[Dialogue] Obama is all for US support of Israeli hardline

[Jim Rippey]

It appears that Obama is thoroughly under the influence of AIPAC.
Meanwhile, elsewhere, the war with Iran that the Israeli government and
AIPAC seem determined to have looks more and more inevitable.   - Jim Rippey



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Giuliani Advisor: Raze Palestinian Villages


DEPARTMENT Washington <http://harpers.org/subjects/WashingtonBabylon>
Babylon BY Ken <http://harpers.org/subjects/KenSilverstein>  Silverstein
PUBLISHED September <http://harpers.org/archive/2007/09>  14, 2007  in
Harpers

On September 11, staffers for Barack Obama had a campaign ad taken down that
had appeared as a "sponsored link" on Amazon.com's web page for The Israel
Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, the controversial new book by John
Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. Obama's campaign didn't place the ad; it
apparently appeared on the Amazon page because his campaign, like those of
other presidential candidates, pay to have their ads pop up when people do
searches for key words like "politics." 

That same day, in the face of questions from the media, Obama's campaign
released a <http://www.jta.org/cgi-bin/iowa/breaking/104133.html>  statement
saying that while he had not actually read the book, its conclusions were
"dead wrong" and that the senator "has stated that his support for a strong
U.S.-Israel relationship, which includes both a commitment to Israel's
security and to helping Israel achieve peace with its neighbors, comes from
his belief that it's the right policy for the United States." 

Yet just five days earlier, Daniel Pipes-who, as I first reported
<http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/08/hbc-90001048>  here, has signed on
as a foreign policy advisor to Rudy Giuliani's campaign-essentially argued
for war crimes against Palestinians, and there was no cry of protest from
the media or anywhere else. 

"Believing that if you don't win a war, you lose it, I have long encouraged
the Israeli government to take more assertive measures in response to
attacks," Pipes wrote on <http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/760>  his blog on
September 6. 

In a Jerusalem Post piece six years ago, "Preventing war: Israel's options,"
I called for shutting off utilities to the Palestinian Authority as well as
a host of other measures, such as permitting no transportation in the PA of
people or goods beyond basic necessities, implementing the death penalty
against murderers, and razing villages from which attacks are launched. Then
and now, such responses have two benefits: First, they send a strong
deterrent signal "Hit us and we will hit you back much harder" thereby
reducing the number of attacks in the short term. Second, they impress
Palestinians with the Israeli will to survive, and so bring closer their
eventual acceptance of the Jewish state. 

The Geneva Conventions label collective punishments as a war crime. "No
protected person may be punished for an offense he or she has not personally
committed," according to Article 33. "Collective penalties and likewise all
measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited." 

For the record, there's much I disagree with in the Mearsheimer/Walt Book.
But there's something terribly wrong with the American debate on the Middle
East when, due to public criticism, Obama's campaign flees from an
unintentional link to that book, while a Giuliani advisor argues for a
policy of ethnic cleansing against Palestinians and his comments pass
unremarked. 

 

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