Palestinians demonstrating outside the UN office in Gaza calling for freedom for political prisoners. Credit: Eva Bartlett/IPS

By Leon Anderson
PHILADELPHIA, Feb 27 2015 (IPS)

There is a currently popular idea in Washington, D.C. that the United States ought to be doing more to quash the recently born Islamic States of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), because if we don’t, they will send terrorists to plague our lives.

Incredibly, most of the decision makers and policy influencers in Washington also agree that America has no standing in the Middle East; that is, the U.S. has no natural influence based on territorial proximity, ethnicity, religion, culture, politics or shared history. In short, the only apparent reason for our presence in the Middle East is to support Israel.Oil is not a weapon as some would have us believe. As the Middle East, and now Russia, knows all too well, it is a crutch.

To say that the United States is universally resented by everyone in the region is a massive understatement. That we are hated, despised, and the sworn enemies of many, is not difficult to understand. There is no moral ground under our feet in any religion. Stealing is universally condemned.

Abetting in the pillaging of Palestinians and their land is hard to justify. Yet we keep sending Israel military and financial aid, we support them in the United Nations, and we ignore the pleas of Israel’s neighbours to stop the spread of settlers on more stolen land.

There was once an old canard that we had to intervene in the Middle East to protect the flow of oil to Western Europe and America. But since the defeat of Nazi Germany in North Africa, that threat has never again existed. The fact is that the source of most of the wealth in the Middle East is oil, which is a commodity; there’s a lot of it all over the world.

If it’s not sold, the producer countries’ economies collapse, because that’s all they have on which to survive. They are, few of them in the Middle East, industrial economies, or mercantile economies. They are almost completely dependent on oil exports to Europe and Asia for their economic survival.

The oil crunch in 1973 that saw prices rise in the West and shortages grow was a temporary phenomenon produced by the Persian Gulf countries that was impossible to sustain. It was like a protest movement, a strike. It ended by costing OPEC a lot of money and by spurring a world-wide surge in exploration and drilling for more oil supplies.

Oil is not a weapon as some would have us believe. As the Middle East, and now Russia, knows all too well, it is a crutch.

Therefore, we get down to the real reasons why the United States is involved militarily in the Middle East. One, we clearly don’t need their oil. A possible reason for being there is conquest: we covet Iraq or Syria or Afghanistan for ourselves. I think we can dismiss that notion as absurd and move on.

Then the question screams: Why are we there? Why are we continuing to give ISIS and other extremist, nationalistic groups a reason to hate us and want to destroy us?

The only answer is Israel. We have made Israel the artificial hegemonic power in the region against the will of everyone who is native to the area. We have lost all credibility among Arabs, all moral standing and nearly all hope of ever restoring either.

The United States has become a pariah in the Middle East, and the result is that we will be faced with endless war and terrorist attacks for ages to come unless we make a dramatic change of course in our foreign policy—namely, stop supporting an Israeli regime that will not make peace with its neighbours.

An organisation called the Jewish Voice for Peace has endorsed a call from Palestinians for a boycott of Israel, divestment of economic ties, and sanctions (on the order of those imposed on Iran and Russia) to encourage Israel to end its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands occupied since 1967.

The JVP urges Israel to dismantle the grotesque wall they have built to keep the Palestinians out of territory that was once theirs; to recognise Palestinians as citizens of Israel with equal rights; and to recognise the right of refugees to return to their homes and properties in Israel as stipulated in U.N . Resolution 194.

The argument that we are fighting ISIS because they threaten our democracy is absurdly infantile. That’s another of those political throwaways we hear because our leaders think we’re all simpletons who can’t figure things out for ourselves.

How on earth could 40,000 or 100,000 disaffected Arabs destroy American democracy? They are fighting us because we are there fighting them. Let us go home, and they would have no reason to fight us.

I suggest this avenue knowing full well that some may say that we must instill the spirit of democracy among these people or there will never be peace in the world. Excuse me, but there will never be peace in the world. We all thought that when Gorbachev gave up the Soviet Empire a new era of Russian democracy would ensue.

Instead, Russia got drunken and loutish leadership until a strongman, in the Russian historical context, Vladimir Putin, took over. Democracy cannot be exported. It has to be wanted and won in the light of local historical, religious, social and economic needs. If they want what we have, Arab women will find a way to get it.

In spite of all this more or less common knowledge, the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, warns us that if we don’t crush Iran, if we don’t continue to support Israel and back their hegemony, the world will collapse in anarchy, and democracy will be lost to all of us. I ask you: how much of this nonsense are you willing to take? Someone has to begin a discussion on what the hell we’re doing in the Middle East—and do it soon.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS-Inter Press Service.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

E3/EU+3 nuclear talks, Vienna - July 2014. Credit: EEAS/cc by 2.0

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Nov 25 2014 (IPS)

Buoyed by the failure of the U.S. and five other powers to reach a comprehensive agreement with Iran over its nuclear programme after a week of intensive talks, pro-Israel and Republican hawks are calling for Washington to ramp up economic pressure on Tehran even while talks continue, and to give Congress a veto on any final accord.

“We have supported the economic sanctions, passed by Congress and signed into law by the president, in addition to sanctions placed on Iran by the international community,” Sens. John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Kelly Ayotte, three of the Republican’s leading hawks, said in a statement released shortly after the announcement in Vienna that the one-year-old interim accord between the so-called P5+1 and Iran will be extended until Jul. 1 while negotiations continue.Most Iran specialists here believe that any new sanctions legislation will likely sabotage the talks, fracture the P5+1, and thus undermine the international sanctions regime against Iran.

“These sanctions have had a negative impact on the Iranian economy and are one of the chief reasons the Iranians are now at the negotiating table,” the three senators went on.

“However, we believe this latest extension of talks should be coupled with increased sanctions and a requirement that any final deal between Iran and the United States be sent to Congress for approval. Every Member of Congress should have the opportunity to review the final deal and vote on this major foreign policy decision.”

Their statement was echoed in part by at least one of the likely Republican candidates for president in 2016.

“From the outcome of this latest round, it also appears that Iran’s leadership remains unwilling to give up their nuclear ambitions,” said Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, a favourite of pro-Israel neo-conservatives.

“None of this will change in the coming months unless we return to the pressure track that originally brought Iran to the table.”

At the same time, however, senior Democrats expressed disappointment that a more comprehensive agreement had not been reached but defended the decision to extend the Nov. 24, 2013 Joint Programme of Action (JPOA) between the P5+1 — the U.S., Britain, France, Russia, China plus Germany – and Iran – an additional seven months, until Jul. 1.

Echoing remarks made earlier by Secretary of State John Kerry, who has held eight meetings with his Iranian counterpart, Javad Zarif, over the past week, Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein noted that “Iran has lived up to its obligations under the interim agreement and its nuclear programme has not only been frozen, it has been reversed. Today, Iran is further away from acquiring a nuclear weapon than before negotiations began.

“I urge my colleagues in Washington to be patient, carefully evaluate the progress achieved thus far and provide U.S. negotiators the time and space they need to succeed. A collapse of the talks is counter to U.S. interests and would further destabilise an already-volatile region,” she said in a statement.

The back and forth in Washington came in the wake of Kerry’s statement at the conclusion of intensive talks in Vienna. Hopes for a permanent accord that would limit Iran’s nuclear activities for a period of some years in exchange for the lifting of U.S. and international sanctions against Tehran rose substantially in the course of the week only to fall sharply Sunday when Western negotiators, in particular, spoke for the first time of extending the JPOA instead of concluding a larger agreement.

Neither Kerry nor the parties, who have been exceptionally tight-lipped about the specifics of the negotiations, disclosed what had occurred to change the optimistic tenor of the talks.

Kerry insisted Monday that this latest round had made “real and substantial progress” but that “significant points of disagreement” remain unresolved.

Most analysts believe the gaps involved include the size and scope of Iran’s uranium enrichment programme – specifically, the number of centrifuges it will be permitted to operate — and the number of years the programme will be subject to extraordinary curbs and international inspections.

Kerry appealed to Congress to not to act in a way that could sabotage the extension of the JPOA – under which Iran agreed to partially roll back its nuclear programme in exchange for an easing of some sanctions – or prospects for a successful negotiation.

“I hope they will come to see the wisdom of leaving us the equilibrium for a few months to be able to proceed without sending messages that might be misinterpreted and cause miscalculation,” he said. “We would be fools to walk away.”

The aim, he said, was to reach a broad framework accord by March and then work out the details by the Jul. 1 deadline. The JPOA was agreed last Nov. 24 but the specific details of its implementation were not worked out until the latter half of January.

Whether his appeal for patience will work in the coming months remains to be seen. Republicans, who, with a few exceptions, favoured new sanctions against Iran even after the JPOA was signed, gained nine seats in the Senate and will control both houses in the new Congress when it convenes in January.

If Congress approves new sanctions legislation, as favoured by McCain, Rubio, and other hawks, President Barack Obama could veto it. To sustain the veto, however, he have to keep at least two thirds of the 40-some Democrats in the upper chamber in line.

That could pose a problem given the continuing influence of the Israel lobby within the Democratic Party.

Indeed, the outgoing Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair, Robert Menendez, who reluctantly tabled a sanctions effort earlier this year, asserted Monday that the administration’s efforts “had not succeeded” and suggested that he would support a “two-track approach of diplomacy and pressure” in the coming period.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the leading Israel lobby group, also called Monday for “new bipartisan sanctions legislation to let Tehran know that it will face much more severe pressure if it does not clearly abandon its nuclear weapons program.”

Its message echoed that of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who had reportedly personally lobbied each of the P5+1’s leaders over the weekend, and who, even before the extension was officially announced, expressed relief at the failure to reach a comprehensive accord against which he has been campaigning non-stop over the past year.

“The agreement that Iran was aiming for was very bad indeed,” he told BBC, adding that “the fact that there’s no deal now gives [world powers] the opportunity to continue …to toughen [economic pressures] against Iran.”

The Iran task force of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), co-chaired by Dennis Ross, who held the Iran portfolio at the White House during part of Obama’s first term, said, in addition to increasing economic pressure, Washington should provide weaponry to Israel that would make its threats to attack Iran more credible.

The hard-line neo-conservative Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI) said Congress should not only pass new sanctions legislation, but strip Obama’s authority to waive sanctions.

“There’s no point waiting seven months for either another failure or a truly terrible deal,” ECI, which helped fund several Republican Senate campaigns this fall, said.

“Congress should act now to reimpose sanctions and re-establish U.S. red lines that will prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability. To that end, such legislation must limit the president’s authority to waive sanctions, an authority the president has already signaled a willingness to abuse in his desperate quest for a deal with the mullahs.”

Most Iran specialists here believe that any new sanctions legislation will likely sabotage the talks, fracture the P5+1, and thus undermine the international sanctions regime against Iran, strengthen hard-liners in Tehran who oppose accommodation and favour accelerating the nuclear programme.

“The worst scenario for U.S. interests is one in which Congress overwhelmingly passes new sanctions, Iran resumes its nuclear activities, and international unity unravels,” wrote Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, on the Wall Street Journal website Monday.

“Such an outcome would force the United States to revisit the possibility of another military conflict in the Middle East.”

Such arguments, which the administration is also expected to deploy, could not only keep most Democratic senators in line, but may also persuade some Republicans worried about any new military commitment in the Middle East.

Sen. Bob Corker, who will likely chair the Foreign Relations Committee in the new Congress, issued a cautious statement Monday, suggesting that he was willing to give the administration more time. Tougher sanctions, he said, could be prepared “should negotiations fail.”

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com. He can be contacted at ipsnoram@ips.org

Edited by Kitty Stapp

By Robert E. Hunter
WASHINGTON, Nov 18 2014 (IPS)

Nov. 24 is the deadline for six world powers and Iran to reach a final deal over its nuclear programme. If there is no deal, then the talks are likely to be extended, not abandoned.

But as I learned from more than three decades’ work on Middle East issues, in and out of the U.S. government, success also depends on Israel no longer believing that it needs a regional enemy shared in common with the United States to ensure Washington’s commitment to its security.

U.S. President Barack Obama talks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as they walk across the tarmac at Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv, Israel, on Mar. 20, 2013. Credit: White House Photo, Pete Souza

Much is at stake in the negotiations with Iran in Vienna, notably the potential removal of the risk of war over its nuclear programme and the removal of any legitimate basis for Israel’s fear that it could become the target of an Iranian bomb.

Success could also begin Iran’s reintegration into the international community, ending its lengthy quarantine. If President Barack Obama and his national security officials get their way, including the Pentagon—hardly a group of softies—a comprehensive final accord would be a good deal for U.S. national security and, in the American analysis, for Israel’s security as well.

Yet more is at issue for Israel, and for the Persian Gulf Arab states led by Saudi Arabia. They want to keep Iran in purdah.

Indeed, since the Iranian Revolution ran out of steam outside its borders, the essential questions about the challenge Iran poses have been the following: Will it be able to compete for power and position in the region, and, how can Iran’s competition be dealt with?

The first response, led by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is to decry whatever might be agreed to in the talks, no matter how objectively good the results would be for everyone’s security. He has the Saudis and other Arab states as silent partners.

Between them, the Israeli and oil lobbies command a lot of attention in the U.S. Congress, a large part of whose members would otherwise accept that President Obama’s standard for an agreement meets the tests of both U.S. security and the security of its partners in the Middle East.

But a large fraction of Congress is no more willing to take on these two potent lobbies than the National Rifle Association.

Netanyahu will also do all he can to prevent the relaxation of any of the sanctions imposed on Iran. But even if he and his U.S. supporters succeed on Capitol Hill, President Obama can on his own suspend some of those sanctions—though exactly how much is being debated.

The U.S. does not have the last word on sanctions, however. The moment there is a final agreement, the floodgates of economic trade and investment with Iran will open. Europeans, in particular, are lined up with their order books, like Americans in 1889 who awaited the starter’s pistol to begin the Oklahoma land rush.

In response, U.S. private industry will ride up Capitol Hill to demand the relaxation of U.S.-mandated sanctions. Meanwhile, the sighs of relief resounding throughout the world will begin changing the international political climate concerning Iran.

Yet America’s concerns will not cease. While the U.S. and Iran have similar interests in opposing the Islamic State (ISIS or IS), and in wanting to see Afghanistan free from reconquest by of the Taliban, they are still far apart on other matters, notably the Assad regime in Syria, as well as Hezbollah and Hamas.

President Obama will also have an immediate problem in reassuring Israel and Gulf Arab states that American commitments to their security are sincere. To be sure, absent an Iranian nuclear weapon, there is no real Iranian military threat and all the Western weapons pumped into the Persian Gulf are thus essentially useless.

Iran’s real challenges emanate from its dynamic domestic economy, a highly educated, entrepreneurial culture that is matched in the region only by Israelis and Palestinians, and a good deal of cultural appeal even beyond Shi’a communities.

Obama thus faces a special problem in reassuring Israel, a problem that goes back decades. When the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty was signed in 1979, the risks of a major Arab attack on Israel sank virtually to zero. So, too, did the risk of an Arab-Israeli conflict escalating to the level of a U.S.-Soviet confrontation. All at once, U.S. and Israeli strategic concerns were no longer obviously linked.

Thus as soon as Israel withdrew from the Sinai in May 1979, then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin started searching for an alternative basis for linking American and Israeli strategic interests.

For him and for many other Israelis, then and now, it is not enough that the American people are firmly committed to Israel’s security for what could be called “sentimental” reasons: bonds of history (especially memories of the Holocaust), culture, religion, and the values of Western democracy.

But such “sentiment” is the strongest motivation for all U.S. commitments, a far stronger glue than strategic calculations that can and often do change, a fact that could be testified to by the people of South Vietnam and Afghanistan.

Yet for Begin and others, there had to be at least a strong similarity of strategic interests. Thus, in a meeting with Secretary of State Cyrus Vance the day after Egypt retook possession of the Sinai, Begin complained that the US had cancelled its “strategic dialogue” with Israel. Vance tasked me, as the National Security Council staff representative on his travelling team, to find out “what the heck Begin is talking about.”

I phoned Washington and got the skinny: the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment had been conducting a low-level dialogue with some Israeli military officers. Proving to be of little value, it was stopped.

The reason for Begin’s outburst thus became clear: in the absence of the strategic tie with the United States that had been provided by the conflict with Egypt, Israel needed something else, in effect, a common enemy.

That’s why many Israeli political stakeholders were ambivalent about the George W. Bush administration’s ambitions to topple Iraq’s Saddam Hussein: with his overthrow, a potential though remote threat to Israel would be removed, but so would the perception of a common enemy. Since Saddam’s ousting, Iran has gained even more importance for Israel as a means of linking Jerusalem’s strategic perceptions with those of Washington.

By the same political logic, Israel has always asserted that it is a strategic asset for the United States. As part of recognising Israel’s psychological needs, no U.S. official ever publicly challenges that Israeli assertion regardless of what they think in private or however much damage the U.S. might suffer politically in the region because of Israeli activities, including the building of illegal settlements in the West Bank.

So what must Obama do in order to eliminate the risk of an Iranian nuclear weapon, while also reassuring Israel of US fealty? On one side, to be able to honour an agreement with Iran, Obama has to undercut Netanyahu’s efforts with Congress to prevent any sanctions relief.

On the other side, he could reassure Israel through the classic means of buttressing the flow of arms, including the anti-missile capabilities of the Iron Dome that were so useful to Israel during the recent fighting in Gaza.

Israel would want even closer strategic cooperation with the U.S., including consultations on the full range of U.S. thinking and planning on all relevant issues in the Middle East. Israel (at least Netanyahu) would also want any notion of further negotiations with the Palestinians, and the relaxation of economic pressures on Gaza, put into the deep freeze—where, in effect, they already are.

Israel has an inherent, sovereign right to defend itself and to make, for and by itself, calculations about what that means. (The country is not unified, however: a surprising number of former leaders of the Israeli military and security agencies have publicly differed with Netanyahu’s pessimistic assessments of the Iranian threat).

As Israel’s only real friend in the world, the United States continues to have an obligation, within reason, to reassure Israel about its security and safety.

For Obama, this reassurance to Israel is a price worth paying in the event of a deal, which would be at least one step in trying to build security and stability in an increasingly turbulent Middle East. But that can only happen if Israel refrains from obstructing Obama’s effort to make everyone, including Israel, more secure.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS-Inter Press Service.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

National Security Adviser Susan Rice was interrupted by a protester who shouted “End the siege on Gaza." Credit: UN Photo/Mark Garten

By Mitchell Plitnick
WASHINGTON, Jul 30 2014 (IPS)

Pro-Israel activists assembled a huge crowd and a long list of congressional leaders and diplomats to declare their unconditional support for Israel’s military operations in the Gaza Strip on Monday, largely downplaying  tensions between Jerusalem and Washington.

Key congressional figures from both the Republican and Democratic Parties echoed similar views: that Israel was exercising its inherent right of self-defence, that the entire blame for the hostilities lies with Hamas, and reminding the audience, in a thinly veiled message to U.S. President Barack Obama, that Hamas is backed by Iran.Many of the speakers brought up Iranian sponsorship of Hamas, despite the fact that the relationship between them splintered after Hamas declared its support for the rebels in Syria.

Obama was represented at the event here, dubbed the National Leadership Assembly for Israel, by his national security adviser, Susan Rice.

Her address was interrupted by a protester, Tighe Berry, who shouted “End the siege on Gaza,” and held up a sign with the same words. Berry was joined by a handful of protesters outside the building from the pro-peace activist group, Code Pink.

After the protester was removed by force, Rice delivered the White House view that a ceasefire was of the utmost urgency in Gaza and Israel.

“The United States supports an immediate and unconditional humanitarian ceasefire,” Rice said. “That humanitarian ceasefire should lead to a permanent cessation of hostilities based on the agreement of November 2012.”

That statement was distinct from the Israeli stance and that of almost all of the speakers at this event. Although Israel accepted an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire several weeks ago along similar lines, it is now insisting on first eliminating any tunnels in Gaza which lead into Israel and taking steps to disarm Hamas before halting its operations.

Robert Sugarman, the chair of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, which spearheaded this gathering, set the tone with his opening remarks to the overflow crowd.

“We must continue to support the decisions of the government [of Israel], whatever our personal views may be,” Sugarman said. “And we must continue to urge our government to support [the decisions of the Israeli government] as well.”

While most of the speakers did not state any direct opposition to the Obama administration’s policy, virtually all of them stressed the view that Hamas must be disarmed and that the Netanyahu government must have unqualified U.S. support.

John Boehner, the Speaker of the House of Representatives and one of President Obama’s leading political opponents, came closest to squarely criticising the president, by tying the crisis in Gaza to Iran.

“We will continue to push this administration to address root cause of conflict in the Middle East,” Boehner said. “What we’re seeing in Gaza is a direct result of Iran sponsored terrorism in the region. This is part of Iran’s long history of providing weapons to Gaza-based terror organizations, which must come to an end. Israel’s enemies are our enemies. As long as I’m Speaker, this will be our cause.”

Many of the speakers brought up Iranian sponsorship of Hamas, despite the fact that the relationship between them splintered after Hamas declared its support for the rebels in Syria, fighting against Iran’s key ally in the region, Bashar al-Assad.

Nonetheless, for many of the speakers, the connection provided a bridge to connect the fighting in Gaza to Congress’ scepticism about diplomacy with Iran over the issue of Iran’s nuclear programme.

But ongoing tensions between the Obama administration and the government of Israel inevitably made their way into the room.

Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Ron Dermer tried to balance a conciliatory tone with Israel’s determination to continue its operations in Gaza despite calls from the United States and most of the international community for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire.

“Israel has uncovered dozens of tunnels whose sole purpose is to facilitate attacks on Israeli civilians. Israel will continue to destroy these tunnels and I’m sure the Obama administration understands this,” Dermer said.

“Everyone understands that leaving these tunnels is like seizing 10,000 missiles and handing them back to Hamas. That is not going to happen. We will not stop until that job is done. Israel believes that a sustainable solution is one where Gaza is demilitarized, rockets are removed, and the tunnels destroyed so Hamas cannot rearm in another year or two. We appreciate that all U.S. leaders have supported us.”

But Dermer also delivered a message of moderate conciliation in the wake of very harsh criticism in Israel of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry after the alleged text of a ceasefire proposal from Kerry was leaked to the Israeli media.

“I am speaking now for my prime minister,” Dermer said. “The criticism of Secretary Kerry for his good faith efforts to advance a ceasefire is unwarranted. We look forward to working with the United States to advance goal of a ceasefire that is durable.”

Rice also addressed the criticism of Kerry. “We’ve been dismayed by some press reports in Israel mischaracterising [Secretary Kerry’s] efforts. We know these misleading reports have raised concerns here at home as well.

“The reality is that John Kerry, on behalf of the United States, has been working with Israel every step of the way to support our shared interests. Both in public and private, we have strongly supported Israel’s right to defend itself. We will continue to do so and continue to set the record straight when anyone distorts facts.”

Rice’s defence of Kerry did not seem to ruffle many feathers in the audience. But the next day, a new controversy arose in Israel when several Israeli radio stations reported on a leaked transcript of a phone call between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Obama. Israel’s Channel 1 reported that Obama “behaved in a rude, condescending and hostile manner” toward Netanyahu in the call.

Both the White House and the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office flatly denied the reports.

“[It is] shocking and disappointing [that] someone would sink to misrepresenting a private conversation between the President of the United States and the Prime Minister in fabrications to the Israeli press,” said an official statement from the Prime Minister’s Twitter account.

Identical language was employed by the United States National Security Council over their own Twitter account. “The…report is totally false,” added White House Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes.

Editing by: Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at plitnickm@gmail.com

BDS and Rabbis For Palestine. Credit: Mike Gifford/cc by 2.0

By Emile Nakhleh
WASHINGTON, May 3 2014 (IPS)

The recent suspension of the U.S. -engineered Israeli-Palestinian talks signals a much deeper reality than the immediate factors that caused it. The peace process and the two-state solution, which for years were on life support, are now dead.

It is time for the United States and the rest of the international community to stop the 20-year old quixotic effort to resurrect a dead “process” and to seriously begin exploring other avenues for Israeli-Palestinian coexistence between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.Perpetuating Israeli rule over half the population through military occupation and without granting them citizenship or equal rights would in the foreseeable future deprive Israel of its Jewish majority, negate its democratic political culture, and ultimately lead to apartheid-like conditions.

The two-state solution has been a convenient policy position that allowed negotiations to go on and on, prompted primarily by the argument that no credible alternatives existed. Many governments, diplomats, negotiators, politicians, academics, NGOs, and consultants on both sides of the Atlantic and in the region have staked their life-long careers on the two-state paradigm.

Dozens of international agreements and declarations and thousands of meetings have been held all around the globe on the so-called modalities of a two-state solution. Unfortunately, all have come to naught.

Whenever the two-state approach was questioned over the years, its defenders would quickly ask, “What’s the alternative?” and would dismiss the “one-state” suggestion and similar options as non-starters. The retort has always been that no Israeli government would dare contemplate any proposal that involves Israelis and Palestinians living together in one political entity.

Palestinian nationalists and ruling economic and political elites, who benefited from their association with the PLO power structure, whether in Ramallah or elsewhere, supported the two-state formula despite their belief that Oslo was a hollow victory that would never lead to statehood. They went along because in the view of one Palestinian at the time, “It was the only game in town.”

The Arab states that advocated this approach drew comfort from the rhetoric because it appealed to Western countries, especially the United States. Yet, these states have failed to commit the necessary resources and political capital and seriously pursue their “Arab Peace Initiative” to its intended conclusion.

Official Arab leaders’ rhetoric continued to extol their unwavering commitment to Palestine, but they gave priority to their separate national interests, which often included unofficial economic, political, and intelligence contacts with Israel.

Successive Israeli governments played a similar game. Whenever the discussions of establishing a Palestinian state got serious, they advanced new conditions and “redlines”, which made it more difficult for Palestinian leaders to accept. The entire negotiating enterprise was reduced to talks about talks, resulting in decoupling the negotiation “process” from the envisioned “peace”.

The pro-Israeli lobby in Washington has successfully erected a solid pro-Israeli stand in the United States Congress. Such support, which has always been identified with right-wing policies in Israel, has severely constrained the diplomatic flexibility of the Executive Branch of the U.S. government.

In lieu of a political settlement, Western countries and the United Nations provided massive aid programmes to Palestinians, and Palestinian leaders and ruling elites benefited disproportionately from the largesse, resulting in newfound wealth and rampant corruption. In the absence of government accountability and transparency, it’s not clear where the huge chunks of the money went.

While rhetorically committed to a two-state solution, high-level PA officials have not been uncomfortable with this arrangement of the political status quo under Israeli occupation. So much so, in fact, that a Palestinian intellectual has described the situation as “The National Sell-out of a Homeland.”

I have supported the two-state solution for almost five decades. Based on my field research in the Occupied Territories in the late 1970s, I published a short book titled “The West Bank and Gaza: Toward the Making of a Palestinian State,” which argued for the creation of a Palestinian state in those parts of Palestine.

In reaction, self-proclaimed Palestinian nationalists, including the current Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat, attacked me publicly for “advocating an American position.” Some pro-Palestinian newspapers in the Gulf derisively described me as a “Palestinian American Sadatist”, a reference to Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s peace treaty with Israel.

Of course, 10 years later, the PLO formally supported the two-state approach and proceeded with the Oslo agreement.

Sadly, I have come to the conclusion that the two-state option is simply no longer viable. The two parties and the international community must search for other options that could accommodate the two peoples living together.

I reached this position fully cognizant of the realities on the ground – Israeli occupation, Palestinian factionalism, and rising poverty and frustration among Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and in Israel – and the lack of credible alternatives to the two-state approach.

As more and more Palestinians search for alternatives, they are transforming their confrontation with the Israeli occupation and anti-Arab discrimination in Israel to a peaceful struggle for human rights, justice, and economic self-sufficiency. BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) has become the global rallying cry against Israeli occupation and continued settlement construction.

Some members of the Israeli cabinet, on the other hand, have begun talking publicly about taking “unilateral actions” on the West Bank, including annexing Area C and the major settlement blocs. Meanwhile, Israeli security forces continue to enter Area A, which is nominally ruled by the PA, at their whim.

In the absence of a Palestinian state, the Israeli government will be faced with a growing Palestinian population in Gaza, the West Bank, and in Israel, which, taken together, constitutes almost 50 percent of the total population between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River.

Perpetuating Israeli rule over half the population through military occupation and without granting them citizenship or equal rights would in the foreseeable future deprive Israel of its Jewish majority, negate its democratic political culture, and ultimately lead to apartheid-like conditions.

The international community and the two peoples should begin a serious exploration of new modalities based on justice, fairness, and equality. These could range from a unitary state to confederal arrangements that guarantee Palestinians equal rights, privileges and responsibilities. But all of them require an end to the occupation.

Some critics might consider this approach Pollyannaish, but it’s not unthinkable in light of the demonstrated failure of the two-state approach.

Emile Nakhleh is a former Senior Intelligence Service Officer in the Central Intelligence Agency, a Research Professor at the University of New Mexico, and author of ‘A Necessary Engagement: Reinventing America’s Relations with the Muslim World’.

P5+1 foreign ministers after negotiations about Iran's nuclear capabilities concluded on Nov. 24, 2013 in Geneva. Credit: U.S. Dept of State/CC by 2.0

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Jan 23 2014 (IPS)

Eight years ago, Stephen Rosen, then a top official at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and well-known around Washington for his aggressiveness, hawkish views, and political smarts, was asked by Jeffrey Goldberg of the New Yorker magazine whether some recent negative publicity had harmed the lobby group’s legendary clout in Washington.

“A half smile appeared on his face, and he pushed a napkin across the table,” wrote Goldberg about the interview. “’You see this napkin?’ [the official] said. In twenty-four hours, we could have the signatures of seventy senators on this napkin.”"The neoconservatives were able to push Bush & Co. to invade Iraq in 2003, but their success required an unusual set of circumstances and the American public learned a lot from that disastrous experience." -- Stephen Walt

Eight years later, the same official, Stephen Rosen, who was forced to resign from AIPAC after his indictment – later dismissed — for allegedly spying for Israel, told a Ron Kampeas of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) that AIPAC needed to retreat from its confrontation with President Barack Obama after getting only 59 senators – all but 16 of them Republicans – to co-sponsor a new sanctions bill aimed at derailing nuclear negotiations between Iran and the so-called P5+1 (U.S., Britain, France, Russia, China plus Germany).

“They don’t want to be seen as backing down… I don’t believe this is sustainable, the confrontational posture,” he said.

If AIPAC had succeeded in getting 70 signatures on the bill, which the administration argued would have violated a Nov. 24 interim agreement between Iran and the P5+1 that essentially freezes Tehran’s nuclear programme in exchange for easing some existing sanctions for a renewable six-month period, that would have been three more than needed to overcome a promised Obama veto.

But, after quickly gathering the 59 co-sponsors over the Christmas recess, AIPAC and the bill’s major sponsors, Republican Sen. Mark Kirk and Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez, appeared to hit a solid wall of resistance led by 10 Democratic Committee chairs and backed by an uncharacteristically determined White House with an uncharacteristically stern message.

“If certain members of Congress want the United States to take military action, they should be up front with the American public and say so,” said Bernadette Meehan, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council. “Otherwise, it’s not clear why any member of Congress would support a bill that possibly closes the door on diplomacy and makes it more likely that the United States will have to choose between military options or allowing Iran’s nuclear program to proceed.”

Combined with a grassroots lobbying campaign carried out by nearly 70 grassroots religious, anti-war, and civic-action groups that flooded the offices of nervous Democratic senators with thousands of emails, petitions, and phone calls, as well as endorsements of the administration’s position by major national and regional newspapers and virtually all but the neo-conservative faction of the U.S. foreign policy elite, the White House won a clear victory over AIPAC and thus raised anew the question of just how powerful the group really is.

AIPAC’s inability to muster more support among Democrats, in particular, came on top of two other setbacks to its fearsome reputation over the past year.

Although they never took a public position on his nomination a year ago, the group’s leaders were known to have quietly lobbied against former Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel for Defence Secretary due his generally critical attitude toward Israel’s influence on U.S. policy in the Middle East.

Several groups and individuals closely aligned with AIPAC, notably the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) – both of which have joined AIPAC in lobbying for the new Iran sanctions bill – questioned or opposed Hagel. Ultimately, however, he won confirmation by a 58-41 margin in which the great majority of Democrats voted for him.

Eight months later, AIPAC and other right-wing Jewish groups lobbied Congress in favour of a resolution to authorise the use of force against Syria – this time, however, at Obama’s request, although clearly also with the approval of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

But the popular groundswell against Washington’s military intervention in yet another Middle Eastern conflict – as well as the reflexive aversion by far-right Republicans to virtually any Obama initiative – doomed the effort.

Neither Hagel nor Syria, however, has approached the importance AIPAC has accorded to Iran and its nuclear programme which have dominated the group’s foreign-policy agenda for more than a decade. During that time, it has become used to marshalling overwhelming  majorities of lawmakers from both parties behind sanctions and other legislation designed to increase tensions – and preclude any rapprochement — between Tehran and Washington.

Last July, for example, the House of Representatives voted by a 400-20 margin in favour of sanctions legislation designed to halt all Iranian oil exports from Iran. The measure was approved just four days before Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s inauguration.

Throughout the fall, AIPAC worked hard – but ultimately unsuccessfully – to get the same bill through the Senate.

Now, two months later and unable to muster even a filibuster-proof 60 votes in the Senate, AIPAC appears to have shelved the Kirk-Menendez bill, which, among other provisions, would have imposed sanctions if Tehran violated the Nov. 24 agreement or failed to reach a comprehensive accord with the P5+1 on its nuclear programme within a year.

“Clearly, the ground has shifted, dealing a huge defeat to AIPAC and other groups who have been aggressively lobbying for [the new sanctions bill],” wrote Lara Friedman, a lobbyist for Americans for Peace Now in her widely-read weekly Legislative Round-up, while other commentators, including Rosen, warned that overwhelming Republican support for the bill put AIPAC’s carefully cultivated bipartisan image at risk with Democratic lawmakers and key Democratic donors.

“They definitely lost this round and that has cost them a huge amount of political capital with the administration and with a lot of Democrats,” said one veteran Capitol Hill observer who also noted AIPAC faced “an almost perfect storm” of an administration willing to fight for a policy that also enjoyed strong support from the foreign-policy elite and an engaged activist community that could exert grassroots pressure on their elected representatives. “Senate offices were getting a couple of calls in favour [of the bill] and hundreds against. That certainly has to make a difference.”

“AIPAC and other hard-line groups remain a potent force in guaranteeing generous U.S. aid to Israel and hamstringing U.S. efforts to achieve a two-state solution, but their clout declines when they advocate a course of action that could lead to another Middle East war,” Stephen Walt, co-author of “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” told IPS in an email exchange.

“The neoconservatives were able to push Bush & Co. to invade Iraq in 2003, but their success required an unusual set of circumstances and the American public learned a lot from that disastrous experience,” according to the influential Harvard international relations scholar.

No one, however, believes that AIPAC and its allies have given up. If the P5+1 negotiations should falter, the Kirk-Menendez bill is likely to be quickly re-introduced; indeed, one influential Republican senator said it should be put on the calendar for July, six months from Jan. 20 the date that Nov. 24 interim accord formally went into effect.

“It seems likely that advocates [of the bill] are getting ready to shift to some form of ‘Plan B’ [which], …one can guess, will look a lot like Plan A, but, instead of focusing on derailing negotiations with new sanctions, [it] will likely focus on imposing conditions on any final agreement – conditions that are impossible to meet and will thus kill any possibility of a deal,” according to Friedman.

That could include conditioning the lifting of sanctions on an agreement that includes a ban on any uranium enrichment on Iranian soil – a condition favoured by Netanyahu that Tehran has repeatedly rejected and that most experts believe would be a deal-breaker.

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

In what looks to be a clear victory – at least for now – for President Barack Obama, a major effort by the Israel lobby and its most powerful constituent, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), to pass a new sanctions bill against Iran has stalled in the U.S. Senate.

While the legislation, the “Nuclear Weapon Free Iran Act of 2013,” had gathered 59 co-sponsors in the 100-member upper chambre by last week, opposition to it among Democrats appears to have mounted in recent days.

That opposition apparently prompted Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who controls the floor calendar, to back away from a previous commitment to permit a vote on the measure some time over the next few weeks. As a result, AIPAC is now reportedly hoping to get the bill through the Republican-dominated House of Representatives.

Democratic resistance to the bill, which its critics say is designed to scuttle the Nov. 24 Joint Plan of Action (JPA) between Iran and the so-called P5+1 (U.S., Britain, France, Russia, China plus Germany) and any chances for a U.S.-Iranian rapprochement, has grown stronger since Sunday’s successful conclusion of an implementation agreement between the two sides and by Obama’s explicit pledge to veto the bill if it comes to his desk.

Even one of the bill’s 16 Democratic co-sponsors, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, said this week that he saw no need for a vote “as long as there is progress” in implementing the Nov. 24 accord.

The accord, which formally takes effect Jan. 20, will ease some economic sanctions that have been imposed against Iran and ban any new ones in exchange for Tehran’s freezing and, in some cases, a rolling back key elements of its nuclear programme pending the negotiation within a year of a comprehensive agreement designed to prevent Tehran from achieving a nuclear “breakout capacity”, or the ability to build a bomb within a short period of time.

That goal is widely considered to be the single-most important – and potentially dangerous, both politically and strategically — foreign policy challenge facing Obama in his second term.

While Obama has pledged to use all means necessary, including taking military action, to prevent Tehran from obtaining a bomb, he has made little secret of his strong desire to avoid becoming engaged in yet another war in the Middle East, a desire that appears widely held both within the foreign policy and military elite, as well as the general public, according to recent opinion polls.

For its part, Iran has long said it has no intention of building a bomb. But it has also insisted that any final agreement must recognise its “right” under the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to enrich uranium to levels consistent with the needs of a civil nuclear programme.

While the administration and the other P5+1 powers appear inclined to accept a deal that would, among other things, permit limited enrichment under an enhanced inspection regime, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has demanded that any final accord should effectively dismantle Iran’s nuclear programme, including its enrichment capabilities.

Netanyahu’s demands are largely reflected in the pending Senate bill which is named for its co-sponsors, Republican Sen. Mark Kirk and Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez, each of whom received more campaign money from AIPAC-related political-action committees than any other senatorial candidates during their runs for office – in 2010 and 2012, respectively.

The bill would impose sweeping new sanctions against Tehran if it fails either to comply with the terms of the Nov. 24 accord or reach a comprehensive accord within one year. Such sanctions would also take effect if Iran conducts a test for ballistic missiles with a range exceeding 500 kms or if it is found to have directly or by proxy supported a terrorist attack against U.S. individuals or property.

While the bill’s supporters insist that those provisions will strengthen the administration’s hand in negotiations over a comprehensive agreement, critics, including administration officials, argue that they violate the spirit, if not the letter, of the Nov. 24 agreement and would, if passed, open up Washington to charges by its P5+1 partners, as well as Iran, of bad faith.

The bill also requires that any final agreement include, among other things, “dismantlement of Iran’s enrichment  …capabilities” – a condition that Tehran has already declared a deal-breaker.

And it calls for Washington to provide military and other support to Israel if its government “is compelled to take military action in legitimate self-defense against Iran’s nuclear weapon program” – a provision that was denounced on the Senate floor by Intelligence Committee chairwoman, Dianne Feinstein, as “let(ting) Israel determine when and where the U.S. goes to war.” In a detailed speech Tuesday, she also described the bill as facilitating a “march to war.”

All of these provisions have lent credibility to the administration’s charge that the main purpose of the legislation is to sabotage the Nov. 24 deal and the negotiations, rather than support to them.

When first introduced nearly a month ago, the bill was co-sponsored by 26 senators, equally divided between Republicans and Democrats, apparently in order to give it a bipartisan cast. But all but three of the additional 33 co-sponsors are Republicans, thus making it an increasingly partisan issue.

Eleven Democratic committee chairs, including Feinstein and Senate Armed Services Committee chief Carl Levin, have come out against a vote on the bill, as has Reid’s deputy, Majority Whip Dick Durbin, who, like Reid, normally defers to AIPAC’s wishes.

In recent days, a number of other influential voices have come out in opposition to the bill. Bill Clinton’s second-term national security adviser, Sandy Berger, warned that a vote on the legislation now raised the “risk of upending the negotiations before they start,” while former Sen. Dick Lugar, until last year the top Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, told a Yale University audience Wednesday that Congress “ought to give diplomacy a chance.”

Similarly, former Pentagon chief Bob Gates, currently touting his memoir of his years under Obama and President George W. Bush, warned Tuesday that enacting new sanctions would be “a terrible mistake” and a “strategic error.”

Several prominent newspapers, including the New York Times, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, USA Today, the Denver Post, and the strongly pro-Israel Washington Post, have also editorialised against the bill in recent days.

The bill, moreover, appears to have created dissension within the organised Jewish community, which ordinarily rallies behind AIPAC’s legislative agenda.

While progressive Jewish groups, notably J Street and Americans for Peace Now, joined 60 other grassroots religious, humanitarian, anti-war, and civic-action organisations in actively opposing the bill by flooding Democratic senators with emails, petitions and phone calls over the past few days, more conservative Jewish groups and influential opinion-shapers, such as New York Times columnists Tom Friedman and Jeffrey Goldberg, also defended the administration’s opposition.

Rabbi Jack Moline, the director of the National Jewish Democratic Council (NJDC), publicly accused AIPAC of using “strong-arm tactics, essentially threatening people that if they didn’t vote a particular way, that somehow that makes them anti-Israel or means the abandonment of the Jewish community.”

“The bill before the U.S. Senate …will not achieve the denuclearization of Iran,” Goldberg, a self-described “Iran hawk,” wrote in his Bloomberg column this week. “What it could do is move the U.S. closer to war with Iran and, crucially, make Iran appear – even to many of the U.S.’s allies – to be the victim of American intransigence, even aggression.”

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

This week’s introduction by a bipartisan group of 26 senators of a new sanctions bill against Iran could result in the biggest test of the political clout of the Israel lobby here in decades.

The government of President Hassan Rouhani has warned repeatedly that the demand that Iran dismantle its nuclear programme entirely is a deal-breaker. Credit: Mojtaba Salimi/cc by 2.0.

The White House, which says the bill could well derail ongoing negotiations between Iran and the U.S. and five other powers over Tehran’s nuclear programme and destroy the international coalition behind the existing sanctions regime, has already warned that it will veto the bill if it passes Congress in its present form.

The new bill, co-sponsored by two of Congress’s biggest beneficiaries of campaign contributions by political action committees closely linked to the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), would impose sweeping new sanctions against Tehran if it fails either to comply with the interim deal it struck last month in Geneva with the P5+1 (U.S., Britain, France, Russia, China plus Germany) or reach a comprehensive accord with the great powers within one year.

To be acceptable, however, such an accord, according to the bill, would require Iran to effectively dismantle virtually its entire nuclear programme, including any enrichment of uranium on its own soil, as demanded by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The government of President Hassan Rouhani has warned repeatedly that such a demand is a deal-breaker, and even Secretary of State John Kerry has said that a zero-enrichment position is a non-starter.

The bill, the Nuclear Weapon Free Iran Act, also calls for Washington to provide military and other support to Israel if its government “is compelled to take military action in legitimate self-defense against Iran’s nuclear weapon program.”

The introduction of the bill Thursday by Republican Sen. Mark Kirk and Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez followed unsuccessful efforts by both men to get some sanctions legislation passed since the Geneva accord was signed Nov. 24.

Kirk at first tried to move legislation that would have imposed new sanctions immediately in direct contradiction to a pledge by the P5+1 in the Geneva accord to forgo any new sanctions for the six-month life of the agreement in exchange for, among other things, enhanced international inspections of Iran’s nuclear facilities and a freeze on most of its nuclear programme.

Unable to make headway, Kirk then worked with Menendez to draw up the new bill which, because of its prospective application, would not, according to them, violate the agreement. They had initially planned to attach it to a defence bill before the holiday recess. But the Democratic leadership, which controls the calendar, refused to go along.

Their hope now is to pass it – either as a free-standing measure or as an amendment to another must-pass bill after Congress reconvenes Jan. 6.

To highlight its bipartisan support, the two sponsors gathered a dozen other senators from each party to co-sponsor it.

Republicans, many of whom reflexively oppose President Barack Obama’s positions on any issue and whose core constituencies include Christian Zionists, are almost certain to support the bill by an overwhelming margin. If the bill gets to the floor, the main battle will thus take place within the Democratic majority.

The latter find themselves torn between, on the one hand, their loyalty to Obama and their fear that new sanctions will indeed derail negotiations and thus make war more likely, and, on the other, their general antipathy for Iran and the influence exerted by AIPAC and associated groups as a result of the questionable perception that Israel’s security is uppermost in the minds of Jewish voters and campaign contributors (who, by some estimates, provide as much as 40 percent of political donations to Democrats in national campaigns).

The administration clearly hopes the Democratic leadership will prevent the bill from coming to a vote, but, if it does, persuading most of the Democrats who have already endorsed the bill to change their minds will be an uphill fight. If the bill passes, the administration will have to muster 34 senators of the 100 senators to sustain a veto – a difficult but not impossible task, according to Congressional sources.

That battle has already been joined. Against the 13 Democratic senators who signed onto the Kirk-Menendez bill, 10 Democratic Senate committee chairs urged Majority Leader Harry Reid, who controls the upper chamber’s calendar, to forestall any new sanctions legislation.

“As negotiations are ongoing, we believe that new sanctions would play into the hands of those in Iran who are most eager to see negotiations fail,” wrote the 10, who included the chairs of the Intelligence and Armed Services Committees, Dianne Feinstein and Carl Levin, respectively. They also noted that a new intelligence community assessment had concluded that “new sanctions would undermine the prospects for a successful comprehensive nuclear agreement with Iran.”

Their letter was followed by the veto threat by White House spokesman Jay Carney and a strong denunciation of the bill by State Department spokesperson Marie Harf. She accused the sponsors of “directly contradict[ing] the administration work. …If Congress passes this bill, …it would be proactively taking an action that would undermine American diplomacy and make peaceful resolution to this issue less possible.”

But none of that has deterred key Israel lobby institutions. “Far from being a step which will make war more likely, as some claim, enhanced sanctions together with negotiations will sustain the utmost pressure on a regime that poses a threat to America and our closest allies in the Middle East,” the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) argued Thursday.

And, in a slap at both the administration and the Senate chairs,  the Conference of Major American Jewish Organisations complained about criticisms of the bill’s proponents. “Some of the terminology and characterizations used in the latest days, including accusations of warmongering and sabotage, are inappropriate and counterproductive,” it said.

Since it lost a major battle with former President Ronald Reagan over a huge arms sale to Saudi Arabia in the early 1980s, the Israel lobby has generally avoided directly confronting a sitting president, but, at this point, it appears determined to take on Obama over Iran.

For some observers, its opposition is difficult to understand, particularly because key members of the Israeli national security establishment have conspicuously declined to join Netanyahu in denouncing the Geneva deal.

“I’m amazed that they’ve taken it this far,” said Keith Weissman, a former AIPAC specialist on Iran. “Bottom line is that if the Iranians comply with the terms of the deal – which it seems like they are doing so far, despite some internal resistance – they are further from breakout capacity [to produce a nuclear weapon] than they were before the deal.”

But Douglas Bloomfield, a former senior AIPAC executive, suggested the motivation may be of a more practical nature. “It’s good for business,” he told IPS. “AIPAC has spent the last 20 years very, very effectively making a strong case against Iran, and Iran has been a great asset to them.”

“They want to show they’re not going to give up on this; they’ve built a huge financial and political base on it. …Most of the Jewish groups and all of Congress have been on auto-pilot on Iran; nobody ever thought you might actually get a deal… In AIPAC’s case, they’re terrified they’re going to lose their major fund-raising appeal.”

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

Catherine Ashton, High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs, in Geneva with Mohammed Javad Zarif, Iranian Minister for Foreign Affairs. Credit: Courtesy of the European Commission

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Nov 23 2013 (IPS)

As Secretary of State John Kerry and foreign ministers of at least four other major powers prepared to join talks with Iran in Geneva Saturday, the stakes over the eventual success or failure of the negotiations seem very much on the rise here.

While nervous Democrats in the Senate held off a last-minute push by Republicans to approve legislation preventing President Barack Obama from easing sanctions against Iran as part of a possible interim deal to curb its nuclear programme, they also warned that, absent an accord in Geneva, new punitive measures are likely to be enacted shortly after Congress returns from its Thanksgiving recess Dec. 9.

Most analysts, including administration officials involved in the negotiation, believe that any new sanctions – or curbs on Obama’s authority to waive existing ones – are likely to drive Iran from the table by bolstering hard-liners in Tehran who have long argued that Obama is either unwilling or unable to deliver what they regard as a minimally acceptable deal.

Such a breakdown in the talks would return the two countries to a path of confrontation, significantly enhancing the chances of war, according to both the White House and most independent analysts.

While diplomats from the so-called P5+1 (U.S., Britain, France, Russia, and China plus Germany) and Iran have been remarkably tight-lipped about the past three days of talks, foes of a likely accord – almost all of whom are associated with the Israel lobby here – have escalated their attacks here.

Even if an interim accord is reached within the coming days, the lobby’s leaders and their backers in Congress have made clear they will not give up on their efforts to derail its implementation. Republican lawmakers, in particular, warned this week that, in addition to seeking new sanctions, they will introduce legislation aimed at reducing Obama’s room for manoeuvre.

A number of prominent neo-conservatives, who have tried to lie relatively low on the Iran issue due to their high-profile championship 10 years ago of the now-highly unpopular Iraq war, have come to the fore in recent days, apparently unable to restrain themselves at such a critical moment.

One leading Iraq hawk and co-founder of the Project for the New American Century and the Emergency Committee for Israel, Bill Kristol, who has been immersed in “Obamacare” and intra-Republican politics for weeks, titled the lead editorial in his Weekly Standard magazine “No Deal”.

“[S]erious people, in Congress and outside, will do their utmost to expose and scuttle Obama’s bad Iran deal. They can expect to be smeared by the Obama administration as reckless warmongers and slandered by Obama’s media epigones as tools of the Israel lobby,” he wrote, calling on lawmakers to resist such intimidation.

Similarly, the Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer, a leading neo-conservative who has largely neglected Iran in recent months, published a column Friday entitled “A ‘Sucker’s Deal'” – the phrase used by French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, who reportedly blew up the last round of Geneva talks at the 11^th hour earlier this month – in which he echoed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s argument that any easing of sanctions against Iran as part of an interim accord would be irreversible.

Netanyahu and his supporters here have demanded that Iran be denied any sanctions relief pending verifiable steps leading to the virtually complete dismantlement of its nuclear programme, including any enrichment of uranium which Iran has long claimed is its “right” under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

According to multiple reports, the current offer by the P5+1 governments for an interim accord – which would eventually be superceded by a comprehensive agreement to be finalised within six months to a year – would permit Tehran to continue enrichment to 3.5 percent, although it would not explicitly recognise a “right to enrich”.

Such an agreement would also require Iran to freeze its 20-percent enrichment programme, as well as the number of centrifuges it is operating; place its current stockpile of 20-percent enriched uranium – which is closer to bomb grade – under international supervision pending its transformation into oxide or less-dangerous forms; and an effective suspension of work on its Arak heavy-water facility, which, when operational, would produce plutonium fuel for its nuclear reactors.

In addition the offer calls for an enhanced inspection regime overseen by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to monitor compliance.

In return, the P5+1 would permit Iran access to as much as 10 billion dollars of its foreign exchange reserves that are currently frozen in Western banks and ease sanctions on its trade in gold, other precious metals, petrochemicals, and airplane spare parts, according to the latest reports.

Obama has insisted that such concessions keep core financial and oil sanctions intact.

Netanyahu and his backers, however, disagree, arguing any easing of sanctions will trigger the collapse of the entire international sanctions regime, and thus make it possible for Iran to retain its basic nuclear infrastructure and, with it, the capability to build a bomb.

They thus oppose any interim agreement that does not require Iran to dismantle – rather than simply freeze — Arak and most of the rest of its nuclear facilities and capabilities.

But administration officials consider Israel’s demands as a deal-breaker. Indeed, a senior White House official told a confidential briefing Wednesday of think tank analysts and advocacy groups that favour an accord that Israel’s terms would “close the door on diplomacy” and “essentially lead to war,” according to an account published in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA).

That kind of warning has infuriated neo-conservatives and Israel lobby leaders, as did an op-ed published this week by the influential New York Times columnist Tom Friedman that blasted both the lobby and lawmakers who oppose an interim accord.

“If Israel kills this U.S.-led deal, then the only option is military,” he wrote. “How many Americans or NATO allies will go for bombing Iran after Netanyahu has blocked the best effort to explore a credible diplomatic alternative?”

“Not many,” he noted.

Indeed, that conclusion was echoed in two polls published this week. Nearly two-thirds of respondents in a Washington Post/ABC poll said they would support an agreement in which “the U.S. and other countries would lift some sanctions against Iran, in exchange for Iran restricting its nuclear programme in a way that makes it harder for it to produce nuclear weapons.”

Fifty-six percent of respondents in a subsequent CNN poll also approved a similarly phrased deal. The latter survey, however, stressed that such a deal would “not end [Iran’s nuclear programme] completely.”

The administration’s strategy gained other influential backers besides Friedman this week. Former national security advisers Brent Scowcroft, who served under President Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, who served under Jimmy Carter, sent a letter to the Congressional leadership endorsing an interim deal. They were joined by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who served under Bill Clinton.

Brzezinski and Scowcroft were key dissenters in the Iraq war, while Albright initially supported it.

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

Secretary of State John Kerry announces that Ambassador Martin Indyk will serve as the U.S. Special Envoy for Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations on Jul. 29, 2013. Credit: U.S. State Department

By Mitchell Plitnick
WASHINGTON, Oct 4 2013 (IPS)

Israeli and Palestinian negotiators returned to the negotiating table on Thursday, ready to put claims by the United States that it will engage more forcefully in the negotiating process to the test.

The talks, which paused for the meetings of the United Nations General Assembly, have been struggling amidst Palestinian complaints of Israeli foot-dragging and the lack of U.S. participation."The publics on both sides have hardened their positions in the last 20 years. So the selling of a deal is harder than it was." -- J Street's Jeremy Ben Ami

Yet for all the enthusiasm around the revived peace talks, there remains considerable doubt about the prospects for ultimate success.

Yousef Munayyer, executive director of the Jerusalem Fund, a non-profit organisation working to raise funds to aid the Palestinian people, believes it unlikely that a permanent agreement will be possible.

“Ideally, all parties would like a comprehensive agreement, except Israel wants one on their terms, the Palestinians want on their terms, and the U.S. wants something that can stick,” he told IPS.

“None of these goals are really in line now. Israeli and Palestinian positions are so far apart that the U.S. may want to save face with an interim agreement. It would be in Israel’s interest at very little cost to them but at a high cost to the Palestinians. And this would be a disaster.”

Yet some see hope as dovish lobbying groups are gaining more prominence in Washington. The moderate group J Street appears to have overcome attempts by more hawkish pro-Israel groups, such as the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), to marginalise it.

This week, U.S. President Barack Obama dispatched his vice president, Joe Biden, to speak at J Street’s annual conference and rally its supporters behind the peace-making efforts of Secretary of State John Kerry.

Biden’s appearance, along with those of Obama’s special envoy Martin Indyk, Israel’s lead negotiator Tzipi Livni and Israeli opposition leader Shelly Yachimovitch, as well as House of Representatives Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, offered strong evidence that J Street has established itself as a significant force here.

“It’s become an accepted notion that there is not only one mass movement lobbying org in DC, which is AIPAC,” Ori Nir, spokesperson for Americans for Peace Now (APN) told IPS.

“What J Street can do now, having been around for five years, it can authentically and credibly claim that its positions [supporting robust negotiations for peace] represent the pro-Israel community much more authentically than the traditional leadership. That puts wind in the sails of the Obama administration.”

Indyk, a former ambassador to Israel and a top Middle East policymaker under former President Bill Clinton, believes there is a real chance for success in the current talks.

“We’ve agreed to intensify the talks, and the U.S. will increase its involvement,” Indyk said at the conference. “All the core issues are on the table and our common objective is a final status agreement, not an interim one.

“The parties have agreed to resolve all the issues in nine months,” he continued. “Both sides have negotiated for years. The outline of an agreement is clear. What is needed is leadership and political decisions.”

However, Daniel Levy, director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at the European Council on Foreign Affairs, and former senior policy adviser to Oslo Accords architect Yossi Beilin, expressed strong scepticism about the current talks.

“I don’t see [Netanyahu] as having walked toward a realistic two-state solution,” Levy said. “From what I understand there is a refusal to present a map, not even of the borders of the settlement blocs. He wants to not remove any settlements and maintain an ongoing military presence…

“I fear that we may repeat some of the old mistakes: an over-emphasis on bilateral negotiations, lack of a frame of reference, and a fetishisation of process [over results].”

J Street’s president, Jeremy Ben Ami, laid out his vision for a two-state solution, emphasising that both sides would have to make sacrifices. On the Israeli side, this includes sharing Jerusalem and evacuating some settlements.

On the Palestinian side, it means accepting a de-militarised state, which many Palestinians see as a denial of their full sovereignty, and acknowledging that virtually no Palestinian refugees would return to Israel, a key Palestinian national aspiration.

“The two-state solution is the only solution for the Israeli people and the Palestinian people and the only way we can secure the future of the region for all their children,” Ben-Ami told his supporters.

Asked by IPS if he was concerned that the proposed solution might not prevail in referendums, which both the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority have conditionally set as requirements for any final agreement, Ben-Ami said, “The publics on both sides have hardened their positions in the last 20 years. So the selling of a deal is harder than it was.

“I think the ultimate deal will involve sacrifices and compromises. I don’t know what they will be but they will be hard to sell and all of us will have a tough selling job to do and we have to be ready to do that.”

But Husam Zomlot, the executive deputy commissioner for international affairs of the Palestinian Authority, spoke passionately at the conference about the rights of Palestinian refugees.

“Some of [the refugees] want to stay where they are. Some of them might want to resettle somewhere else in a third country. Some of them might want to come back to the State of Palestine. And some of them might want to return to their original homes. But all of them want one thing: full recognition of the Nakba (catastrophe, referring to the dispersion of Palestinians during Israel’s war of independence from 1947-49) that has befallen our people.”

Zomlot cushioned his point by indicating that his own father would not choose to physically return, suggesting that many Palestinian refugees would feel similarly. Still, this issue seems far from easily resolved.

As far as Palestinians are concerned the right of return is a human right,” Munayyer said. “In my view, human rights are not negotiable.”

With Congress still deliberating over Barack Obama’s request for authorisation to take military action against Syria, the powerful Israel lobby here has taken the lead in pressing the president’s case.

But in addition to echoing the administration’s view that Damascus’ alleged violations of international norms against the use of chemical weapons must be punished, pro-Israel groups are  focusing their appeals at least as much, if not more, on stopping what they say is Iran’s nuclear-weapons programme.

“The Syria issue needs to be largely understood through the context of Iran,” said Michael Makovsky, the director of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), as he unveiled his organisation’s latest report, “Strategy to Prevent a Nuclear Iran,” here Wednesday.

“Stopping a nuclear-capable Iran is the gravest, most pressing national security threat facing the United States today,” he added, quoting from the introduction of the report, the product of a task force that included several former George W. Bush administration officials, several retired flag officers, and Ambassador Dennis Ross, who served as Obama’s top adviser on Iran for most of his first term.

“(I)f there isn’t a [Congressional] response to the crossing of the red line [against the use of chemical weapons], the Iranians will draw the lesson that when we create red lines, we don’t mean it,” Ross said.

“So when the administration makes it clear that prevention [of Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon] is the objective, [the failure to act on Syria] will make it look more rhetorical than real,” according to Ross, who currently serves as counsellor to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a pro-Israel think tank.

“So, I think there’s a direct relationship between what’s going on on Syria and how the Iranians would perceive it.”

Those warnings came as the administration appeared to make progress on Capitol Hill Wednesday in rallying Congress behind military action.

In a 10-7 vote, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved a resolution authorising Obama to conduct military strikes against Syria. Two Democrats and five Republicans, including presidential hopefuls Marco Rubio and Rand Paul, opposed the resolution. Another Democrat abstained.

To rally a majority, the resolution’s authors limited the authorisation to 60 days – with a possible 30-day extension – and banned the use of ground forces in Syria “for the purpose of combat operations”.

But they also appeased hawkish forces, led by Republican Sen. John McCain, by adding a statement that any action should aim to “change the momentum on the battlefield” in favour of the rebels in order to enhance the chances of a negotiated settlement to the two-year-old civil war. The resolution, which will go to the floor next week, also urged an increase in U.S. military aid to the rebels.

The draft resolution submitted by the White House had called for a “limited” action to prevent the use or proliferation of chemical weapons in Syria.

While some administration officials initially predicted a campaign of only two or three days of cruise-missile strikes that would not necessarily affect the current balance of power in the war, stronger action now appears more likely unless the Republican-led House of Representatives votes no or places more limits on its version of the authorisation when it meets next week.

The administration’s efforts to gain authorisation have been significantly bolstered by the Israel lobby which, until Tuesday, had maintained a public silence on the issue. However, some of its more important institutions had been quietly pressing both the administration and lawmakers for a more aggressive policy toward Damascus for weeks, even before the alleged Aug. 21 chemical attack that killed more than 1,400 people, according to the White House.

On Tuesday, however, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the lobby’s most powerful group, came out strongly in support of the authorisation, as did the Conference of Presidents of American Jewish Organisations and the Anti-Defamation League.

They were followed by, among others, the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), a group dominated by strongly anti-Obama wealthy donors who have provided millions of dollars to Republican campaigns and are closely associated with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud Party.

While most of the group echoed the administration’s position that the use of chemical weapons must be punished, they also stressed that Washington’s credibility regarding its enforcement of “red lines” was at stake, particularly with respect to Iran.

“This critical decision comes at a time when Iran is racing toward obtaining nuclear capability,” AIPAC stressed in its endorsement.

“Failure to approve this resolution would weaken our country’s credibility to prevent the use and proliferation of unconventional weapons and thereby greatly endanger our country’s security and interests and those of our regional allies.”

That was very much the message conveyed by the new JINSA report and its two co-chairs, Ross and Bush’s former undersecretary of defence for policy, Eric Edelman, among other task force members present for the report’s release.

“I do think it’s important …for the credibility of the president’s statements [to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon] with regard to Iran that the Congress authorise the use of force,” Edelman said.

“Unless Iran believes there is a credible military option underpinning the willingness to negotiate, there will not be a successful negotiation,” he added in reference to the so-called P5+1 (U.S., Britain, France, China, Russia plus Germany) talks with Iran that are considered likely to resume later this month.

JINSA’s task force consists largely of members of a previous task force that issued a series of very hawkish reports on Iran for the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) over the past five years.

It said Washington’s explicit policy objective should be “to render Iran unable to develop a nuclear weapons capability” which it defined as the point at which Iran could “manufacture fissile material for a nuclear device in less time than would be required to detect and respond to such activity.” According to some experts, that threshold is likely to be reached by mid-2014.

With the election of Hassan Rouhani as Iran’s president, it said, Washington should “try to make diplomacy work,” although the task force failed to reach agreement on what terms would be acceptable.

While some members of the task force, including Ross, said the U.S. should offer a deal that would permit Iran to enrich uranium up to five percent and limit its stockpile of enriched uranium subject to a strict inspections regime, others said Iran should not be permitted any enrichment capability.

In the meantime, the task force argued against recent calls by think tanks and Iran experts for Washington to make goodwill gestures, such as recognising Iran’s right to enrich or “preemptively signal a willingness to lift sanctions during talks”.

On the contrary, the report urges increasing the pressure on Iran by imposing new sanctions and preparing and developing “a very real military strike capability against Iran’s nuclear and strategic facilities, and an array of opportunities for pursuing political warfare against the Iranian regime.”

With respect to the former, Ross suggested “we should have a demonstration [of a 30,000-pound ‘bunker-buster bomb’], put it on YouTube, let it go viral, let the Iranians see it; this is a capability that was developed basically to deal with them…”

“I still think at this point, given where we are in Syria, the most important thing right now is to act on the resolution and do it in a way that is seen as being effective and meaningful and serious,” he added.

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

Samantha Power, U.S. President Barack Obama’s nominee for the post of ambassador to the United Nations, made a strong case for her confirmation Wednesday with strong pro-Israel and interventionist statements that will appeal to many of the hawks in the U.S. Senate.

Samantha Power. Credit: Angela Radulescu/cc by 2.0

Speaking at her confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Power called defending Israel at the United Nations her top priority.

Listing those priorities, Power said, “First, the U.N. must be fair… The United States has no greater friend in the world than the State of Israel. Israel is a country with whom we share security interests and, even more fundamentally, with whom we share core values – the values of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.

“America has a special relationship with Israel. And yet the General Assembly and Human Rights Council continue to pass one-sided resolutions condemning Israel above all others…Israel’s legitimacy should be beyond dispute, and its security must be beyond doubt… I will stand up for Israel and work tirelessly to defend it.”

Power’s nomination was initially questioned by some observers, based on comments made over a decade ago which were deemed offensive to Israel.

In 2002, she suggested that if the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, which at that time was at a high point of violence, continued to worsen, the United States should consider a large protection force, which she said may mean “alienating a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import,” a clear reference to the powerful pro-Israel lobby in the United States.

Based on that statement, far right-wing and neoconservative groups blasted Power’s nomination in early June. The Republican Jewish Coalition, still reeling from their failed opposition to Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel’s nomination earlier this year, stepped carefully.

Its executive director, Matt Brooks, said that “Samantha Power has a record of statements that are very troubling to Americans who support Israel… She must respond to the strong doubts about her views raised by (her) record…The U.S. has an important role to play in the United Nations to defend freedom, Western values, and our democratic allies.

“We need an ambassador who will fight for U.S. interests in the international arena. Samantha Power must show the Senate and the American people that she can fill that role.”

The Zionist Organization of America went further, largely misrepresenting even her most controversial views by saying that, “Ms. Power’s record clearly shows that she is viscerally hostile to Israel, regards it as a major human rights abuser, even committing war crimes, and would like to see the weight of American military and financial power go to supporting the Palestinian Authority, not Israel. In contrast, she has spoken of Iran as though it scarcely poses a problem.”

But as early as 2008, with Obama in line for the presidency and recognising her own potential for a key role in his administration, Power disavowed her 2002 statements, and reached out to the heart of the pro-Israel lobby.

As described by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, who shares with Mitt Romney the dubious distinction of being a failed 2012 Sheldon Adelson-financed Republican candidate, Power addressed a closed-door meeting of Jewish-American leaders and “…became deeply emotional and struggled to complete her presentation as she expressed how deeply such accusations (of her being anti-Israel) had affected her.”

The outreach worked. Hawks lined up in support of Power’s nomination. They included the neo-conservative writer Max Boot, Republican Senator John McCain and the notorious pro-Israel attack dog, Alan Dershowitz.

Dershowitz expressed the belief that Power was well-positioned to defend Israel at the United Nations. “She’s a perfect choice. A perfect choice,” he said. “She has real credibility to expose the U.N.’s double standard on human rights. She also understands the principle of ‘the worst first’ – you go after the worst human rights abusers first.”

Power’s long-standing support of military intervention was reinforced by her statements about Syria at the hearings. Speaking about perceived failures of the United Nations, Power was also implicitly critical of Obama’s policy regarding the ongoing atrocities in that country.

“We see the failure of the U.N. Security Council to respond to the slaughter in Syria,” she said. “(It is) a disgrace that history will judge harshly.”

Obama has pursued a careful policy in Syria, condemning the violence of the regime of embattled President Bashar al-Assad, but consistently displaying reluctance to actively intervene in the conflict.

Power has long been identified as a “liberal interventionist”, denoting her liberal credentials along with her belief that military intervention is a preferable option in cases where there is a threat of atrocities being committed. She is widely credited with being a key force in pressing Obama into his intervention in Libya.

Former Senator Joseph Lieberman, a committed hawk who left the Democratic Party in his last years in the Senate over differences regarding foreign policy, offered strong support to Power, drawing a distinction between her views and those of the president who has nominated her.

“Generally speaking from her writings, Samantha is probably more personally interventionist as a matter of American foreign policy based on human rights than this administration has been,” Lieberman said.

Power also struck a friendly chord with the Senate by vowing to press for financial reform at the U.N., a cause that is embraced by many Democrats while being overwhelmingly popular among Republicans. “The U.N. must become more efficient and effective,” Power told the Committee.

“In these difficult budget times, when the American people are facing tough cuts and scrutinising every expense, the U.N. must do the same. This means eliminating waste and improving accounting and internal management…It means getting other countries to pay their fair share. And it means closing down those missions and programmes that no longer make sense.”

Power is also a well-known advocate for human rights. Much of her testimony was devoted to this cause.

“The U.N. Charter calls for all countries ‘to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights and the dignity and worth of the human person.’ But fewer than half of the countries in the world are fully free. The Universal Declaration on Human Rights is universally hailed and yet only selectively heeded.”

Even this statement followed the general tone of her testimony, which was often critical of the U.N. and often characterised its best qualities as an extension of U.S. foreign policy.

This raises serious questions about whether the Obama administration’s commitment to multilateralism is waning or if this was simply a charm offensive toward a Congress that has become more and more hostile to the U.N.

Two days after a military coup ousted Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, Washington appeared deeply divided over how to respond to what most experts believe is a critical moment for future relations between the U.S. and political Islam both in Egypt and throughout the Middle East.

On the one hand, some analysts are arguing that the U.S. must try hard to dispel the notion that it supported or now accepts the coup, lest it persuade Islamist parties, including Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood, that its purported promotion of democracy worldwide does not apply to them.“Those who, out of their distaste for anything Islamist, are welcoming the Egyptian military coup, ought to be careful what they wish for." -- CIA veteran Paul Pillar

“The Obama administration would be wise to distance itself from the army’s actions and use its leverage, particularly the promise of financial assistance, to pressure the military to respect the rights of Islamists,” warned Shadi Hamid, director of research at the Brookings Doha Center in Qatar, in an op-ed published Friday by the New York Times.

Like many other experts, he noted that the current moment recalled Washington’s acquiescence in the Algerian military’s last-minute cancellation of the 1992 elections which the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) was poised to sweep – an action that resulted in a civil war in which an estimated 200,000 people were killed and that radicalised a generation of Islamists.

On the other hand, other analysts – many of them neo-conservatives and others closely associated with the Israel lobby — have greeted the coup in Egypt more positively, urging the Obama administration to accept the coup, continue aid, and work closely with the generals, who are now seen as in control despite their nominal transfer of power to the chief justice of the Supreme Constitutional Court, to ensure a return to democratic rule.

“(A)ctually cutting off the aid now would be highly counterproductive, turning the United States into the adversary of the very actors we now depend upon to return Egypt to a democratic path,” according to Martin Indyk, vice president of the Brookings Institution and founder of the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP).

Any distancing by the administration from the Egyptian military risked alienating U.S. allies in the Gulf who supported the coup, he wrote on foreignpolicy.com, and by Israeli leaders whose relations with the military “have grown much stronger since (former President Hosni) Mubarak’s overthrow; cutting U.S. aid is the last they will want.”

For itself, the Obama administration has maintained a studied silence since its initial reaction to Wednesday’s coup issued in Obama’s name several hours later.

“(W)e are deeply concerned by the decision of the Egyptian Armed Forces to remove President Morsy and suspend the Egyptian constitution,” Obama said.

He also called on the military “to move quickly and responsibly to return full authority back to a democratically elected government as soon as possible through an inclusive and transparent process, and to avoid any arbitrary arrests of President Morsy and his supporters” – a request that appears already to have been disregarded, as Morsi, as well as hundreds of other Brotherhood leaders, have reportedly been taken into custody.

Obama also directed the relevant U.S. agencies to “review the implications under U.S. law for our assistance” to Egypt – a reference to laws dating back nearly 30 years that require the government to suspend military and most economic aid whenever a democratically elected government is overthrown in a military coup d’etat or decree.

To most observers, Obama’s decision to apply the law would be the most dramatic way of distancing Washington from the coup and demonstrating to the Brotherhood and other Islamist parties that it is not applying “double standards” in the Middle East, as was already suggested during the George W. Bush administration when U.S. officials insisted on a Western diplomatic and aid boycott of Hamas, a Brotherhood affiliate, after it swept Palestinian elections in 2006, and then supported a failed coup against Hamas’ government in Gaza.

“…(T)here should be no question that under a law passed by Congress, U.S. aid to Egypt – including the 1.3 billion dollar annual grant to the military – must be suspended,” according to the lead editorial in Friday’s Washington Post, which argued that “if it does not provoke the eruption of violent conflict, this coup may well ensure that Islamist forces, including more radical groups, grow stronger.”

Some analysts gave voice to that fear even before the coup. “If the Brotherhood’s tenure in office is abruptly ended due to pressure from a secular military, opposition, media and judiciary,” warned Ed Husain, an expert on political Islam at the Council on Foreign Relations in another Times op-ed posted Wednesday, “then the more extremist Islamists in the Arab world will say: ‘We told you so. Democracy does not work. The only way to create an Islamist state is through armed struggle.’”

“Those who, out of their distaste for anything Islamist, are welcoming the Egyptian military coup, ought to be careful what they wish for,” noted Paul Pillar, a CIA veteran who headed U.S. intelligence analysis on the Middle East from 2000 to 2005.

“They may wind up with something that is not just distasteful but dangerous,” he added, recalling how some insurgents in the Algerian civil war have since mutated into Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).

Still, others, such as a former top Obama Mideast adviser, WINEP counsellor Dennis Ross, said the huge public anti-Morsi demonstrations that preceded the coup made Egypt different from Algeria and that what limited influence Washington still had in the country should be used to prod the military in the desirable direction.

“The last thing we want is for Egypt to become a failed state…” he wrote in a USA Today column Friday.

Similarly, the top Republican and Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee issued a joint statement Friday suggesting that Washington give the military the benefit of the doubt before taking action.

“It is now up to the Egyptian military to demonstrate that the new transitional government can and will govern in a transparent manner and work to return the country to democratic rule,” said Republican Rep. Ed Royce and Democrat Rep. Eliot Engel – both of whom are close to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

“We are encouraged that a broad cross-section of Egyptians will gather to rewrite the constitution,” they added.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal’s hard-line neo-conservative editorial board stressed Washington had too much at stake to disassociate itself in any way from the military, insisting that “cutting (military aid) off now would be a mistake. Unpopular as America is in Egypt, 1.3 billion dollars in annual military aid buys access with the generals. U.S. support for Cairo is written into the Camp David peace accords with Israel,” according to its lead editorial Friday.

It added that Egyptians “would be lucky if their new ruling generals turn out to be in the mold of Chile’s Augusto Pinochet…”

Other pro-Israel neo-conservatives insisted that Morsi’s tenure proved that Washington had been mistaken in engaging the Brotherhood or political Islam.

“(T)he lesson from Egypt is that democracy may be a blessing for people capable of self-government, but it’s a curse for those who are not,” wrote the Journal’s Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign affairs columnist, Bret Stephens, on the eve of the coup. “There is a reason Egypt has been governed by pharaohs, caliphs, pashas and strongmen for 6,000 years.”

Added the New York Times columnist David Brooks even more broadly, in a column entitled “Defending the Coup”: “It has become clear – in Egypt, Turkey, Iran, Gaza, and elsewhere – that radical Islamists are incapable of running a modern government. …It’s not that Egypt doesn’t have a recipe for a democratic transition. It seems to lack even the basic mental ingredients.”

More moderately, Bush’s senior democracy and Mideast adviser, Elliott Abrams, called in nationalreview.com for suspending aid pursuant to the law, but noted that, because most of that assistance is already obligated, “…an interruption of aid for several months is no tragedy, so long as during those months we give good advice, stay close to the generals, continue counter-terrorism cooperation, and avoid further actions that create the impression we were on Morsi’s side.”

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

Um Abed plants an olive tree in support of Palestinian farmers. Credit: Eva Bartlett/IPS

By Mitchell Plitnick
WASHINGTON, May 7 2013 (IPS)

The Oslo peace process has failed and Europe must take stronger leadership in the Middle East, according to a distinguished group of former European leaders that is pushing for a stronger and more independent European stance on the Israeli occupation.

And some United States analysts believe the European Union’s current leadership may heed the call."Israel must make its own case to Europeans now. That will not be easy.” -- Former U.S. Ambassador Chas Freeman

A recent letter from the European Eminent Persons Group (EEPG) to the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs, Catherine Ashton, is deeply critical of both the EU’s and the United States’ approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict and calls for specific steps to try to save the two-state solution.

The letter was signed by 19 prominent Europeans – amongst them seven former foreign ministers, four former prime ministers and one former president – from 11 European countries, including the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and Latvia.

“We have watched with increasing disappointment over the past five years the failure of the parties to start any kind of productive discussion, and of the international community under American and/or European leadership to promote such discussion,” the letter said.

Specifically critical of the U.S.’s role, the letter also stated that President Barack Obama “…gave no indication [in his recent speech in Jerusalem] of action to break the deep stagnation, nor any sign that he sought something other than the re-start of talks between West Bank and Israeli leaders under the Oslo Process, which lost its momentum long ago.”

The EEPG criticised what they referred to as “the erasing of the 1967 lines as the basis for a two-state (solution).” They called for changes in EU policy and some specific steps to promote peace.

They called, among other points, for an explicit recognition that the Palestinian Territories are under occupation, imposing on Israel the legal obligations of that status; a clear statement that all Israeli settlements beyond the 1967 border be recognised as illegal and only that border can be a starting point for negotiations; and that the EU should actively support Palestinian reunification.

The notable leaders also called for “a reconsideration of the funding arrangements for Palestine, in order to avoid the Palestinian Authority’s present dependence on sources of funding which serve to freeze rather than promote the peace process,” an acknowledgment that the often praised “economic improvement” in the West Bank has been built on international donations and is not sustainable.

The timing of the letter, sent just after U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s most recent trip to the Middle East, was a clear statement that the EEPG does not believe the current round of U.S. diplomacy is likely to achieve significant progress. The letter has received only moderate publicity, yet EEPG’s co-chair, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, believes that the recommendations of the Group can get the long-dormant peace process back on track.

“We have had an acknowledgement from Ashton’s office to say that a response is being prepared,” Greenstock told IPS. “The letter recommends a strategic change, which is a big ask. The first step must be to start a more realistic debate about the poor results from recent policy.  We then hope that our recommendations will get a good hearing.”

Greenstock also expressed confidence that EU leadership can not only contribute to reviving diplomacy but can also help the United States realign its policies toward a more productive track.

“The EEPG recognises that a U.S. role is indispensable,” he said. “But the current American stance is unproductive.  We believe the Europeans can at least lead on exploring some alternatives, which could in the end be helpful to Washington.”

Hard-line pro-Israel voices have long insisted that only the United States should be mediating between Israel and the Palestinians. Elliott Abrams, a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and leading neo-conservative pundit, sharply criticised the letter in his blog.

“This letter is a useful reminder of European attitudes, at least at the level of the Eminent: Blame Israel, treat the Palestinians as children, wring your hands over the terrible way the Americans conduct diplomacy,” Abrams wrote.

“The Israelis will treat this letter with the derision it deserves, and the Palestinians will understand that because this kind of thing reduces European influence with Israel, the EU just can’t deliver much. Indeed it cannot, and the bias, poor reasoning, and refusal to face facts in this letter all suggest that that won’t be changing any time soon.”

But Paul Pillar, a professor in Georgetown University’s Security Studies Programme who spent 28 years as a CIA analyst, thinks Washington might welcome a European initiative along the lines suggested by the EEPG.

“I don’t think that European activism along this line would cause a great deal of heartburn, political or otherwise, in the White House,” Pillar told IPS. “Of course for the United States to take the sorts of positions mentioned in the letter would be anathema to the Israel lobby, and thus the United States will not take them.

“But it would be hard for the Israeli government or anyone else to argue that merely acquiescing in European initiatives is equivalent to the United States taking the same initiatives itself. If the EU were to get out in front in the way recommended by the EEPG, President Obama would say to Netanyahu and others – consistent with what he has said in the past, ‘I have Israel’s back and always will.

“But as I have warned, without peace we are likely to see other countries doing more and more things that challenge the Israeli position.’”

Chas Freeman, former U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia and former president of the Middle East Policy Council, believes the EU has lost patience with U.S. policy in the Middle East and that Israel will soon need to contend with an EU that is more demanding than it has been in the recent past.

“The international community has long since lost confidence in American diplomacy in the Middle East,” Freeman told IPS. “Europe is not an exception, as shown in trends in voting at the United Nations.  The ‘peace process’ was once the emblem of U.S. sincerity and devotion to the rule of law; it is now seen as the evidence of American diplomatic ineptitude, subservience to domestic special interests, and political hypocrisy. Europe no longer follows American dictates.

“The EU has its own divided mind. Israel must make its own case to Europeans now.  That will not be easy.”

Greenstock believes the urgency of the moment can lead to firm European action. Asked why the EEPG members are taking bolder stances now than when they were in office, he said: “When most of the signatories were in office, there was still some hope that Oslo-Madrid could produce a result. Time and a lack of recent effective action has changed that.  Almost every observer now thinks that the prospects for a two-state solution are fading.  Hence the urgency.”

Israeli soldiers and police block Palestinians from one of the entrances to the old city in Jerusalem. Credit: Mel Frykberg/IPS

By Mitchell Plitnick
WASHINGTON, Apr 30 2013 (IPS)

Despite indications that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is committing a substantial amount of time and effort to revive the long-stalled Israel-Palestinian “peace process”, a growing number of experts believe a two-state solution is no longer viable and the lack of a realistic discussion of the issue in the United States is leaving the country without an alternative policy.

In the two months since confirmation in his post, Kerry has made three trips to the region. On Monday, he hosted an Arab League delegation, including the League’s secretary general, the Qatari prime minister and representatives from the Palestinian Authority, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt, and Lebanon."Obama’s failure makes it clear that the U.S. will never be an honest broker." -- Harvard's Stephen Walt

The meeting was aimed at renewing the long-dormant Arab Peace Initiative (API), which promises full normalisation of relations between Israel and all Arab League member states in exchange for Israeli withdrawal from the territories it occupied in 1967 and a “just resolution” of the Palestinian refugee issue.

Kerry hopes that the API can serve to get Israeli-Palestinian negotiations back on track.

But those efforts may yet be for naught, according to analysts, some of whom have long championed the two-state solution but who now believe that a combination of U.S. fecklessness and Israel’s establishment of “facts on the ground” in the predominantly Palestinian West Bank have made such a settlement impossible.

“The U.S. public has bought a narrative that is totally dishonest and misrepresents the obvious facts – and what can be more obvious that there can be no peace process if you simultaneously steal the land in question,” Henry Siegman, former national director of the now-defunct American Jewish Congress and current senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and president of the US/Middle East Project, said at a recent talk hosted by the Middle East Institute in the halls of the U.S. House of Representatives.

“But the reason the U.S. public is overwhelmingly supportive of the Israeli position is that it is uninformed on geography and world affairs… So it is not surprising that the public accepts a narrative that is totally unrelated to facts on the ground,” he said.

The effect of that distorted narrative is to cripple the United States’ ability to act as an honest broker in this conflict, Siegman said.

“It was always assumed that the United States’ great friendship and support for Israel meant at some point it would say ‘enough’ because if you cross this line, we can no longer invoke our common values – apartheid is not a common value. But the other reason for our failures is that presidents and Congress have never had the courage to act on that reality.”

Philip Weiss, editor of the anti-Zionist web site, Mondoweiss, clarified the reason for that inactivity, and contended that the key place to try and change things is within the U.S. Jewish community.

“The U.S. has allowed this to happen despite knowing Israeli ambitions (to control all of the West Bank) due to the Israel Lobby,” Weiss said. “The Lobby draws its strength from the U.S. Jewish community’s commitment to Zionism… Zionism was once a valid response to the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe. But the need for Israel to be a Jewish state leads inevitably to the excesses of occupation.”

Professor Stephen Walt of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and co-author of the controversial book, “The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy”, identified the United States as a major reason for the current impasse.

“The failure of the two-state solution means we have to start considering alternatives,” Walt said. “For the past 15 years or so, the two-state solution was the consensus of the foreign policy community. The problem is that this goal is further away than ever.

“Many believe it is now impossible, due to settlements, the Israeli drift to right and the split [between Fatah and Hamas] among the Palestinians.

“[President Barack] Obama’s failure makes it clear that the U.S. will never be honest broker…That’s why we need alternatives. People will want to know what the U.S. is in favour of instead.”

The “failures” Walt spoke of are not limited to Obama’s first term. Despite a well-received speech during Obama’s first presidential visit to Jerusalem as well as two trips to Israel by Kerry, the divide between Israel and the Palestinians seems more entrenched than ever.

Reports from Israel after Kerry’s visit earlier this month indicated that the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected Kerry’s formula for dealing with borders and security first as a way to restart talks with the Palestinians.

This cannot be surprising, as Netanyahu’s own party, Likud, as well as two of his three major coalition partners, the Israel Beiteinu and The Jewish Home parties, are strong supporters of the settlement franchise.

Kerry’s strategy to encourage progress through Palestinian economic growth was deeply undermined by the resignation of Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad just after that same visit.

While Kerry insisted that his economic initiative was not meant to replace a political peace process, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas insisted on focusing on the political issues such as Israeli settlements and the fates of Palestinian prisoners in Israel.

Even Kerry’s attempt to build on the progress Obama made in rekindling diplomacy between Israel and Turkey by asking Turkish Prime Minister Recip Erdogan to postpone a planned trip to Gaza was met with refusal and a sharp rebuke of Kerry from Turkey.

All of this suggests that there is no hope on the immediate horizon. Secretary Kerry testified before a Senate subcommittee recently and said there was a window of only one to two years for the two-state solution, and given the lack of opportunity now, this is strong evidence for the position that the path to two states is indeed closed.

In a clear signal of the international community’s frustration with the U.S.’s failure to find any progress in the conflict, a recent letter signed by 19 former European prime ministers, presidents and foreign ministers urges European Union Foreign Affairs Representative Catherine Ashton to take immediate action to save the two-state solution.

“European leaders cannot wait forever for action from the United States,” the letter says, while advocating a clear EU statement that all Israeli settlements beyond the 1967 borders are illegal and calling for stronger efforts to unify the divided Palestinian leadership, among other measures.

Canada’s major Israel lobby organisation is running into conflict with critics who say it is betraying the historical liberal legacy of this country’s 380,000-member Jewish community.

The barely two-years-old Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) is supporting restrictive Canadian refugee legislation, Bill C-31, that has sparked opposition from traditional human rights groups including Amnesty International, the Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers and the Canadian Council for Refugees.

For prominent Toronto Jewish refugee doctor, Dr. Philip Berger, CIJA is rejecting traditional sympathy in his community in Canada for people fleeing oppression. This included fellow Jews escaping Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 40s, when an earlier Canadian government under Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King enforced a “none is too many” policy towards people seeking refuge from Nazi rule.

“CIJA is a disaster for the Jewish community. It is actually starting to become evident a little bit already,” he told IPS.

The new Canadian refugee law provides wide powers to Minister of Immigration Jason Kenney to designate countries as “safe” and “democratic” and thus more liable to generating “bogus” refugees versus those who are genuine.

The inclusion of Hungary on the Canadian government list despite reports of the Budapest government’s failure to protect its Roma minority population from discrimination and physical attacks is also upsetting some Jewish organisations, including the Toronto Board of Rabbis and the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre.

Says Alice Herscovitch, executive director of the Montreal Centre, “People should have access to a fair refugee system. There are countries that produce refugees despite the fact that they are democratic and have an elected government.”

But CIJA’s Steve McDonald counters that Bill C-31 makes “significant improvements toward protecting the safety and security of Canadians”, as well as “deterring human smuggling and dispensing with unsubstantial refugees fairly and quickly”. The centre is refusing to join others in demanding Hungary be taken off the safe list.

CIJA has also unsuccessfully urged the Canadian government to rethink its decision to restrict health services to refugees from its designated list of safe countries.

But this is not enough for Berger. “CIJA should be leading front and centre (on
this issue),” he said. “They know damn well what is going on. They are so manacled to the Conservative government that they have forfeited any notion of an independent organisation that represents the true interests and views of the Jewish community.”

CIJA came into being as Canadian foreign policy, first under the Liberals and now under the Conservatives, became decidedly more pro-Israel versus taking an even-handed stance between Israel and the Palestinians, notes University of Victoria political scientist and professor emeritus, Reg Whitaker.

“The uncritical alignment of the (Stephen) Harper government with the Israeli Right (i.e. Israel’s governing Likud party) has obviously created a much more welcome climate for aggressive AIPAC-style lobbying in Ottawa,” he told IPS.

Whittaker was alluding to the U.S.-based American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which he describes as having a higher profile in Washington than is the case with CIJA in Ottawa.

This is not for lack of trying on the part of CIJA, he added. Whitaker suggested that the powerful donors who decided to merge various organisations, including the century-old Canadian Jewish Congress, to create CIJA wanted a Canadian version of AIPAC to buttress the case for Israel in Canada.

“The effect of the takeover is to subsume the wider and diverse interests of the (Jewish) community, previously served by a variety of institutions and advocacy groups, under an aggressive AIPAC-style umbrella that conflates ‘Jewish’ interests with Israel’s interests – or in fact with the interests of the Israeli Right. The flip side of course is to automatically label any criticism of the Israeli government as anti-Semitic,” he said.

But CIJA has been clumsy at times, said Carleton University political science professor Mira Sucharov. She pointed to CIJA’s effort to discourage a U.S. author, Peter Beinart, from addressing Jewish Hillel student groups on two university campuses in Ottawa and Montreal. He was on a tour advocating a boycott of products manufactured in illegal Jewish settlement on Palestinian lands under Israeli control.

Also calling for a similar action, Sucharov predicted being barred personally from speaking to the same students. “Through my annual donation to my local Jewish Federation’s annual campaign, I help fund both CIJA and Hillel, the very organisations that would seek to muzzle me and the many others who oppose economic support of the settlements.”

In its defence, CIJA contends that a boycott of settlement products plays a part in “delegitimize(ing)” the state of Israel.

“A boycott of Jews – no matter where they live – is not a tactic of debate or engagement. It’s a tool of conflict. One who calls for the singling out of our fellow Jews for punishment, economic or otherwise, has rejected an essential principle of people hood,” CIJA CEO Shimon Fogel said in a statement.

Meanwhile, Bernie Farber, who headed the old Canadian Jewish Congress before it was forced to merge with the new CIJA, refuses to be drawn into a criticism of the new governing Jewish body.

“CIJA did come out with a couple of statements in support of the Roma. Some feel that it wasn’t strong; some feel they should not have said anything,” he told IPS. “It is typical of the Jewish community where you are going to have a number of opinions.”

Farber also maintained that Jews and Roma groups share a special historical bond because both were specifically targeted in Europe for genocide during the Holocaust by the Nazis.

And he recalled the significant legal and human resources that his organisation under this leadership invested in the past decades on behalf of the Roma in Canada. “There is no longer a Canadian Jewish congress, but the (Jewish) community is still finding ways (to speak out), maybe not through its official spokesbody,” he said.

Steve McDonald defended the different emphasis at CIJA. “I have to say, in general, I’m not sure I can conceive a situation in which we take a position that isn’t met with some disagreement within the diverse landscape of Canada’s Jewish community. This goes back to our view that we should strive for unity of purpose rather than uniformity of viewpoint.”

Meanwhile, to discourage potential asylum seekers the Canadian government is paying for billboard advertising in the Hungarian city of Miskolc where many members of the Roma community reside.

“Virtually all Hungarian asylum claims are abandoned or withdrawn by the claimants themselves, or determined to be unfounded by the independent Immigration and Refugee Board,” said Alexis Pavlich, a spokesperson for Canadian minister Jason Kenney in an interview with the Toronto Star.

“Canadians have no tolerance for those who abuse our system and seek to take unfair advantage of our country at great expense to taxpayers.”

Senator Chuck Hagel at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Service Committee Jan. 31, 2013. Credit: DoD Photo by Erin A. Kirk-Cuomo

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Feb 2 2013 (IPS)

If former Defence Secretary-designate Sen. Chuck Hagel’s lacklustre performance at his confirmation hearing Thursday heartened neo-conservatives and other hawks opposed to his nomination, those who argued that the Israel lobby has been exerting too great an influence on U.S. foreign policy were ecstatic.

Indeed, Stephen Walt, the Harvard international relations professor who co-authored the “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy”, issued a special thanks to the Senate Armed Services Committee that held the hearing on his foreignpolicy.com blog Friday, suggesting that controversial 2007 book should sell like hotcakes after what he called “the Hagel circus”.

“I want to thank the Emergency Committee for Israel, Sheldon Adelson, and the Senate Armed Services Committee for providing such a compelling vindication of our views,” wrote Walt, who, among other things, has been accused of anti-Semitism for writing a book that criticised the allegedly excessive influence the Israel lobby wields over U.S. foreign policy and the public debate that surrounds it.

As evidence, Walt cited the number of mentions of Israel and its most powerful regional foe, Iran, received in the course of Hagel’s eight-hour ordeal – 166 and 144, respectively, according to a compilation by the Internet publication, Buzzfeed.

By comparison, he noted, the epidemic of suicides among U.S. troops – a necessary concern for any incoming Pentagon chief – was addressed only twice.

In fact, the degree to which Israel and the threat posed to it by Iran dominated the hearing was somewhat understated by Buzzfeed. The full transcript revealed that Israel was brought up no less than 178 times, followed closely by Iran with 171 mentions.

Those numbers compared with a grand total of five mentions of China, the central focus of the Obama administration’s much ballyhooed “pivot” from the Middle East to the Asia/Pacific; one mention (by Hagel himself) of Japan, Washington’s closest Asian ally whose territorial dispute with China has recently escalated to dangerous levels; and one mention of South Korea, Washington’s other major treaty ally in Northeast Asia.

Similarly, NATO, Washington’s historically most important military alliance – and one with which it fought a successful air war in Libya last year and is currently fighting its 12th year in Afghanistan – warranted a total of five mentions.

“It is extraordinary that, in an eight-hour hearing, as little attention was devoted as it was to issues such as China and NATO, which ought to be near the top of the concerns for any secretary of defence of the United States,” said Paul Pillar, a former top CIA analyst who served as the National Intelligence Officer for the Near and South Asia from 2000 to 2005.

“The emphasis on Israel and Iran – which, in American politics, has become for the most part an Israel issue – demonstrates that the senators were far less concerned with the strategic questions that the secretary of defence should be focused on and much more interested in trying to defeat a nominee who has strayed from political orthodoxy, especially on issues related to Israel,” he told IPS.

Hagel, a decorated Vietnam War veteran and former Republican senator from Nebraska, has come under sustained attack from neo-conservatives – who still exercise a preponderant influence on the Republican Party’s foreign policy views despite the general unpopularity of the Iraq war which they championed – since he was first rumoured to be Obama’s top choice to succeed Leon Panetta as Pentagon chief in mid-December.

The anti-Hagel attacks have been carried out by a number of groups, such as the Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI), that have refused to disclose the identity of their donors.

The New York Times reported Sunday that billionaire Sheldon Adelson, the single biggest contributor to the Republican presidential campaign last year and a staunch supporter of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was involved in the campaign, by far the most expensive and organised ever mounted against a cabinet nominee.

Initially joined in their attacks by some leaders of the more-mainstream and bipartisan Israel lobby, they charged, among other things, that Hagel was anti-Semitic (in part because he had used the phrase “Jewish lobby” on one occasion) and hostile to Israel.

Conversely, they complained, he has been too sympathetic toward Palestinians, too eager to engage Iran and other Israeli foes diplomatically, and too averse to using military force, particularly against Iran if negotiations over its nuclear programme fail.

On these issues, they argued in a mantra subsequently adopted by half a dozen Republican senators, Hagel was “out of the mainstream” or even “far to the left of” Obama himself.

In fact, Hagel’s views on the Middle East and the use of military force, in particular, not only largely reflect those of the administration and, according to public-opinion polls, of a war-weary electorate, but also of most of the foreign-policy elite. Dozens of retired top-ranked diplomatic, intelligence, and military officials, as well as former Cabinet officers from both Republican and Democratic administration have rallied to Hagel’s defence in recent weeks.

But those “mainstream” views are not reflected in Congress, where the Israel lobby has long wielded its greatest influence.

While its main institutions, such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), declared their neutrality on the nominee after his formal nomination by Obama earlier this month, they worked with sympathetic senators from both parties and their staffers to ensure that particular questions would be asked that would elicit reassuring answers with respect to both supporting Israel and preventing Iran from achieving a nuclear bomb by any means necessary.

The effort – which was supplemented by angry prosecutorial performances by several senators, notably John McCain, Lindsay Graham, and Ted Cruz, closely associated with neo-conservatives – largely worked, as Hagel recanted or softened some of his more-provocative previous statements to the disappointment of many of his supporters.

But, in some respects, the effort, as suggested by Walt, succeeded too well, simply because it demonstrated quite dramatically to the interested public how completely Israel dominates the foreign-policy agenda, at least on Capitol Hill.

After all, the U.S. remains the world’s one superpower with interests in every country. Its defence budget – at well over half a trillion dollars this year — is greater than the combined budgets of the 10 next-most powerful militaries.

Yet Israel was mentioned more often in the hearing, according to IPS’s tally, than the following countries or entities combined: Iraq (30), Afghanistan (27), Russia (23), Palestine or Palestinian (22), Syria (18), North Korea (11), Pakistan (10), Egypt (9), China (5), NATO (5), Libya (2), Bahrain (2), Somalia (2), Al-Qaeda (2), and Mali, Jordan, Turkey, Japan, and South Korea (once each).

Several key regional powers with which Washington has been trying hard to build or already enjoys strong defence relationships – notably India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and Indonesia – were not mentioned even a single time. Vietnam was mentioned 41 times but exclusively in relation to Hagel’s wartime service there or his work as a senior official in the Veterans Administration.

“They were not asking questions that had any relevance to the tasks facing the secretary of defence, in terms of either the military or budgetary challenges we face,” noted Amb. Chas. Freeman (ret.), whose appointment early in the Obama administration to head the National Intelligence Council (NIC) provoked such a furious campaign by neo-conservatives and key Israel lobby figures that he felt compelled to withdraw his name from consideration.

“So there was no serious discussion of defence or larger strategic issues,” he told IPS. “What was there was a lot of grandstanding about whether or not the nominee was politically correct.”

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.