New Yorker editor David Remnick, who seems to be growing increasingly disenchanted with Israel, is now blaming the absence of a peace deal almost entirely on the Israeli government and pro-Israel groups.
Remnick’s entire column ignores reality, but this Stephen Walt–esque paragraph on the “right-leaning” Israel lobby is especially noteworthy:
For decades, AIPAC, the Anti-Defamation League, and other such right-leaning groups have played an outsized role in American politics, pressuring members of Congress and Presidents with their capacity to raise money and swing elections. But Democratic Presidents in particular should recognize that these groups are hardly representative and should be met head on. Obama won seventy-eight per cent of the Jewish vote; he is more likely to lose some of that vote if he reverses his position on, say, abortion than if he tries to organize international opinion on the Israeli-Arab conflict. However, some senior members of the Administration have internalized the political restraints that they believe they are under, and cannot think beyond them. Some, like Dennis Ross, who has served five Presidents, can think only in incremental terms.
Forget the tinge of paranoia in his statement for a second. As Remnick must know (but for some reason chooses to ignore in this paragraph), it’s not only the Jews who support Israel. According to a Gallup poll from late last month, 63 percent of Americans take the Israeli side of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. U.S. lawmakers don’t simply stand with Israel because Jewish lobbying groups tell them to — they do it because it’s a position that the majority of Americans believes in.
People like Remnick and Friedman consistently lie to foster their paranoid anti-Jewish fantasies. The powerful and mysterious Jew has always been a staple of anti-semitic propaganda in Europe and now here in the United States.