The senators sign the letter, usually without reading it, it gets sent to the State Department or the White House, where it isn’t read either. And the dreaded Israel Lobby pats itself on the back for another bipartisan statement of support for Israel, peace and more rockets being shot at Israeli cities.
Occasionally the Israel Lobby will get truly serious and a non-binding resolution of support will be introduced in Congress. Everyone will vote for it, even the senators and congressmen whose fondest wish is that Israel didn’t exist. And it will go on the list right next to the resolution commemorating the achievements of the guy who made the world’s biggest ball of twine.
In a truly disturbing overreach of power, sometimes there will be a bill proposing to cut off aid to the terrorists unless they stop shooting rockets at Israeli cities. The bill will allow for a national security waiver by the president. And every president will employ the waiver making the bill slightly less useless than a non-binding resolution, but not in any way that can be pinned down.
Meanwhile the three-hundred blogs dedicated to exposing the Israel Lobby’s muzzling of dissent will denounce the bill and author six more books describing how the dreaded lobby makes it entirely impossible to discuss the conflict from the perspective that Israel is to blame for absolutely everything. This is a perspective that seldom appears in major newspapers and magazines and is absolutely never heard on CNN. You could go a whole five seconds without encountering it on any world news broadcast.
It’s not always clear what the Israel Lobby’s accomplishments really consist of. There’s a good deal of traffic between the interlocking American and Israeli defense industries that adds up to a sizable amount of foreign aid. But by that measure the Egyptian and Jordanian lobbies must also belong to some rather impressive hotels. To say nothing of the Pakistani Hotel Taliban. Israel is doing better than Taiwan which can’t convince the United States to sell it any serious firepower for fear of offending China, and if folks like Hagel had their way, Israel might be in the same boat.
Beyond that, Israel and the United States have a mutual agreement. The State Department, an adjunct of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, will blame Israel for all of America’s troubles with the Muslim world, especially those caused by Saudi Arabia, and Israeli diplomats will attend negotiating sessions with terrorists that will fail and then accept responsibility for the failure.
The United States will provide foreign aid to Israel and the countries and terrorist groups trying to destroy it. This will be known as a pro-Israel policy because Israel will get more aid than the countries trying to destroy it giving it a qualitative advantage.
The United States will help fund the terrorists shooting rockets at Israeli cities and help fund the Israeli Iron Dome anti-rocket program, so that both sides are evened out. Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood will get fighter jets and tanks and Israel will get a visit from Obama. The last time Obama visited Egypt, it imploded, but when he visits Israel, he promises not to reduce the country to a violent civil war and urban anarchy. And so qualitative advantage is upheld once again due to the work of the Israel Lobby.
In one of his more brilliant moments, Hagel signed on to a report that called on Obama to present Israel with his own peace plan backed by a 60,000 NATO peacekeeping force deployed inside Israel that would include soldiers from Muslim countries. We have no idea if this latest brilliant plan will ever come to fruition, but carving up Israel like a turkey and deploying Muslim armies inside it is clearly another creation of the Israel Lobby.
It doesn’t sound like something the Saudi Lobby would come up with, does it?
Originally published at Sultan Knish, February 27, 2013.