Clearing up the message
Re “The Lobby” by R.V. Scheide (SN&R News, December 14):
It was predictable that the message would get obscured when Jewish Voice for Peace protested at an AIPAC event on December 3. The event attracted bands of flag wavers: the “Israel can do no wrong” cheerleaders in blue and white and others showing “unconditional support for the Palestinian cause,” as R.V. Scheide reported, by waving Hamas and Hezbollah flags and brandishing inflammatory slogans to demonize anything Israeli.
Amid the sideshows, JVP’s center ring must have seemed a bit boring and less photogenic. While it’s true that we eschew “unconditional” support for any warring side and reject demonization of any people, the spectrum of views on Palestine/Israel is not linear. Nor can the complexities of the conflict be reduced to a neat “balance” between two very unequal sides.
The report mentioned only one JVP slogan at the protest: “AIPAC doesn’t speak for me.” While accurate, it overlooked the fact that our action was primarily designed as one of more than 100 around the world that weekend in response to a call from Israelis and Palestinians actively resisting the Israeli occupation to focus attention on the ongoing siege of Gaza. Nearly 1.5 million Palestinians are being held prisoner in a tiny territory deprived of livelihood, power, adequate food and water. Until a tenuous cease-fire this month, they’d been subject since June to an unprecedented level of bombardment, home demolitions and other attacks by Israeli forces that left hundreds--most civilians--dead.
None of these measures did anything to achieve Israel’s ostensible goals: to free a captured soldier or stop the firing of homemade rockets from Gaza into Israeli towns, which, like all attacks on civilians, are to be condemned.
JVP joins most of the world in calling for an end to the Gaza siege and to U.S. support for Israeli occupation; to other militarist policies like the devastating summer attack on Lebanon, openly encouraged by the Bush regime; and to the latest saber rattling by Washington and Jerusalem aimed at Iran.
One of JVP’s goals is to challenge the assumption that AIPAC speaks for very many U.S. Jews, let alone all. But at the same time, we challenge the myth that AIPAC and other “pro-Israel” groups are so powerful as to actually dictate U.S. policy against “real American interests.” Fans of the Walt-Mearsheimer article last spring that Scheide mentions ignore that the United States has consistently backed corrupt militarists, dictators and oppressors worldwide for decades, even when the objects of such support lacked Washington lobbyists.
Scheide quotes me as saying that AIPAC’s operation is not “sinister or conspiratorial.” What I tried to make clear was that it is no more so than other powerful conservative lobbies. Moreover, AIPAC’s message is indeed sinister, and we actively oppose it. As for what is “way off base,” I was referring specifically to the fallacy that AIPAC actually runs U.S. foreign policy.
JVP stands for the human rights of Palestinians and Israelis alike. We’ll continue to provide active support for groups of Jews and Arabs in the Middle East that struggle for that vision of peace, justice and equality, and we’ll work alongside others for a totally different U.S. foreign policy that supports such goals in Palestine/Israel and everywhere else.
David L. Mandel, Jewish Voice for Peace
Sacramento