I intend to give the Netanyahu-speech situation a rest after this, though there will be more to say on the risks and merits of the underlying negotiations with Iran. (For past items on the speech controversy, follow the links in this post.) But here is one last reader message on the speech itself. It's from someone whose real identity I know but am not using here. He lives in the Western U.S.
Let's get the disclaimers out of the way right from the start: I'm Jewish, or at least I was raised Jewish, had a bar mitzvah, and continue to consider myself culturally Jewish.
A substantial portion of my parents' families died in the Holocaust. One branch survived because they emigrated to Palestine in the early twentieth century. That branch still lives in Israel and they have all served in the Army and many have fought during the numerous wars, starting with independence. My father's family spent a year as refugees in France until a miracle yielded entry visas to the US. My mother's family evacuated at Dunkirk. I've visited family in Israel twice as an adult. So, if you wonder if I appreciate the importance of Israel to Jews around the world, my credentials are solid.
That said, I remain utterly baffled by the obeisance American politicians pay to a country that, due to the disproportionate influence of fanatic religious parties in the coalition, sometimes borders on the theocratic. Israel's policies towards the occupied territories are in conflict with international law and US policy, yet we turn a blind eye. Israel is America's ally when it serves Israel's interest (which of course is how any rational country behaves, putting its own interests first.)
Perhaps all the more ironic, a frequent anti-Semitic (or at least anti-American Jew) canard is that American Jews place loyalty to Israel ahead of the US (a claim one doesn't hear applied to western European immigrants, like the Irish, in spite of decades of support for IRA terrorists).So here we have Jewish senators and congressmen, who supposedly place loyalty to Israel ahead of the US because of their religion, threatened with being viewed as anti-Israel for not attending Netanyahu's circus, yet the Republicans behind this spectacle are not being questioned about their loyalty to the US for apparently placing Israel's interests ahead of the US. And of course, Netanyahu's interests and Israel's interests are not even the same thing.
So, when the cameras show who attends and who doesn't, who applauds and who doesn't, let's not think about who is pro-Israel or anti-Israel, let's ask who is pro-American or anti-American.
I know from other correspondence with this reader that his aim is not to launch some different sort of re-directed loyalty witch-hunt. Rather it is to ridicule or challenge the general idea of "loyalty tests" and instead to concentrate on the sanest long-run pursuit of U.S. national interests.
To my mind those interests lie with seeing if an acceptable deal with Iran can be found—a prospect that cannot possibly be helped by the spectacle a foreign leader addressing Congress to criticize the administration's approach to negotiations, while those talks are still underway. Again, imagine Congress inviting Chaing Kai-shek to address a joint meeting on the problems with the Nixon opening to China, while the negotiations that would lead to the Shanghai Communique were still underway. No American strategist would have thought that was a good idea at the time, and similar logic applies now. But I've made this point already and will move on.
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Time for the periodic housekeeping note about reader mail. Unless specified otherwise, I consider any incoming message to be available for quotation here. I don't have an open-comments section, because I don't want to commit the time to moderate and tend it (as Ta-Nehisi Coates has so impressively done). But I try to give an idea of the range of response by quoting samples of what's come in.
I generally want/need to know a reader's real name before quoting a message. That's to avoid trolling, phony claims about background or identity, false-flag-style arguments, etc. But I don't ever use a reader's real name on our site unless agreed in advance.
This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/02/anti-israel-or-anti-american/385524/
