Everyone knows about Joe McCarthy’s red-baiting during the 1950s. Nowadays, the pro-Israel right in this country engages in Israel-baiting especially when it comes to electoral politics. Every two years the Republican Jewish Coalition gets some rich Jewish chump like Shelly Adelson to ante up a million or two to shrey from the rooftops that the Democrats are soft on Israel. The stunt works as well for them as Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme ended up working for him. Many of you will remember the RJC and its affiliated henchmen taking out ads in the Jewish press arguing that Barack Obama was anti-Israel because of an insufficient deference for some Aipac-touted position or other. We’ve come to expect it of the Republicans and the Israel lobby. It’s their MO.
But hearing Israel-baiting (the Jewish equivalent of red-baiting) from the heart of the Democratic Party is a new one on me. Knowing of M.J. Rosenberg’s distaste for Jane Harman and her slavish devotion to Aipac, I suggested that he look up Marcy Winograd’s progressive primary challenge against Harman. He replied, obliquely mentioning something atrocious Henry Waxman and Lynne Woolsey had pulled. It took me a while to find it, but I did.
Those of you who follow my blog regularly may remember that I’ve taken on Jane Harman several times over the years as one of Aipac’s most trusted Congressional flunkies. A few years ago she even enlisted Haim Saban to pressure Nancy Pelosi to name her chair of the House Intelligence Committee. Harman knew that Pelosi knew that if Saban wanted the former in that job he held an enormous financial sword over the House Speaker’s head since the wealthy Israeli-American was a major donor to the Party. For a federal official to ask anyone to intervene on her behalf with another federal official in this fashion is illegal and I thought she at least should’ve been indicted. A separate story came out that as part of an intelligence operation the FBI heard an Israeli agent of influence ask Harman to intercede for a favor.
Thanks to her personal wealth ($112-million and 3rd wealthiest Congress member), political sway and Israel lobby connections she managed to dodge the bullet–this time.
Now, Henry Waxman, the dean of the powerful California Congressional delegation has taken out after Marcy Winograd, Harman’s primary challenger with a crackerjack bit of Israel-baiting:
Recently, I came across as astounding speech by Marcy Winograd, who is running against our friend Jane Harman…Ms. Winograd’s views on Israel I find repugnant in the extreme.
What alarmed Waxman so much? The fact that Winograd is a progressive Jew who says, along with many other progressive Israelis I might add, that the time for a two-state solution has passed due to Israeli intransigence. The fact that Winograd opposes U.S. aid that supports Israeli “institutional racism.” The fact that she doesn’t want to be associated with “occupation or extermination.”
To be clear, my views aren’t the same as Winograd’s. I’m still hanging on to the possibility for a two-state solution though the prospects grow dimmer by the day. But I completely reject the notion that such views are “repugnant” or beyond the Jewish pale or whatever. In fact, we already have over 400 members of Congress who are clones of Waxman’s and Harman’s pro-Israel views. To have one member of Congress who refuses to toe the Aipac line would not undermine the republic.
Waxman fulminates further:
…The notion that a member of Congress could hold such views is alarming. Ms. Winograd is far, far outside the bipartisan mainstream of views that has long insisted that U.S. policy be based on rock-solid support for our only democratic ally in the Middle East.
In Winograd’s foreign policy, Israel would cease to exist. In Winograd’s vision, Jews would be at the mercy of those who do not respect democracy or human rights…Jane’s victory will represent a clear repudiation of these views…
I ask you to join me in showing maximum support for Jane…
This bit of hasbara is standard Aipac boilerplate. Waxman can probably recite it backwards and forwards and does so thrice a day just as Orthodox Jews recite their daily prayers. A few problems though: the only democracy in the Middle East leaves out Turkey, Lebanon, Pakistan, and…the Palestine Authority which duly elected Hamas in a democratic election. A bit of pro-Israel myopia seems to have crept into Waxman’s argument. And it seems to me that arguing that Palestinians don’t respect “democracy or human rights” ignores the fact that Israel has a few challenges on the human rights front itself. As for democracy, we can argue about the nature of Israeli democracy, but Hamas actually won a democratic election. So ignoring Palestinian democracy is at best a glaring omission.
Winograd has drafted her own response to Waxman here. It reads in part:
Like you, I am intimately aware of our Jewish history. On my mother’s side, my great-grandparents escaped the Russian Pogroms to make a better life for themselves in Europe. On my father’s side, my great-grandparents were killed in the Jewish Holocaust of Nazi Germany. Because of our collective experience with persecution, it behooves us to stand in opposition to persecution anywhere and everywhere, rather than sanctify reductionist state policies that cast all Jews as victims who can only thrive in a segregated society. Furthermore, we must stand in explicit opposition to the Israeli persecution of the Palestinians; the brutal blockade of Gaza, an act of war by international standards, denying children clean water, food, and medicine.
We are better than that…
To stop the suffering of the Palestinian people and to end the rocket attacks on Israelis near the border, I am ready and willing to accept a negotiated peace agreement that adheres to principles of justice and recognizes a two-state solution based on withdrawal of illegal settlements to the 1967 borders or a mutually-agreed exchange of territory.
To be fully candid, I think Winograd is in a tough spot here as a Congressional candidate. If you’ve endorsed a one-state solution you’ve potentially marginalized yourself among your Jewish constituency and other pro-Israel forces. I wish this wasn’t the case. But it is.
All that being said, I think times are changing and that Winograd should confront this slightly differently than she has. I think she should say look, no one in Congress gets to determine whether there will a one or two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The president and secretary of state and the parties themselves will make those determinations. The main thing any member of Congress should stand for is dignity, respect and justice for both Israelis and Palestinians. The main thing any member of Congress should oppose is any legislation that demeans or diminishes the rights of either Israelis or Palestinians.
Marcy Winograd hasn’t spent 30 years in the Beltway attending Aipac briefings and Israel junkets. She hasn’t been fed the standard Likud line as have Congressmembers Harman and Waxman which parrots back Israel right or wrong talking points. For all the time her opponent has been in Washington, Marcy’s actually been living with her middle-class Los Angeles family dealing with the travails of everyday folk as a teacher and community activist. She hasn’t had a chance to develop the polished vacuous statements churned out by the Waxman-Harman political machine.
But you know what–Marcy Winograd spoke from the heart in her All Saint’s Church speech out of a sense of pain as a Jew at the suffering of both Israelis and Palestinians. And if that’s a hanging offense for Harman’s buddies at Aipac, so be it. Nothing she said in her speech can be remotely construed as hostile to Israeli Jews or Israel’s security. In addition, there are tens of thousands of Israelis who were shocked and scandalized, as she was, by the terrible suffering inflicted by the IDF on Gaza. So Congressman Waxman, if you smear Marcy Winograd for caring too much about Gazan suffering, you’re smearing those courageous Israelis who believe that what their government and armed forces did their was wrong regardless of the reason for doing so.
Maybe on their next Aipac junket, Harman and Waxman will visit more than the Knesset and meet with other leaders than Bibi and Shimon. Maybe they will meet with Israeli human rights NGOs like B’Tselem and Peace Now. Maybe, God forbid they’ll visit the West Bank and Gaza, as Congressmembers Baird and Ellison and Senator Kerry did last year. Maybe they’ll try to see how the other half lives in the Middle East. And then maybe they’ll understand that what Marcy Winograd believes isn’t so outrageous after all. In fact, she has nothing to apologize for. If anything, it is Harman and Waxman and their slavish relationship with Aipac who have some explaining to do.
Returing to Winograd’s letter above, it also contains a cogent denunciation of the inadequacies of Jane Harman and her betrayal of values that most members of the Democractic Party hold dear.
If you feel like me that Marcy Winograd is not treif and that she represents a true progressive voice that should be in Congress, I hope you’ll join me in supporting her in any way you can (but especially with a financial contribution).
“The fact that Winograd is a progressive Jew who says, along with many other progressive Israelis I might add, that the time for a two-state solution has passed due to Israeli intransigence.”
Define many, i think you could count them on one hands fingers, even Dov Hanin and his Communist peers support the two-state solution. Can you elaborate on this progressive Israeli community who gave up on the 2ss? what are they advocating now, btw? not yordim, not diaspora Jews, not American politicians, maybe you meant Palestinians citizens of Israel.
I should’ve amended that support to read “many Israelis who believe the time of a two state solution, if not past, is rapidly closing.” Among many Jews who feel this way are Meron Rapaport, Meron Benvenisti, Henry Siegman. But there are literally tens of thousands of others including myself in Israel & here who feel this way. And I have not a scintilla of doubt that Dov Chenin feels the same way.
Rafi, I had promised myself that I would never dignify your rants with a reply. But here is one progressive who agrees that a two-state solution is not only dead, but undesirable. I could list a host of others, but will limit myself to the following: Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Ilan Pappe – it would take all day to name the rest.
It was always Israel’s intention to obviate the two-state solution, and they have succeeded as far as I can tell. What they did not consider was that by obviating the two-state solution they were heading dangerously in the direction of a single state in which Jews cannot possibly maintain a majority, and which therefore will inevitably evolve into an actual democracy in which all citizens are equal, at which point Israel will cease to be The Jewish State it was artificially created to be, and become a state like other states.
The two-state solution died with the 1967 war. Although lip service has been paid to it, the real aim has always been to cleanse Palestine of all Arabs. That is Zionist Israel’s sole aim. Palestinians be damned. The US, for geopolitical reasons supports this aim. Forget peace, until that is accomplished, after which we will have peace like Turkey and Armenia have peace.
You are all urged to read John Pilger’s “Freedom Next Time,” especially chapter two; “The Last Taboo.”
I would say that Gene Schulman (guessing), Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein are diaspora Jews, Ilan Pappe is a yored, living in London and everything, and even if you describe him as just an Israeli, his political position is on the fringes of the fringes in Israel, not enough for a single Knesset seat, saying that many Israelis on the left view the 2ss as dead is ridiculous.
Saying the window for the 2ss is closing is one thing (i agree), saying that it is dead is another, and call either as un/desirable is another matter.
The two state solution is dead because Israel has finally killed it.
“We are better than that…
To stop the suffering of the Palestinian people and to end the rocket attacks on Israelis near the border, I am ready and willing to accept a negotiated peace agreement that adheres to principles of justice and recognizes a two-state solution based on withdrawal of illegal settlements to the 1967 borders or a mutually-agreed exchange of territory.”
Except for the withdrawal of settlements, I agree. Unfortunately, that requirement does make a two-state solution impossible currently, as it requires mass forced relocation, in the name of opposing forced relocation.
A better option is to establish the 67 border (or close), with the right of settlement residents to remain in Palestine as Palestinian citizens, assuming that they abide by Palestinian law, which hopefully will be color-blind. Fayyad has endorsed this approach in the past.
Likely 2/3 will return to Israel.
Taking an impossible position as a rock, compels a then impossible subsequent conclusion and approach.
Peace is so much more important than that.
Perhaps if she heard about the Fayyad proposal she would shift slightly to a possible solution, that then supports her assertive defense of Palestinian humanity plausibly.
Yes, of course, Richard Witty. In your world the Israelis should be able to profit forever from their theft of Palestinian land, and the fact that their presence in the occupied territories is completely illegal under international law to which Israel is a signatory, as well as a violation of the human rights of the Palestinians on whose land they live is irrelevant.
And of course if the situation were reversed and it were Palestinians who had colonized stolen Jewish land by force, you would feel exactly the same way, I am sure.
Oh Witty don’t get me started. Are you back here or just slummin’?
You’re opposed to withdrawal of Israeli settlements? Quel surprise! You think that Israel couldn’t relocate the 50-70,000 settlers that would be required to go in such a settlement? If you do you’re preposterous. It wouldn’t be easy, but they evacuated 8,000 fr. Gaza & it went almost like clockwork.
I have no problem w. settlers staying behind who are willing to become Palestinian citizens & subject themselves to Palestinian sovereignty. The PA has also said as much. Much more than 2/3 will return to Israel. I think all but Rabbi Menachem Froman & his followers will return to the Green Line.
“I have no problem w. settlers staying behind who are willing to become Palestinian citizens & subject themselves to Palestinian sovereignty. The PA has also said as much. Much more than 2/3 will return to Israel. I think all but Rabbi Menachem Froman & his followers will return to the Green Line.”
Probably more than just Rabbi Froman, but that would be a good outcome, no?
Fayyad has endorsed the idea as eliminating an enormous obstacle (definitely caused by a very flawed enterprise).
If the Palestinian current leadership regards the proposal as a valid one, why would you be so condemnatory?
I’m opposed to forced removal from peoples’ homes, Israeli and/or Palestinian. If another solution is possible, that is worth investing in.
Your “are you slumming” comment was very rude, Richard. Please try being more charitable.
50,000-70,000, Richard? That is less than 10% of the illegal Israeli colonists now living on stolen Palestinian land in the Occupied Territories. Is allowing Israel to profit from its crimes by removing of a mere 8-10% of the illegal colonists, and therefore return of a mere 8-10% of the stolen land your idea of a just and fair resolution for the victims of more than four decades of theft, exploitation, oppression, destruction, and murder?
If so, I am very disappointed.
IOW, is allowing Israel to keep around 90% of the land it stole after 1967, and therefore allowing the criminal to profit from the crimes, your idea of a just resolution? It is not mine.
And, of course, there is also the Golan Heights, which, if anything, is an even more blatant case of illegal colonization and exploitation of the soveriegn land of another state. Should Israel also be allowed to maintain its colonies in the Golan Heights, and continue to profit from the exploitation of stolen land?
Shirin: It’s not up to me to negotiate the territorial outcome. All I know is that various Palestinian leaders & groups have negotiated serious proposals with Israelis that would provide for land swaps so that much of the Israeli W Bank population would transfer to Israel. If this is a result satisfactory to Palestinians then it’s satisfactory to me. If it’s not satisfactory to Palestinians then I guess it won’t work. But I think it is, perhaps reluctantly, satisfactory to most Palestinians. The figures I have read say that Israel should be able to return about 95% of the W Bank to the Palestinians while retaining most of the Israeli population. I’m not sure where you’re getting the number 90%. That doesn’t reflect the Geneva Accord or any other agreement I’ve ever heard.
I don’t see any reason why Israeli settlers should stay in the Golan unless Syria was willing to give them citizenship & they wanted to remain.
The land Israel would exchange would be in the Negev which would not have many, if any, Israeli Palestinian citizens. Avigdor Lieberman is not the one who will negotiate the exchange nor will he have an opportunity to surreptitiously implement his own transfer program via this method.
PPS regarding the idea of exchange of territory, it is a given that whatever land Israel is willing to exchange for its illegal colonies in the Occupied Territories will in no way be of comparable value to the stolen land. Further, Israel will undoubtedly use the land-exchange as an opportunity to rid itself of as many of its “Arab” citizens as possible. And how, I wonder, is that more just than removing the colonists who were placed there illegally and who have no legal or moral right to remain there?
You underlined what makes the two-state solution so ridiculous. All the Israelis who support the 2ss I’ve met don’t want it implemented without first looting all the built-up areas, to be signed away by the Palestinian authority, natch. They think the 1949 territory swapped away should be left to the govt., so, yeah. And since Israel has no intention of a negotiated solution anyway, it will probably find another mechanism of doing that land swap. I don’t see why it couldn’t be accomplished using a fig-leaf styled after the Oslo “self-government” accords.
Some degree of land exchange is likely inevitable, unless a prospective Palestinian state was willing to be dependent on Israel and the surrounding Arab states for the capability to transit between Gaza and the West Bank.
There are about 500,000 settlers including E. Jerusalem. Figures I have read say that all but 70K or so could be retained within the few settlement blocs that most proposed peace agreements (Geneva Accord, etc.) would transfer to Israeli control (in return for land swaps w. Israel). A very large number of settlers live on a very small amt of Palestinian land. These 70,000 live in illegal outposts & far flung settlements far fr. the Green Line are deep in W. Bank territory.
I hope that explains even if it may not satisfy.
Oh why do I stay in this insipid, brain-dead, cowardly political party? Why exactly? It is probably the most hypocritical, morally bankrupt, intellectually denuded waste of a political entity in the universe today. I’m reminded of this basic fact time and time again, and then I remember that I am a registered Democrat and I feel nothing but shame and revulsion. But for some retarded reason I hold on to this empty gutted-out political affiliation. I’ve got to face up to the bare-boned reality that the Democratic party is no longer the party of Franklin Roosevelt and hasn’t been for a long time.
You got to hand it to the Republicans, at least they are totally open and up-front in their thuggishness. What’s so pathetic about a majority chunk of the Senate Democrats and a sizable chunk of the House Democrats is that these corporate whore patsies pretend to care about the people, and give lip service to enlightenment values and universal principles, but when it comes down to the punch, they grovel at the feet of the wealthy & powerful, and grease the wheels of the military-corporate state.
For Henry Waxman to demonize a primary candidate, Marcy Winograd, who simply proposes that this people and nation, the Palestinians, who live/try-to-survive under occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, should have the same fundamental and inalienable human rights and equality under the law as Israeli Jews, as all other human beings are entitled to, well, it’s a revolting spectacle on the part of Waxman. In this particular instance, Waxman is just as much of a reactionary bigot as the most hard right-wing neocon. In fact, it’s hard for me to see any difference at all.
When are we going to get our politics out from under these supremacists who dominate our two main political parties? The fact that this particular brand of (anti-Palestinian) supremacism has widespread bi-partisan support in our bought-off American political system does not make it any more ethically acceptable or right.
The only chance my benighted party has of holding on to any substance and purpose is to get more Winograds, Bairds, Kapturs and the like in there, and let’s pleaaase boot out the Pelosis, Reids, Waxmans, Schumers, Harmans and the rest of the Democratic neocons, they can start their own party, the pro-choice Republican-Lite Kindler & Gentler Corporatist War (on Arabs & Persians) party. I’m sure it’ll be a great hit with the people.
Why do you belong to any political party? I am opposed to the entire concept because political parties are by their very nature corrupt. As for the Democratic party, it amazes me that so many people are only just now discovering that overall Democrats are no better than Republicans. Middle Eastern people have known that all along.
Democrats are no better on Mideast issues. They are better on some others. I’m not the one to argue this with any passion, however. You can go to other blogs and find the sort who will (though maybe fewer than before, given the past year).
In fact, Bill Clinton has every bit as much Iraqi blood on his hands as does GWB. He intentionally starved and isolated the Iraqi people for eight long years, depriving them of the most basic human necessities, and to add insult to injury periodically found a pretext to bomb them, killing many civilians, including one of Iraq’s premier artists and her husband, and blinding her daughter, an aspiring artist, in one eye. And I am sure it was merely an amazing coincidence that that particular bombing attack was to punish Saddam for a supposed plot to kill George H.W. Bush (a plot that turned out to be bogus), and it killed the artist who designed the mosaic of George H.W. Bush on the floor at the entrance to the Rashid hotel.
And don’t get me started on Clinton’s pretence at being an “honest broker” between Israel and the Palestinians.
I agree with all that.
I actually have a lot of contempt for the contemporary Democratic party (at least the establishment bulk of it, there are a handful of genuinely good people at the edges), particularly the way it has behaved the last 25 years or so. I’ve remained a registered Democrat since I first was able/of age to vote in ’92, but it’s not remotely in any way a (strong) ‘identity’ frame for me. The whole sense of the political spectrum is so pinched and narrow in establishment American discourse that I don’t frankly find anywhere, at least any established venue, to call ‘home’; I guess politically I consider myself a progressive left social democrat in the wider European sense, which for the establishment American media would put me way out Left field almost off the radar screen—if I had to label myself. My ‘time and time again’ sentence above I think made it clear I’ve been aware of how corrupt, hypocritical and genuinely bad the Democrats have been for quite a long time. And you’re right, the establishment center (I don’t like the term ‘mainstream’ because there’s the connotation that that’s where most of ‘the people’ are, which I think is misleading) of the party that wields decisive power is not substantively better than the Republicans.
Being registered in a political party in the U.S. allows you to vote in that party’s primaries. So, relating to this post, if I was in Jane Harman’s district (which unfortunately I’m not) I could vote in the Congressional Democratic primary for her challenger, Marcy Winograd. Our de facto two-party system is so tough to break out of because of the institutional power constraints at play, that I still think the best hope is for a “progressive take-over” of the Democratic party, however remote and far-fetched such a future possibility may be (especially given how rigged and money-dominated the American system is). That’s probably totally deluded on my part, but that’s what’s kept me “in”, also, I suppose nostalgia for my sense of American history from the 30’s, Roosevelt, the New Deal and so on, really more related to domestic than foreign policy (though I think we needed to fight WWII and stop Hitler & imperial Japan—one of the very few American foreign policy ‘decisions’ in our history I agree with, not that I agree with every aspect of the way that war was fought… )
Perhaps the only thing that will fundamentally change American foreign and domestic policy is a real bona fide Revolution, but us Americans are heavily indoctrinated to steer away from such ‘radical’, untidy concepts. Heck, this ain’t France!
Vive la Revolution!!
Shirin, sometimes the way the threads are it’s hard to tell who’s responding to whom, but my above comment was in reply to your question.
Marcy Winograd is a very impressive individual. I have made a couple of contributions to her campaign (initially at the behest of Paul Rosenberg at OpenLeft) and plan to make more.
just a minor point: the coinage “Israel-bating” is confusing. The original red-baiting was used to describe people who were (1) opposed to “reds” and (2) exaggerated the extent of their influence. So “Israel baiting” would apply to a regime like Abdul Nasser’s, that eventually treated all Jews as potential spies for Israel. The phenomenon you’re describing is more like Hamas-baiting, or something of the sort.
You’ve got it wrong. “Israel-baiting” in the context I use it refers to those who bait Jews by claiming their views are anti-Israel or anti-Zionist when they are not. The baiting that the Waxmans of the world engage in has the same purpose, function & origin that the red-baiting of the McCarthys had in the 50s.