     Dear friend,

    here is a long but very interesting background piece on the Jewish Lobby
    by this intrepid fighter, Jeff Blankfort. But let us start with a few
    words about the forum where his piece was presented.

    Jeff described this antizionist get-together as follows:

      I had been invited to speak on a panel on an all day conference in
      London sponsored by the Islamic Human Rights Commission, the subject of
      which was: Against Zionism: Jewish Perspectives. The day was broken down
      into three panels. The first was the 'Religious Case Against Zionism'
      which featured two rabbis from Neturei Karta...

      The second panel on 'Subjugation in the Name of Self-Determination' was
      composed of Israeli historian Uri Davis, who was the among the first to
      describe Israel as an apartheid state, Les Levidow, a member of the UK
      Palestine Solidarity Campaign whose subject was 'Western support for
      Zionism; implications for strategy,' and Roland Rance, a trade union
      activist whose subject was 'Opposition to Zionism: The core strategy of
      a solidarity movement.' On the third panel were Michael Warshawski, who
      spoke on 'Zionism as the Frontline of so-called Jewish-Christian
      Civilization'; John Rose, a leading member of the UK's Socialist Workers
      Party, who spoke on 'Dismantling Zionism--the pre-condition for
      Arab-Jewish reconciliation,' and yours truly, who spoke on 'The
      Influence of Israel and its America Lobby over US Middle East Policy.'

      Anyone listening to the second panel would have been forgiven for
      wondering if any of the speakers had heard of the Mearsheimer-Walt
      paper, let alone read it. There was nothing in the presentations of
      Levidow or Rance, who were presumably addressing what should be the
      strategy of a Palestine solidarity movement, that would indicate that
      they had or that paying attention to what the Zionist lobby was doing in
      the UK or elsewhere was of any significance. It was only when a member
      of the audience asked the panelists what they thought of the
      Mearsheimer-Walt paper did they respond and denounce it and the notion
      of the lobby's power, Rance with as much gusto as he devoted to
      denouncing Israel's crimes in Gaza, and Levidow more passively but just
      as firmly. While it was not Davis's subject, he agreed with both that
      the Israeli tail does not wag the American dog.

      My presentation roused the ire of John Rose who departed from his
      remarks to blast the idea of the lobby having any say over US policy,
      insisting that Israel is a 'proxy' for the US in the region. In a brief
      rebuttal, provided by the moderator, I drew the audience's attention to
      the fact that the only two groups that have rejected the thesis of the
      Mearsheimer-Walt paper are the Zionists, themselves, and the
      Anti-Zionist Left, and that it was curious that those who had done so
      with such emotion at this conference, unlike myself, have had no
      experience dealing with the Israel lobby in the US; that their position
      allowed the pro-Israel forces to run up and down the field with no
      opposition. I am appreciative of the fact that the IHRC gave me the
      opportunity to present a side that is still largely excluded from
      conferences on the I-P issue that are organized by the 'official'
      Palestine solidarity groups.

      What happened on that Sunday was not just an academic disagreement on a
      hot London summer afternoon, but represents a critical failing of the
      Western Palestine solidarity movement; one that amounts to allowing
      certain self-decribed 'anti-zionist' Jews who have assumed key positions
      in the movement over the years to continue to provide a protective
      shield for the well-documented destructive activities of the pro-Israel
      lobbies both in the US and the UK and no doubt, elsewhere. They clearly
      need to be confronted and challenged even as the lobby itself needs to
      be confronted and challenged and the issue thoroughly discussed and
      understood among movement members.. Those who think otherwise should
      examine the sorry record of the solidarity movement thus far and ask
      whether or not the failure to recognize the importance of the lobby's
      role is one of the reasons for its failure.

      Jeff

    Shamir adds:

    I fully second Jeff's views: indeed, Rance, Warshawsky etc are the Left
    Wing of the Lobby. This is pity that the Islamic organisers of the
    conference are such gutless and spineless creatures: we do not need
    Muslims to organise an all-Jewish conference. By the way, I was also
    invited to the conference, but then under pressure of the Jews, my
    invitation was canceled. Here are two emails to such effect. The first
    was sent on 30.06 saying:

      Dear Israel Shamir, I am writing from the Islamic Human Rights
      Commission. As you may already be aware, IHRC are organising a
      conference on 2 July 2006 titled, ‘Against Zionism: Jewish
      Perspectives’. We have already sent you an email requesting your
      presence at this conference. If you have not received our initial email,
      please do not hesitate to let us know, and we will resend it. I very
      much hope you can attend. Please do not hesitate to contact me
      (Massoud@ihrc.org) or my colleague Musthak Ahmed who is co-ordinating
      the event (musthak@ihrc.org) for further details.

        Massoud Shadjareh, Islamic Human Rights Commission

    I agreed to come, and then the second email came:

      Dear Israel, I regret to inform you that we cannot extend an invitation
      to you for this event. However, we are keen to invite you to London in
      the near future for one or possibly a series of talks. Sorry for the
      inconvenience.

        Yours Sincerely, Massoud Shadjareh

    Anyway it is good that Jeff was there and gave them a piece of his
    mind...

    Israel Shamir

      The Influence of Israel and it’s American Lobby over US Middle East
      Policy

      Presented by Jeffrey Blankfort at the Islamic Human Right Commission
      Conference, School of Oriental and African Studies, London, July 2, 2006

      The apparent ability of Israel, one of the world’s smallest countries,
      to shape the Middle East policies of the world’s remaining superpower
      has been a source of puzzlement, conjecture, and constant frustration on
      the part of those fighting for justice for the Palestinians and for the
      peoples of the region, as a whole.

      One of the roots of this unique historical phenomenon may be found in
      the interpretation of a 120-year-old US Supreme Court decision that
      afforded corporations the same rights as individual American citizens.

      One of those rights is the freedom of speech that is guaranteed by the
      1st amendment to the US Constitution.

      Thanks to the extraordinary degree of corruption that was manifest in
      American society in the late 19th century, financial contributions to
      political candidates came to be seen by the court as expressions of
      political speech and thus under the court’s protection.

      This has resulted in the American political system becoming one of
      never-ending and ever more costly political campaigns, and, without
      question, the most corrupt among what are generally described as
      “advanced countries.” The Supreme Court’s decision, reaffirmed over the
      years, opened the door to well funded “special interests’ and their
      lobbies and has allowed them, through what amounts to legal bribery, to
      shape the foreign and domestic policies of the United States.

      By 1907, the American author, Mark Twain would write that there was only
      one “native criminal class in America—Congress” and a decade later, the
      humorist Will Rogers would joke, “ America has the best Congress money
      can buy.”

      In the beginning it was the railroads and the steel companies who paid
      the going price and then came the lumber, oil and construction
      companies, the weapons and automobile manufacturers, the airplane and
      communications industries, and what are euphemistically known as the
      health providers--the doctors, the hospitals and the pharmaceutical
      manufacturers who have made sure that Americans would be the only
      citizens in a developed country that have no national health service.

      In the arena of foreign policy, no lobby has proved more powerful than
      that of the organized American Jewish community in support of Israel;
      what is generally referred to as the Israel Lobby and in the halls of
      Congress, simply as “the lobby.”

      Its power is all the more impressive when one realizes the lobby
      represents no more than a third of America’s six million Jews.

      The dedication and single-mindedness of that one third, however, stands
      in stark contrast to the lack of involvement by the overwhelming
      majority of Americans in a system for which they long ago lost faith and
      respect. This has made the lobby’s task much simpler than it might first
      appear. It is also why unconditional support for Israel will likely
      remain the only issue in which Democrats and Republicans submerge their
      hostilities and march in lock step together like trained circus animals.
      Not only do pro-Israel measures usually receive 400 votes of the 435
      member House and up to 99 of a 100 in the Senate, but when it comes to
      foreign aid, Congress has frequently voted to grant Israel more money
      than a president has requested and to pass legislation favorable to the
      lobby over his opposition.

      Since 1985 the amount of direct aid has fluctuated between $3 and $3.5
      billion while unpublicized extras in the Pentagon budget have tended to
      raise that figure considerably higher.

      The total today is estimated to be at least $108 billion.

      This figure does not include the costs of $19 billion in loan guarantees
      to Israel since 1991, the billions of taxpayers dollars invested in
      Israeli government bonds by union pension funds, individual states and
      county and city governments, nor the billions in tax-exempt donations by
      American Jews to quasi governmental Israeli agencies and charities since
      Israel became a state.

      The state of the US economy has never been a consideration. When funds
      have been unavailable for essential domestic programs, such as in 199l,
      when six out of ten U.S. cities were unable to meet their budgets and
      several states their payrolls, Israel received, over the first president
      Bush’s wishes, an additional $650 million in cash as part of the Gulf
      War emergency spending bill. In September 1992, after stubbornly
      resisting for a year Israel’s request for $10 billion in loan
      guarantees, but with a difficult election against Bill Clinton just two
      months away, Bush went along with Congress’s demand that Israel’s
      request be approved. It was too late to help him at the polls,

      This is not only a tribute to the millions of dollars contributed to
      national political candidates by wealthy American Jews but a testament
      to the fear that AIPAC, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee,
      Israel’s officially registered lobby, has instilled in members of
      Congress who have neither a personal interest in supporting Israel nor a
      sizeable Jewish constituency.

      “If there was a secret ballot, aid to Israel would be cut severely,” a
      Congressman described as pro-Israel told the New Republic’s Morton
      Kondracke in 1989. “It’s not out of affection any more that Israel gets
      $3 billion a year. It’s from fear you’ll wake up one morning and find
      out than an opponent has $500,000 to run against you.”

      The lobby, however, is more than AIPAC, which, alone, would be unable to
      exert such power. There are, in fact, more than 60 organizations, from
      small to large, engaged single-mindedly, in promoting Israel’s interests
      in the US while marginalizing, intimidating and silencing its critics.
      Its targets include Jews opposed either to Israel’s existence as a
      Jewish state, such as myself and others who are simply outraged by
      Israel’s continuing occupation and theft of Palestinian land, and the
      deadly means with which both are carried out, held in check only by the
      mild restraints of the international community.

      Some 52 of these organizations belong to Conference of Presidents of
      Major Jewish American Organizations, which is supposed to the voice of
      American Jewry.

      Along with AIPAC, the two largest and most influential of them are the
      Anti-Defamation League, or ADL, and the American Jewish Committee, or
      AJC. Representatives of the major organizations meet every month to plan
      strategy for that month. Nothing can be left to chance.

      The ADL began in 1914 as an offshoot of the nation’s oldest Zionist
      organization, B’nai B’rith. Its mission was to defend Jews from
      anti-Jewish acts and words. It still does that, but anti-Jewish racism
      ceased to be a serious problem in the US years ago and the ADL’s chief
      task today is gathering information on critics of Israel, what it calls
      the “new anti-Semites” and smearing them in the public media.

      Fourteen years ago, its information gathering went too far. A raid by
      the San Francisco police on ADL’s San Francisco office revealed that the
      organization was conducting a major private spying operation across the
      United States. In the San Francisco area alone, its agent had illegally
      compiled files on more than 600 organizations and 12,000 individuals,
      myself among them. These were not just Arab-American, Palestinian and
      Muslim groups, but Black, Latino, Asian, Irish, and trade unions, as
      well.

      There was a special category for the anti-apartheid movement which given
      Israel’s ties with apartheid South Africa, was not surprising, but the
      ADL spy was also passing that information on to a South African
      intelligence agent along with reports on black South African exiles
      living in the area.

      Pressure from influential local Zionists convinced city officials not to
      bring the ADL while the organization promised it would stop its spying
      activities. There is no reason to believe it has done so. Today, it
      works very closely with police departments across the country, educating
      them on so-called “hate crimes” and routinely sends groups US police
      officials on free trips to Israel to learn how to respond to “terrorist
      attacks.” This doesn’t bode well for what is left of America’s civil
      liberties.

      The American Jewish Committee was founded by German Jews in 1906 and was
      firmly anti-Zionist until the events of the Second World War and the
      Jewish Holocaust led it to change its position. Today, it is the lobby’s
      unofficial foreign office, and until recently was largely content to
      work behind the scenes pressuring foreign governments in behalf of
      Israel. It began flexing its muscles more publicly two years ago when it
      opened an office in Brussels to lobby the European Union.

      The AJC now has weekly meetings with a high official if not the chief of
      state of a EU member government and one can already see the effect. Over
      the past year the EU has moved away from its relative support for the
      Palestinians and adopted one position after another that reflect Israeli
      demands

      A number of other important components of the lobby will not be found in
      the President’s conference, including 117 Jewish community relations
      councils, 155 Jewish federations, and several powerful “independent”
      Washington think tanks such as the Washington Institute for Near East
      Policy, a creation of AIPAC; the American Enterprise Institute, and the
      Foundation for the Defense of Democracy, founded after the attack on the
      World Trade Center..

      When one adds to what I have mentioned so far, the Jewish religious
      bodies that also lobby for Israel, it should be obvious that there is no
      other ethnic or religious group that comes close to being so intensely
      organized, except, perhaps, the Christian Zionists, but the scope of
      their activities is relatively limited. This is but one of several
      things that distinguish the Israel Lobby from other powerful US special
      interest lobbies, apart from the fact that it represents the interests
      of a foreign country. All are important to understanding its success.

      The first, of course, is its money. It is impossible to know exactly how
      much of it Jews contribute to American politicians, but it is far more
      than any other group.

      The difficulty occurs because groups monitoring the data categorize
      contributions according to the financial sector of the donor, which, in
      the case of Israel, tends to disguise the goal of the contributor. For
      example, the Communications industry in the US is dominated by Jews,
      most of whom are known supporters of Israel. When they contribute to the
      Democrats or Republicans, however, that money is not attributed to the
      Israel Lobby, but to the Communications industry. This applies to the
      Banking and Wall Street Financial houses that are also largely Jewish,
      as well as to other sectors of the business world.

      Haim Saban exemplifies this problem. An Egyptian-born Israeli-American
      billionaire and media owner, Saban, in 2002 gave the Democratic Party
      $12.3 million, $7.5 in one chunk. This was two million dollars more than
      the Exxon corporation gave the Republican Party over a 10-year period
      but rated no more than a few inches in the NY Times. Saban, a good
      friend of former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, has also made large
      contributions to AIPAC.

      He also established the Saban Center on the Middle East at the Brookings
      Institute, turning that once independent think tank into another
      component of the lobby. Saban’s $12.3 million, however, was not
      considered to be Israel lobby funding.

      What is considered as pro-Israel money is largely restricted to funds
      from some three dozen pro-Israel PACs or political action committees and
      their members. PACs are groups that are licensed to collect donations
      and pass them on to politicians supportive of the particular interests
      of the industry, trade union, or non-profit organization that formed the
      PAC. What distinguishes the pro-Israel PACs from the others is that they
      disguise their identity to avoid the prying eyes of the media and the
      public. They do this simply by not mentioning Israel in their name. Thus
      we have the Northern Californians for Good Government, St. Louisans for
      Good Government, the Desert Caucus, Hudson Valley PAC, and NATPAC, etc.
      This has led to them being referred to as “stealth PACs” by a former
      State Department official.

      Moreover, unlike other PACs, they only contribute to candidates in other
      states.

      For example, the Desert Caucus will send money to congressional
      candidates or an incumbent Senate or House members in Illinois or New
      Jersey, based solely on their positions on Israel. This has led critics
      of the lobby to portray them as Israel Firsters. That is meant to
      indicate that they are more concerned with the welfare of Israel than
      they are with that of their fellow Americans.

      The way I measured pro-Israel political contributions was to go to the
      web site of Mother Jones magazine, a pro-Israel liberal monthly. In 1996
      and 2000, it compiled lists of the top 400 individual donors to both
      political parties. What I found was that in 2000, 7 of the top 10
      donors, 12 of the top 20, and at least, 125 of the top 250 were Jewish,
      most of which went to the Democrats. In other words, at least 50% and
      even higher among the larger contributors. It is an extraordinary figure
      you realize that Jews make up but 2.3 % of the American population.

      The 50% overall figure corresponds to estimates from within the
      Democratic Party as well as Jewish organizations although some speculate
      the figure is as high as 70%.

      The extent of these contributions, coupled with those from trade unions
      that are strongly pro-Israel at the leadership level and which have
      invested at least

      $5 billion in Israeli government bonds, have made the Democratic Party,
      into what American law professor Francis Boyle recently called, “a front
      for AIPAC.”

      While maintaining a formidable presence in the nation’s capitol, so much
      so that it is referred to in Congress simply as “the lobby,” AIPAC
      gathers its strength from its grass roots cadres and that of other
      Jewish organizations with which it networks in every state and major
      city in the United States. Its operations are carried out by a staff of
      165, a healthy $47 million annual budget, and offices across the
      country. What affords it a special advantage is that it is considered a
      domestic lobby and not required to register under the Foreign Agents
      Registration Act.

      This gives its lobbyists access such registration would prohibit, such
      as taking part in Congressional committee hearings, drafting or vetting
      legislation that concerns Israel or the Middle East, and placing its
      interns as volunteers in the offices of members of Congress where they
      serve as AIPAC’s eyes or, if you prefer it, spies.

      Few AIPAC staff members actually lobby. Most provide research materials,
      talking points, and speeches for members of Congress or help prepare
      AIPAC’s Near East Report, a four-page bi-weekly that is essential
      reading on Capitol Hill. At a local level, in addition to contributing
      money, AIPAC members voluntarily provide their expertise to competing
      candidates in congressional elections, so whoever wins, Israel is
      assured of a supporter.

      AIPAC’s annual conference in Washington each Spring is a major event of
      the political season. In 2005, 4,000 of its members attended along with
      1000 student guests. The keynote address is usually given by the
      President, the Vice-President or the Secretary of State. This year it
      was Vice President Dick Cheney who was greeted with may rounds of
      applause and a standing ovation. As a tribute to the lobby’s power,
      approximately half the members of Congress attend, including the
      Democratic and Republican leaders in the Senate and the House.
      Predictably, their speeches reflect their personal loyalty and of
      America’s unbreakable commitment to Israel. The names of the congress
      members who show up are publicized on AIPAC's web site, which enhances
      their status among major Jewish donors.

      As important but rarely publicized are regional lunches and dinners that
      AIPAC holds across the country, to which local political leaders--
      mayors, supervisors, city council members, police chiefs, district
      attorneys, school superintendents, etc, are invited. The speakers at
      these events will usually be a US Senator or a governor from another
      state. What is interesting is that the media is never invited nor
      informed of their appearance, neither where the event takes place nor in
      the speaker’s state.

      As a follow-up, those favored public officials will soon find themselves
      invited on all-expense paid trips to Israel provided by local Jewish
      community relations councils, federations or other community
      organizations. There they meet the prime minister, defense minister and
      the IDF Chief of Staff, tour Israel and a West Bank settlement, and
      visit the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum. It is from such so-called “civil
      servants” that new members of Congress invariably emerge and so the
      personal relations established between them and influential Jewish
      community activists through these trips are mutually beneficial.

      Politicians, from Congressional candidates to the president, frequently
      travel to Israel to gain the support of Jewish voters back home.

      George W. Bush made his only trip to Israel before deciding to run for
      President in what was widely viewed as an effort to win pro-Israel
      voters' support. California Governor Arnold Shwarznegger and New York
      Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a non-practicing Jew, did the same.

      Once in Congress, members can be assured of more free trips to Israel
      arranged through the American Israel Education Fund, a foundation set up
      by AIPAC for that purpose. In 2005 alone, more than 100 members of
      Congress visited Israel, some several times.

      It should be noted that few politicians think it necessary to make such
      a political trip to Mexico prior to or even after an election, despite
      the fact that Mexico is far more vital to the US economy and is the
      genuine homeland of many more millions of Americans. But then, there is
      no Mexican lobby with similar political or financial clout.

      AIPAC does not contribute directly to congressional or presidential
      campaigns but it does advise its members and the pro-Israel community as
      to where their money can be the most effective, whether through
      individual contributions or through one of the PACs.

      An important hallmark of AIPAC’s power is its ability to get the
      signatures of at least 70 U.S. senators on any letter it wishes to send
      to a U.S. president when they believe he is not acting in Israel’s best
      interests. One of the most notable was the letter of 76 of them
      addressed to President Gerald Ford on May 21, 1975 after Ford had
      suspended aid to Israel and was about to make a major speech
      re-assessing the US-Israel relationship and calling on Israel to return
      to the 1967 borders. The letter warned Ford against making any changes
      in the strong US-Israel relationship. Ford never gave the speech and no
      president has dared to make such a threat again.

      Mitchell Bard, a former editor of AIPAC’s Near East Report, explains
      that the source of the lobby’s power is that “Jews have devoted
      themselves to politics with almost religious fervor.” Though the Jewish
      population in the United States is roughly six million, or a little over
      2 % of the U.S. population, almost 90 percent live in twelve key
      electoral college states.

      “These states alone,” writes Bard, “are worth enough electoral votes to
      elect the president. If you add the non-Jews shown by opinion polls to
      be as pro-Israel as Jews, it is clear Israel has the support of one of
      the largest veto groups in the country.”

      Bard points out what has been obvious to political observers for years.
      Jewish political activism obliges members of Congress to consider what a
      mixed voting record on Israel-related issues may mean to their political
      future. There are no benefits for those who openly criticize Israel and
      “considerable costs in both loss of money and votes from Jews and
      non-Jews alike.” For a member of Congress, even to call for
      even-handedness towards both the Israelis and Palestinians is enough to
      be targeted for defeat.

      Consequently, politicians at every level of government tend to be more
      responsive to the concerns of Jewish voters than to the larger segments
      of their constituencies who pay more attention to “reality” TV, soap
      operas, professional sports, and their mobile phones than they do to
      electoral politics.

      While the fact “that the campaign contribution is a major key to Jewish
      power…[is] one of the worst-kept secrets in American Jewish politics,”
      as JJ Goldberg, noted in his book, “Jewish Power, it was not considered
      enough by Israel’s supporters in the years immediately following
      Israel’s establishment. What was thought necessary was for Jewish groups
      to create a supra-organizational structure that would work to ensure
      that no sector of American life would be immune from its influence.

      Although this structure has evolved over time and while the scope of its
      activities have expanded and become more sophisticated, its modus
      operandi has remained largely unchanged.

      This was revealed in a Senate Committee on Foreign Relations hearing in
      1963, a time when U.S. financial assistance and political support for
      Israel was minimal compared to what it would become, and it was still
      possible for at least one elected legislator to publicly criticize
      Israel on the floor of Congress. The retaliation would come later. Thus,
      in May 1963, Sen. J.W. Fulbright, an Arkansas Democrat, chairman of the
      Committee on Foreign Relations initiated a series of hearings concerning
      the activities of foreign agents in the US to determine if more
      restrictive laws needed to be put in place.

      Among the groups under investigation were those of the young Israel
      lobby, including the supra-organizational structure or umbrella group,
      the American Zionist Council (AZC), and AIPAC that at the time was
      little more than a one man organization.

      At the time, the AZC was comprised of eight other groups; only two are
      major players today, the extreme right-wing Zionist Organization of
      America, and the Women’s Zionist Organization of America, better known
      as Hadassah. As the American Zionist Committee for Public Affairs, AIPAC
      had been launched in 1951 as the lobbying arm of the American Zionist
      Council, but separated itself from the AZC in 1954 so as not to
      jeopardize the tax-exempt status of the other organizations by its
      lobbying efforts. It dropped “Zionist” from its name and became AIPAC in
      1959. The separation was largely cosmetic. While AIPAC would focus its
      efforts on Congress, the other groups would take their lobbying for
      Israel along the length and breadth of American society.

      .

      This became clear from the program of a single committee of the AZC that
      was presented at the Senate hearing. It should be noted that at the time
      Israel was under no external danger and the Palestine Liberation
      Organization did not exist.

      The Americam Zionist Council’s Committee on Information and Public
      Relations would carry “on a major part of its work through highly
      specialized subcommittees composed of professionals in specific areas of
      activity who volunteer their services…” Its targets for the 1962/63
      budgetary year were magazines, and their editors; TV, radio and films;

      Christian religious groups; academia, at every level; the daily press;
      book publishing and promotion; expanding its already active speakers
      bureau; liaison with organizations, both on the national and local
      levels, especially those with an international relations programs with
      special attention to “the Negro community;” “issuance of special
      material and guidance on controversial issues such as Arab refugees,
      Syrian-Israeli situation, etc.,” subsidizing trips to Israel for
      “individual public opinion molders to help provide them with an
      experience in Israel…and organizing tours “in which public opinion
      molders will participate [and] provide suitable arrangements in Israel
      for handling American visitors;… counteracting the opposition” (which
      was minimal at the time but they were taking no chances), “the
      monitoring and counteraction of all activities carried out here by the
      Arabs, American Friends of the Middle East and other hostile groups” and
      finally number twelve labeled “Miscellaneous,” which included “Answering
      requests for information and providing suitable literature for the many
      thousands of requests annually received.”

      Those were their targets 44 years ago. Let’s see how far they have come,

      The first item was magazines and cultivating their editors.

      While a several of the most important magazines of that day are no
      longer published, those that exist today such as Newsweek, Time, US News
      & World Report, and the Weekly Standard are either Jewish owned or
      managed with Jews furnishing a substantial portion of their editorial
      staffs. While the fact that someone is Jewish does not necessarily mean
      he or she is an active Zionist, my observations, over the years,
      indicate that most are sympathetic to Israel and, at the very least, for
      their own self-interest, will know how to spin a story.

      Television, Radio and Films were dominated by Jews then, but are more
      strongly in support Israel now, from ownership, to management, to news
      direction. This is a prime source of pro-Israel propaganda and
      influence.

      Christian religious groups have been a challenge for the lobby as
      various denominations have, over the years, sought to take a balanced
      position on the Israel-Palestine conflict. This, for Zionists, is an act
      of “anti-Semitism.” By and large, however, the Zionists have made sure
      their relations to the most of the Christian denominations is one in
      which Christian guilt for centuries of Jewish persecution is never far
      from the table. Their biggest success has been with the addition of the
      Christian evangelicals to the ranks of the Zionist movement, which
      provides massive voter support in rural America where few Jews live.

      Among the more liberal denominations, the Zionists have had to work
      overtime recently to keep the Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and
      Congregationalists, from approving or implementing plans that would have
      them divest from US companies profiting from the occupation.

      Academia has long been a major battle ground between the Zionists and
      supporters of Palestine. In recent years, the battle over divestment and
      what can or cannot be taught about the Israel-Palestine conflict have
      been the main issues. The Zionists had already been extremely active
      before the present intifada but shortly after Israel was widely
      criticized for its attack on, Jenin in April 2002, 26 of the campus
      groups led by Hillel and off-campus organizations, led by AIPAC, the ADL
      and the AJC formed the Israel Campus Coalition. They have so far been
      able to turn back all attempts at divestment on the universirt campuses
      as they have in the churches.

      In the battle over teaching content, the ADL had a head start. In the
      early Eighties, it became the first organization to publish a list of
      pro-Arab professors and activists and distribute it to their members and
      to the media. The most recent group, Campus Watch, went so far as to put
      their addresses on its web site until obliged to remove them.

      In the academic arena, the AJC and Campus Watch have been pushing
      Congress to pass legislation that would require monitoring of Middle
      East studies in the universities to make sure that professors are not
      indoctrinating their students with anti-Israel or anti-US “propaganda.”
      Since this would clearly violate the 1st amendment and curtail the free
      speech of professors in the classroom, the legislation is stalled in the
      Senate.

      Most recently, the lobby scored an important victory when it was able to
      prevent Yale university, the nation’s oldest, from hiring University of
      Michigan professor and Middle East expert, Juan Cole, even though Cole
      had been recommended by the university’s hiring committees. His crime?
      He is critical of Israel and of the lobby and a supporter of the
      Palestinians.

      Conquering the daily press has been at times a contest, but the lobby
      has emerged a clear winner. With ownership of the two most influential
      papers in the country, the New York Times and the Washington Post
      historically in Jewish hands, with pro-Israel columnists for both of
      those papers syndicated in hundreds of other papers across the country,
      the pro-Israel position is the only one that America reads on both its
      editorial and op-ed pages.

      The news, as well, is given a pro-Israel slant but this is not enough
      for the Zionist media monitoring groups, CAMERA and Honest Reporting.
      They accuse both papers of having an anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian bias.
      This, of course, is nonsense, but it serves to keep them in line.

      Any survey of book titles will reveal yet another success of the lobby.
      While there have been a plethora of books about Israel and Jewish
      culture, nothing has been more successful than promoting books about the
      Jewish holocaust and the output appears to be never-ending. Moreover, it
      is the rare American child that can go through public school without an
      intense study of the holocaust through the diary of Ann Frank. For them,
      that is the story of the Second World War. More time, in fact, is spent
      by American school children studying the holocaust than the genocide of
      the Native Americans and the three and a half centuries of slavery and
      the decades of racism that followed. Before they get out of college
      students will also have read and experienced the maudlin recriminations
      of Eli Wiesel against the non-Jewish world for not coming to the aid of
      the Jews. Wiesel is now a permanent fixture on the American cultural
      scene.

      I’ll not go through all the rest of AZC’s program except to point out
      that its liaisons with the African-American community, and more recently
      with the emerging Latin-American population, have been of major
      importance to the lobby’s leadership. While left-wing Jews played
      important roles in America’s civil rights struggles, controlling the
      black political agenda and determining its leadership have long been
      major goals of the lobby. It has succeeded in achieving both.
      Contributions from wealthy pro-Israel Jewish businessmen provide key
      financial support for black churches and keeps their pastors quiet,
      while providing campaign funding and key data bases for aspiring black
      politicians insures their loyalty to their donors, if not to Israel.
      Those who refuse to genuflect to the lobby, which required their
      withholding of criticism when Israel was providing arms to apartheid
      South Africa, find themselves accused of “anti-Semitism” and targeted
      for political extinction.

      What remains today is what I have called “the invisible plantation.” The
      only member of Congress not on that plantation at the moment is Cynthia
      McKinney from Atlanta, Georgia. They defeated her in 2002 for
      criticizing Israel and the war on Iraq but she battled back to regain
      her seat in 2004, much to the unhappiness of not only the lobby but also
      the Democratic Party.

      They are gunning for her again in Georgia’s July 18 primary.

      Finally, and what is most disturbing, what distinguishes the Israel
      Lobby from all the others is that it has no significant opposition.

      In fact, it was only this spring, with the publication of a paper
      entitled The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy in the London Review of
      Books by Professors John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and
      Steven Walt, of Harvard, that the subject of the lobby’s power and
      influence over US Middle East policy became an acceptable subject for
      public debate.

      In their paper, the professors asserted, with considerable evidence,
      that US support for Israel over the years has not been in America’s
      national interest and the present war in Iraq was essentially initiated
      in Israel’s behalf and argued, effectively, against the notion of Israel
      serving as “strategic asset” of the US at the present time.

      That the article had to come to light in London, after being rejected by
      the Atlantic magazine in the US, is a telling commentary on the degree
      to which discussion of the lobby has been a taboo subject in American
      political circles.

      Those circles include not just the supporters of Israel and the
      politicians and the media over which they maintain their influence, but
      the American left and its leading icon, Prof. Noam Chomsky. While
      praising the two professors for having raised the issue, he proceeded to
      casually dismiss their thesis without addressing its key points.

      This was no surprise. For more than 30 years, in countless books,
      speeches, and interviews, Professor Chomsky has maintained that Israel
      is a “strategic asset” of the US, that it serves as Washington’s “cop on
      the beat” in the Middle East, and that the lobby is not really a factor
      in Washington’s foreign policy deliberations. It only seems so, he
      insists, because its positions tend to agree with those of America’s
      ruling elites. It is also important to note that he strongly opposes any
      form of economic pressure being brought against Israel, be it, boycott,
      divestment, or South African type sanctions.

      With so much invested in his position Professor Chomsky is not about to
      change his mind at this point. Nor, apparently, will other professors
      such as Stephen Zunes who have rigidly adopted his viewpoint.

      But what is more important and unfortunate, that has also been the
      position taken by the anti-war and Palestine solidarity movements.
      Rather than welcoming the opportunity to criticize or even discuss the
      lobby’s role that has been afforded by the Mearsheimer-Walt paper, they
      have either ignored it or, like Chomsky and Zunes, insisted that the
      problem is not the lobby, but US imperialism (as if the two were
      mutually exclusive) which is an easy target but provides little
      foundation for concrete political action. The fact that the Palestine
      support movement in the United States has been an utter failure to this
      point in time, I believe, can be traced, in a large part, to its refusal
      to acknowledge the power of the Israel lobby and to challenge that power
      either locally and nationally.

      It is interesting to note that in 1971, three years before Chomsky
      published his first book on the subject, Roger Hilsman, who had been a
      State Department official in charge of intelligence under the Kennedy
      administration wrote :

      "It is obvious to even the most casual observer, for example, that
      United States foreign policy in the Middle East, where oil reigns
      supreme, has been more responsive to the pressures of the American
      Jewish community and their natural desire to support Israel than it has
      to American oil interests."

      Stephen Green, whose ground-breaking research into State Department
      documents, was incorporated in his superb book, Taking Sides: America’s
      Secret Relations with Militant Israel,” put it in a more nuanced way:

      “Since 1953,” he wrote, “Israel, and friends of Israel in America, have
      determined the broad outlines of US policy in the region. It has been
      left to American presidents to implement that policy, with varying
      degrees of enthusiasm, and to deal with tactical issues.”

      The late Professor Edward Said did not mince words on the issue. In
      2001, in his contribution to The New Intifada, entitled, appropriately,
      "America’s Last Taboo," he rhetorically asked: “What explains this
      [present] state of affairs? The answer lies in the power of Zionist
      organizations in American politics, whose role throughout the "peace
      process" has never been sufficiently addressed—a neglect that is
      absolutely astonishing, given the policy of the PLO has been in essence
      to throw our fate as a people into the lap of the United States, without
      any strategic awareness of how American policy is dominated by a small
      minority whose views about the Middle East are in some ways more extreme
      than those of Likud itself.

      And on the subject of AIPAC, Said wrote:

      “ [T]he American Israel Public Affairs Committee—AIPAC—has for years
      been the most powerful single lobby in Washington. Drawing on a
      well-organized, well-connected, highly visible and wealthy Jewish
      population, AIPAC inspires an awed fear and respect across the political
      spectrum. Who is going to stand up to this Moloch in behalf of the
      Palestinians, when they can offer nothing, and AIPAC can destroy a
      professional career at the drop of a checkbook? In the past, one or two
      members of Congress did resist AIPAC openly, but the many political
      action committees controlled by AIPAC made sure they were never
      re-elected... If such is the material of the legislature, what can be
      expected of the executive?”

      Professor Said’s opinion, like the others, fell on largely deaf ears.

      Thus, it should come as no surprise that in the absence of any organized
      public opposition and the abject default to it by those purporting to
      support the Palestinian cause, the Israel Lobby has had no trouble
      maintaining its control over the US Congress, and essentially US Middle
      East policy while making the political costs of any president that
      opposed it, a predictable defeat at the polls on election day.

      Every president beginning with Richard Nixon has made at least a
      half-hearted effort to get Israel to leave the West Bank, Gaza, and the
      Golan Heights, not for the benefit of the Palestinians, but to improve
      America’s regional interests and each has been thwarted by the lobby.

      The exception was Jimmy Carter, a political outsider, who forced
      Menachem Begin to evacuate the Sinai in exchange for the Camp David
      peace treaty with Egypt and in 1978, to rub it in, ordered him to
      withdraw his troops from Lebanon after Israel’s first invasion of its
      northern neighbor.

      The lobby was not pleased with Camp David and with Carter’s other
      efforts to pressure Israel and he paid for it at the polls in 1980 when
      he received only 48% of the Jewish vote, the lowest for any Democrat
      since they started keeping count.

      Given the situation, I have described, the outlook for changing American
      policy in terms of providing even a modicum of justice to the
      Palestinians is not bright.

      What is left for us to do is explain why and to challenge those on our
      side who stubbornly control the message to face the truth or get out of
      the way.