Oct. 28 Free Gaza Boat Trip

For Immediate Release
October 24, 2008

On October 28, 2008, the http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=2ob64TK%2FPeHINqkSTaJd7ymM8hzhjK9i Free Gaza Movement will set sail again for Gaza. On board will be a Nobel Peace Prize winner, five physicians, a member of the Israeli Knesset, and a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council. The boat will again carry 26 passengers and crew to the port of Gaza.

"We've spent the past month making sure our boat is better and stronger, because the weather is getting more severe. Since we promised the people of Gaza we'd return, we wanted to make sure we would return safely," said Derek Graham, first mate on board the boat. Mairead Maguire, the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize winner for her work for peace in Northern Ireland and one of the passengers on board stated, "We sail to Gaza to show the people we love and care for them. What less can we do whilst our governments remain silent and inactive in face of such preventable suffering of the women and children of Gaza and Palestine."

Also on board is Mustafa Barghouthi, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council and Jamal Zahalka, a member of the Israeli Knesset. Both Palestinians are determined to forge alliances with their countrymen in Gaza, something they have not been able to do, because Israel has closed all land borders to this besieged people.

On this occasion the siege-breakers will deliver 6 cubic metres of medicine as a gift from the European Campaign to End the on Siege on Gaza. Dr Arafat Shoukri, head of the campaign stated, "This is just the first consignment of medical supplies we hope to deliver. Our choice of medicines has been in response to a specific request from the health authorities in Gaza. Many basic items such as cough syrup for children are non-existent in the territory and we are happy to make them available. Our campaign will also dispatch a number of medical specialists to Gaza to assist in the worsening humanitarian crisis brought on by the siege."

Greta Berlin, one of the organizers, reiterated the goals of the Free Gaza Movement: "We intend to break Israel's blockade as often as we can. This second trip is just one of many we intend to organize over the next year. We have lawyers, members of Parliament and other professionals already on our passenger lists for upcoming voyages."

The staff at the Council for the National Interest strongly support the efforts of the Free Gaza Movement to bring global attention to the plight of the population of the Gaza Strip.

To support the on-going campaign to break the siege of Gaza, please visit www.freegaza.org and donate today! Together, we can make a difference in the lives of the 1.5 million residents suffering as a result of collective punishment policies.

Shattering a 'national mythology

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/966952.html

Shattering a 'national mythology' By Ofri Ilani

Unlike other "new historians" who have tried to undermine the assumptions of Zionist historiography, Sand does not content himself with going back to 1948 or to the beginnings of Zionism, but rather goes back thousands of years. He tries to prove that the Jewish people never existed as a "nation-race" with a common origin, but rather is a colorful mix of groups that at various stages in history adopted the Jewish religion. He argues that for a number of Zionist ideologues, the mythical perception of the Jews as an ancient people led to truly racist thinking: "There were times when if anyone argued that the Jews belong to a people that has gentile origins, he would be classified as an anti-Semite on the spot. Today, if anyone dares to suggest that those who are considered Jews in the world ... have never constituted and still do not constitute a people or a nation - he is immediately condemned as a hater of Israel."

According to Sand, the description of the Jews as a wandering and self-isolating nation of exiles, "who wandered across seas and continents, reached the ends of the earth and finally, with the advent of Zionism, made a U-turn and returned en masse to their orphaned homeland," is nothing but "national mythology." Like other national movements in Europe, which sought out a splendid Golden Age, through which they invented a heroic past - for example, classical Greece or the Teutonic tribes - to prove they have existed since the beginnings of history, "so, too, the first buds of Jewish nationalism blossomed in the direction of the strong light that has its source in the mythical Kingdom of David."

So when, in fact, was the Jewish people invented, in Sand's view? At a certain stage in the 19th century, intellectuals of Jewish origin in Germany, influenced by the folk character of German nationalism, took upon themselves the task of inventing a people "retrospectively," out of a thirst to create a modern Jewish people. From historian Heinrich Graetz on, Jewish historians began to draw the history of Judaism as the history of a nation that had been a kingdom, became a wandering people and ultimately turned around and went back to its birthplace.

Actually, most of your book does not deal with the invention of the Jewish people by modern Jewish nationalism, but rather with the question of where the Jews come from.

Sand: "My initial intention was to take certain kinds of modern historiographic materials and examine how they invented the 'figment' of the Jewish people. But when I began to confront the historiographic sources, I suddenly found contradictions. And then that urged me on: I started to work, without knowing where I would end up. I took primary sources and I tried to examine authors' references in the ancient period - what they wrote about conversion."

Sand, an expert on 20th-century history, has until now researched the intellectual history of modern France (in "Ha'intelektual, ha'emet vehakoah: miparashat dreyfus ve'ad milhemet hamifrats" - "Intellectuals, Truth and Power, From the Dreyfus Affair to the Gulf War"; Am Oved, in Hebrew). Unusually, for a professional historian, in his new book he deals with periods that he had never researched before, usually relying on studies that present unorthodox views of the origins of the Jews.

Experts on the history of the Jewish people say you are dealing with subjects about which you have no understanding and are basing yourself on works that you can't read in the original.

"It is true that I am an historian of France and Europe, and not of the ancient period. I knew that the moment I would start dealing with early periods like these, I would be exposed to scathing criticism by historians who specialize in those areas. But I said to myself that I can't stay just with modern historiographic material without examining the facts it describes. Had I not done this myself, it would have been necessary to have waited for an entire generation. Had I continued to deal with France, perhaps I would have been given chairs at the university and provincial glory. But I decided to relinquish the glory."

Inventing the Diaspora

"After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people remained faithful to it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom" - thus states the preamble to the Israeli Declaration of Independence. This is also the quotation that opens the third chapter of Sand's book, entitled "The Invention of the Diaspora." Sand argues that the Jewish people's exile from its land never happened.

"The supreme paradigm of exile was needed in order to construct a long-range memory in which an imagined and exiled nation-race was posited as the direct continuation of 'the people of the Bible' that preceded it," Sand explains. Under the influence of other historians who have dealt with the same issue in recent years, he argues that the exile of the Jewish people is originally a Christian myth that depicted that event as divine punishment imposed on the Jews for having rejected the Christian gospel.

"I started looking in research studies about the exile from the land - a constitutive event in Jewish history, almost like the Holocaust. But to my astonishment I discovered that it has no literature. The reason is that no one exiled the people of the country. The Romans did not exile peoples and they could not have done so even if they had wanted to. They did not have trains and trucks to deport entire populations. That kind of logistics did not exist until the 20th century. From this, in effect, the whole book was born: in the realization that Judaic society was not dispersed and was not exiled."

If the people was not exiled, are you saying that in fact the real descendants of the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Judah are the Palestinians?

"No population remains pure over a period of thousands of years. But the chances that the Palestinians are descendants of the ancient Judaic people are much greater than the chances that you or I are its descendents. The first Zionists, up until the Arab Revolt [1936-9], knew that there had been no exiling, and that the Palestinians were descended from the inhabitants of the land. They knew that farmers don't leave until they are expelled. Even Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, the second president of the State of Israel, wrote in 1929 that, 'the vast majority of the peasant farmers do not have their origins in the Arab conquerors, but rather, before then, in the Jewish farmers who were numerous and a majority in the building of the land.'"

And how did millions of Jews appear around the Mediterranean Sea?

"The people did not spread, but the Jewish religion spread. Judaism was a converting religion. Contrary to popular opinion, in early Judaism there was a great thirst to convert others. The Hasmoneans were the first to begin to produce large numbers of Jews through mass conversion, under the influence of Hellenism. The conversions between the Hasmonean Revolt and Bar Kochba's rebellion are what prepared the ground for the subsequent, wide-spread dissemination of Christianity. After the victory of Christianity in the fourth century, the momentum of conversion was stopped in the Christian world, and there was a steep drop in the number of Jews. Presumably many of the Jews who appeared around the Mediterranean became Christians. But then Judaism started to permeate other regions - pagan regions, for example, such as Yemen and North Africa. Had Judaism not continued to advance at that stage and had it not continued to convert people in the pagan world, we would have remained a completely marginal religion, if we survived at all."

How did you come to the conclusion that the Jews of North Africa were originally Berbers who converted?

"I asked myself how such large Jewish communities appeared in Spain. And then I saw that Tariq ibn Ziyad, the supreme commander of the Muslims who conquered Spain, was a Berber, and most of his soldiers were Berbers. Dahia al-Kahina's Jewish Berber kingdom had been defeated only 15 years earlier. And the truth is there are a number of Christian sources that say many of the conquerors of Spain were Jewish converts. The deep-rooted source of the large Jewish community in Spain was those Berber soldiers who converted to Judaism."

Sand argues that the most crucial demographic addition to the Jewish population of the world came in the wake of the conversion of the kingdom of Khazaria - a huge empire that arose in the Middle Ages on the steppes along the Volga River, which at its height ruled over an area that stretched from the Georgia of today to Kiev. In the eighth century, the kings of the Khazars adopted the Jewish religion and made Hebrew the written language of the kingdom. From the 10th century the kingdom weakened; in the 13th century is was utterly defeated by Mongol invaders, and the fate of its Jewish inhabitants remains unclear.

Sand revives the hypothesis, which was already suggested by historians in the 19th and 20th centuries, according to which the Judaized Khazars constituted the main origins of the Jewish communities in Eastern Europe.

"At the beginning of the 20th century there is a tremendous concentration of Jews in Eastern Europe - three million Jews in Poland alone," he says. "The Zionist historiography claims that their origins are in the earlier Jewish community in Germany, but they do not succeed in explaining how a small number of Jews who came from Mainz and Worms could have founded the Yiddish people of Eastern Europe. The Jews of Eastern Europe are a mixture of Khazars and Slavs who were pushed eastward."

'Degree of perversion'

If the Jews of Eastern Europe did not come from Germany, why did they speak Yiddish, which is a Germanic language?

"The Jews were a class of people dependent on the German bourgeoisie in the East, and thus they adopted German words. Here I base myself on the research of linguist Paul Wechsler of Tel Aviv University, who has demonstrated that there is no etymological connection between the German Jewish language of the Middle Ages and Yiddish. As far back as 1828, the Ribal (Rabbi Isaac Ber Levinson) said that the ancient language of the Jews was not Yiddish. Even Ben Zion Dinur, the father of Israeli historiography, was not hesitant about describing the Khazars as the origin of the Jews in Eastern Europe, and describes Khazaria as 'the mother of the diasporas' in Eastern Europe. But more or less since 1967, anyone who talks about the Khazars as the ancestors of the Jews of Eastern Europe is considered naive and moonstruck."

Why do you think the idea of the Khazar origins is so threatening?

"It is clear that the fear is of an undermining of the historic right to the land. The revelation that the Jews are not from Judea would ostensibly knock the legitimacy for our being here out from under us. Since the beginning of the period of decolonization, settlers have no longer been able to say simply: 'We came, we won and now we are here' the way the Americans, the whites in South Africa and the Australians said. There is a very deep fear that doubt will be cast on our right to exist."

Is there no justification for this fear?

"No. I don't think that the historical myth of the exile and the wanderings is the source of the legitimization for me being here, and therefore I don't mind believing that I am Khazar in my origins. I am not afraid of the undermining of our existence, because I think that the character of the State of Israel undermines it in a much more serious way. What would constitute the basis for our existence here is not mythological historical right, but rather would be for us to start to establish an open society here of all Israeli citizens."

In effect you are saying that there is no such thing as a Jewish people.

"I don't recognize an international people. I recognize 'the Yiddish people' that existed in Eastern Europe, which though it is not a nation can be seen as a Yiddishist civilization with a modern popular culture. I think that Jewish nationalism grew up in the context of this 'Yiddish people.' I also recognize the existence of an Israeli people, and do not deny its right to sovereignty. But Zionism and also Arab nationalism over the years are not prepared to recognize it.

"From the perspective of Zionism, this country does not belong to its citizens, but rather to the Jewish people. I recognize one definition of a nation: a group of people that wants to live in sovereignty over itself. But most of the Jews in the world have no desire to live in the State of Israel, even though nothing is preventing them from doing so. Therefore, they cannot be seen as a nation."

What is so dangerous about Jews imagining that they belong to one people? Why is this bad?

"In the Israeli discourse about roots there is a degree of perversion. This is an ethnocentric, biological, genetic discourse. But Israel has no existence as a Jewish state: If Israel does not develop and become an open, multicultural society we will have a Kosovo in the Galilee. The consciousness concerning the right to this place must be more flexible and varied, and if I have contributed with my book to the likelihood that I and my children will be able to live with the others here in this country in a more egalitarian situation - I will have done my bit.

"We must begin to work hard to transform our place into an Israeli republic where ethnic origin, as well as faith, will not be relevant in the eyes of the law. Anyone who is acquainted with the young elites of the Israeli Arab community can see that they will not agree to live in a country that declares it is not theirs. If I were a Palestinian I would rebel against a state like that, but even as an Israeli I am rebelling against it."

The question is whether for those conclusions you had to go as far as the Kingdom of the Khazars.

"I am not hiding the fact that it is very distressing for me to live in a society in which the nationalist principles that guide it are dangerous, and that this distress has served as a motive in my work. I am a citizen of this country, but I am also a historian and as a historian it is my duty to write history and examine texts. This is what I have done."

If the myth of Zionism is one of the Jewish people that returned to its land from exile, what will be the myth of the country you envision?

"To my mind, a myth about the future is better than introverted mythologies of the past. For the Americans, and today for the Europeans as well, what justifies the existence of the nation is a future promise of an open, progressive and prosperous society. The Israeli materials do exist, but it is necessary to add, for example, pan-Israeli holidays. To decrease the number of memorial days a bit and to add days that are dedicated to the future. But also, for example, to add an hour in memory of the Nakba [literally, the "catastrophe" - the Palestinian term for what happened when Israel was established], between Memorial Day and Independence Day."

An Israeli Jew in Gaza

By Jeff Halper Ma`an 05 / 08 / 2008

http://www.maannews.net/en/index.php?opr=ShowDetails&ID=31095

In another few days, I will sail on one of the Free Gaza movement boats from Cyprus to Gaza. The mission is to break the Israeli siege, an absolutely illegal siege which has plunged a million and a half Palestinians into wretched conditions: imprisoned in their own homes, exposed to extreme military violence, deprived of the basic necessities of life, stripped of their most fundamental human rights and dignity. The siege violates the most fundamental principle of international law: the inadmissibility of harming civilian populations.

Our voyage also exposes Israel`s attempt to absolve itself of responsibility for what is happening in Gaza. Israel`s claim that there is no Occupation, or that the Occupation ended with `disengagement,` is patently false. Occupation is defined in international law as having effective control over a territory. If Israel intercepts our boats, it is clear that it is the Occupying Power exercising effective control over Gaza. Nor has the siege anything to do with `security.` Like other elements of the Occupation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, where Israel has also besieged cities, towns, villages and whole regions, the siege on Gaza is fundamentally political. It is intended to isolate the democratically-elected government of Palestine and break its power to resist Israeli attempts to impose an apartheid regime over the entire country.

This is why I, an Israeli Jew, felt compelled to join this voyage to break the siege. As a person who seeks a just peace with the Palestinians, who understands (despite what our politicians tell us) that they are not our enemies but rather people seeking precisely what we sought and fought for - national self-determination I cannot stand idly aside. I can no more passively witness my government`s destruction of another people than I can watch the Occupation destroy the moral fabric of my own country. To do so would violate my commitment to human rights, the very essence of prophetic Jewish religion, culture and morals, without which Israel is no longer Jewish but an empty, if powerful, Sparta.

Israel has, of course, legitimate security concerns, and Palestinian attacks against civilian populations in Sderot and other Israeli communities bordering on Gaza cannot be condoned. Under the Fourth Geneva Convention, Israel, as an Occupying Power, has the right to monitor the movement of arms to Gaza as a matter of `immediate military necessity.` As activists committed to resisting the siege non-violently, I have no objection to the Israeli navy boarding our boats and searching for weapons. But only that. Because Israel has no right to besiege a civilian population, it has no legal right to prevent us, private persons sailing solely in international and Palestinian waters, from reaching Gaza - particularly since Israel has declared that it no longer occupies it. Once the Israeli navy is convinced we pose no security threat, then, we thoroughly expect it to permit us to continue our peaceful and lawful journey into Gaza port.

Ordinary people have often played key roles in history, particularly in situations like this where governments shirk their responsibilities. My voyage to Gaza is a statement of solidarity with the Palestinian people in their time of suffering, but it also conveys a message to my fellow citizens.

First, despite what our political leaders say, there is a political solution to the conflict, there are partners for peace. The very fact that I, an Israeli Jew, will be welcomed by Palestinian Gazans makes that very point. My presence in Gaza also affirms that any resolution of the conflict must include all the peoples of the country, Palestinian and Israeli alike. I am therefore using whatever credibility my actions lend me to call on my government to renew genuine peace negotiations based on the Prisoners Document accepted by all Palestinian factions, including Hamas. The release of all political prisoners held by Israel, including Hamas government ministers and parliamentary members, in return for the repatriation of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, would dramatically transform the political landscape by providing the trust and good-will essential to any peace process.

Second, the Palestinians are not our enemies. In fact, I urge my fellow Israeli Jews to disassociate from the dead-end politics of our failed political leaders by declaring, in concert with Israeli and Palestinian peace-makers: We refuse to be enemies. Only that assertion of popular will can signal our government that we are fed up with being manipulated by those profiting from the Occupation.

And third, as the infinitely stronger party in the conflict and the only Occupying Power, we Israelis must accept responsibility for our failed and oppressive policies. Only we can end the conflict.

In the Israeli conception, Zionism was intended to return to the Jews control over their own destiny. Do not let us be held hostage to politicians who endanger the future of our society. Join with us end the siege of Gaza, and with it the Occupation in its entirety. Let us, the Israeli and Palestinian peoples, declare to our leaders: we demand a just and lasting peace in this tortured Holy Land.
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Jeff Halper, the head of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, was a nominee for the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize.

Neocon Flap Highlights Jewish Divide

http://www.antiwar.com/ips/lubanlobe.php?articleid=13232

July 31, 2008

Neocon Flap Highlights Jewish Divide

by Daniel Luban and Jim Lobe

A mushrooming media controversy pitting neoconservatives against a prominent Jewish-American political commentator could mark a new stage in the growing battle over who speaks for the US Jewish community on foreign policy issues, particularly regarding the Middle East.

Time columnist Joe Klein's accusations that Jewish neoconservatives, who played a particularly visible role in the drive to war in Iraq and have since pushed for military confrontation in Iran, sacrificed "US lives and money...to make the world safe for Israel," have spurred angry charges of anti-Semitism and personal attacks from critics at such neoconservative strongholds as the Weekly Standard, National Review, and Commentary.

But the fierceness of the controversy surrounding Klein, generally considered a political centrist, highlights the growing antagonism between neoconservative hardliners and prominent US Jews whose more moderate views are aligned more closely with those of the foreign policy establishment.

The controversy began Jun. 24, when Klein argued in a Time blog post that the "fact that a great many Jewish neoconservatives ˆ people like [independent Democrat Sen.] Joe Lieberman and the crowd at Commentary ˆ plumped for this war [in Iraq], and now for an even more foolish assault on Iran, raised the question of divided loyalties."

Within a day, Abraham Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League, accused Klein of espousing ,"age-old anti-Semitic canards about a Jewish conspiracy to control and manipulate government."

The reaction from the right-wing press was even harsher. Commentary editor John Podhoretz reiterated the accusation of "anti-Semitic canards," and called Klein "manifestly intellectually unstable."

Writing in National Review, former George W. Bush speechwriter Peter Wehner called Klein "a man who cannot control his anger and even hatred."

But Klein has refused to back down, accusing his attackers of using charges of anti-Semitism to silence criticism of neoconservative policies.

"When [Commentary writer] Jennifer Rubin or Abe Foxman calls me anti-Semitic, they're wrong," he said in an interview. "I am anti-neoconservative."

In its broad contours, the controversy is a familiar one, as critics accuse neoconservatives of exercizing pernicious influence on US Middle East policy and neoconservatives reply with charges of anti-Semitism and conspiracy-mongering.

What distinguishes the recent furor over Klein, however, is that it involves someone who is widely regarded as an exemplar of the centrist political establishment.

Klein is best known for his 1996 novel Primary Colors a thinly-veiled and largely unflattering portrait of Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign that was originally published anonymously and subsequently made into a Hollywood movie. A frequent critic of Clinton, Klein has at times expressed admiration for George W. Bush.

He also endorsed the invasion of Iraq in 2003 (although he has since expressed regret for his support) and describes himself as "a strong supporter of Israel."

The Klein dust-up is the latest in a series of events over the last several years that have placed neoconservatives both in the spotlight and on the defensive.

Neoconservatism, a predominantly ˆ but by no means exclusively ˆ Jewish movement, got its start in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when a small but influential group of Democrats began distancing themselves from the party which, in their view, had become too dovish toward the Soviet Union and too sympathetic toward Arab demands against Israel.

By 1980, most had become strong supporters of Ronald Reagan. A number of prominent neoconservatives joined his administration, including many who would later play key roles in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq war.

Consigned to the political wilderness under President George H.W. Bush, the neoconservatives became increasingly identified in the 1990s with Israel's right-wing Likud Party. It was also during the same period that they began agitating for "regime change" in Iraq, arguing that such a move would transform the balance of power in the Middle East decisively in favor of both Israel and the US.

They experienced a rebirth with the election of Bush's son in 2000, and particularly after the 9/11 attacks, when they played a major role, both inside the administration and in the media, in rallying the public and Congress behind war in Iraq.

But with the deterioration of the situation in Iraq, the influence of neoconservatives inside and outside the administration began to wane, and critics began charging that they had led the US astray.

A series of incidents also focused critical scrutiny on the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the powerful lobbying group whose hawkish right-wing leadership has often defied both the views of the broader US Jewish community and the policies of Israeli governments.

In 2004, the Justice Department charged Pentagon staffer Lawrence Franklin with passing classified US government documents to two AIPAC lobbyists, who had then given the documents to an Israeli Embassy official. In January 2006, Franklin was sentenced to more than 12 years in prison, while the AIPAC staffers are still awaiting trial.

In March 2006, the well-respected and staunchly realist international relations scholars John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt published the article "The Israel Lobby" in the London Review of Books. That article, which charged that the lobby had for decades skewed US policy towards Israel in a direction detrimental to US interests, became the basis for their 2007 book, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy.

Mearsheimer and Walt's thesis was instantly controversial. Like Klein, they were accused by critics, including the ADL and Commentary, of anti-Semitism and of perpetrating stereotypes about shadowy Jewish conspiracies.

But as a result of their stature, the two authors' work clearly created political space for those, both within the foreign policy establishment and within the US Jewish community, who had been long privately critical of the neoconservatives but had been worried about the consequences of going public with their misgivings.

More recently, AIPAC has come under fire for its close alliance with right-wing Christian Zionists, particularly controversial pastor John Hagee and his organization Christians United for Israel (CUFI).

Hagee views an undivided Israel as a precondition for precipitating the Armageddon, and his group has accordingly pushed for hawkish US policies in the Middle East that have been consistent with the neoconservatives' own preferences.

Matters came to a head earlier this year, when Republican presidential candidate John McCain was compelled to repudiate Hagee's endorsement after comments came to light in which the pastor suggested that the Holocaust was biblically ordained in order to force Jews to resettle in Israel.

Nonetheless, Hagee and CUFI have maintained close ties with the neoconservatives, and a collection of prominent Israel hawks, including Senator Lieberman, spoke at CUFI's summit in Washington earlier this month.

The belief that AIPAC has failed to accurately represent the views of the US Jewish community led to the foundation earlier this year of J Street, a Jewish lobbying group that aims to push for a more moderate stance on Middle East issues.

In the wake of these developments, many observers have taken Klein's comments ˆ and particularly his refusal to back down in the face of withering criticism from neoconservatives ˆ as a sign that new political space is being created for the public airing of more moderate views on Middle East policy.

M.J. Rosenberg, a former AIPAC staffer now associated with the moderate Israel Policy Forum, expressed the hope that commentators would stop equating neoconservatism with Judaism and start treating it as a political movement subject to political criticism.

"Although most neocons are Jews, few Jews are neocons," he wrote Wednesday. By equating the two groups, "[the neocons] want Americans not to follow the trail of war-mongering that leads not to Jews but to them."

support in ending the stalemate

My name is Simcha Levental. I am a 26-year-old Israeli whose army service took me to the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Ask me about my politics and I'd say I am a moderate who loves his country and who sees his future here. But I have also seen how Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has led to daily humiliations and harassment of ordinary Palestinians. And I have learned that being an occupier, even one without malicious intent, means doing shameful, regrettable, and often self-defeating things.

I am writing to enlist your support in ending the stalemate between Israel and the Palestinians. I will not dwell on the lethal violence that regularly takes lives on both sides. That violence is well-known. Instead, I want to draw your attention to the silent injustices and arbitrary acts of brutality that take place day after day. We must confront the fact that, in the West Bank, injustice has become routine, mundane, banal. It has become the fabric of the occupation, and it threatens Israeli society.

Many despair in the face of this reality, but there is a path out of the occupation. Negotiations to create a two-state solution can provide Israel with security and Palestinians with lasting freedom.

In November 2000, I entered the Israeli military with a great deal of enthusiasm. In a democracy like Israel's, it is the responsibility of every citizen-soldier to contribute, and I looked forward to doing my part to defend my country.

At that point in my life, I knew nothing of substance about the Palestinians. The truth is that I hardly even thought about them. And when I did, I could only conjure up stereotypes: a bunch of Arab anti-Semites or terrorists.

Support the work of Shalom Achshav and Americans for Peace Now.

Despite my training as an artillery specialist, my active service took place almost exclusively at West Bank checkpoints with no cannons in sight. The location would change, but the work was always the same: I would stand guard and decide which Palestinians would pass and which would not.

On some days, of course, we enforced a full "closure," meaning that no Palestinians could pass at all. It didn't matter if you were a teacher or a student trying to get to the school right on the other side of the checkpoint. Nobody got through.

Every day at lunch, we closed the checkpoint down until we were done. Queues would form, but we would pay them no mind. If a Palestinian got impatient and started approaching, we knew what to do: One of us would get up and point a rifle at him. He would quickly turn back. If not, we would make sure that he spent many good hours waiting at the checkpoint.

Of course, if a settler came by the checkpoint -- during lunch or at any other time -- he'd just smile at us, wave hello, and walk by. Today, I am filled with rage at that double standard. I know that acts like these corrode the moral fabric of Israeli society. But back then, at the checkpoint, that was how things were.

We held so much power. We ruled over people the age of my grandparents. And we quickly learned that nobody would stop us if we took advantage of it. In those three years, there was no shortage of cigarettes in my unit. We just took them from the Palestinians at the checkpoints. What were they going to do about it?

These were the day-in, day-out realities of my time in the IDF. And there were, of course, examples of more extreme behavior. Like the day my unit set up a surprise checkpoint at the outskirts of a Palestinian village. A local farmer trying to pass through the area had raised a bit of a fuss. He wanted to transport some chickens, but a soldier refused him. Our commander decided to show the Palestinian who was boss. He lifted his rifle, aimed, and shot one of the chickens. End of argument.

It is because of my experience in the West Bank that I am an activist with Shalom Achshav (Peace Now), Israel's largest pro-peace organization, and I support its partner in the United States, Americans for Peace Now (APN). The mission of both groups is to enhance Israeli security by promoting peace negotiations that would end the occupation and create a viable Palestinian state.

During my service at the checkpoints I began to ask questions that have no simple answers: Does Israel need to interfere in the daily routine of Palestinian life? Does defending settlements scattered across the West Bank justify the orders I carried out? Are these actions leading Israel to a more secure and prosperous future?

I still struggle with these questions. But I know that much of what I did as a soldier -- much of what the Israel Defense Forces still does in the West Bank -- has nothing to do with making Israel safe.

a.. Consider a poll conducted by the Israeli military that was leaked to the press last December: 25 percent of Israeli combat soldiers who serve in the West Bank testified that they had either taken part in or witnessed abuse by soldiers at checkpoints. Among the abuses reported were: bribe-taking, humiliation of travelers, and gratuitous delays.

b.. Polling numbers can be abstract, so here's something more tangible: Israeli settlers routinely harass Palestinians during the autumn olive harvest, an important source of livelihood for Palestinians in the West Bank. There have been cases of olive groves torched or chopped down. But it's not only the settlers. The Israeli military has often been turned into a collaborator in these crimes, despite Israeli Supreme Court rulings that oblige the military to facilitate the olive harvest. For example, Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights group, reported that during the 2006 harvest, an IDF division commander prevented the residents of one Palestinian village from reaching their fields as collective punishment after firebombs were thrown on a road near the village.

c.. One more example: Amnesty International reported in March that two human rights activists -- Art Arbour of Canada and Janet Benvie from the United Kingdom -- were attacked by Jewish boys in the West Bank, while a soldier stood by and watched. One of the boys spat at Benvie while another kicked her leg. Arbour was hit on his ear by a rock, causing him to bleed heavily. Following the incident, the two asked the soldier why he had not intervened. He reportedly responded that it was not his job. Such incidents are inevitable in an occupation that has become institutionalized. Every day is volatile, fraught with suspicion and paranoia. A soldier who sees settlers use violence has orders not to interfere. There's a division of labor whereby the police deal with Israeli civilians (i.e. the settlers) and the soldiers deal with Palestinians. And since the police are never around (that at least is my experience) the soldier absurdly ends up an accomplice to violence.

Allow me to say something else, something that will be hard for many supporters of Israel to hear: I believe that harassment, intimidation and injustice are unavoidable byproducts of the occupation. The most moral soldiers, the best commanders, will not be able to bend Palestinians to life under the Israeli thumb without resorting to intimidation tactics. That is the ugly reality, and that is why it is so important that we find a path out of the madness, a path towards peace.

It pains me to write about this. I know we Israelis are better than this. So I am speaking out -- not to clear my conscience, but to solicit your help. We need to end the IDF's role as an army of occupation and an enabler of settler violence. We need negotiations. Israel would be much better off if its soldiers could spend their time learning how to defend its borders, not subjugating a hostile population.

The moral case for ending the occupation is clear. And so is the case ending the occupation to improve Israeli security, especially in the wake of the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war. Testifying about the IDF's performance during that war, Israel's former Chief of Military Intelligence, Major General Amos Malka, said that the IDF "atrophied" as a result of its almost exclusive focus on enforcing the occupation. "What I can say unequivocally is that the army atrophied for 4-5 years with regard to its fitness. It atrophied," Malka said. "Excessive attention was given to one thing only, the Palestinian issue, [while] other matters were neglected, resources were directed to purposes that do not allow units to reach a reasonable level of readiness," he explained.

Israel and the Palestinians need to negotiate an end to the conflict, to establish an independent Palestinian state alongside a secure Israel. We need vigorous, unblinking American participation in the negotiations. And our need is urgent. Time entrenches the status quo.

Negotiations are the only way out of the conflict. That has been APN and Peace Now's position from the start. That's why I ask you to support their work.

a.. It is Americans for Peace Now that argues for negotiations to end the occupation.

b.. It is APN that makes its tough, rational message heard in Congress, in the campaign for the White House, on college campuses, and in the American Jewish community.

c.. It is APN that provides the best resources for the pro-peace community through its website peacenow.org, newsletters, opinion articles, and newspaper ads.

d.. In Israel, Peace Now is the one organization that brings Israelis out to the streets to fight the status quo.

e.. It is Peace Now's Settlement Watch project that monitors the construction of settlements and outposts, providing vital information to the media, diplomats, Israeli officials, and the general public.

f.. It is Peace Now that hosts seminars where young Israelis and Palestinians talk to one another and plan joint political action.

g.. It is Peace Now's attorneys who, again and again, force the Israeli government to address the takeover of Palestinianowned land by settlers. Numerous times, Peace Now's petitions have gone all the way to Israel's High Court of Justice, with significant success.

h.. And it is the activists behind Peace Now that give me hope that Israel can have a future free of the burdens of occupation. As the U.S. sister organization of Peace Now, APN provides 60 to 90 percent of the funds that Peace Now uses for its activities. APN is the gathering place for Americans who believe that Israel deserves better than unthinking support for its military actions, coupled with a blind eye to the reality in the West Bank. Israel needs to live free from the terrible fatalism of simply waiting for the next war.

I am often asked if I regret my service in a combat unit in the West Bank. I always answer no. My experience made me who I am today, and it gave me an intimate understanding of the political and moral quandaries facing my country.

At the same time, my experience opened my eyes to a terrible reality. It shattered my pre-conceived notions about "good guys" and "bad guys." It makes me terribly concerned about the future of Israeli society. It drives me to be a political activist, to fight for change.

If you believe as I do that justice demands an end of the occupation through negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, then please join APN. Help end the occupation. Create a better future for Israelis and Palestinians. Make a generous contribution to support the work of Peace Now and Americans for Peace Now.

Our future depends on it.

Simcha Levental Jerusalem

Support the work of Shalom Achshav and Americans for Peace Now.
http://www.peacenow.org/

Jewish Voices for Peace on Iran

Responding to the Israeli voices and actions noisily advocating a preemptive strike against Iran, Ha-Aretz columnist Uzi Benziman (<http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=smKW5YDQ6IQcrG0dB1%2FB6sqkuie1PAC2>July 21, 2008) writes, "Before bombing Iran, it would be best [for Israel] to solve the conflict with the Palestinians. By the way, there does appear to be a link between the two threats." While Benziman doesn't specify the links, there are at least two significant ones.

First, the effect of foregrounding the Iranian nuclear threat, which both the International Atomic Energy Agency and US intelligence agencies say does not now exist, has been to take the spotlight off Israel's continuing occupation of the Palestinian territories. The agreement brokered by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to open the Gaza Strip crossings last November was only a partial palliative at best. No political progress has been made on the Gaza front since Israeli and the US continue to isolate and reject negotiations with Hamas, which they simplemindedly define as a terrorist organization allied to Iran. According to the latest report of the Crisis Group, in the West Bank, Israel has not loosened its closure regime or halted its military incursions. The economy has not grown much. And the Palestinian Authority has used harsh tactics against Hamas sympathizers, including torture, that undermine good governance. Meanwhile, the negotiations launched at Annapolis in November 2007 are on life support and President Bush is taking no heroic measures to resuscitate them.

Second, the political forces in the United States who have been loudest in advocating a confrontational stance towards Iran are the same forces that have obstructed Palestinian-Israeli peace. Prominent among them are AIPAC, the ADL, the ZOA, the Council of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, and right wing evangelical Protestants exemplified by John Hagee's Christians United for Israel.

On June 8 Shaul Mofaz, Minister of Transportation and former defense minister and IDF chief-of-staff, proclaimed that an Israeli attack on Iran was becoming "unavoidable." That same week the Israeli air force carried out a practice bombing run on Iran in the eastern Mediterranean. Two weeks later Israeli officials "leaked" the news of the exercise.

Mofaz is positioning himself as the security hawk in the potential contest to succeed Ehud Olmert as Prime Minister and leader of the Kadima party should Olmert be forced to resign due to ongoing investigations of alleged financial corruption. Like President Bush and Vice-President Cheney, both Mofaz and Prime Minister Olmert reject the findings of the US National Intelligence Estimate released in December 2007 which concluded that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003. Olmert and Mofaz also apparently dismiss the views of former Mossad director Ephraim Halevy, who said in a public lecture last October that the Iranian threat "is substantive, but not existential" (Ha-Aretz, Oct. 18, 2007).

Not to be outdone by Mofaz's blustering, Olmert made a not-so-secret visit to Israel's nuclear reactor at Dimona on July 1 which served to advertise its nuclear capacity. Israel's nuclear weapons are a major source of regional insecurity, and its neighbors often express their concern about their danger. Doesn't Olmert's visit then seem counterproductive? Isn't it notable that, as was the case before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, intelligence professionals have a more sober analysis than the political leaders to whom they report and whose policies are supposedly based on that analysis?

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livini, another aspirant for Olmert's job, is positioning herself as the "moderate" in the Kadima leadership. She has criticized Olmert's exaggeration of the Iranian threat. Shortly after Halevy publicly downplayed the Iranian danger, Ha-Aretz reported that Livini also believed that "Iranian nuclear weapons do not pose an existential threat to Israel." The same article revealed that Livni was out of the loop on Israel's decision to attack Lebanon in 2006 and that her chief advisor was pessimistic about the possibility of reaching a permanent settlement with the Palestinians any time soon.

However, President Bush and Secretary of State Rice, were interested in convening the Annapolis conference and encouraging Palestinian-Israeli negotiations, although there was no hope of them succeeding during the president's last year in office. The real purpose of this charade remains unclear. To the extent that it had a strategic vision, it seems to have been motivated by the desire to line up America's "moderate" Sunni Arab allies - Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the smaller Persian Gulf statelets - against Hamas and its shi'a supporters, Iran and Lebanese Hezbollah.

So, Livni has dutifully headed up the Israeli negotiating team and Rice has logged tens of thousands of miles in fruitless visits to the Middle East with almost nothing to show for her efforts. Until she dispatched Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs William Burns to Geneva to meet with Javier Solana, the European Union's High Representative for a Common Foreign and Security Policy, and Iran's nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, on July 19, Condi had fallen into line behind warmonger-in-chief Cheney on Iran.

This is the first official contact between the United States and Iran since the revolution of 1979, a momentous policy shift followed up by public discussion of the possibility of opening a US interests section in Teheran. It is especially remarkable since only two months before, while addressing the Israeli Knesset, President Bush compared Barack Obama's willingness to engage in diplomatic talks with Iran to Europe's appeasement of Nazis at Munich in 1938. Meanwhile, Admiral Michael Mullen, chair of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff has been conducting his own campaign against a US strike on Iran. http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2c=NBfk%2FNZXhAak%2Byn6yfMPi8qkuie1PAC2

Earlier this month, he warned against opening a "third front" and called for "dialogue" with Iran. On July 20 he told Fox News Sunday that he was concerned that any US or Israeli strike on Iran would risk "significant" turmoil in the Middle East. Thus, it appears that the likelihood of an American assault on Iran has been significantly reduced. Since two-thirds of all Israelis oppose a solo Israeli attack on Iran according to a poll conducted last December, Prime Minister Olmert might want to avoid a second unpopular and potentially disastrous military adventure.

However, it's too soon to breathe a sigh of relief. The Geneva talks did not produce the result that Solana hoped for. He gave Iran a two week deadline to freeze uranium enrichment in return for freezing the sanctions now in place. However, as Julian Borger wrote in The Observer "for now, US moderates are in the ascendant."

Lest good sense win the day, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee has leaped into the breach to promote an ultra-aggressive posture towards Iran embodied in House Concurrent Resolution 362. According to Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council, this non-binding resolution "was the top agenda point of the 7,000 AIPAC members who descended on Capitol Hill" after their annual conference in June.

The resolution, which is on the fast track to adoption by the House and Senate, demands that the President initiate an international effort to immediately and dramatically increase the economic, political, and diplomatic pressure on Iran to verifiably suspend its nuclear enrichment activities by, inter alia, prohibiting the export to Iran of all refined petroleum products; imposing stringent inspection requirements on all persons, vehicles, ships, planes, trains, and cargo entering or departing Iran; and prohibiting the international movement of all Iranian officials not involved in negotiating the suspension of Iran's nuclear program.

This language, as one of the bill's 247 (!) co-sponsors Rep. Robert Wexler (D-FL) acknowledged, "could lead to a US blockade of Iran." Unless it is authorized by a UN Security Council resolution, a blockade is a violation of international law and an act of war. Should this occur it would be the ultimate irony, since Israel claimed that the casus belli for its preemptive attack on Egypt and Syria in 1967 was Egypt's blockade of the Straits of Tiran. But AIPAC and its allies in the Bush administration and the US war party are not particularly good at learning from history.

Joel Beinin, Professor of Middle East History, Stanford University
Oakland, CA, July 22, 2008

Twisted Politics of Expulsion (thanks, Eldad)

The Historian and the Twisted Politics of Expulsion Dr. Benny and Mr. Morris

http://www.counterpunch.org/carey07192008.html

By ROANE CAREY

Is it possible for someone who matter-of-factly supports crimes against humanity to be a good historian? A startling and provocative question, no doubt, but one that inevitably arises upon consideration of the remarkable career of Israeli scholar Benny Morris. A professor in the Middle East Studies department at Ben-Gurion University, Morris is well-known as one of the most important of the "New Historians," a group that upended traditional Zionist historiography of the Israeli-Arab conflict. In the first edition of his book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (1988), Morris conclusively demonstrated, through the mining of newly released Israeli government archives, that the refugees from the 1948 war had, overwhelmingly, fled or been expelled by Israeli forces rather than left as a result of encouragement by Arab leaders, as a previous generation of Israeli propagandists had claimed.

After the release of that book and in subsequent years, with the publication of Israel's Border Wars (1997) followed by a general history of the conflict, Righteous Victims (1999), Morris was generally lauded by liberals as a historian willing to expose uncomfortable truths about the Israeli past. This Morris, the seemingly liberal Morris, rose to fame at the time of the first Palestinian intifada and the Oslo period that followed, when both support for Palestinian resistance to occupation and new hope for a peaceful resolution of the conflict gained traction around the world.

But, like much of the liberal Israeli intelligentsia, Morris was deeply shaken when the second intifada began in the fall of 2000. He accepted the establishment Israeli (and American) claim that the breakdown of the Camp David summit the previous summer was entirely the fault of the Palestinians and that they launched the new intifada because they would never really accept the Jewish presence in Palestine. In an astounding January 2004 interview in the leading Israeli daily Ha'aretz, Morris went much further, arguing that the "ethnic cleansing" - his words - of the Palestinians was justified; that it was not only justified but that Israel's leader at the time, David Ben-Gurion, didn't go far enough and should have expelled all the Palestinians then living between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River; and that today's Palestinian citizens of Israel are "a time bomb.an emissary of the enemy that is among us." Morris topped off the tirade by applauding the "clash of civilizations" world view common in the West after September 11, condemning the entire Islamic world as one in which "human life doesn't have the same value as it does in the West" and "the people we are fighting.have no moral inhibitions." In a mad crescendo of bigotry he condemned Palestinians as "barbarians" and Palestinian society as "in the state of being a serial killer. It is a very sick society.. Something like a cage has to be built for them.. There is a wild animal there that has to be locked up in one way or another."

Of course, not only liberals and leftists but anyone remotely respectful of human rights or common decency was horrified at this and similar jeremiads. But it wasn't so easy simply to dismiss Morris out of hand. For one thing, his fulminations occurred at the same time as publication of the revised edition of his book on the Palestinian refugee problem. In the new edition Morris gave more credence to critics of the first volume who had accused him of underplaying support for "transfer" (expulsion) among the Zionist leadership. He admitted that "by the early 1930s a full-throated near-consensus in support of the idea began to emerge among the movement's leaders"; indeed, "transfer was inevitable and inbuilt into Zionism - because it sought to transform a land that was `Arab' into a `Jewish' state and a Jewish state could not have arisen without a major displacement of Arab population."

True, Morris still denied evidence of "a policy or master-plan of expulsion." But he came much closer to the idea that there didn't need to be a policy because expulsion was "in the air.accepted as inevitable and natural by the bulk of the Jewish population." Not only that, but in his new edition Morris documented more instances of Israeli massacres, rapes and expulsions during the war. His politics may have become, well, barbaric, but Morris the empiricist historian, Morris the painstaking comber of archives, continued to report what he found. And those findings, if not always his interpretations of them, were valuable.

Now, with 1948: The First Arab-Israeli War, Morris has published his magnum opus on the war. So which Morris wins out? The ideologue and bigot, or the careful researcher and historian? Blessedly, the latter - for the most part. The book is, on the whole, a judicious and carefully argued narrative, and hews to the general themes of his earlier, nonpolemical writings on the war. Morris is at his best when explaining the broad strategic context and balance of forces between the contending sides - how it was, for example, that the Yishuv, as the Jewish pre-state community was known, though seemingly outnumbered and outarmed, was able to prevail. Morris contrasts the careful planning for statehood and military preparations of the Yishuv with the haphazard organisation, almost complete lack of planning and near-constant infighting among not only the various Palestinian factions but also among the Arab front-line states.

As Morris demonstrates, the two sides were actually fairly evenly matched at the start of the conflict, but by April-May of 1948, the Jewish forces, primarily because of crucial Czech arms shipments, had not only rough parity in number of soldiers but also in weapons and ammunition. While a UN arms embargo deeply damaged the Arab war effort, causing critical shortages, the Jewish side had become expert at evading it, even as they benefited from the technical expertise of international volunteers and financial donations from the Jewish Diaspora, especially in the United States. Between the UN's November 1947 partition resolution and the Arab invasion of May 1948, the Zionist leadership carried out a rapid build-up and professionalisation of its armed forces, transforming the Haganah militia into a genuine army; it nearly doubled in size between the May 15 Arab invasion and July, by which point it outnumbered the Arab forces.

Morris continues to deny that there was a master plan to expel the Palestinians, but, as in his previous books on the refugee problem, he presents so much evidence that expulsion was both understood and widely accepted by the Jewish leadership that the lack of a clear, unambiguous order from the top seems almost beside the point. He reports "the near-systematic destruction of villages after conquest and depopulation" that began in April and continued, with occasional lapses, for the rest of the war, on every front. By the late summer of 1948, "a consensus had formed that the refugees were not to be allowed back during the war, and a majority.believed that it was best that they not return after the war either.. If allowed back, returnees would constitute a demographic and political time bomb, with the potential to destabilise the Jewish state." Morris is also forthright in reporting atrocities. The massacre at Deir Yasin in April 1948, near Jerusalem (carried out primarily by extremist Jewish militias but in concert with the Haganah), is only the most infamous example; the worst concentrations of these were in the northern Galilee in late October. "In the yearlong war," he says, "Yishuv troops probably murdered some eight hundred civilians and prisoners of war all told." The Arab side committed atrocities too, of course, but Morris says "the Jews committed far more atrocities than the Arabs and killed far more civilians and POWs in deliberate acts of brutality."

It's only in his final chapter, titled Some Conclusions, that Morris the ideologue really shows his colours. He downplays the nationalist element that dominates the discussion not only in his previous books but also the entirety of this one, switching into full Bernard Lewis, clash-of-civilizations mode, arguing that the conflict was "part of a more general, global struggle between the Islamic East and the West," with the Arab abhorrence of Zionism "anchored in centuries of Islamic Judeophobia." He argues, on the one hand, that "the Arab war aim, in both stages of the hostilities, was, at a minimum, to abort the emergence of a Jewish state or to destroy it at inception" - but then has to acknowledge that this wasn't true: the most powerful military player on the Arab side, Jordan, secretly colluded with Israel, was willing to accept a Jewish state and was primarily concerned with seizing the Arab-populated West Bank and thus preventing formation of a rival Palestinian state, as called for in the UN partition resolution. In perhaps his most outlandish claim, Morris asserts that expulsionist thinking on the part of the Yishuv "was in large part a response to the expulsionist ideology and violent praxis of [Palestinian Mufti Haj Amin] al Husseini and his followers" in the decades leading up to 1948. In other words, expulsion was forced on the Zionist movement - if the Palestinians had not been so ill-mannered as to resist the seizure of their native land, and had instead quietly left when the settlers first arrived, the Zionists would not have had to expel them.

So we return to our original conundrum: can a man seemingly without ethical scruple, who exuberantly supports ethnic cleansing and damns entire religions and ethnicities to perdition, who blames the victims of a historic tragedy for their misfortune, make valuable contributions to historiography? It doesn't seem possible. And yet Benny Morris, at least by the evidence presented in 1948, seems to have done just that. The political judgments may often be twisted, and the moral sensibility may be damaged beyond repair. But the well-trained historian lives on.

Roane Carey is managing editor of The Nation in New York and the editor of The Other Israel and The New Intifada.

June 30, 2008 Issue Copyright © 2007 The American Conservative

Looking Into the Lobby

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s annual conference is one of Washington’s most important—and least reported—events.

by Philip Weiss

For three days in the capital in early June, suspense built over the question of how the American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference would greet Barack Obama. There was a lot of grousing about Obama in the hallways of the Washington Convention Center, and AIPAC officials repeatedly warned the faithful to be respectful. “We are not a debate society or a protest movement. … our goal is to have a friend in the White House,” executive director Howard Kohr said in a strict tone. It wasn’t hard to imagine things going poorly: Obama gets booed on national television. He feels insulted. Conservative Jewish donors and voters turn off to Obama. He becomes president without their support. AIPAC has no friend in the Oval Office.

But of course, Obama complied. His speech became the annual example the conference provides of a powerful man truckling. Two years ago, it was Vice President Cheney’s red-meat speech attacking the Palestinians. Last year, it was Pastor John Hagee’s scary speech saying that giving the Arabs any part of Jerusalem was the same as giving it to the Taliban. Obama took a similar line. He suggested that he would use force to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons, made no mention of Palestinian human rights, and said that Jerusalem “must remain undivided,” a statement so disastrous to the peace process that his staff rescinded it the next day. Big deal. The actual meeting had gone swimmingly.

This was my first AIPAC conference, and the first surprise was how blatant the business of wielding influence is. The conference makes no bones about this function, the most savage expression of which is the Tuesday dinner at which AIPAC performs its “roll call,” where the names of all the politicians who have come to the conference are read off from the stage by three barkers in near auctioneer fashion. The pols try to outdo one another in I-love-Israel encomia. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi surely won the day when she teared up while dangling the dogtags of three Israeli soldiers captured by Hezbollah and Hamas two years ago.

The second big surprise was that apart from coverage of the headline speakers, the AIPAC conference is a media no man’s land. It would be hard to imagine a more naked exhibition of political power: a convention of 7,000 mostly rich people, with more than half the Congress in attendance, as well as all the major presidential candidates, the prime minister of Israel, the minority leader, the majority leader, and the speaker of the House. Yet there is precious little journalism about the spectacle in full. The reason seems obvious: the press would have to write openly about a forbidden subject, Jewish influence. They would have to take on an unpleasant informative task that they have instead left to two international relations scholars in their 50s—Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, authors of last year’s book The Israel Lobby.

The press is missing a phantasmagorical event. Imagine a basement meeting in the Warsaw Ghetto transplanted to the biggest hall in Vegas, and you have something of the feeling of the thing. The staging is faultless. Little documentaries called “Zionist Stories” play on the Jumbotron, complete with footage of Auschwitz, and then the subject of the documentary comes out on stage to thundering applause. There is breakout session after breakout session on Middle East policy and Jewish identity and anti-Semitism, with star turns by Natan Sharansky, Bill Kristol, and Leon Wieseltier. The press was excluded from “Advanced Lobbying Techniques,” but still this is a feast of the political condition. And posh. The roll call is described by AIPAC as the largest seated dinner in Washington. The wine flows. I went about in a daze of awe and admiration.

My awe was for men like Haim Saban, a toymaker and giant donor to the Democratic Party. After his Zionist story, Saban came out on stage wearing a platinum tie and white shirt and silver gray suit. He has wonderful presence and something of an Arab look—black-haired, wide forehead. He was surrounded by 200 college students, veterans of the Saban Leadership Seminars he sponsors at AIPAC.

On Middle East policy, Saban is barely distinguishable from his Republican counterparts, who are there in equal force. The main hall of the conference was filled with lavishly-produced banners featuring AIPAC donors, not a few with trophy wives, alongside statements of their mission. There was Donald Diamond, an Arizona real estate developer whom the New York Times recently profiled on the front page after he raised $250,000 for John McCain. The Times said nothing in its piece about Diamond’s Israel work. But that was all the banner was about. “The U.S.-Israel relationship is the single most important determinant of democracy in the world, and we must commit to securing it,” Diamond wrote. “It is so obvious to us that the Jewish community is a family and that we have to take care of each other.”

I was writing that down when an AIPAC spokesman stopped to check my credentials. The audience for this stuff isn’t the public, it’s people in the hall—other rich Jews who might put AIPAC in their wills.

At most conventions, people gather out of self-interest. Therein lies my admiration: the AIPAC’ers didn’t come for selfish reasons. They are devoutly concerned with the lives of people they don’t know, very far away. Yes, people with whom they feel tribal kinship. When Israelis came out on the dais to speak, they were almost invariably overwhelmed by the generosity, if not the Vegas schmaltz. “There is a tremendous amount of love in this place,” Meir Nissensohn, an Israeli executive of IBM, said in wonder. “If it was a beaker, it would explode.” Even a sharp critic like myself of what AIPAC is doing to American policy in the Middle East was frequently moved by the pure loving feeling that surrounds you at every moment.

Among the devout there is only one real issue: What is the latest AIPAC line? This is the organization’s function. After consulting closely with the Israeli political leadership (leaning toward the right wing), AIPAC regurgitates a simple version of Israeli policy to its followers, who in turn regurgitate that line to American politicians. AIPAC’ers do this with the conviction that Israel’s life is on the line. “It is we that are the guardians of that relationship,” AIPAC president David Victor said. James Tisch, the Lowes executive and leader in the Jewish community, warned the audience that it might be 1939 all over again were it not for them.

AIPAC makes sure the Israeli line is America’s line by cultivating politicians before they reach the national scene. Victor described this process when he warned the audience that 10 percent of Congress will be new next year because so many seats are open: “Do we know them? Do they know us? Have they been to Israel? Do they understand the issues we care so deeply about?” Finding Israel activists in the suburbs of Detroit is easy, Victor said. “But how about finding the one right person to reach out to candidates for communities like Muscle Shoals, Alabama, or Tacoma, Washington, or Council Bluffs, Iowa? Ladies and gentlemen, the success or failure of the pro-Israel community rests on three words, our personal relationships.” And people accused Walt and Mearsheimer of fostering a conspiracy theory.

AIPAC flashes its relationships the way kids trade baseball cards. Bill Kristol said that Hart Hasten, a Holocaust survivor and successful Indianapolis businessman, had been crucial to shaping Dan Quayle’s view of Israel, having “spent a lot of time” with Quayle when he was still a congressman. (Quayle’s office later told me, “The statement Bill Kristol made was not exactly accurate. Mr. Quayle said his broad knowledge of Israel came from many people and sources, not specifically from Mr. Hasten.”) Dan Senor, an analyst on CNN and former AIPAC intern, boasted that AIPAC won over Spencer Abraham when he was the head of the state Republican Party, years before he became a Michigan senator. The party was $500,000 in debt, and an AIPAC leader helped him pay that off. And of course, the famous story was told of George W. Bush going up in Ariel Sharon’s helicopter in 1998, two years before he ran for president, and saying of Israel’s ten-mile waist, “We have driveways in Texas longer than that.”

The anxiety about Obama is that he is so new to the scene that few people have had a chance to get to him. The relationship guy is Lee Rosenberg of Chicago, who introduced Obama. “I can personally attest that Senator Obama is a genuine friend of Israel,” he said. In 2006, Obama “fulfilled a pledge he made to the Chicago Jewish community” and visited Israel. And the topper: Obama “has gotten to know” Benjamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister who is against ever dividing Jerusalem. Rosenberg looked pale, drained—as queasily forceful as a mob boss vouching for an unknown family’s bona fides.

The good news I can report is the new AIPAC line. In some ways the organization is belligerent: speakers emphasized the need to attack Iran before it gets nukes and to invade Gaza to take on Hamas. But peace is in the air, too, now that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s government is working overtime to cut a deal with the Palestinians on the West Bank and with the Syrians for the return of the Golan Heights. AIPAC reflected this policy. I heard a few conference-goers saying at microphones that the Bible gives Israel a right to the West Bank. But they received only a smattering of applause, and in one instance the moderator said the questioner was using inappropriate language.

The soul of the conference for me was Tal Becker, the highly personable Israeli negotiator. “I see [Palestinian negotiator] Saeb Erekat a lot more than I see my wife and kids,” he said, promising that if he and Palestinian moderates fail to reach an agreement, their goal is “to keep talking and keep talking and keep talking.”

Yet before you get out your handkerchief, reflect that AIPAC has for more than 30 years promoted the colonization process. In 1975, when President Ford wanted to reassess Mideast policy over Israeli intransigence, he was cut off at the knees by an AIPAC letter signed by 76 senators. Then in 1989, when James Baker went before AIPAC and told them to give up their idea of a Greater Israel including the West Bank, George H.W. Bush received a letter of anger signed by 94 senators. In both instances, AIPAC was hewing to the Israeli government line and nullifying American policymaking.

No, AIPAC’s change of heart cannot be ascribed to the good thinking of American Jews. They’re not thinking at all. They have passed on their full powers of judgment to the Israeli government. In that sense, the Zionists in that hall might best be compared to Communists of the ’30s and ’40s, who also abandoned their judgment to a far off authority even as they argued this and that subclause codicil in intense councils. On my train ride back to New York, a little rich kid of about 14, traveling with his uncle in the seat behind me, called his parents to complain that Obama’s views on Israel seemed “tailored” and “he’s never really stood up for Israel.” Indoctrination, pure and simple.

The great sadness here is that American Jewry is the most educated, most affluent segment of the public. Yet on this issue there is little independent thinking. The obvious question is whether they don’t have dual loyalty. As a Jew, I feel uncomfortable using the phrase, given its long history, but the facts are inarguable. Leon Wieseltier of The New Republic speaks of everything “we” should do to make peace with the Palestinians, then corrects himself to say what Israel should do. Speaker after speaker says that Israel is in our hearts. People who emigrate to Israel are applauded, and when the national anthems are played, one cantor sings the “Star Spangled Banner,” but the “Hatikvah” has two cantors belting it out, with the audience roaring along. Maybe most revealing, I heard a right-wing Israeli politician sharply criticizing Olmert’s policy in the West Bank. Think of the scandal it would cause if American politicians went abroad and criticized the president’s foreign policy. It’s no scandal here because AIPAC is a virtual extension of Israel.

Of course, AIPAC and its roll call of politicians would say that American and Israeli interests are identical. I wonder how those politicians really feel. Their I-love-the-miracle-of-Israel rhetoric is so endless that it creates an undercurrent of doth protest too much—an impression that if there weren’t so much money at stake, they would run from Israel with winged heels.

AIPAC takes care to remind the pols of deeper reasons to help the Jews. The Holocaust imagery never stops. And there is a related theme: that Jews are the golden goose of Western society. The very last of the “Zionist Stories” AIPAC showed before Obama and Clinton spoke was of a scientist, IBM’s Nissensohn. The piece emphasized Israel’s contribution to high-tech industry from software to desalination, hinting at a traditional Jewish idea: for a society to flourish, it must treat Jews well. Haim Saban’s story made the same point. Look what Egypt lost when it forced the Saban family to flee.

The theme of the conference was “The U.S.-Israel Relationship: Built to Last.” But that seems another case of protesting too much. AIPAC is beset on many sides.

It surely noticed how much attention Palestinians got this spring for commemorations of the Nakba, their dispossession in 1948 and onwards. AIPAC fought back with its own dispossession narrative. About 700,000 Jews, including Haim Saban, were forced out of Arab societies following the formation of Israel. One of them was novelist Eli Amir, who grew up in privileged Baghdad and was forced into a refugee camp in 1950. Amir appeared live by satellite and berated AIPAC for not highlighting his story before this year.

Another problem for AIPAC is the growing alienation of younger Jews from Israel’s hardline policies, especially as those Jews do well here and assimilate. “I worry a lot more about the American Jewish community than I do about Israel—about which I have grave doubts,” Wieseltier said.

AIPAC is happy to work with non-Jewish Americans. At one dinner, I sat at the same table with Mark and Carrie Burns, Christian evangelical radio hosts from Illinois. Carrie said that many Christians she knows will vote on Jerusalem being in the hands of the Jews as a litmus issue. Thus AIPAC may hope to replace dwindling elite influence with populist numbers. I wouldn’t hold my breath. Carrie said that at a synagogue she addressed, the first question came from a high-school girl who said, “But isn’t Israel an apartheid state?”

The Jews are quietly leaving the room. Saban described his horror at visiting his son’s college, Wesleyan, and seeing a table on peace in the Middle East at which Israel was demonized. Some of the kids at that table were surely Jews.

Especially now that an alternative lobby, J Street, has formed on its left, AIPAC seems to be making gestures in a more peaceable direction. One was the testimony from Sderot, the Israeli city bordering Gaza that American politicians must learn to pronounce or face political doom. (I think it’s Stay-ROTE.) It was inevitable that someone from the region would take the stage, and it’s impossible to imagine a more appealing spokesperson than Chen Abrahams, a pretty, soft-spoken kibbutz-dweller of about 40. The audience was utterly quiet as she described the terrible price her community has paid for the siege of Gaza. Nothing like the price the Palestinians have paid, I’d note. Still, if this was schmaltz, it was real schmaltz. At the end of her taped appearance, Abrahams said, “My biggest hope is for peace. I believe in talking to them, I don’t believe in wiping them out.” I was stunned.

Then Abrahams came out on stage to a standing ovation, and it struck me that it might be possible to take all the loving energy in this place now directed at helping other Jews and redirect it to great effect. If the AIPAC legions were somehow convinced that Jews will only be safe in the Middle East if the Arabs among them were also safe—without checkpoints, without a siege, with the dignity and freedom that Jews have had in the West—all these arrayed powers might then be directed to a larger idea of family and produce a miracle at last.

Philip Weiss is at work on a book about Jewish issues. He blogs at http://www.philipweiss.org/mondoweiss/.