AIPAC Is Destroying Israel, Not Safeguarding It
AIPAC corrupted Israel, teaching it that everything is permissible: The day AIPAC weakens, Israel will grow stronger, forced to stand on its own two feet and be more moral.
Gideon Levy (Washington DC) Mar 19, 2016
▻http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.709751
WASHINGTON – The enemies of Israel will gather here Sunday for their annual conference. Almost 20,000 people will flock to the city’s Walter E. Washington Convention Center. Almost all are Jews, and almost all are not friends of Israel, despite their organization’s name and pretensions.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee may be the organization that has caused the greatest damage to Israel. It corrupted Israel, taught it that everything is permissible to it. It made sure America would cover up and restrain itself over everything. That it would never demand anything in exchange. That Uncle Sam would pay – and keep mum. That the supply of intoxicating drugs would continue. America is the dealer, and AIPAC the pusher.
America’s second most powerful lobby, after the National Rifle Association, is considered pro-Israel. But it is pro an evil, aggressive, occupying, right-wing and nationalist Israel. With friends like these, Israel doesn’t need enemies in the United States. The day AIPAC weakens, Israel will grow stronger. It will be forced to stand on its own two feet and be more moral.
This is an annual parade of toadying to Israel. Only the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces is a more embarrassing and ridiculous organization (there, they also put disabled IDF veterans on the dais to expose their stumps and beg for donations). And in an election year, this embarrassing toadying reaches its peak.
There’s no rational explanation for it. I’ve never met anyone who could provide a comprehensive explanation for the enormous and destructive power AIPAC has accumulated. I’ve never met anyone who could explain America’s blind, automatic policy toward Israel, for which AIPAC is to a large extent responsible, and which contradicts both America’s interests and its declared values.
A belated snowfall is expected to hit the city on Sunday. The cherry trees actually flowered early this year, and this isn’t the only contradiction. At the conference center, presidential candidates will vie over who can be more fawning.
This isn’t a good situation for Israel. Behind this fawning, which more and more Americans are beginning to try to get to the root of, hides suppressed thoughts that will eventually burst forth. Not all of those who fawn over Israel in the Senate and House of Representatives do so willingly. The fear of AIPAC silences them. It also silences the media. This can’t go on forever. It’s also liable to spark anti-Semitic sentiment.
An organization whose achievements include getting Congress to pass a resolution congratulating Israel on the 40th anniversary of the Six-Day War can’t continue to congratulate Israel on the 50th anniversary of that cursed war without more Americans starting to ask why. They’re already beginning to ask where their money is going, and for what purpose. Why to Israel, of all places? Why so much for Israel?
After all, residents of the world’s most financially supported state, which is also the best at whining and playing the victim, live in a country that is ranked 11th in the UN’s World Happiness Report – four places above the country of its funders. Is Israel the neediest country in the world? After all, it’s also a military power, in a region where there are virtually no real armies left, so why should all that weaponry go to Israel, of all countries? And what does it do with it: bomb children in their sleep in Beit Lahia? Kill knife-wielding children of the same age at the Damascus Gate?
Conference participants will wallow in a great deal of self-satisfaction: Look how strong we are. Only Bernie Sanders dared not to come. And if he hadn’t been Jewish, he never would have dared. Qassam rockets, cherry tomatoes and the “gay-friendly” slogan will once again star here to the applause and tears of the masses, together with praise for the Mideast’s only democracy.
Very few will cast doubt on it, even though the cracks on its facade are already gaping and apartheid lies in its backyard. Look at Syria, the Israeli propagandists who will arrive here en masse from Ben-Gurion International Airport will say. And nobody will respond that America doesn’t fund Syria, that nobody says Syria is America’s greatest ally.
Therefore, thank you very much, dear brothers from AIPAC, for bringing us to this point. Without your efforts, we would be in a different and much better place today.