The Israel Lobby: Targeting Democrats for Election Day Defeat

By MJ Rosenberg

“October 22, 2010 “Huffington Post”—The fury of the “pro-Israel” lobby lately has truly been something to behold.

It has abandoned bipartisanship by setting up front organizations like the so-called Emergency Committee for Israel, which is running ads across the country calling on voters to defeat Democratic members of the House and Senate for signing a letter urging President Obama to address the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

With all the problems average Americans are facing, the lobby is so out-of-touch that it thinks that hard-hit Pennsylvanian voters (the ads runs most often in the Keystone State) will actually cast their votes based on the lobby’s litmus test of who is and who isn’t hawkish enough on Israel.

Then there is the American Jewish Committee, which has now issued an unusual second political poll this year. The first, issued in March, was its traditional annual poll of American Jewish opinion on matters foreign and domestic.

This second poll, issued just before the congressional elections, is more limited and clearly is designed to demonstrate that Jewish voters are deserting President Obama because of his efforts to bring Israelis and Palestinians to the peace table. (The AJC press release carries the title: “AJC Poll Shows Jewish Disapproval of President Obama Rising.”)

Actually, the poll’s intent is to create the shift it claims to portray, a shift that is, in fact, not happening because, as Republican Whip Eric Cantor said on October 2, American Jews are voting Democratic, as they always have, because “Jews are prone to want to help the underdog.”

But not the American Jewish Committee, the most established and establishment of lobby organizations which, under its current leadership, is a bastion of neoconservative war-mongering and has put its once-respected polls to the service of the GOP.

The good news is that Eric Cantor is right: American Jews (not him) are liberals and Democrats. But the “pro-Israel” establishment just follows lockstep behind Prime Minister Netanyahu who wants Republicans to win in November (he has a history of supporting the GOP) and President Obama gone in 2012.

One, they are tired of even Obama’s timid pressure on settlements and (2) they want a President who will give Israel permission to bomb Iran. George W. Bush said “no” to that scheme as has Obama. But President Palin or Huckabee? They know that they would say “bombs away” in a heartbeat.

That is why they are running these ads. That is why the American Jewish Committee has become a Republican cutout. It’s all about the Middle East: preventing Israel from achieving peace with its neighbors and preventing Iran from getting nuclear weapons, not through diplomacy but war.

And check out this ad the “Emergency Committee for Israel” is running against a Democratic Congressman in Connecticut. (They are using the same ad against a host of Democrats). Happily, it won’t work. But it does demonstrate what this game is all about. And it’s not jobs, jobs, jobs.”

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article26665.htm

An article by longtime Middle East award winning journalist and friend to many Israeli leaders, Alan Hart had this to say on his site

“I’m beginning to think that the awesome influence of the Zionist lobby and its stooges in Congress is not the complete answer. And the question I am asking myself is this: Could it be that all American presidents know there is nothing nuclear-armed Israeli leaders would not do if they were seriously pressed to make peace on terms which they believed in their own deluded minds would put Israel’s security at risk? Always in my own mind is what Prime Minister Golda Meir said to me in a BBC Panorama interview and from which I quote in my book – in a doomsday situation Israel “would be prepared to take the region and the whole world down with it.”

Given that the current Israeli government is a law
unto itself - an administration that ignores not only
the United Nations but also even the United States
who is its primary funder and arms supplier – it is
apposite to ask whose finger is on the button that
can arm and deploy Israel’s estimated hundreds of
nuclear warheads?

Unfortunately, this information, and the number of
warheads and WMD stockpiled by Israel, is completely
undeclared to the International Atomic Energy Agency
of the UN.

Bearing in mind that the current Likud government
consists of a fragile coalition that is dependent on
the votes of an extreme right-wing party under the
leadership of the foreign minister, Avigdor
Lieberman, the details of who has control over the
largest, secret nuclear arsenal on the planet should
be a key concern to the EU, the UN and the US.

It is not in the interest of world peace that these
details are apparently unknown particularly when
there seems to be every possibility of another war in
the Middle East. This makes the status quo extremely
dangerous to European interests.