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01 October 2010 By Maidhc Ó Cathail
If Israel's stranglehold over U.S. foreign policy is
to be broken, Americans will need to be informed about
the harm that Washington's unconditional support for
the Jewish state is doing to American interests, say
leading analysts of U.S.-Israeli relations.
According to John J. Mearsheimer, co-author of The
Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, "The only
plausible way to weaken the lobby's influence on U.S.
foreign policy is for prominent policymakers and
opinion-makers to speak openly about the damage the
special relationship is doing to the American national
interest."
"Plenty of people in the United States, especially
inside the Beltway, know that Israel is an albatross
around America's neck," says Mearsheimer, the R.
Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of
Political Science at the University of Chicago. "But
they are afraid to stand up and say that for fear that
the lobby will attack them and damage their careers."
"Hopefully, some of them will develop a backbone," he
adds.
Philip Giraldi, executive director of the Council for
the National Interest, believes that Tel Aviv's
stranglehold over Washington can be broken "only by
directly challenging the power of the Israel lobby and
the false narrative about how it is of value to the
United States."
Giraldi, a contributing editor to The American
Conservative, says that "it must be done from the
bottom up as Israel cannot be challenged in the
mainstream media, Congress, and in the White House."
"The American people must learn that Israel is and
always has been a strategic liability that has done
immense damage to the United States and its worldwide
interests," concludes the former CIA officer.
If there is to be an end to Israel's decades-long
"sway over Congress and intimidating presidents," says
Jeffrey Blankfort, a prominent Jewish American critic
of Israel and its American lobby, "it will require
appeals and actions beginning on a local level that
inform the American people not so much about what
Israel has done to the Palestinians but what its
unregistered agents in the U.S., euphemistically
described as ‘lobbyists,' have done to destroy what
little is left of American democracy and the attendant
costs in flesh and blood, as well as its tax dollars."
A long-time pro-Palestinian activist noted for his
trenchant critique of Noam Chomsky, Blankfort
attributes the failure of such efforts to get off the
ground to "the continued unwillingness of the leading
figures of the Palestinian solidarity movement in the
U.S. to acknowledge the invidious power of the Zionist
Lobby," who, following Chomsky's anti-imperialist
analysis, prefer to "place the primary responsibility
for Israel's crimes and U.S. Middle East policies at
Washington's doorstep."
"So the first steps," Blankfort suggests, "may be to
publicly challenge these figures while at the same
time moving past them and addressing the American
people directly."
No American President will ever have enough latitude
to resolve the conflict in Palestine "unless and until
enough Americans are informed enough to make their
democracy work," according to Alan Hart, former Middle
East Chief Correspondent for Britain's Independent
Television News.
"In other words," explains Hart, who was also a BBC
Panorama presenter specializing in the Middle East,
"if President Obama or any of his successors is ever
going to be free to confront and defeat the Zionist
lobby's stooges in Congress and the mainstream media,
there has got to be created a constituency of
understanding about why it is not in America's own
best interests to go on supporting Zionism's monster
child right or wrong."
The essence of the problem, Hart argues in the
three-volume American edition of his book Zionism: The
Real Enemy of the Jews, is that "Americans have been
conditioned, brainwashed, to believe a version of
history, Zionism's version, which is a pack of
propaganda lies."
Jeff Gates, former counsel to the U.S. Senate
Committee on Finance, believes that "transparency,
accountability and better design" are required to
break Israel's hold on American foreign policy.
"At present, the American public is ignorant of
Israel's all-pervasive influence. Its control includes
the media-enabled deployment of fixed intelligence to
induce this nation to war for Greater Israel," says
Gates, author of Guilt By Association: How Deception
and Self-Deceit Took America to War.
"We will know that accountability is underway when we
see federal grand juries convened to consider charges
against Israel's agents, assets and sayanim
(volunteers). When a jury brings in the first verdict
for treason, Americans will know that the rule of law
is being restored. We will know that a solution is
within sight when the many appendages of its lobby are
required to register as foreign agents."
Maidhc Ó Cathail
is a writer and educator. Born and raised in Ireland,
he has been living in Osaka, Japan since 1999. Salem-News.com
is happy that this extremely diverse writer has joined
forces with our team. In addition to writing a monthly
column for the Irish language internet magazine Beo!,
Maidhc's work has been published by Antiwar.com,
Dissident Voice, Foreign Policy Journal, Khaleej
Times, Media Monitors Network, Online Journal,
Palestine Chronicle and many more. Maidhc Ó Cathail
was asked to join the Salem-News team because of his
fantastic world coverage. His reports covering events
like the conflict in Palestine, show a fantastic
overview of the developing events that are shaping
world history. We look forward to sharing stories from
this well connected individual with our readers. It is
a tough and complicated world out there, and we're all
better off with the additional education gleaned from
Maidhc Ó Cathail's research and reporting. You can
write to Maidhc at:
maidhc98@yahoo.com
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