Is The American Public About To Toss Israel?
By Franklin Lamb
13 November, 2010
Al Manar
Beirut: Ever so slowly over the past two decades, and gaining momentum since
the April 2002 Israeli destruction of the West Bank town of Jenin, American
attitudes toward Israel appear to be changing according to some public
opinion analysts. The American Public Opinion and U.S. Foreign Policy
polling unit, that works on behalf of the Chicago Council on Foreign
Relations has argued that the American opinion shift accelerates with each
perceived Israeli outrage such as the saturation bombing of much of south
Lebanon and south Beirut during the July 2006 war, the massive civilian
slaughter, more than one-third women and children, in Gaza during the
winter of 2008/9, the May 2010 murders and carnage committed against the
Mavi Marmara, including the assassination of 19 year old American Furkan
Dogan, and the cumulative effect of a half century of Geneva Convention
and international law violations by Israel against occupied Palestine and
Lebanon.
Some opinion analysts, like the 2009 Zogby International poll of American
attitudes toward Israelis and Palestinians, express surprise with what they
are learning from the American public and detect significant changes in
American public attitudes favoring US disengagement from Israel.
Such changes in attitudes are not yet evident in Congress or in the Office
of the Vice President. But then, as one of Biden’s Democratic Congressional
colleagues from Cleveland Ohio, just recently reelected and now planning to
force a Congressional vote on withdrawing from Afghanistan noted this
week, “Joe’s a nice fella but a God awful slow learner! Cracks and fissures are
shooting around and inside Joe’s great American pro Israel public opinion
vase etched in gold with the words: ‘US Support for Israel Must Continue
Forever!’
The NYT’s Tom Friedman seemed to concur during meetings in Israel
recently:
“US support for Israel could shatter like Humpty Dumpty-- and it
could get ugly…You are losing the American people who believe me,
are fed up with the Mideast in general. But they're also fed up with
Israel. When they see their president working hard to try to tee up an
opportunity… And you say 'No, first pay me – let Jonathon Pollard out
of jail, have Abu Mazen sing Hatikva in perfect Yiddish, and then
we'll think about testing.' It rubs a lot of Americans the wrong way."
Changes of US citizens attitudes toward Israel are evident in Lebanon also.
Hundreds of Americans and other foreigners have visited Shatila and other
Palestinian refugee Camps in Beirut in the past few years according to the
Sabra Shatila Foundation that conducts tours of the camp. Many visiting
Americans have been surveyed by various firms and the results mirror recent
surveys from the States. Several explanations are being offered by pollsters
for the developing American public opinion shift away from support for
Israel.
One is the growing perception that Israel, despite its consistent claims of
self defense and accidents, when it attacks and kills civilian populations, is in
fact the aggressor and lacks respect for non Jewish lives. Growing American
revulsion at the increasing incidents of verbal assaults on Arabs and Muslims,
and racist hate speech graffiti by the Israeli public, internet defamation
by elements of the US Israel lobby, and seeming encouragement by Israeli
officials and some Rabbi’s ensconced among the more than 100 illegal
colonies in occupied Palestine.
Two often mentioned examples are:
The followers of the late Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu who regularly broadcast
his calls that "All of the Palestinians must be killed; men, women, infants,
and even their beasts”.
And Rabbi Yizhak Shapiro, who lately published the book The King's Torah in
which he detailed the "jurisprudence" sanctioning the killing of Palestinian
infants and children. The White House has reportedly been surprised by the
number of Americans objecting to, or even knowing about, these kinds of
outrageous and immoral US funded extremists that has been going on for
half a century.
Americans are becoming weary of Israel constantly moving the goal post in
the “peace negotiations ” and Israeli officials undercutting the American
President and flaunting their power in Congress and using the US-Israel
lobby and media juggernaut to ridicule him. When Obama condemns Israeli
settlement building and calls for suspension, within days, Israel often
announces more settlement construction, often claiming mere coincidence.
A growing belief among the American public that Israel takes the US for
granted and is only interested in its own economic and military benefits at
American expense. Just this week, President Obama criticized Israel for
announcing another stage in the approval process of 1,300 housing units in
the Jerusalem neighborhoods of Pisgat Ze’ev and Har Homa. He warned:
“This kind of activity is never helpful when it comes to peace
negotiations. I'm concerned that we're not seeing each side making the
extra effort involved to get a breakthrough.”
Israel’s reaction was immediate, condemnatory and harsh. Knesset Members
as well as AIPAC staff attacked President Obama, saying that he is ignoring
the reality of Israel’s needs in Jerusalem. MK Avi Dichter, told the Jerusalem
Post that the American people are smart enough to “understand that there is
no chance that Jerusalem will return to the 1967 borders. But they are either
not smart enough or still don’t understand that the most sensitive part of
the negotiations is Jerusalem. For their President to deal with Jerusalem at
the beginning of negotiations is a recipe for failure.” Bar Ilan University
professor Ehud Gilboa added that he does not think Obama will “lay off”
Israel in the near future:
“I believe he has an obsession with Israel. He will want to get the talks
between Israel and the Palestinians going only because he wants to be
remembered in history as the one who is signed on the peace agreement.
We expect him to be a one term President and I don’t think he warrants
being taken seriously.”
More Americans appear to be tiring of Israeli officials telling them they
don’t understand how to view Israeli land confiscations, ethnic cleansing and
use of American cash and weapons. One poll conducted during October
2010 of Americans living in Beirut asked about Israeli PM Netanyahu calling
the United Nations’ Goldstone Report “a modern day blood libel.” Only
4% of the Americans believed this. But 85% believed that Israel manipulates
this term and also the Nazi crimes against Jews during WW II to justify
its occupation and treatment of Palestinians.
Opinion analysts at Rasmussen Polls Delaware believe changes in US public
attitudes are also due to the collapsing American economy. The US public is
getting angry, loud and distressed. Perhaps always a little paranoid, it is
more despondent and pessimistic. Americans have generally believed in the
country's capacity for regeneration, that a new awakening is possible at any
time. Now, 63 percent of Americans don't believe that they will be able to
maintain their current standard of living. American companies like Apple and
Coca-Cola, Google and Microsoft are putting their money, not in the US but
in Asia, where labor is cheap and markets are growing. The US government’s
debt now exceeds 90 percent of the gross domestic product and more than
half of all Americans don't believe that the America Dream is still realistic but
rather that their country is dysfunctional and its Congress corrupt.
It is not sure how the Tea Party will ultimately view Israel being given
annually a total of approximately $5 billion and then investing approximately
60% of it in interest bearing accounts while every penny of the US taxpayer
money it gets must be borrowed by Washington with US taxpayers paying
the interest on cash gift to Israel. But isolationism and xenophobia are on the
rise with growing numbers of American unhappy with what they see as
Israeli “shenanigans at US taxpayer expense”, according to a Congressional
staffer who, during a recent ‘brown bag’ lunch in the Cannon Congressional
House Office building cafeteria, was warned about speaking out against US
aid to Israel to fellow staffers. He explained:
“We’ve got two criminal wars, one in Iraq and one in Afghanistan,
that have cost this country, in real terms more than two trillion. The
government debt continues to grow, from 57 percent of GNP in 2000 to
83 when Obama got elected and the national debt of $13.8 trillion
and growing by the hour. That amounts to 94 percent of GNP, and in
two years it will exceed 100 percent. We can’t afford Israel financially
and never could afford them morally, politically or what they have
done with American weapons!”
Likely Republican Majority leader Eric Canton, one of the three key leaders
of the Israel lobby in Congress is reportedly terrified that the Tea Party
will insist, as rumored, on enacting Legislation that terminates foreign aid
of all kinds if the U.S. unemployment level rises above 4-percent.
Consideration would be given to restarting foreign aid when the
unemployment level drops below 4-percent and remains below 4-percent
for 12 months. Canton must figure out how to protect Israel’s cash with
having the Tea Party come after him. I may be recalled that Canton is floating
an AIPAC scheme to take US funds of Israel out of Foreign Aid and call it
“Homeland Security” expenditures, “ in order to save it from foreign aid cutting zealots.”
Public opinion analysts are increasingly seeing that the American public
wants to distance itself from Israel. But it is unlikely that Congress will,
in the short term, follow the public’s lead. This conclusion is supported by
the just passed congressional amendments that authorized the increase of
U.S. weaponry, ammunition and war supplies stored in Israel to a record $1.2
billion, Defense News reported this week.. The value of U.S. weapons to be
prepositioned in Israel will reach $1 billion in 2011, with another $200
million added in 2012. Once the weaponry arrives, the amount of U.S.-owned
materiel available for Israel's emergency use will have jumped threefold
since 2007. Over the past two years, logisticians and war planners from U.S.
European Command and the Israel Defense Forces elevated war stocks to the
then congressionally authorized threshold of $ 800 of equipment. Ready for
Israel’s next war against Lebanon or Syria or Iran-or all three countries
One pro-Israel group dismayed by the shift in American public opinion
is the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) which sounded the alarm this week at
the Canadian governments sponsored Inter-Parliamentary Coalition for
Combating Anti-Semitism (ICCA) held at Parliament in Ottawa “to inspire
parliamentary action against anti-Semitism around the world.” Fifty
countries from six continents sent delegations to help combat what ADL’s
Abe Foxman, claims is a dangerous softening of US public opinion for Israel.
The conference adopted an Ottawa Protocol on Combating Anti-Semitism --
building on the 2009 London Declaration on Combating Anti-Semitism
of 2009,* which has built on more than 50 similar initiatives over the past
98 years since ADL was launched in 1913.
ADL’s current focus, according to Christopher Wolf, who chairs ADL's
Internet Task Force on “cyber hate”, is ”to take the lead and show the
American public why they must stick with Israel during these days of
Islamist terror against Americans and their only reliable ally, Israel.”
One of Abe Foxman’s problems is that many Americans are distancing
themselves from ADL’s nonstop “fear and smear” campaigns. Another is that
history, along with the American public, is accelerating its rejection of the
Zionist colonial enterprise in Palestine.
Franklin Lamb is doing research in Lebanon and in reachable at
[email protected]
First Published in Al Manar
