Middle East policy under Israeli dictats

Middle East Policy Suffers from Subservience to Israel,
by Georgie Anne Geyer,
uexpress.com, (from Universal Press Syndicate) December 18, 2001
"In Israel/Palestine, to the contrary, the president has put American power and interests under not just Israel, but under an Israeli leadership with a famously shady political and military past. He has not declared, much less enforced, American interests in the area. He has accepted an historical interpretation of events in the region that is highly questionable. And he seems to tend increasingly toward an overreach that could involve everything from marching through Iraq, to invading Iran, to wiping out whole clans in Somalia ... The core of the problem is that President Bush has put American power behind the no-compromise line of Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon. The legendary and respected Israeli Labor Party is bitterly critical of Sharon -- but the Bush White House ignores it. So American power and principle are seen by the world -- rightly, in fact -- as approving of Sharon's ongoing Jewish settlements on Palestinian land, his intention that eventually the Palestinians should be moved to Jordan, and his assassination squads against Palestinian militants. In fact, when the president sent Gen. Zinni, one of our most admired retired officers, to the Middle East several weeks ago, ostensibly as a 'negotiator,' he was really putting the envoy under the Israeli prime minister's direction. Simple political psychology tells us that someone can hardly be a disinterested and fair negotiator when his government's position so flagrantly favors one side."

The Israel Lobby, by Michael Lind,
Prospect (UK), April 2002
"America's unconditional support for Israel runs counter to the interests of the US and its allies. We need an open, unprejudiced debate about it. The indifference of much of the national security elite and the public to the [Middle East], in between crises, permitted US policy to be dominated by two US domestic lobbies, one ethnic and one economic-the Israel lobby and the oil industry (which occasionally clashed over issues like US weapons sales to Saudi Arabia). Times have changed. The collapse of the Soviet empire created a power vacuum which has been filled by the US, first in the Persian Gulf following the Gulf war, and now in central Asia as a result of the Afghan war. Today the middle east is becoming the centre of US foreign policy -- a fact illustrated in the most shocking way by the al Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington. A debate within the US over the goals and methods of American policy in the middle east is long overdue. Unfortunately, an uninhibited debate is not taking place, because of the disproportionate influence of the Israel lobby. Today the Israel lobby distorts US foreign policy in a number of ways. Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, enabled by US weapons and money, inflames anti-American attitudes in Arab and Muslim countries. The expansion of Israeli settlements on Palestinian land makes a mockery of the US commitment to self-determination for Kosovo, East Timor and Tibet. The US strategy of dual containment of Iraq and Iran, pleases Israel -- which is most threatened by them-but violates the logic of realpolitik and alienates most of America's other allies. Beyond the region, US policy on nuclear weapons proliferation is undermined by the double standard that has led it to ignore Israel's nuclear programme while condemning those of India and Pakistan. The debate that is missing in the US is not one between Americans who want Israel to survive and those -- a marginal minority -- who want Israel to be destroyed. The US should support Israel's right to exist within internationally-recognised borders and to defend itself against threats. What is needed is a debate between those who want to link US support for Israel to Israeli behaviour, in the light of America's own strategic goals and moral ideals, and those who want there to be no linkage. For the American Israel lobby, Tony Smith observes in his authoritative study, Foreign Attachments: The Power of Ethnic Groups in the Making of American Foreign Policy (Harvard), "to be a 'friend of Israel' or 'pro-Israel' apparently means something quite simple: that Israel alone should decide the terms of its relations with its Arab neighbours and that the US should endorse these terms, whatever they may be.'"

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When Victims Rule. A Critique of Jewish pre-eminence in America
2,000 page scholarly work featuring approximately 10,000 citations from about 4,000 bibliographic sources.
The most thorough investigation to this day on Jewish power and influence in the USA and the world.