@Foofie,
Foofie wrote:
Since you talk about the "power of the Israel lobby at the ballot box is overrated," it might be more intellectually honest to talk about the "Christian Zionists" at the ballot box, since that is really the ballot box that is being "rated." Not five million Jewish voters that usually vote Democratic.
Using the word "Israel lobby" connotes Jewish voters, and they are really not all that powerful, especially as Democrats. However, the word "Israel lobby" does equate in the minds of many as Jewish Americans, and as you well know, the thought of Jewish machinations for power worked for the Czar, and still gets an audience.
I think that's fair. We are talking about the wrongful actions of the Israeli State and the folks here who (usually for their own interests) actively support AIPAC and other like political action groups supporting Israel. Some Jews are also Zionists and some are not. Some Gentiles are Zionists also. Many Evangelicals and their church groups are, for their own reasons, very active supporters of Zionism. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that some of them are also anti Semites.
I believe Izzie's unqualified opposition to everything Israeli should be tempered with more awareness of his country's substantial involvement in the unrest and antagonisms that plague the Mideast, from Pakistan to Iran, Syria and Egypt (and beyond). To a very large degree they are clear historical consequences of British imperialism; the destruction of the Ottoman Empire; colonial misrule; and economic exploitation.
Divide and conquer was the rule for the expansion of the British Empire. Britain used the Arabs to help them overthrow the Ottomans (so they and their French alies could control the region and its oil) and promised Palestine to their Hashemite leaders as a reward. At the same time they were blithely promising a Palestinian homeland to European Zionists (led by Lord Rothschild), and doing so with a truly amazing disregard for the likely consequences. (At the time Zionisn was but a minor preoccupation among European Jews who, more often than not, were as preoccupied with assimilation as the distant dream of Zionism. All that changed after the Holocaust.) The U.S. foolishly agreed in 1953 to finance and back a British plan to overthrow the Iranian parliamentary government in favor of installing the young Shah as absolute ruler and ensuring the British could maintain their 90/10 split of oil profits with the Iranians - an act that had bad consequences that cointinue today.
WWII brought everything to a head. The Germans attempted to exterminate European Jews from the Atlantic to the Volga, and the effort involved some passive (and occasionally active) complicity on the part of other nations. At the end of this war there was a vast population of "displaced persons" , the euphamism then used for Germans expelled from their land in the new borders of Poland, the Baltic States, and Czechoslovakia, and, even more prominently, a very large population of European Jews saved from various internment camps, who were no longer welcome in their former European homes. That these suffering people aggressively sought to resurrect the Zionist dream and create a new homeland for themselves, should surprise no one.
Ideally the immigrant European Jews should have sought a peaceful accomodation and even assimilation of the resident Palestinain population right from the start. However those were not ideal conditions, and they were further exacerbated by the British who simply washed their hands of the whole affair they had created and bugged out, bequeathing the problem to the UN (which then had almost no Moslem states in its membership).
Instead, I fault the Israelis for missing the crucial political and moral opportunity that presented itself after the 1967 war. Israel was then safe and secure - able to safely take a chance by recognizing the immediate human and political rights of the large Palestinian population, then in their control. Unhappily they chose otherwise and have since then pursued a policy of forced displacement and separation that will likely yield a conflict which will last for centuries.
I believe there are two important moral lessons here.
1. Freedom and peace for the oppressed cannot be found by oppressing others.
2. Let him who is without sin cast the first stone...
