UNMIA

David Harris, the director of the American Jewish Congress, was invited recently to address the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin to respond to the appearance the previous month of Professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, authors of The Israel Lobby. We present the text of his address here…

Last month, this Council was addressed by two American academics who recently authored a book entitled The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. The book, and the articles that preceded it in the London Review of Books and on the website of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, have received some attention both in the United States and Europe.

Let me assure you: I have no interest in selling books for Professors Walt and Mearsheimer. I’m not here to add to what some would describe as the “controversy” surrounding their book. I’m here because the Council graciously invited me to balance their perspective with a different one.

I have been asked to address this distinguished audience about the so-called Israel lobby in the United States—or, more generally, about the place of Israel in America. It’s my pleasure to do so.

The argument in The Israel Lobby is complex, and describing it here …

The Arab League and the anti-Israel left wing activists in the US, Europe and Israel commonly claim that any Jewish building outside of the 1949 Armistice lines is illegal and contravenes international law. They fail to point out what provision of which international law is violated, but they point out that most of the members of the United Nations are against Israeli building. Evidently they consider majority opinion to be international law. However, that isn’t actually international law. Then what is international law? Aren’t UN resolutions international law, and so can’t it be said that majority opinion and political pressure is international law?

General Assembly resolutions are commonly cited as international law, but in practice, they are not treated as and international law, but only international suggestions. UN Security Council resolutions carry much more weight, but they are frequently ignored by nations around the world and are only partially enforceable. Membership in the UN is voluntary, as is acceptance of UN decisions. Any nation may withdraw from the UN, and any nation may reject UN determinations and resolutions, as the Islamic nations aligned against Israel and some African nations regularly do, for example, or as Germany, Italy, Great Britain, China, North …

The following article by Daniel Pipes gives statistical backing to the claims frequently made and daily supported by facts on the ground: that Palestinian leadership is violent and corrupt, and money given to it goes not for the public good, but for murder and carnage against both Israelis and Arabs.

How can the delusion persist that giving Mahmud Abbas billions of dollars will bring peace? He is a career terrorist, head of a network of violent and gangster-like factions. When has feeding money to criminals, terrorists and racists ever made them into humane, tolerant peaceful people? It never has and never will, and to persist in such a belief is a sign of serious imbalance.

Lavishing funds on Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority to achieve peace has been a mainstay of Western, including Israeli, policy since Hamas seized Gaza in June. But this open spigot has counterproductive results and urgently must be stopped.

Some background: Paul Morro of the Congressional Research Service reports that, in 2006, the European Union and its member states gave US$815 million to the Palestinian Authority, while the United States sent it $468 million. When other donors are included, the total receipts come to about …

By David Meir-Levi
Published in Front Page Magazine 12/14/07

Front Page Magazine Intro:

The following is chapter from David Meir-Levi’s new book, History Upside Down: The Roots of Palestinian Fascism and the Myth of Israeli Aggression. The Terrorism Awareness Project previous printed his history of the “right-wing” influence on Islamic extremism, “The Nazi Roots of Palestinian Nationalism and Islamic Jihad.” Taken together (with his entire book), these chapters show that Islamofascism is a political, not merely a religious force; and the potent and deadly offspring of the totalitarian ideologies of the past. — The Editors.

Although many Nazis found new and ideologically welcoming homes in Egypt and Syria after World War II, the Grand Mufti’s Palestinian national movement itself, bereft of its Nazi patron, was an orphan. No sovereign state of any consequence supported it. On the contrary, most of the surrounding Arab states, all of them buoyed by postcolonial nationalism and looking for political stability, perceived the Palestinian cause, especially as embodied in the Muslim Brotherhood, as a threat. Egypt aggressively suppressed the Brotherhood. Saudi and Jordanian royalty watched the growth of radical Islam with suspicion. Syria and Lebanon, trying to move toward more open societies in the pre-Ba’athist era, feared …