.

It's always possible that Israel will face a quick death by a nuclear Iran or some other unforseen way.  But if you think that desperately making concessions to Hamas is going to forestall or prevent that, you're living in an alternate universe.  And after what Israel went through in the last seven years, you are simply not going to convince a majority of Israelis that repeating the Oslo formula with whoever happens to call themselves the government in the Palestinian territories is going to solve anything. 

There is also the popular post-Marxist-post-modernist ideology which divides the world into victims and victimzers. The great victimizer is of course the United States. However, depending the era the victimizer can be the white European males or Europe or today when discussing the Middle East Israel is the stand-in for the United States.

This is want makes the American far left, such as Rosenberg, so supportive of the deaths of Israelis and so delusional about their pet Palestinians. Not only is there no effort to look at reality, how Bush like, but there is not need to do so. Victims get a pass if they blow up school buses, fire missiles into countries or spend 50 years threatening the destruction of their "victimizer." Victims are morally able to do anything they deem necessary no matter how immoral or how stupid.

The other result is that Universities, blogs like this one are largely marginalized in American thought. They are so out of touch with the 67% or so who support Israel.

Rosenberg seems himself as so clever by defining what hawks support. He supports the policies that have shown no evidence, ever, of leading to peace but lots of evidence of leading to dead Jewish children. His merry band of supporters are largely irrelevant in the national debate, even with the Jewish community, because most Americans and most Jews recognize that the Palestinians can make peace among themselves and have basically made their own plight and that the Jews of Israel should not be put at risk to make those indifferent to dead Jewish children happy.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

I am curious which is it: The Bush Administration came to office wanting to go to war with Iraq and AIPAC supported the policy of the sitting president of the United States or AIPAC lobbied for the war and thus led to the war?

Was AIPAC the only supporter of the war with Iraq? By the way why were you indifferent to Saddem's torturing and murdering of his own people and his invasions onf Iran and Kuwait?

Daniel A. Greenbaum

It's like Daniel is in love. Work it out, Danny. MJ doesnt know you exist. Besides he's married with 5 kids!

Yes, davai, I agree TPM Cafe really needs to get some good Palestinian and/or Arab-American commentators.

:-)

"If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail." ~~ Abraham Maslow

The problem comes when Americans promote policies in a foreign conflict that are in the interests of the foreign country to which they are attached, not necessarily in American interests.
The pro-Israel lobby has pushed America into a situation where the world sees us and Israel as identical. Israel's enemies become our enemies.
This is precisely the kind of "foreign entanglement" Washington warned us to avoid.
With the exception of the current President, American policies have supported peace between Israelis and Arabs as in America's best interests.
Bush, under the influence of the neoconservatives/AIPAC crowd, dropped that in favor of 100% identification with Israel.
This pleases the "Israel is always right" crowd in this country but dismays those of us who see Americans defending "my country right or wrong" not in relation to America but Israel.
I always hated that slogan. I don't believe in America right or wrong. But I don't apply that to any foreign country either. The lobby and its supporters do.

Too late,

and you take the last word.

So nothing anyone says, writes or signs necessarly means anything other than what you want it to mean.

Isn't that what you are doing, by insisting that the language cannot evolve to reflect a more accurate meaning of the term? Whether one considers "Semites" to be an ethnic group or a linguistic classification, it's clear that the term, "Semites," does not refer only to Jews, yet you and folks like Dershowitz insist that when we need to add an "anti-," that's the only acceptable meaning, logic be damned, and if all of the rest of us don't toe the line we'll be accused of anti-Semitism. 

And since I doubt very highly that what Marr had in mind was a linguistic category, your arguments appear to be self-contradictory. I don't think that you should have final say over how the English language evolves. None of this dilutes in any way the very real anti-Semitism of the Nazis, Zionista.

"If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail." ~~ Abraham Maslow

Deleted

That Israel is a decent, tolerant society with Western values for all its faults

I'll leave it at that. I researched for a longer post but found it almost impossible to find anything written from a neutral stance. Let's just say that most tolerant Western societies don't allow armed civilians to illegally set up settlements on other peoples land. And then tut tut over the open illegality without taking positive action.

Israel under Labour at least tried hard on the tolerance side. Israel under Netanyahu, Sharon and Ohmert? Not so much.

And you forgot the part where, when you first moved in, having just fled another neighborhood after being driven out and repurchased your great-great-grandfather's old house, the neighbors said "we don't want your kind here," and tried to burn the place down. You also forgot the part about how actually this part of the drama, where you moved back in, were attacked, then seized a chunk of extra land etc., took place decades ago, and the feud is now being carried on by grandchildren, most of the original participants having died.

Well, it wasn't really a claim to the house based on your great-great-grandfather's ownership, was it? It was a 2,000 year old claim, that you insist has greater legitimacy than that of the family who had occupied the house for the hundreds of previous years. And rather than that family, wasn't it you, by saying that you were setting up an exclusively Jewish household, who was saying, "we don't want your kind here," first. Your neighbor had suggested that you share the land equally together, after all, but you didn't want that. 

And you're not aware that the Occupation is a current event? This is precisely the kind of attitude that fuels Palestinian dispair - and rage. Should we simply forget about what really happened because the Israelis have been so successful in delaying the intevitable, while forever expanding the settlements, creating facts-on-the-ground?

But really, who cares about this narrative?

I think you do, or you wouldn't have posted the analogy that started all this. I've noticed that the narrative only seems to become unimportant when someone insists that the Palestinian portion of the narrative be considered as well as the Israeli part.

"If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail." ~~ Abraham Maslow

"'17, '36, '47, '67, '87 or '00."

The root of the situation lies much further back than the 20th C. Much of the problem festers in the belief among significant numbers of Israeli and American Jews that current-day Israel is just part of the Land of Israel, given to the Jews by God, and no arguments based on law, fairness, justice, or even human decency, can shake this tribal belief.

"Was war started before such declaration?"

No.

Isn't that what you are doing, by insisting that the language cannot evolve to reflect a more accurate meaning of the term?

You have it quite backwards.

Words are most often developed to describe things that already exist. The phenomena of Jew hatred is a sadly pervasive one in Western culture. It has existed for centuries with surprisingly consistency in its elements and in its impact.

The word antisemitism developed in Western languages for the very purpose of naming this very specific ideology.

The most "accurate meaning" of the word antisemitism is the one that refers specifically to Jew hatred.

In support of this point, I will note that there has been specific discussion, by those who study language, over the years, that the correct way to spell it is without the hyphen. When spelled with the hyphen, it can lead to the misconception that it means "against semites". Without the hyphen, the "most accurate" definition is not blurred by those who wish, for whatever reason, to divest the word of its actual meaning.

You're not stupid Mr. Rosenberg and you've made it clear you strongly dislike Israel as it exists today. You know what the word anti-semite means and when it where it originated. And why. I read Rep. Moran's comments on Israel being one of the major causes of our invasion of Iraq and the shrillness and repetitiveness of that claim and I wonder. Cheyney had little to do with the war? The oil, our oil under their sand, doesn't matter? Just Jews in America matter more than all that in his very often repeated view. Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, I think he may well be a duck.

Wordie,

Whether one considers "Semites" to be an ethnic group or a linguistic classification, it's clear that the term, "Semites," does not refer only to Jews, yet you and folks like Dershowitz insist that when we need to add an "anti-," that's the only acceptable meaning, logic be damned, and if all of the rest of us don't toe the line we'll be accused of anti-Semitism.

Another shoulder, another chip.  Who are these folks like Dershowitz accusing you of antisemitism (or is it wishful thinking)?

None of this dilutes in any way the very real anti-Semitism of the Nazis,

As I would similarly question one who would insist that racism only existed at the level of Ku Klux Klan lynchings -- and that examining racism anywhere short of the extreme is somehow an attempt to "stifle debate" -- what puzzles me is why it is so vital to folks like you that antisemitism be defined out of existence and history, or at least limited strictly to the Nazi extreme.

Your statements would receive more consideration if you learned not to undermine them with gross exaggerations.

Or, at the very least, learned to count.

which is responsible for the ethnic cleansing of millions of people

Even if, as you seem keen to do, you place the blame for every non-Jewish person dislocated from their homes in the Israeli/Palestinian national train wreck, it still doesn't add up to "millions".

Yes, there are millions of Palestinians who are classified as refugees. However, those refugees are the result of many varieties of circumstances. Most are actually living where they were born.

Take, for example, the following situation. In 1948 some significant segment of the Palestinian population were renters. Of them, some significant segment were not living where they, their parents, or their grandparents were born. Now, sixty years later, are the grandchildren and great grandchildren (of those folks who subsequently had to leave their homes) accurately considered individuals who were "ethnically cleansed" by the Israelis?

As usual, Abdul-hass, you are completely ignoring the parts of the equation that don't fit your severe antithapy towards all things Israel. Nationalism is not a uniquely Western value. Moving one's family around due to war is not a uniquely Palestinian story.

This thread is basically about how the lobby is losing some of its ability to stifle debate for which we can thank Mearsheimer and Walt.

For those who would like to see a good essay on the book I recommend Uri Avnery at Counterpunch:

http://www.counterpunch.org/

Who cares if it "makes no sense that it would be used to refer exclusively to Jews"? It is.

Well, my idealistic self somehow has had the thought that if the similarities between the Israelis and their Palestinian neighbors were to be emphasized, rather than the differences, that perhaps that would be something that could lead to peace. You know, all Semitic peoples, all descendants of Abraham, all People of the Book. Some pipe dream, eh?

Quite frankly, I regret having waded into this part of the discussion. My real issue over "anti-Semitism" as a term has far more to do with what I see as it's far-too-broad application by some to refer to those who disagree with Israeli policy, or question U.S. foreign policy vis a vis Israel, as in the case of W&M, and in the particular case of the comments of Rep. Moran, as described in the articles MJ cited.

It was a mistake to have started to quibble about what for me is primarily a minor and only slightly annoying issue of logic. I have this problem with wanting things to make sense...

"If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail." ~~ Abraham Maslow

Nationalism doesn't have to be "uniquely western" or not, the fact remains that Zionism is a racist ideology that has a common root with Nazism.

And if Zionists can claim that they are have birthright to Israel based on their alleged and mostly falsified connection to the ancient Hebrews, then every single last Palestinian who has been driven out of their homes by the the racist pig murdering thug Zionists, and every single child, grandchild, great grand child, and 1000000th decendant has an absolute and unqeustionable right to RETURN.

Just look at Israel: driven by racism, hatred, living behind walls, murdering people, stealing land, shooting children, shoving families into tents so a bunch of BIGOTS can take their property. That's Israel. That's ALL Israel is. There is absolutely NOTHING redeeming about ISrael in comparison.

And until every single last Palestinian's rights are redeemed, every single Israeli is STEALING palestinian LAND, is drinking stolen Palestinian WATER, is breathing STOLEN Palestinian AIR, and is occupying STOLEN palestinian space. YOU"RE ALL THIEVES, the lot of you. Each and every single last one of you is personally absolutely responsible for MURDER.

The whole world knows it. You will never be admitted to among the civilized states of the world. You can never erase the memory of the thousands of Palestinain villages you eradicated.
You will never erase the memory of the MILLIONS of Palestians you've murderdered, tortured, dispossessed, and stolen from.

Never ever.

All if Israel is tainted, forever. And no matter how many fake "Jews" you import from Russia, and no matter how many Palestinian children you murder, it will never change.

Get used to it.

I'm a second generation American Jew. My grandmother came from a Jewish family that has lived in whatever you want to call it on the shores of the Med for generation upon generation. Although some of the family still live there (same city, not same house) some had to leave 101 years ago. By UN definition (ask them) I am a Palestinian refugee. I'm not alone. There was power and money in making that number as big as possible so the definition is to put it kindly, loose. I never did realize that I may have also have been ethnically cleansed.

How about considering the converse theory: that the Palestinians are subject to a harsh occupation because they continue to behave in a thuggish manner?

Recognizing that Palestinians or Germans are behaving in a thuggish manner in a certain period of time cannot be fairly accused of being a racist view.

The Palestinians will get nowhere until they start behaving in a civilized manner. They can start by being civilized to each other. Oh, I forgot, many here think that the fact that Fatah and Hamas are killing each other is not their fault or their moral responsibility -- it's Israel's. We can't expect, the argument goes, the Palestinians to behave in a civilized manner because they are so angry at the Israelis.

No, the analogy I posted was a situational analogy, in the present, about two households living next to each other. Everybody else immediately took it historical. I have been pointing out how useless that is, and I've been proven correct; predictably, it took about 4 levels of posts to arrive at King David (see below).

"All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out." - I.F. Stone

They can capture policymaking and government practice but not for long if they don't have support of majority of voters.

You need to find a better explanation.

Strategic depth is a military concept. Those who want to safeguard the long term well being of Israel, cannot possibly think that maintaining "strategic depth" is going to lead to any sort of peace with the Palestinians, or anyone else in the region.

Even from a purely military point of view, you need to merely look at the demographics of the region to realize that--over time--any kind of "holding them at bay" strategic depth scenario--is not a sustainable long-term plan.

The problem is the Israeli/Palestinian conflict has gone down this implausible path for so long, that certain attitudes have hardened and it is not easy to undo the harm.

Rather than contemplate illusory safety in (permanent?) strategic depth it is time for creative minds on both sides to begin the process of actually establishing a peace.

That, of course, is easy to say. But Israel does hold strong cards, both economic and military and it can begin the process by softening the harsh occupation, without abruptly ending it.
Ending it will require some sense of reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians and that will surely take some time.

But blind insistence that the "we will crush them utterly until they realize they are a defeated people and roll over" strategy is the only one that is available to Israel is a non-starter.

There are only two kinds of people in the world. Those who think that there are only two kinds of people in the world and those who think there are many different kinds of people in the world whose views shade into each other on a continuum of shades of gray. :-)

You have a better explanation but it has noting to do with nationalist minorities.

fluffy.

"My grandmother came from a Jewish family that has lived in whatever you want to call it on the shores of the Med for generation upon generation. Although some of the family still live there (same city, not same house) some had to leave 101 years ago. "

Haifa?

Just curious.

Yaffa

Syvanen wrote:
------------------------------------------
One of the virtues of Mearsheimer and Walt's book is the 108 pages of footnotes. Just reading the list of editorials and op eds in Israeli papers during the spring and summer of 2002 makes a very convincing case that the Israel heavily urged the US to war in Iraq. That remains a solid fact. The debate is over the importance of this pressure in moving the US toward war. To see a recently neocon rag like TNR proposing the restoration of Moran's reputation is a measure of how far the lobby book is influencing current discourse.

---------------------------------------

BK-Do seriously believe Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld went to war because they read a lot of editorials in Israeli newspapers egging them on?
I live in Israel, and I was here during the time Saddam was raining Scud missiles down on us. I also recall his saying he would "burn half of Israel with chemical weapons". I also recall his awarding $25,000 cash to the families of suicide bombers. Do you really think people in Israel liked Saddam and wouldn't want to get rid of him? Is that surprising to you?
I can assure you the Kuwaitis didn't like him either, but I have never heard MJ, W&M, Richard Silverstein, Michael Lerner or the rest say that the Kuwaitis, or the Kurds, or the Iranians or the numerous others who also had a grudge against Saddam were responsible for persuading Bush & co. and the rest of the US (including the majority in Congress who approved the war resolution) to get rid of Saddam, they just blame Israel for it.
I can assure you that I and many others were very leery about Bush's plans and his ridiculous attempt to bring "democracy" to Iraq. A friend of mine who was born in Iraq told me what his father told him about what Iraq and Iraqis were like and he quite accurately predicted at the time that Bush's adventure would turn into a disaster.
He always said the US should give Saddam a slap on the wrist and put him back in power. Unfortunately it is too late for that now.

Maybe he reads 'different views' from sources other than TNR? I don't watch FOX NEWS, I don't listen to Limbaugh or Hannity, but I do read some conservative columnists and I do get some conservative views on the Sunday Morning news shows.

Do you really believe that only people of the same opinion of you know everything and your opponents are totally ignorant?

Silly comment, straw man.

Wordie,

I'm really not the enemy, Zionista....

Really, don't flatter yourself.  Rest assured, however, that while the House of Podhoretz is making an enemy out of liberals, self-syled progressives are busy making enemies out of the likes of me.... 

But of course if you're a Zionist then war is what you want.

It's easy.  So, as the fearmongering over Iran swells up, the Iraq disaster fishtails along and conservatives charge liberals with "stabbing America in the back," you can always easily shift attention to "The Israel Lobby" - however the various definitions and connotations of the phrase evolve.  You can even count on the valuable cooperation of those strong progressive voices like Pat Buchanan, Bob Novak and Ron Paul.

You're the one who tried to pull the old "we were here first" nonsense justification for Zionist ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinians.

Hey don't blame me if your arguments lack merit.

That's right - anti-semitism is exclusive to Jews. So is the Holocaust.

Why?

Because there's points in being the forever-victim.

Monopolization of victimhood is useful for Israel.

Thus, no one else can ever be permitted to be more of a victim than Jews - and most certainly not the Palestinians.

We can cry and moan about "anti-semitism" whenever there's the slightest criticism of Zionists and Israel - and in fact we should to to extremes in order to equate any criticism of Israel with antiSemitism, but we shouldn't react a wink to the regular bigotry and hatred against Arabs which is commonplace among the Pro-Israeli crowd. No, that should not be viewed as 'anti-semitic' - we own that word. We use it like a club.

... it is a code word for Jew hatred.

I probably shouldn't continue with this, but it's hardly a code word, is it? I mean, there's no hidden meaning and I doubt the term is frequently used by actual anti-Semites.

What is worse is that some Jew haters then deny their status by arguing as follows: I can't be called an anti-Semite because I like Arabs and they are Semites. In fact, some of that portion of Arabs who do hate Jews will argue that it is wrong to call them Anti-Semites because they themselves are Semites when they know that the intended and correct charge is that they hate Jews.

I guess the difficulty I have is that people can wander into this completely unawares, as Don Bacon apparenly did at the beginning of this thread, and end up starting off a shower of recrimination and accusations that they themselves are anti-Semitic, when the comment was innocently made and not evidence of anti-Semitism at all.

Wouldn't it be better to focus that energy on real anti-Semitism? If there's so much difficulty associated with the use of the term, wouldn't it be far better to use an alternate term with an absolutely unambiguous meaning? Why such intense ownership of this particular word, rather than favoring the use of what I would see as a far less ambiguous one, such as "Jew-hater"? Please don't attack me for asking these questions, I'm sincerely asking about this, and really don't understand the reasons for the Jewish preference for the use of the term.

"If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail." ~~ Abraham Maslow

abdul-hass,

...No, that should not be viewed as 'anti-semitic' - we own that word. We use it like a club.

The only accusations of antisemitsm in this discussion have been the  paranoid preemptive assumptions of those who have convinced themselves that antisemitism and its implications need to be stricken from the discussion.

This was support for a UNILATERAL pullout -- i.e. one with no guarantee of peace. Since then, support for a unilateral pullout has evaporated because of the examples of Lebanon and Gaza; now Israelis will need a guarantee of peace from a trustworthy Palestinian leadership. Since that will not be forthcoming, we are in for a lot more occupation.

You seem to think that this is somehow an unreasonable position for Israelis to take, as if what happened to Gaza over the last two years is no big deal and if the same thing happened in the West Bank (which, remember is right on the doorstep of Israel's major population centers) well, that's the price Israel is going to have to pay to get to a peace that MAY materialize "in the long run".

As Keynes said, in the long run, we're all dead.  Unfortunately, if Israelis were to follow your advice, many of them would be dead in the short run too.