WASHINGTON - Faced with what the Wall Street Journal calls "one of Israel's
worst international relations disasters in years", the right-wing leadership of
the so-called "Israel Lobby" has been pulling out all the stops to defend the
Jewish state against global outrage over its deadly seizure of a Gaza-bound
vessel in international waters carrying humanitarian supplies early on Monday
morning.
Its biggest concern for now is to prevent the administration of US President
Barack Obama from distancing itself in any way - let alone joining in the
almost universal condemnation - from the military operation in which at least
nine civilian passengers of the Turkish-flagged Mavi Marmara were killed
by Israeli commandos.
"As the international community is engaged in a biased rush to judgment against
Israel and a diplomatic lynching, now is the time
for the United States to firmly stand with the Jewish state and its people,"
said Abraham Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League, on Wednesday.
"The US must show the world that it not only supports Israel's right to defend
its borders and citizens against terrorism, but that it supports Israel's right
to protect itself from people who pretend to be 'peace activists', and parade
under the guise of humanitarians while supporting Hamas and violently attacking
Israeli military personnel," he added.
Indeed, even after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's spokesman
publicly thanked Washington for its efforts to "water down" a statement by the
president of the United Nations Security Council issued early on Tuesday
morning, hard-line neo-conservatives complained bitterly that Obama had
betrayed its closest ally by not vetoing it.
"So why did we agree to the presidential statement?" asked Elliott Abrams,
former president George W Bush's top Middle Eastern aide, in an article
entitled "Joining the Jackals".
"The White House did not wish to stand with Israel against this mob [of
Security Council members who condemned the Israeli attack] because it does not
have a policy of solidarity with Israel," Abrams, who is now based at the
Council on Foreign Relations, wrote for the neo-conservative
Weeklystandard.com. "It would have been simple to stop the mob had the White
House wanted to." (Emphasis in the original.)
Some neo-conservatives, whose worldview is closely aligned to that of
Netanyahu's Likud Party, even suggested that Obama's failure to unconditionally
defend Israel in its hour of need could well make the Jewish state take even
more aggressive action in the future.
"If Obama decides it is in America's interest to make an example of Israel
after the Gaza flotilla incident in order to win goodwill in Cairo, Beirut,
Tehran and Ankara," warned Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute,
"then he must also recognize that the leadership in Jerusalem is going to
conclude that it cannot trust the United States to safeguard its security, and
that therefore it must take matters into its own hands on any number of issues,
not the least of which is Iran's nuclear program."
In effect, if the White House decides to come down hard on Israel now," he
added in National Review Online, "it is the same as giving a green light for
Israel to strike Iran."
That threat was echoed in a remarkable column published by the neo-conservative
Wall Street Journal on Tuesday in which the author, Ronen Bergman of Israel's
Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, argued that the operation itself was
"irresponsible" and evidence that a "siege mentality" - based on the belief
that world opinion is irreversibly hostile to the Jewish state - had taken hold
of the country and its governing elite.
Citing Iran's nuclear program, Bergman argued that such an "unhealthy mindset"
was "profoundly disturbing when the fatigued and isolated country itself has
the means to strike pre-emptively and punishingly at its enemies, including in
ways from which, realistically, there may be no return."
While neo-conservatives were warning darkly about the geopolitical consequences
for the administration of any distancing from Israel's position, the Lobby's
leaders and their friends in US Congress focused more on defending Israel's
version of the pre-dawn incident that took place on Monday some 100 kilometers
off Gaza's coast.
They insisted, among other things, that the Israeli commandos who carried out
the operation, armed only with paintball rifles and handguns, acted in
self-defense after coming under attack from passengers brandishing iron bars,
knives and other crude weapons.
"Israeli soldiers had every right to defend their lives against a lynch mob
attacking them with knives and clubs," said Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the top
Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
Based primarily on a short video distributed by the Israel Defense Forces, this
version of events, including the weapons involved on both sides, has been
called into question by the testimony of many of the 600 some passengers. After
being towed to Israel and held incommunicado for some 24 hours, they were
deported on Wednesday.
It also failed to take into account the right of self-defense of those aboard a
vessel that came under attack in international waters. "This is like a
carjacker complaining to the police that the driver bashed him with a crowbar
that was under the seat," noted M J Rosenberg, a Middle East analyst at Media
Matters.
Israel's defenders have also tried to focus media and public attention on what
they have called the "terrorist-linked, radical Islamic" group that reportedly
bought the Mavi Marmara, the Turkish-based Insani Yardim Vakfi, or IHH,
and helped sponsor the flotilla of eight vessels that set out to breach
Israel's three-year-old blockade of Gaza.
According to a release put out on Monday by the powerful American Israeli
Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a declassified report by the Central
Intelligence Agency after 9/11 named the IHH "as part of 15 organizations that
employed members or otherwise facilitate the activities of terrorist groups -
INCLUDING al-Qaeda".
Another AIPAC release cited testimony by a "famed French counter-terrorism
investigator" that the IHH had played "an important role" in the al-Qaeda
Millenium [sic] bomb plot" that targeted Los Angeles International Airport.
But, while the IHH appears to have played a role in recruiting fighters in the
Bosnia and Chechnya conflicts in the mid-1990s when the US Central Intelligence
Agency report was written, it currently carries out relief operations in more
than 100 countries, including Haiti and a number of African countries, as well
as in Gaza, the New York Times reported Tuesday. And, aside from an assortment
of sticks and kitchen knives, no weapons were found aboard any of the ships
seized by Israel.
Similar talking points, however, were deployed by The Israel Project (TIP),
another right-wing Zionist group that mobilized its members to write e-mails to
lawmakers and media outlets in their area calling on them to stand by Israel.
In the space of two hours on Tuesday afternoon, the Washington bureau of Inter
Press Service received nearly 20 emails from TIP members in support of Israel's
version of the incident.
Jim Lobe's blog on US foreign policy can be read at http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/.
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