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Don't accept the rules for how to criticize the Israel lobby

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Philip Weiss
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6. Bill Clinton and Israel's lawyers.

AIPAC's Steiner said he had "full confidence" that Clinton loved Jews more than Bush and would extend the loan guarantees despite the Israeli settlements.

"We gave two employees from AIPAC leave of absences to work on the campaign. I mean, we have a dozen people in that campaign, in the headquarters... In Little Rock, and they're all going to get big jobs. We have friends. I also work with a think tank, the Washington Institute. I have Michael Mandelbaum and Martin Indyk being foreign policy advisers. Steve Speigel -- we've got friends -- this is my business... [I have] full confidence that we're going to have a much better situation. He's got Jewish friends. A girl who worked for me at AIPAC stood up for them at their wedding. Hillary lived with her. I mean we have those relationships. We have never had that with Bush. Susan Thomases, who's in there, worked with me on the Bradley campaign. We worked together for 13 years. She's in there with the family. They stay with her when they come to New York. One of my officers, Monte Friedkin, is one of the biggest fund-raisers for them. I mean, I have people like that all over the country.

"'He's going to be with us.' he said he's going to help us. He's got something in his heart for the Jews, he has Jewish friends. Bush has no Jewish friends."

Clinton allowed settlements to continue and though he tried to bring off a peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians, he ultimately blamed the talks' failure on the Palestinians. And Aaron David Miller would admit later that the U.S. was biased. "For far too long, many American officials involved in Arab-Israeli peacemaking, myself included, have acted as Israel's attorney, catering and coordinating with the Israelis at the expense of successful peace negotiations." In fact, the lead negotiator for the White House, Dennis Ross, has embraced that role: he told a synagogue audience three years ago that American Jews "need to be advocates for Israel," not Palestine.

7. George W. Bush and the neoconservatives.

Bush determined never to be out-Israel'd again, per Tom Friedman; and he appointed many neoconservatives to his Cabinet including several signatories of letters by the Project for a New American Century, which said that Israel's war is our war, and which pushed for war with Iraq. Bush bragged that the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute was his brain trust 20 appointments!

Three Bush appointees, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser and Richard Perle, had collaborated in 1996 on a plan for Benjamin Netanyahu titled A Clean Break, which called for putting the Palestinian issue on ice and helping to end Saddam Hussein's regime.

Feith, a Pentagon official who later earned the appellation "the dumbest f*cking guy on the planet" had also helped found One Jerusalem, which sought to stave off the peace process in the wake of Clinton's Camp David initiative. The group was supported by Sheldon Adelson, who along with his wife Miriam backed Israeli settlements and promoted Islamophobia. As Connie Bruck reported for The New Yorker, Adelson tried to foil the peace process inside the administration at every turn.

"Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was organizing a major conference in the United States, in an effort to re-start the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and her initiative had provoked consternation among many rightward-leaning American Jews and their Christian evangelical allies. ... A short, rotund man, with sparse reddish hair and a pale countenance that colors when he is angered, Adelson protested to Bush that Rice was thinking of her legacy, not the President's, and that she would ruin him if she continued to pursue this disastrous course. Then, as Adelson later told an acquaintance, Bush put one arm around his shoulder and another around that of his wife, Miriam, who was born in Israel, and said to her, 'You tell your Prime Minister that I need to know what's right for your people -- because at the end of the day it's going to be my policy, not Condi's. But I can't be more Catholic than the Pope.'"

The neocons pushed for the Iraq war with a storm of books, Netanyahu pushed for the Iraq war in Congress. And AIPACpushed for war, writing:

"As long as Saddam Hussein is in power, any containment of Iraq will only be temporary until the next crisis or act of aggression."

The book The Israel Lobbyof 2006 and Tom Friedman agree, the war would not have happened without that pressure. Here's Friedman's analysis, paraphrased by Ari Shavit in Haaretz:

"Is the Iraq war the great neoconservative war? It's the war the neoconservatives wanted, Friedman says. It's the war the neoconservatives marketed. Those people had an idea to sell when September 11 came, and they sold it. Oh boy, did they sell it. So this is not a war that the masses demanded. This is a war of an elite. Friedman laughs: I could give you the names of 25 people (all of whom are at this moment within a five-block radius of this office) who, if you had exiled them to a desert island a year and a half ago, the Iraq war would not have happened."

Friedman who has countered Ilhan Omar by saying, "I am devoted to Israel as a Jewish democracy" himself supported the Iraq war and said that the purpose of the war was to smash up something in the Arab world because of suicide bombers in Tel Aviv:

"The real reason for this war -- which was never stated -- was to burst what I would call the 'terrorism bubble,' which had built up during the 1990s.

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Philip Weiss is a longtime writer and journalist in New York. He co-edits a website on Israel/Palestine, Mondoweiss.net, which he founded in order to foster the movement for greater fairness and justice for Palestinians in American foreign policy. He is currently working on a novel about the US in Australia during WW2.

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