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WHO RULES: THE ISRAEL LOBBY OR UNCLE SAM? The answer at last! Uri Avnery, former Knesset member, assesses the Lobby's power. "If the Israeli government wanted a law tomorrow annulling the 10 Commandments, 95 U.S. Senators (at least) would sign the bill forthwith." But, yes, in the end the dog wags the tail. Fifty years ago Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" blew the cobwebs out of millions of young minds and drove a stake through the heart of Eisenhower's America. Lenni Brenner remembers Ginsberg in the East Village. Dr Mengele died in exile, in disguise. Dr Ishii died rich and recognized, in his own Tokyo home. Christopher Reed on Japanese WW2 medical tortures and how the U.S. covered them up. CounterPunch Online is read by millions of viewers each month! But remember, we are funded solely by the subscribers to the print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this website by buying a subscription to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation for the online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! |
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Today's Stories May 8, 2006 Alexander Cockburn May 6 / 7, 2006 Jeffrey St. Clair Ariel Dorfman Joe Allen Fred Gardner Jeff Taylor Saul Landau Stephen Philion Trish Schuh Ralph Nader Robert Fisk Paul Cantor John Holt James Ryan Lawrence R. Velvel Greg Moses Laray Polk Ron Jacobs Ben Tripp Mickey Z. Jeffrey St. Clair Poets' Basement Website of the Week
May 5, 2006 Vijay Prashad Robert Fisk David Swanson Mearsheimer / Walt Dave Lindorff Sarah Ferguson CounterPunch
News Service Corporate Crime Reporter Website of the
Day
May 4, 2006 John F. Sugg Jonathan Cook Roger Burbach Chris Dols Christopher Brauchli Tony Swindell Website of the Day
May 3, 2006 Robert Bryce Paul Craig Roberts James Petras Lee Sustar David Bolton Joshua Frank Jeffery R. Webber Website of the
Day
May 2, 2006 Evelyn Pringle Tariq Ali Saul Landau Paul Craig Roberts Gary Leupp Ron Jacobs Sen. Russell
Feingold Anthony Papa Website of the
Day
May Day, 2006 Norman Finkelstein Christopher Reed Michael Donnelly Dave Zirin Mike Whitney Gilad Atzmon Missy Comley Beattie Alexander Cockburn Website of the
Day
April 29 / 30, 2006 Peter Linebaugh Ralph Nader Robert Bryce Rev. William
Alberts Lee Sustar John Chuckman Eric Ruder Seth Sandronsky Ron Jacobs Ben Tripp Fred Gardner Don Monkerud Tommy Stevenson Lettrist International Contratiempo St. Clair, Vest
and D'Antoni Poets' Basement Website of the
Weekend
April 28, 2006 James Ridgeway Ramzy Baroud Sarah Knopp William S. Lind Werther April 27, 2006 Winslow T. Wheeler Robert Fisk Juan Santos Robert Jensen Dave Lindorff Jose Pertierra
April 26,2006 Robin Philpot Sherry Wolf Pratyush Chandra Joshua Frank Gary
Leupp Bill
Quigley
April 25, 2006 Gary
Leupp Paul
Craig Roberts Linda
S. Heard Ralph
Nader Mike
Whitney Michael
Donnelly Sharon
Smith Website
of the Day
April 24, 2006 Tim
Wise John
Stanton Dave
Lindorff Steve
Shore Amadou
Deme Mickey
Z. Ralph Nader Alexander
Cockburn Website
of the Day
April 22/23, 2006 Jeffrey
St. Clair Jeff
Halper Jeff
Klein Thomas
P. Healy David
Underhill Lee
Sustar Deb
Reich John
Chuckman Fred
Gardner Julian
Edney Seth
Sandronsky Brynne
Keith-Jennings Dave
Lindorff Catherine
Ann Cullen and Harry Browne Bill
Pahnelas Jim
French Ron
Jacobs David
Krieger Jeffrey
St. Clair Poets'
Basement Website
of the Weekend
April 21, 2006 Jonathan
Cook Lawrence
R. Velvel Evelyn
Pringle Christopher
Brauchli Pratyush
Chandra Michael
George Smith Missy
Comley Beattie Sarah
Hines Website
of the Day
April 20, 2006 Chris
Kutalik Gary
Leupp Joshua
Frank Diane
Christian William
S. Lind Ramzy
Baroud Justin
E.H. Smith
April 19, 2006 P.
Sainath Norman
Solomon Anthony
Papa Mike
Ferner Stanley
Heller Rifundazione Christopher
Reed Alexander
Cockburn Website
of the Day April 18, 2006 Paul
Craig Roberts Eric
Wingerter Juan
Santos Greg
Weiher Sam
Bahour Behzad
Yaghmaian Website
of the Day
April 17, 2006 Kevin Zeese Uri Avnery Norman Solomon John Ross Laila al-Haddad Jeffrey Blankfort Website of the Day
April 15 / 16, 2006 Jeffrey
St. Clair Ralph
Nader Thaddeus
Hoffmeister Kevin
Prosen / Dave Zirin Thomas
P. Healy Kristoffer
Larsson Fred
Gardner Edwin
Krales Brian
Cloughley John
Holt Seth
Sandronsky Rafael
Renteria Michael
Ortiz Hill William
A. Cook Gideon
Levy Andrew
Wimmer Madis
Senner Michael
Kuehl Mark
Scaramella Nate
Mezmer Jesse
Walker Poets'
Basement Website
of the Weekend
April 14, 2006 Col.
Dan Smith Saul
Landau Stan
Cox Kevin
Zeese Brian
McKinlay Howard
Meyers Ishmael
Reed Website
of the Day
April 13, 2006 CounterPunch
News Service Norman
Solomon Stanley
Heller Jeff
Birkenstein Evelyn
J. Pringle Michael
Donnelly Kamran
Matin Website
of the Day
April 12, 2006 Vijay
Prashad Alan
Maass Dave
Lindorff Ron
Jacobs Ramzy
Baroud Randall
Dodd Missy
Comley Beattie P. Sainath Website
of the Day
April 11, 2006 Al
Krebs Lawrence
R. Velvel Sonia
Nettinin Willliam
S. Lind Robert
Ovetz Pratyush
Chandra Grant
F. Smith Laray
Polk Francis
Boyle José
Pertierra Website
of the Day
April 10, 2006 Ralph
Nader Heather
Gray Uri
Avnery Joshua
Frank Seth
Sandronsky Michael
Leonardi Evelyn
Pringle Tom
Kerr Lucinda
Marshall Website
of the Day April 7 -9, 2006 Alexander
Cockburn Jeffrey
St. Clair Patrick
Cockburn David
Vest Dave
Lindorff Gary
Leupp Elaine
Cassel Saul
Landau James
Ridgeway Ron
Jacobs John
Walsh Ramzy
Baroud Christopher
Brauchli Todd
Chretien Jonathan
Scott John
Bomar Michele
Brand Ronan
Sheehan Mickey
Z. Don
Monkerud Michael
Dickinson Website
of the Weekend
April 6, 2006 John
Ross Dave
Lindorff Don
Monkerud Robert
McDonald Boris
Kagarlitsky Remi
Kanazi Niranjan
Ramakrishnan Robert
Fisk
April 5, 2006 Dick
J. Reavis Mark
Brenner Brian
Cloughley Jozef
Hand-Boniakowski Matt
Vidal Juan
Santos Alan
Maass JoAnn
Wypijewski Website
of the Day
April 4, 2006 Jackson
Thoreau Gary
Corseri Dave
Lindorff Paul
Craig Roberts Norman
Solomon Michael
Carmichael Winslow
T. Wheeler Ingmar
Lee Michael
Neumann Website
of the Day
April 3, 2006 Saul
Landau Richard
Thieme Timothy
B. Tyson Omar
Barghouti Iwasaki
Atsuko Julian
Edney Roger
Morris
April 1 / 2, 2006 Alexander
Cockburn Ralph
Nader Dave
Zirin David
Underhill Earl
Ofari Hutchinson Dave
Lindorff P.
Sainath Fred
Gardner Clancy
Chassay Heather
Gray Greg
Moses John
Chuckman Ron
Jacobs Jeffrey
St. Clair Poets'
Basement Website
of the Weekend
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May 8, 2006 CounterPunch DiaryThe Row Over the Israel Lobby By ALEXANDER COCKBURN For the past few weeks a sometimes comic debate has simmering in the American press, focused on the question of whether there is an Israeli lobby, and if so, just how powerful is it? I would have thought that to ask whether there's an Israeli lobby here is a bit like asking whether there's a Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor and a White House located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC. For the past sixty years the Lobby has been as fixed a part of the American scene as either of the other two monuments, and not infrequently exercising as much if not more influence on the onward march of history. The late Steve Smith, brother in law of Teddy Kennedy, and a powerful figure in the Democratic Party for several decades, liked to tell the story of how a group of four Jewish businessmen got together two million dollars in cash and gave it to Harry Truman when he was in desperate need of money amidst his presidential campaign in 1948. Truman went on to become president and to express his gratitude to his Zionist backers. Since those days the Democratic Party has long been hospitable to, and supported by rich Zionists. In 2002, for example, Haim Saban, the Israel-American who funds the Saban Center at the Brooking Institute and is a big contributor to AIPAC, gave $12.3 million to the Democratic Party. In 2001, the magazine Mother Jones listed on its web site the 400 leading contributors to the 2000 national elections. Seven of the first 10 were Jewish, as were 12 of the top 20 and 125 of the top 250. Given this, all prudent candidates have gone to amazing lengths to satisfy their demands. There have been famous disputes, as between President Jimmy Carter and Menachem Begin, and famous vendettas, as when the Lobby destroyed the political careers of Representative Paul Findley and of Senator Charles Percy because they were deemed to be anti-Israel. None of this history is particularly controversial, and there have been plenty of well-documented accounts of the activities of the Israel Lobby down the years, from Alfred Lilienthal's 1978 study, The Zionist Connection, to former US Rep Paul Findley's 1985 book They Dare To Speak Out to Dangerous Liaison: The Inside Story of the US-Israeli Covert Relationship, written by my brother and sister-in-law, Andrew and Leslie Cockburn and published in 1991. Three years ago the present writer and Jeffrey St Clair published a collection of 18 essays called The Politics of Anti-Semitism, no less than four of which were incisive discussions of the Israel lobby. Jeffrey St Clair described how the Lobby had successfully stifled any public uproar after Israeli planes attacked a US Navy ship in the Mediterranean in 1967 and killed many US sailors. Kathy and Bill Christison, former CIA analysts, reviewed the matter of dual loyalty, with particular reference to the so-called Neo-Cons, alternately advising an Israeli prime minister and an American president. Jeffrey Blankfort offered a detailed historical chronology of the occasions on which the Lobby had thwarted the plans of US presidents including Carter, Reagan, Ford, and Bush Sr. Most vividly of all in our book, a congressional aide, writing pseudonymously under the name George Sutherland, contributed a savagely funny essay called "Our Vichy Congress". Some extracts:
So it can scarcely be said that there had been silence here about the Israel Lobby until two respectable professors, John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt (the former from the University of Chicago and the latter from Harvard) offered their analysis in March of this year, their paper ,"The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy", being published in longer form by the Kennedy School at Harvard (which has since disowned it) and, after it had been rejected by the Atlantic Monthly (which originally commissioned it) in shorter form by the London Review of Books. In fact the significance of this essay rests mostly on timing (three years' worth of public tumult about the Neocons and Israel's role in the attack on Iraq) and on the provenance of the authors, from two of the premier academic institutions of the United States. Neither of them has any tincture of radicalism. After the paper was published in shortened form on the London Review of Books there was a brief lull, broken by the howls of America's most manic Zionist, Professor Alan Dershowitz of Harvard, who did Mearshseimer and Walt the great favor of thrusting their paper into the headlines. Dershowitz managed this by his usual eruptions of hysterical invective, investing the paper with the fearsome allure of that famous anti-Semitic tract, a forgery of the Czarist police, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Mearsheimer-Walt essay was Nazi-like, Dershowitz howled, a classic case of conspiracy-mongering, in which a small band of Zionists were accused of steering the Ship of Empire onto the rocks. In fact the paper by Mearsheimer and Walt is extremely dull. The long version runs to 81 pages, no less than 40 pages of which are footnotes. I settled down to read it with eager anticipation but soon found myself looking hopefully for the end. There's nothing in the paper that any moderately well read student of the topic wouldn't have known long ago, but the paper has the merit of stating rather blandly some home truths which are somehow still regarded as too dangerous to state publicly in respectable circles in the United States. For example, on the topic of what is often called here " America's only democratic ally in the Middle East" Mearsheimer and Walt have this to say:
After Dershowitz came other vulgar outbursts, such as from Eliot Cohen in the Washington Post. These attacks basically reiterated Dershowitz's essential theme: there is no such thing as the Israel lobby and those asserting its existence are by definition anti-Semitic. This method of assault at least has the advantage of being funny, (a) because there obviously is a Lobby as noted above and (b) because Mearsheimer and Walt aren't anti-Semites any more than 99.9 per cent of others identifying the Lobby and criticizing its role. Partly as a reaction to Dershowitz and Cohen, the Washington Post and New York Times have now run a few pieces politely pointing out that the Israel Lobby has indeed exercised a chilling effect on the rational discussion of US foreign policy. The tide is turning slightly. Meanwhile, mostly on the left, there has been an altogether different debate, over the actual weight of the Lobby. Here the best known of the debaters is Noam Chomsky, who has reiterated a position he has held for many years, to the general effect that US foreign policy has always hewed to the national self interest, and that the Lobby's power is greatly overestimated. The debate was rather amusingly summed up by the Israeli writer Uri Avnery, a former Knesset member:
Will the debate roused by the Mearsheimer-Walt paper continue? I think so, if only because in the era of George Bush, the influence of the Israel lobby and of the Christian Zionists has become so crudely overt. And as Avnery concludes, far more colorfully than the two professors:
I have to say I'm not 100 per cent on board with NC on this one. The Lobby really does have very hefty clout. Ask Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and Bush Sr. In her excellent book The One-State Solution Virginia Tilley makes a persuasive case that the US strategy and tactics in Iraq have more to do with what Israel wants than any self-interested "realist" US plan.
J. K. Galbraith and the Forks in the Road Galbraith died on April 29, at the great aqe of 97. I once drove up to Vermont to interview him in his Vermont farm house. It was dark and I drove uncertainly along a dirt road and up a driveway and knocked on the door, shouting, "Is this the home of Professor Galbraith?" "No, " came a testy cry from within. "It's the home of Professor Hook." Sidney Hook, the prototypical neo-con, lived on the opposite side of the hill from the Keynesian progressive, Galbraith. By no means for the last time, I reflected how easy it is in America to take, often without noticing, and end up 180 degrees from where you thought you were headed. My Vermont trip took place in the mid 70s and it was still possible, though barely so, to imagine that there still might be feasible radical options available around the next corner. From Saigon, on April 29, 1975, just before midnight, CIA station chief Tom Polgar had just sent his last secure communiqué to headquarters Langley, saying
There was talk of a "peace dividend". Optimistic souls wrote about a shift in budgetary priorities from the military industrial to the social industrial complex, with money pouring into low income housing and mass transit. At this point, in the wake of the Watergate disclosures of slush funds run by Fortune 500 companies, the corporate sector stood as low in public esteem as the CIA. The energy sector and even the Federal Reserve seemed ripe for serious bids for public control. The usefulness of talking to Galbraith was that his own career lent a cautionary perspective to such hopes. No decent agricultural economist (such as Galbraith had been) in the Depression could have anything other than radical expectations as regards the shackling of the predatory corporate impulse. It was men like Henry Wallace, from the farm belt, who urged whatever left contour the New Deal actually had. But by 1938 the New Deal had run out of steam, the recovery turned sour and what actually bailed out America was the loom and then the reality of the Second World War. Galbraith, still in his thirties, became deputy administrator in charge of price controls for the office of Price Administration. As far back as the German script for 1914, war planning has mostly been the pragmatic backbone of socialist blueprints and it was easy to imagine that minute supervision of the economy post Pearl Harbor could flower into large-scale economic planning in war's aftermath. Meanwhile the reality was that the cost-plus ten percenters were cleaning up on war contracts and around the corner lay the corporate counter-attack of the postwar years that gutted the Wagner Act with Taft Hartley. Ahead lay comfortable Fifties academic visions of "plural elites", or the "countervailing power" stand-off between business and labor advanced by Galbraith, already contradicted by the AFL-CIO's postwar acceptance of its role as business's junior partner at the feeding trough of a postwar boom underpinned by the permanent war economy ushered in by Harry Truman. This was the "war scare" of 1948, father of all those later budget-inflating scares, such as JFK's "missile gap", or the first neocon stampede initiated by Paul Nitze in the late 70s, which finished off the post-Vietnam vision of a peace dividend. By the time I got to Oxford in 1960 people had Galbraith's 1958 tract, The Affluent Society, on their desks, jacket to jacket with the works of such other moral critics of capitalist consumerism as Leavis, Hoggart and Williams. How we sneered at the tailfin, first drawn in the Chrysler studio by Cliff Voss in 1954 as emblem of the company's "forward look" launched in 1956. The consumers had it right. Labor never was going to get any purchase on the commanding heights of the economy or any putative supervision by Congress of the allocation of credit, and of social investment, so they bought fun baroque cars on the installment plan instead, as thoughtfully arranged by GM's Alfred Sloan decades earlier. Although, as with his hero Veblen, his drollery could get tedious, Galbraith had the virtue of irreverence, albeit within the stifling constraints of urbanity. He liked to irk respectable economic opinion by applauding, for example, the stimulative effects of endemic inflation in Brazil. Within the Keynesian tradition - I remember him snarling with graceless venom about Marx -- he was good--as in one of his best books, The Great Crash: 1929 -- at pointing out that the free enterprise system, so-called, never has worked very well, same way as he established with the postwar bombing survey, that saturating Germany with high explosive never put much of a dent in the German war effort. But the American free enterprise system, undeterred by urbane critique, pressed on deeper into error, always taking the wrong fork in the road. Confronted with a rational empirical critique of the efficacy of bombing, America offered in reply Curt Lemay's Strategic Air Command and LeMay's triumphant boast to JFK at the time of the Cuban missile crisis that SAC could "reduce the Soviet Union to a smouldering, irradiated ruin in three hours." In the early sixties came official identification by a task force assembled by Bobby Kennedy, of "pockets of poverty" blighting the American landscape. By May, 1964, Galbraith was writing LBJ's launch speech for the Great Society. The price tag was ruthless escalation of the war in Vietnam. From 1961-63 Galbraith served as US ambassador to New Delhi. He got on well with Nehru and advised the Indian government on economic policy. But in India a fateful fork in the road had already passed. The CIA had secretly given the Congress Party funds to thwart the Communists' revolution in Kerala, started in 1957 and embodying many of Galbraith's social and economic ideals. The person disclosing that secret funding in his memoir A Dangerous Place was a later US ambassador to India, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. In the late 50s Galbraith offered his critique of capitalism's public squalor and in the late 60s came Moynihan's response: the blacks have only got themselves to blame. Onward into "benign neglect". That was a big fork in the road, and one from which America has never turned back. At least Galbraith, in his 90s, could look back to a time when a reformer could not only body forth a social vision, but tentatively identify the agencies whereby that vision could be put into practice. As I read through the Nation's recent special issue on reforming the world's economic arrangements, with fine contributions by Stiglitz, d'Arista, Galbraith's son James and others, not once, in all the essays, was the question of agency ever raised, or the Democratic Party even alluded to. If there's going to be a fork in the road ahead, the question of agency had better be on the agenda. Galbraith certainly understood that, though he politely underestimated just how roughly capitalism could play to win. Note: A shorter version of the Galbraith item ran in the edition of The Nation that went to press last Wednesday.
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from CounterPunch Books! The Case Against Israel By Michael Neumann Grand Theft Pentagon: Tales of Greed and Profiteering in the War on Terror by Jeffrey St. Clair Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid? CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair are available to speak forcefully on ALL the burning issues, as are other CounterPunchers seasoned in stump oratory. Call CounterPunch Speakers Bureau, 1-800-840-3683. Or email beckyg@counterpunch.org. |