"Joe Lieberman should register as the agent of a foreign government." At one point I wrote this quip in one of my blogs, and one friend liked it so much he started using it as a tag line in his email. The more I think about it however, the more I wonder if there is not some literal truth in the line. Last night, I watched an interview with Hilary, and she, too, sounded as if she had taken a public relations job with the Israeli government. During the Israeli debacle in Lebanon last year, few if any voices in Congress were raised against Israel’s precipitous behavior in Gaza and the ensuing battle in Lebanon. Is it premature to ask for a Congressional inquiry into Israel’s involvement in U.S. foreign policy decisions?
At no point during the cold war did anyone ever equate anti-Communism with anti-Russianism. Even during the hot war fought in the 1940s, most people refused to see being anti-Nazi or anti-Fascist as the equivalent of hating all Germans or Italians. Yet, there are many among the supporters of Israel who treat the term anti-Zionist as just code language for the term anti-Semitic. Even the word "Zionism" front-loads the argument. To say that being anti-Zionist is not tantamount to being anti-Semitic doesn’t quite put enough psychological distance between the two terms. Certainly, saying that one is anti- the policies of Israel doesn’t get one past a prejudicial linguistic tinge. Thus there is a chilling of debate built into the very language available to us. This linguistic phenomenon contributes to making virtually all criticism of Israel taboo here in the United States. Informally, many will acknowledge that for any U.S. politician to criticize Israel’s policies is to commit political suicide. That is certainly the case here in New York. Just consider the aftermath of Jimmy Carter’s Palestine: Peace not Apartheid.
Ask just about anyone outside of the Bush inner circle, and you will find a basic consensus about the major cause of the rift between the Islamic world and the U.S. and its Western allies, namely, Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Nevertheless, this issue is currently relegated to ancillary status in public dialogue. And while this is the case, it is clear that Israel uses the diversion of the spotlight as an opportunity to commit one outrage after another.
It is fairly clear that from Israel’s perspective the only happy solution to the war in Iraq or the "problem" of nations like Syria and Iran being outside of the fold is either conquest or the kind of neo-colonization that has evolved among our Islamic client states in the area. Converting Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and even Pakistan into a terrestrial twenty-first century version of the Philippine archipelago might be nice for Israel, and the twenty-first century may look a lot like to the nineteenth to some, but it ain’t. If Israel is truly interested in being a respected member of the international community, it will stop acting like a roaring mouse, give up its illegal nuclear arsenal, forfeit its claims to a free pass on the playing board and find its appropriate niche under the protection of the great powers.