Dissenting
At Your Own Risk
By Cecilie Surasky
04 October, 2007
Star-Telegram
Last
year, I agreed to speak to a Jewish youth group about my organization,
Jewish Voice for Peace, and our opposition to Israel's occupation. My
talk was to follow one from a member of the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee, which calls itself "America's pro-Israel Lobby."
A week before, a shaken program
leader said the AIPAC staffer had threatened to get the entire youth
program's funding canceled if I was allowed in the door. The threat
worked, and in disgust, they canceled the whole talk.
Pundits will surely argue
for years about professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer's explosive
new book, The Israel Lobby, which blames poor U.S. policy in the Middle
East on a loose network of individuals and pro-Israel advocacy groups.
But the book, and the response
to it, opens up another controversy: the stifling of debate about unconditional
U.S. support for Israeli policies.
Why is Israel's increasingly
brutal 40-year occupation of Palestinian land regularly debated in the
mainstream media abroad, including in Israel, but not here? And why
is there an almost total lack of discussion among presidential candidates
about the dollars that subsidize this occupation and the American diplomatic
support that makes it possible?
In a society built on the
free exchange of ideas, as Walt and Mearsheimer point out, one answer
can be found by looking at the many self-appointed gatekeepers, such
as Abraham Foxman and the Anti-Defamation League, or Harvard law professor
Alan Dershowitz, who use their Jewish identity as both a shield and
cudgel. They work diligently to silence those who question ill-conceived
policies of the Israeli and U.S. governments.
Non-Jewish critics, even
former President Carter, are denounced as anti-Semites. Special ire
is reserved for Jewish dissenters, who are branded as "self-hating"
or "marginal," while Muslim and Arab-Americans are easily
smeared and even criminalized with charges of supporting terrorism.
Stunned by the stifling of
dissent, we decided to start a Web site, Muzzlewatch, to track the incidents.
Just as we launched, Stanford Middle East Studies Professor Joel Beinin
was disinvited from a speaking engagement at a high school with just
24 hours' notice.
After an unprecedented campaign
of outside interference waged by Dershowitz, Professor Norman Finkelstein
was refused tenure by DePaul University because of his criticism of
U.S.-Israeli policy.
Palestinian-American anthropologist
Nadia Abu El-Haj is fighting a political campaign to deny her tenure
at Barnard.
Even Walt and Mearsheimer,
who are getting plenty of exposure, couldn't have asked for better proof
of their point that the lobby works to stifle dissent when an embarrassed
head of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs told them that their scheduled
speech was canceled. (They did speak before the World Affairs Council
of Dallas/Fort Worth on Sept. 17.) This was apparently because Foxman
was not available that day to "balance" their talk.
(They had initially been
booked by themselves. The talk was not rescheduled.)
Many groups that started
with the important work of fighting real anti-Semitism now rely on anti-Semitism
to insist that to show one's love of Jews, one must offer uncritical
support to Israel. They are especially displeased by Jews who believe
that enabling Israeli violations of Palestinian human rights is not
good for anyone.
Unless this atmosphere of intimidation is confronted, Americans will
continue to lack access to information and perspectives necessary to
formulate effective Middle East policies, virtually ensuring that Israel
and the United States will be at war for many years to come.
'The Israel Lobby'
A podcast of Walt and Mearsheimer's
presentation is available at http://podcast.dfwworld.org/2007_09-17_
The_Israel_Lobby.MP3
Cecilie Surasky
is communications director for the Oakland-based Jewish Voice for Peace.
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