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On Thursday the LA Times published an editorial about the Chas Freeman affair which perfectly exemplifies the self-contradictory reasoning of the ‘Israel Lobby’ conspiracy theorists.

An open debate on Israel

LA Times, March 12, 2009

Obama’s appointee to lead the National Intelligence Council withdrew, blaming the Israel lobby. To shape U.S. policy, many voices must be heard.

The writer suggests that some voices were suppressed. Were they? We’ll see.

When John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt wrote about “The Israel Lobby” in 2006, many supporters of Israel were outraged. How, they wanted to know, could anyone say that the United States offered “unwavering support” to Israel? Worse yet, how did these two misguided professors dare suggest that there was a cabal of die-hard Zionists in the media, in Congress, in the Pentagon and in neocon think tanks working to ensure that U.S. policy did not deviate from the pro-Israel party line?

The smug, ironic tone is designed to suggest that the professors were not so misguided after all.

The debate was ferocious; the world (or at least the part that cares about these things) divided along angry partisan lines. Mearsheimer and Walt were shouted down in many quarters as anti-Semites. Needless to say, no resolution was reached, and eventually the furor died down.

What ‘resolution’ could there have been?  But note that the “debate” had two sides, and both sides had ample opportunity to be heard. Their opponents were outraged, but they weren’t  “shouted down” — i.e., prevented from publishing or speaking. Several versions of the original article and a book based on it were published; Mearsheimer and Walt toured the US promoting it. Indeed, Mr. Freeman’s Middle East Policy Council even published a footnoted version of their article.

Several weeks ago, however, it re-erupted after President Obama appointed Charles W. Freeman Jr., a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, as chairman of the National Intelligence Council. Vehement objections came from several of Israel’s most loyal supporters in Congress, from some journalists and lobbyists known for their strong support of the Jewish state, and from other members of what some would no doubt call, well, the Israel lobby.

The Israel Lobby slander did not re-erupt like Mt. St. Helens. It was introduced by Freeman’s supporters as a red herring to distract attention from the very real concerns raised about his qualifications.

Freeman was not the sort of person they were ever going to like. He once said that “the brutal oppression of the Palestinians by the Israeli occupation shows no sign of ending.” He also said: “American identification with Israel has become total.” Israel, he once said, “excels at war; sadly, it has shown no talent for peace.”

He said a lot more, but in any event it is not unsurprising that he was opposed by people who support Israel. But they did not argue that he was unfit to digest intelligence information for the President because he disliked Israel. They argued that his close ties with foreign governments and his high degree of partisanship disqualified him.

Those are certainly provocative statements. On the other hand, Freeman was backed by a group of 17 former U.S. ambassadors who described him as a man of integrity who “would never let his personal views shade or distort intelligence assessments,” and defended by Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair, who called him “a person of strong views, of an inventive mind in the analytical point of view.”

Interesting. It certainly looks as though “many voices” were heard. Who, exactly, was silenced by the Israel lobby? The LA Times thus joins Mearsheimer, Walt and Freeman in insisting that the sinister Israel lobby silences dissent, in the face of evidence for the precise opposite.

But Freeman’s critics kept at him, and on Tuesday, Freeman withdrew from the appointment. Afterward, he was blunt: “The tactics of the Israel Lobby plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency” and reflect “an utter disregard for truth.”

Do they? Let me quote one of his critics, Steve Rosen, formerly of AIPAC and someone who, by the way, was himself a victim of an FBI sting operation designed to silence him for his views:

Freeman received more from Saudis than previously revealed

According to a letter from the Acting Executive Director of Freeman’s Middle East Policy Council in today’s Washington Times, MEPC received five previously undisclosed contributions from the Saudi Foreign Ministry in 2008, and $1 million from the King of Saudi Arabia in 2005. In addition, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Al-Saud announced that he “donated more than $1 million to the US Middle East Policy Council” on March 18, 2007. MEPC’s executive director says in his letter that the budget of MEPC is $600,000 a year, a sum roughly equal to the total of these three contributions from different donors in Saudi Arabia since 2005. He claims that, “Over the past decade, scheduled contributions to the council from the Saudi government have amounted to less than one-twelfth of our annual budget.” What if we take unscheduled contributions and only the period since 2005?? The numbers suggest a much higher level of dependence on Saudi Arabian sources.

Blair’s letter to Congress mentions only Saudi government funding. Universities that receive federal funding having to disclose all foreign-source gifts above a certain amount, and this should be the standard for the national intelligence Council. Likewise, what about other Arab/Gulf governments? Freeman should reveal all foreign-sourced gifts, donations, etc. for the entire time he headed the MEPC.

So who is disregarding the truth here, Freeman or Rosen?

The Times continues:

Our opinion is this: Israel is America’s friend and ally. It deserves to exist safely within secure borders. We hope it will continue to prosper as a refuge for Jews and a vibrant democracy in the region (alongside an equally democratic Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza). But we do not believe that Israel should be immune from criticism or that there is room for only one point of view in our government.

U.S. policy has been extremely supportive of Israel over the years, as have many of our policymakers. That’s fine. But theirs should not be the only voices allowed in the room.

The Times has suggested along with Mearsheimer and Walt that pro-Israel ones are “the only voices allowed in the room”. Then it contradicts itself by bringing up the “ferocious” debate — pro and con — about the Mearsheimer-Walt paper, as well as the equally two-sided one about Freeman’s qualifications. The facts show that all sides spoke loudly in this dispute. And they certainly show that anti-Israel voices like Mearsheimer and Walt — as well as Chas Freeman, who has been writing, speaking and lobbying against Israel for years — are being heard loud and clear.

The Times and Freeman also suggest that the pro-Israel lobby has a lock on US policy. But if the opinions of the 17 former ambassadors are any indication of the climate in the State Department, this is decidedly not the case.

Technorati Tags: Chas Freeman, LA Times, Israel, Israel lobby

Here’s the lead paragraph in the latest AP story on the Israeli elections, by Mark Lavie, which appeared in our local newspaper today:

JERUSALEM The Kadima Party of moderate Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni kept its slight lead over Benjamin Netanyahu’s hawkish Likud in final election results announced Thursday, but the hard-line bloc in Israel’s new parliament will have the power to stymie Mideast peace efforts.

Writer Lavie is by no means anti-Israel like some AP staffers, but this paragraph illustrates why people in this part of the world have little understanding of what’s going on in the Mideast.

One gets the idea from it that there are ‘peace efforts’ that are on the verge of success, as long as some nasty hawkish hard-liners don’t come along and screw it up.

Actually, there has been no progress in negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) since the Annapolis conference despite a very strong desire on the part of current Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his Foreign Minister, Kadima leader Tzipi Livni, to reach an agreement.

The problem has not been right-wing sabotage, but simply that the PA’s demands have exceeded anything that even Olmert and Livni can agree to — and they are far ahead of the average Israeli in what they will accept.

Anyway, even if Netanyahu forms a narrow ‘right-wing’ coalition without Kadima, the Likud and the major parties that would join it all favor a two-state solution. It’s unlikely that the smaller parties would be able to exercise a veto power over negotiations with the PA. And Netanyahu himself has said that he would continue negotiations if elected.

Lavie continues,

But the hawkish makeup of the new parliament — and Netanyahu’s own opposition to peace treaty talks with the Palestinians — could stall efforts to negotiate an accord. That could put the new government into conflict with the U.S., where President Barack Obama has pledged to put Mideast peacemaking high on his agenda.

The only sense that I can make of this is that Lavie is conflating the negotiations with the PA, which are intended to lead to a peace treaty and which Netanyahu would continue, with the indirect talks with Hamas over a cease-fire. Netanyahu did express his opinion that the war should not have been stopped short of overthrowing Hamas. But then he adds this:

Last month Obama sent a special Mideast envoy, George Mitchell, on his first tour of the region. Mitchell is on record as favoring talks on a peace treaty and opposing expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Netanyahu disagrees on both issues.

Thursday evening, Palestinian [PA] President Mahmoud Abbas urged Israel’s incoming leaders to press ahead with peace efforts. He told a Christian gathering in Ramallah that Israel must stop settlement expansion and construction of the security barrier dividing Israel from the West Bank.

Israel should “accept the two-state solution — Palestine and Israel living side by side in security and peace,” Abbas said.

So he is after all talking about negotiations with the PA and is simply wrong about Netanyahu’s position. No wonder Americans don’t understand!

Lavie quotes Abbas’ usual red herring that what is preventing agreement is “settlement expansion” and the security barrier, instead of the real reason, which is that the PA’s own weakness in confronting hardline elements prevents it from taking reasonable positions on borders, Jerusalem and refugees. Abbas’ Fatah party is contending for dominance with Hamas and other extreme factions, and its flexibility is highly limited. No Israeli government led by a Zionist party, even Labor or Meretz, can possibly agree to anything that Abbas will be allowed to accept — or vice versa.

So in a sense Lavie is getting things exactly backwards. The problem isn’t hard-line Israelis, it’s hard-line Palestinians, particularly Hamas. But that would be disturbing to the conventional wisdom, which says that everything is Israel’s fault.

Oh yes. Nowhere in the article does the word ‘Hamas’ appear. Not once.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Israeli election, Netanyahu, Mark Lavie

In case you were wondering why so many non-governmental organizations (NGOs) concerned with human rights seem to spend so much time bashing Israel and ignore the multiple — and continuing — war crimes of  Hamas,

Human rights groups argued Wednesday that a detailed probe into Hamas’s firing of Kassam rockets at Israeli communities is not necessary, because it constitutes such a “blatant” war crime. By contrast, Israel’s actions are more complex, and therefore do require such investigation, they said.

War crimes, said Sarit Micha’eli of B’tselem, are those actions that violate Article III of the Geneva Convention, and it was clear that Hamas was in violation of the requirement of distinction between civilian and military targets.

“It makes it quite easy regarding Hamas. It is quite clear that they are attacking and targeting civilians. When someone straps a bomb on themselves or fire missiles at civilians, the details are less important. It is clearly a war crime without even looking at the details,” she said. “Even if they fired a Kassam missile as a military target, the fact that it is an inaccurate weapon, it would still count as an indiscriminate attack…”

“With Israel things are more complicated because Israel states it does not deliberately target civilians and that it safeguards them. With Israel, you have to investigate each specific incident because even if a civilian is killed in an attack, it doesn’t mean its necessarily a war crime. Targeting civilians is a war crime, but the damage to civilians in a given situation isn’t indicative of a war crime.”

“The Israeli authorities deny everything, so one has to prove what happened in a way that you don’t need to do with the Palestinian rockets,” said Donatella Rovera of Amnesty International. — Jerusalem Post (my emphasis)

In other words, “we know Israel is deliberately trying to kill civilians, but they lie about it.”

One might wonder how they know this, since it is manifestly not in Israel’s interest to kill civilians. The whole dynamic of the war was Israel trying to damage Hamas as severely as possible before international pressure forced an end to the fighting, while Hamas and friends tried their best to create outrage over Israeli ‘atrocities’. And as I’ve noted before, if Israel had wanted to kill Palestinians, it could have easily done it in the tens of thousands.

But the abovementioned Donatella Rovera of Amnesty International (AI) is quite prepared to bend logic when necessary. In a discussion with Alan Dershowitz in 2005, Rovera — AI’s researcher in the territories — defended an AI report which claimed that violence against Palestinian women by Palestinian men was actually Israel’s fault! Dershowitz wrote,

Here is AI’s conclusion, listing the causes of the violence directed against Palestinian women, presumably in the order of their importance: “Palestinian women in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are victims of multiple violations as a result of the escalation of the conflict, Israel’s policies, and a system of norms, traditions and laws which treat women as unequal members of society.” The “escalation of the conflict” (which AI blames primarily on Israel) and “Israel’s policies” rank higher than the “norms, traditions and laws which treat women as unequal.” The report asserts that violence against women has “increased” dramatically during the Israeli occupation and has reached “an unprecedented level” as a result of the “increased militarization of the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation.” It is as if the West Bank and Gaza Strip had been violence free for Palestinian women until the Israeli Occupation.

On August 23, 2005, I spoke with Donatella Rovera, who is AI’s researcher on Israel and the Occupied Territories and asked her to provide the data on which she had based her conclusion that violence against women had escalated to an “unprecedented level” during the occupation, and especially during its most militarized phase. I also asked her whether AI had compared violence against women in the occupied West Bank and Gaza with violence against women in unoccupied Arab-Muslim areas that have comparable populations, such as Jordan. Rovera acknowledged that AI could provide no such comparative data and confirmed that the report was based on anecdotal information, primarily from Palestinian NGOs.

Rovera’s ‘research’ seems to follow the same pattern time and again (she’s frequently quoted in news reports accusing Israel of using white phosphorus shells against civilians, summary executions of Palestinian children, etc.): Palestinians tell her that thus-and-such happened, and she repeats it to reporters along with her judgment that whatever atrocity she is describing is a violation of international law.

Ms. Rovera and other NGO representatives serve an important function in the anti-Israel propaganda machine: they provide an aura of impartiality that makes it possible for the media to repeat unverified stories which would be less convincing in the mouths of Palestinians. Some observers call this the “NGO halo effect“; I prefer the expression “bullshit laundering”.

Donatella Rovera at work

Technorati Tags: Israel, Donatella Rovera, Amnesty International, bullshit laundering