The Israel Lobby and Us

 -- By Tom Phillips 

Columbia University’s Law Review was taken offline Monday after its editors published an article that said Palestinians are living under a “brutally sophisticated structure of oppression” by Israel that amounts to a crime against humanity. As of Wednesday night, the Review’s website said only that it was “under maintenance.”  By week’s end, the website was back online, with the complete fall issue including the article, titled “Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept.” It was accompanied by a statement from the review’s Board of Directors, complaining that not everyone had a chance to read the article before it was published.  The Board said for now it would “memorialize” its concern with the process, and continue to review it.

This was the latest iteration of a story that has been going on for decades. In 2012, after the Occupy Wall Street protests, I wrote about it, offending some people. But 90 percent of what I wrote then is relevant today — and more important than ever. At the certain risk of offending more people, I invite you to read “Across the Barricades 2: The Israel Lobby.” originally published here in January, 2012.

Occupying Wall Street, 2011

Last year’s occupiers of Wall Street included protesters against not just the financial and banking lobby, but other powerful interest groups that dominate political life in America.   And the harshest criticism from across the barricades was directed not at people like me denouncing corporate greed, but against a lone fellow with a sign protesting U-S aid to Israel – billions of dollars in annual aid to a modern, prosperous country, far more than anything we give to any of the world’s poor nations.  He was subjected to long, heated lectures from passersby offended by the idea that the U.S should not provide such extraordinary support to its special friend in the Middle East.   I sympathized with him, and told him so, because I’ve been through it.

In fifty years as a journalist, I learned that criticizing Israel is a risky business in America – it can cost you friendships, reputation, career, or political office.  For example, in the current presidential campaign, no candidate including the President has questioned U.S. support for Israel, even as Israel has repeatedly threatened to ignite a disastrous war by attacking Iran’s nuclear program.  They haven’t because to do so would guarantee a storm of protest from one of the most powerful interest groups in America, known as the Israel lobby.

Columbia 2: The Moral High Ground

 

Last night’s bust at Columbia University was the police equivalent of the Powell Doctrine in war —The application of massive or overwhelming force to disarm and incapacitate the enemy with as few casualties as possible. It worked. No one was hurt as a massive force of police surrounded and then invaded the campus to clear about a hundred remaining protesters from Hamilton Hall and the encampment on the south lawn. Here's how it looked on Broadway.

My wife, a 71-year-old retired Presbyterian minister, and I, an 82-year-old retired journalist, were among the witnesses —searching, in our separate wonted ways, for the moral high ground. In the end, the cops stood on it, by default.

Hamas blew it by its inhuman tactics against Israeli civilians. Israel blew it by its excessive force and disregard of civilian casualties in Gaza. Columbia blew it by caving in to political pressure, and refusing to respect what started out as a peaceful protest. The US blew it by mindlessly pouring arms into another unwinnable war. Biden and Blinken are blowing it daily by allowing themselves to be blown off by Bibi Netanyahu.

The students blew it by allowing the protest to be derailed by the usual suspects — agents provocateurs, and fringe political groups pushing  violence and hate. We saw it last night, standing by the police barricades. The usual call and response chants were going on —and the students, like sheep, followed whatever calls were loudest. A couple of middle-aged guys showed up on Amsterdam Avenue, one with a bullhorn, and from the rear of the crowd they took the lead intermittently with chants like “NYPD, Piggy, Piggy, we will make your lives shitty” and “NYPD, KKK, we know you’re Israeli-trained.” I asked the one guy where he got his bullhorn. "Amazon," he said. I asked the other who he represented, and he said “the people.”  

The chants, of course, were all recorded, and will be used as evidence that the protesters were “spewing hatred” and deserve to be expelled. I can attest from my own and others’ eyewitness reporting, that the core of the student protest was moral outrage over US and university support for Israel’s assault on Gaza. But Fox News has half of America’s viewing public, and it is now having a ball vilifying and ridiculing the protesters. In his prime-time stew of news and right-wing views, Jesse Watters last night called it the “Arab Spring Break,” led by the “Columbia Caliphate” AKA the "Keffiyeh Antifa" in their “terror tepees.” The protesters are “Pro-Hamas” and “Hamas is Iran.” Their Columbia professors are “indoctrinators.” Meanwhile the hero of the nation is detained at a “show trial” downtown, designed to prevent him from going out among the people.

Right now at Columbia, the cops are playing the role of grownups. Shoulder to shoulder at the barricades last night, they were in defensive mode, confident in their overwhelming numbers, with face shields and bullet-proof vests, but only lightly armed, A friendly sergeant at the corner turned away everyone who wanted to cross the barricades, even students with Columbia IDs, and an old lady who said she wanted to go home. It’s a hard freeze, he said. Nobody gets in. We’ll tell you when it’s over.

Their operation was meticulously planned and methodically carried out, with little if any resistance and no casualties. It was like the strategy General Colin Powell used to rout Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1991 in four days, with so few US losses that American medical units wound up treating the enemy’s wounded.

There’s more to to the Powell Doctrine, though, than overwhelming force. It’s a list of questions that have to be answered “yes” before undertaking a military operation. Is a vital national interest at stake? Do we have a clear attainable objective? Have the risks and costs been fully and frankly analyzed?

Did anyone, in Israel or the US, ask those questions about Gaza? And at home, has anyone asked if the Powell Doctrine is appropriate to use against college students? 

By its own request, Columbia will be a police state through graduation. It’s a nanny police state, created by a university that treats its students like misbehaving middle-schoolers, not “men and women” supposedly educated to think and judge for themselves.

No disrespect to the police. But when they hold the moral high ground on an Ivy League campus, where do we turn for instruction?

Copyright 2024 by Tom Phillips 

Peace, Brothers

 

Gaza

On the Upper West Side of Manhattan, at the UN and in the Middle East, it has become impolitic to talk of Peace.  Nobody wants it -- it would just get in the way of the new Mother of All Battles, the bloodbath underway between Hamas and Israel.  Round Two is due to begin after Israel flattens most of Gaza, in preparation for a suicidal mission to "uproot" and "eliminate" Hamas. That's the same Hamas which has been allowed and encouraged to flourish for years by Israeli prime minister Bibi Netanyahu, because it shares his distaste for Peace.  

Both sides are out of their minds. Hamas thinks it can reclaim the entire land of Israel and Palestine.  Israel thinks it can occupy that land forever, or steal what remains in such small increments that no one will fight back.  

Forget it, people.  It doesn't work and it never will.  

Here's a Peace Plan for Israel and Palestine: