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Friday, April 7, 2006

And not surprisingly, it's one of those anti-democratic champions of the defunct and discredited Geneva Initative, back from the dead like a zombie someone forgot to torch.

I thought Daniel Levy's piece in this past Sunday's Boston Globe, Visions of Israel after the conflict, was something of a one-off. It contained this eyebrow-raiser:

Domestically, a recent Harvard Kennedy School of Government research paper by Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer suggested that the ''pro-Israel Lobby" is the prime driver of US foreign policy in the region. Their argument, strong in substance but lacking in nuance and overdosing on polemic, is that the Israel lobby (and mainly AIPAC) goes largely unchallenged in defining the debate both in Washington and in the public at large -- with intimidation tactics featuring prominently.

Strong on substance? Yikes. Levy goes on to reveal that AIPAC is too in the bag to Likud:

Yet, to the extent to which this phenomenon exists, the Israeli election results suggest the antidote. AIPAC has too much allowed itself to be an echo chamber for the Likud, now only Israel's fifth party by size, with a puny 11 seats. The pro-Israel position in the United States needs to start approximating more closely just where the debate is in Israel. Israel seems to be waking up to the devastating effect that occupation has on its moral fiber and national security interests. Those in the United States who claim to speak in the name of Israel's good should also turn that page. Mainstream organizations like Israel Policy Forum and the Union for Reform Judaism are already there and should be listened to more closely.

So here they are again, these champions of Israeli democracy, coming overseas to beg for allies against their domestic political opponents, and even cozying up to Walt and Mearsheimer to do it without a care as to the damage they do. The Lobby was alright when the Geneva Initiative people brought the American Jewish Community over to prep them to go home and sell their surrender plan to the American masses, and help pressure their countrymen for them because they couldn't convince them themselves. Fortunately, the hoi polloi weren't having any of the pig in a poke our "leaders" were trying to sell us.

Levy's reference to the W&M piece was no one off, as this piece which appeared two days later on an Indian-oriented web site shows: So pro-Israel that it hurts. Here the mask is off, and this guy who warns in the piece that "Israel would do well to distance itself from our “friends” on the Christian evangelical right" has no trouble using Walt and Mearsheimer and their allies for his own purposes.

...The case built by Mearsheimer and Walt is a potent one: Identification of American with Israeli interests can be principally explained by the impact of the pro-Israel lobby in Washington in limiting the parameters of public debate, rather than by the fact that Israel is a vital strategic asset or has a uniquely compelling moral case for support (beyond, as the authors point out, the right to exist, which in any case is not in jeopardy)...

Really? Mr. Levy needs to get out more. Efforts to delegitimize Israel are ongoing, serious and need to be fought. Instead of contributing to the problem by sticking another knife in the back of his countrymen and their allies, he could go home and try to win an election -- he'd then see how quickly the American Jewish Community falls into place for him. Instead, he demonstrates the worst characteristics of the far-Left, with all its coercive utopian, anti-democratic impulses on display, and where even the left-leaning American Jewish establishment isn't left-leaning enough.

At the end of both articles, Levy is described thus:

Daniel Levy was a policy adviser in the Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak. He was the lead Israeli drafter of the Geneva Initiative.

No wonder Barak lost.

6 Comments

The FT published an editorial on April 1 in which it said that Walt's position as dean was "in question." To his credit, Walt wrote in to correct them,

http://www.israpundit.com/2006/?p=745

but of course his letter (pub'd 3 days after the editorial) will be seen by a lot fewer people than saw the editorial. Now the Christian Science Monitor has a piece

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0406/dailyUpdate.html

re. reactions to W & M, including a link to the FT editorial, but with no link to Walt's letter. So CSM readers reading the editorial might get the mistaken impression that Walt's academic freedom is under threat, when Walt himself has said that it isn't.

As for Daniel Levy, Martin Kramer's caption for the radio discussion Levy recently participated in (my eyes are about to shut given how late it is so I won't go looking for a link but it's on Kramer's site) about the W-M paper, got it exactly right. Kramer called the participants in the haughty Chris Lydon's NPR Open Sources show "bit players." Yup.

PS

The Levy piece you mentioned was also published in Haaretz

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/698302.html

..which doesn't really surprise me about that newspaper.

Last but not least, there's a link within this post

http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/001336.php

to the blowhard radio program I mentioned above. Clemons, whose blog The Wash. Note is, was one of the other blowhard participants.

Thanks for those links!

No problem. The CSM piece I linked to is really messed up. There's a sentence where the Financial Times is referred to as The Times, though the latter is a separate newspaper. And though there are links in the CSM article to both pro- and con- analyses of W&M, it's clear that the reporter is pro-W&M.
See, as well, how many errors you can spot in The Observer interview with the LRB editor that the CSM piece links to. (A hint re. one of them: gender confusion.) I have to run now, but I'll be back later to say more about that.
Melanie Phillips' latest post at her blog relates to all of this.

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