NOVANEWS
Here’s a reflection at Alternet (missing the point, but that’s not the point) on Jeremy Ben-Ami, J Street, Walt, and Mearsheimer:
Most recently, Obama was urged in an open letter signed by 50 prominent diplomats, journalists and scholars not to veto a U.N. Security Council Resolution condemning Israeli settlement-building. The bipartisan list of signatories includes Ambassador Thomas Pickering, former Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci and former Assistant Secretary of State James Dobbins. Also on the letter, organized by Steve Clemons of the New American Foundation, a centrist Washington think tank, are the names John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. “I thought Walt and Mearsheimer’s book was extremely important,” enthuses Jack Matlock, Ambassador to the Soviet Union during the Reagan administration, who signed the letter.
Matlock believes the authors erred only in their analysis in not calling their book “TheLikud Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” referring to the right-wing Israeli party. “They’ve done a great job in starting a movement.” Vice-President Joe Biden, Gen. David Petraeus, the top commander in Afghanistan, and Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have all reportedly suggested in various ways that Israel’s policies are undercutting American security.
Seeing Walt and Mearsheimer’s fingerprints on the letter and other developments seems sensible, but only in the broadest sense. “They opened up a discussion, and J Street is part of the answer to the questions they raised,” says Jeremy Ben-Ami, executive director of J Street. Ben-Ami believes Walt and Mearsheimer went further in their arguments than they should have, but that they were outlining a problem J Street was designed to solve. “I don’t think they made our job harder or easier, but they helped crystallize, prior to our launch, the question we were trying to answer, so it was perhaps a little easier for people to understand what we were trying to do.”
What is it that J Street is intended to do? To push Israel into a two-state “solution.”* Why? Walt told us in Boston Review in a think-piece telling us how to run our empire about six years ago:
What if George Bush had made achieving a just peace between Israel and the Palestinians the cornerstone of his foreign policy after 9/11, and had been willing to commit the same amount of time, political capital, and money ($145 billion and rising) that he committed to overthrowing Saddam?
Putting to the side that fact that Walt seems uninterested in understanding why we went after Saddam — the astounding 876 billion dollars in profits for BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell from 2001 – 2009 has nothing to do with it, surely — he has a point. He goes on to write, “Israel should be expected to withdraw from virtually all the territories it occupied in June 1967 in exchange for full peace.
The United States has every right to pressure Israel in this way…This policy would undoubtedly be anathema to the different elements of the Israel lobby and would probably make some other Americans uneasy.” Some other Americans: like the MIC that Israel is begging to feed with another 20 billion dollars of taxpayer cash, no doubt, like the oil companies that made almost a trillion dollars off speculation and ripping off Americans under the pretext of “stability fears” from regional conflict. J Street? Ben-Ami tells us exactly: a product of enlightened thinking in the establishment about how to safeguard the long-run interests of empire. How? By pushing Israel to the ’67 armistice line with the West Bank encased in a hostile Jordanian-Israeli military alliance. These are our friends, WaltMearsheimer. Ben-Ami’s too, since we love Zionist militarist racist J Street right?
*A friend recently sent me something about how it’s “too late” for a two-state “solution.” I wish. Given current moods in sectors of Washington, re-configuring Israeli society to accept two states and withdrawal of the settlements will be easier than creating one democratic state. Crappy but true. I wrote the above to friend; friend has not responded. Weird.
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