Supporting Israel is different from supporting the wrong policies of one sub-section of its militant right wing racist apartheid polity (which AIPAC supports).

We can support Israel without supporting AIPAC.

We should cut off funding for Israel.

$10million go from US taxpayers to the Israeli govt EACH DAY.

We need that money here -- and they have enough nukes and planes and bombs already. They are the regional superpower and have committed WAR CRIMES with our weapons.

Our Arms Export Control Act DICTATES that we cut-off most of our Israel aid.

WAKE UP CONGRESS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

For the last decade at least, it's been pretty much nothing but crude hardcore neoconservative propaganda the Washington Post -- thus, among other things, the attacks on Walt and Mearsheimer by Dana Milbank and Richard Cohen.

"Liberalism," neocon-style:

BEGIN NML
BEGIN ARTICLE
AUTHOR Jamison Foser
TITLE Richard Cohen, the Washington Post's pro-torture "liberal"
PUBLICATION Media Matters for America
DATE September 01, 2009
URL http://mediamatters.org/blog/200909010009
BEGIN QUOTE
Richard Cohen is, supposedly, a liberal columnist for the Washington Post. Never mind that he embraced the Iraq war, belittling those who did not buy the Bush administration's trumped-up case for war as "fools or Frenchmen." Never mind his defense of the Bush administration's outting of Valerie Plame, or his defense of Monica Goodling, or his defense of financial services executives who ran their companies into the ground and the business media that stood idly by while it happened, or his outrage that Stephen Colbert dared make fun of President Bush's low approval ratings at the White House correspondents dinner -- or the fact that he didn't seem to mind Bush's jokes at an earlier dinner about failing to find WMD in Iraq.

Never mind all that. Richard Cohen is the Washington Post's idea of a liberal. And Richard Cohen loves him some torture.
END QUOTE
END ARTICLE
END NML

It should be pointed out, however, that Cohen seems to feel some internal conflict about the current state of Israeli politics, and occasionally criticizes Israeli policies. But that kind of criticism apparently is only permitted to a certain segment of Americans, and not to Walt and Mearsheimer.

Richard Cohen embodies everything that is corrupt and confused among mainstream and establishment punditry. The blogging world has left these characters in the dust.

Cohen has occasionally gone farther in his critique of Israel and Zionism than even Walt and Mearsheimer:

BEGIN NML
BEGIN ARTICLE
PUBLICATION Wikipedia
URL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Cohen_%28Washington_Post_columnist%29
BEGIN QUOTE
In August 2006, he wrote a column declaring that "Israel itself is a mistake" in which he stated: "The greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now."
END QUOTE
END ARTICLE
END NML

As mentioned before, Cohen seems to be conflicted and confused.

What Israel is now culpable for are the illegal Jewish settlements and apartheid conditions in the occupied territories.

Our Arms Export Control Act DICTATES we cut off aid to Israel

Supporting Israel is different from supporting the wrong policies of one sub-section of its militant right wing racist apartheid polity (which AIPAC supports).

We can support Israel without supporting AIPAC.

We should cut off funding for Israel.

$10million go from US taxpayers to the Israeli govt EACH DAY.

We need that money here -- and they have enough nukes and planes and bombs already. They are the regional superpower and have committed WAR CRIMES with our weapons. See the Goldstone Report.

Our Arms Export Control Act DICTATES that we cut-off most of our Israel aid.

WAKE UP CONGRESS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Life in the settlements -- 60 Minutes

CBS News' 60 minutes:

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4752349n

I am sick of Americans dieing for Israel's Apartheid policies.

Anyone concerned with the future of the Israelis, but who doesn't want to use overt or covert ethnic cleansing on the Palestinians, would stay on their case. The current situation, and the two state solution, is simply not feasible in the long term. Psychologically it is warping both Israeli and Palestinian societies. And unless demographic patterns change, Palestinians will eventually outnumber Israelis, this despite Israel's desperate attempts to keep luring people. If we think this situation is serious at present, imagine how bad it will be fifty years from now, assuming something doesn't happen before hand? Hardliners always say that the Palestinians just want to drive the Israelis into the sea, but it seems like those same hardliners are doing their very best to insure such an outcome.

You call Israel a "democarcy".

It is not. It is slightly complicated. From the NYTimes --

"Israel is simultaneously running three systems of government. The first is full democracy toward its Jewish citizens — ethnocracy. The second is racial discrimination toward the Palestinian minority — creeping Jim Crowism. And the third is occupation of the Palestinian territories with one set of laws for Palestinians and another for Jewish settlers — apartheid."

Op-Ed Contributor
A Harsh Reality for Palestinians
By AHMAD TIBI
Published: April 6, 2009

JERUSALEM — The right-wing coalition of the new Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, does not bode well for Palestinians in Israel. With the appointment of Avigdor Lieberman as foreign minister, the extremists are going after the indigenous population and threatening us with loyalty tests and the possibility of “transfer” into an area nominally controlled by the Palestinian Authority.

Netanyahu’s intransigence vis-à-vis Palestinians in the occupied territories is certainly cause for concern. No less concerning is what the Netanyahu-Lieberman combination may mean to Palestinian citizens of Israel.

This government, particularly with Lieberman as foreign minister, should be boycotted by the international community, just as it once boycotted Jörg Haider, the late Austrian far-right politician who won global notoriety for his anti-immigrant views.

Lieberman, in one of many outrageous comments, declared in May 2004 that 90 percent of Israel’s Palestinian citizens “have no place here. They can take their bundles and get lost.”

But my family and I were on this land centuries before Lieberman arrived here in 1978 from Moldova. We are among the minority who managed to remain when some 700,000 Palestinians were forced out by Israel in 1948.

Today, Lieberman stokes anti-Palestinian sentiment with his threat of “transfer” — a euphemism for renewed ethnic cleansing. Henry Kissinger, too, has called for a territorial swap, and Lieberman cites Kissinger to give his noxious idea a more sophisticated sheen. Lieberman and Kissinger envision exchanging a portion of Israel for a portion of the occupied West Bank seized illegally by Jewish settlers.

But Israel has no legal right to any of the occupied Palestinian territories. And Lieberman has no right to offer the land my home is on in exchange for incorporating Jewish settlers into newly defined Israeli state borders. We are citizens of the state of Israel and do not want to exchange our second-class citizenship in our homeland — subject as we are to numerous laws that discriminate against us — for life in a Palestinian Bantustan.

We take our citizenship seriously and struggle daily to improve our lot and overcome discriminatory laws and practices.

We face discrimination in all fields of life. Arab citizens are 20 percent of the population, but only 6 percent of the employees in the public sector. Not one Arab employee is working in the central bank of Israel. Imagine if there was not one African-American citizen employed in the central bank of the United States.

Israel is simultaneously running three systems of government. The first is full democracy toward its Jewish citizens — ethnocracy. The second is racial discrimination toward the Palestinian minority — creeping Jim Crowism. And the third is occupation of the Palestinian territories with one set of laws for Palestinians and another for Jewish settlers — apartheid.

A few weeks ago, Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu Party led the charge in the Israeli Knesset to ban my party — the Arab Movement for Renewal — from participating in the elections. Netanyahu’s Likud also supported the action. The Supreme Court overturned the maneuvers of the politicians. But their attempt to ban our participation should expose Israel’s democracy to the world as fraudulent.

Lieberman’s inveighing against Palestinian citizens of Israel is not new. Less than three years ago, he called for my death and the death of some of my Palestinian Knesset colleagues for daring to meet with democratically elected Palestinian leaders. Speaking before the Knesset plenum, Lieberman stated: “World War II ended with the Nuremberg trials. The heads of the Nazi regime, along with their collaborators, were executed. I hope this will be the fate of the collaborators in this house.” Lieberman now has the power to put his vile views into practice.

We call for more attention from the Obama administration toward the Palestinian minority in Israel. It is a repressed minority suffering from inadequately shared state resources. The enormous annual American aid package to Israel fails almost entirely to reach our community.

Between Netanyahu and Lieberman, the Obama administration will have its hands full. Make no mistake that Netanyahu and Lieberman will press the new administration hard to accept Israeli actions in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem — as well as discriminatory anti-Palestinian actions in Israel itself. Settlements will grow and discrimination deepen. American backbone will be crucial in the months ahead.
Ahmad Tibi is a Palestinian citizen of Israel and a member of the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament.

Today, Tax day, and every other day $10million goes to Israel -- for what? To do war crimes?

Where are the Tea-Party folks on THIS huge waste?

http://mideast.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/04/13/israels_latest_population_transfer_scheme

On Israel, Iran, and existential threats

"...if Iran were to have nuclear weapons Israel would lose its role as the regional superpower...."

and that, IMHO, would be a good thing.

see more at:

http://mideast.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/03/24/threats_to_israel_from_without_and_within

In February 2005 I sat in an intelligence briefing for Israeli Middle East and diplomatic affairs correspondents at the headquarters of the Israel Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem. There were probably 15 of us around a long table. At the head, various researchers took turns speaking about the threat levels coming from different parts of the Muslim world.

When it came to Iran, the intelligence researcher told us in the most foreboding tone that Iran was very close to building a nuclear weapon. It was the same ‘and-that-will-be-the-end-of-us' tone that numerous Israeli politicians had been using in the media to warn Israelis following the Iranian announcement to develop nuclear energy.

At the time, I was serving as the Middle East correspondent for The Jerusalem Post and was a member of the Gulf/2000 Project, a group led by former National Security Council member and presidential advisor Gary Sick and made up mainly of academics, journalists, diplomats and intelligence people from East and West with a professional interest in the Persian Gulf. It exposed me to a wealth of information about Iran, including the problems it faces, its own security fears and the question of the nuclear threat. And it became clear to me that the Iranian regime was not crazy enough to push a would-be red button on Israel.

But I wanted to know how the Israeli intelligence people would answer the question:"So do you think that if the Iranian regime were to develop nuclear weapons some crazy mullah would press the red button?" So, I asked.

Before they could respond, Ayala Hasson, Israeli Channel One's diplomatic affairs correspondent, shouted across the table, "But of course they'll press the button!"

Harry Kney-Tal, director of the Foreign Ministry's Center for Diplomatic Research, paused before answering: "No, we don't think there is some crazy Iranian who is going to press the button." Nuclear weapons were a form of "insurance" against being attacked, he said.

For years now, official Israel has been scaring its people into believing Iran is near the ‘point of no return' and the day it reaches it will be doomsday for Israel (of course, Israel's estimated ‘point of no return' dates continuously pass, prompting it to make new ones). But the Israeli establishment knows that there is no existential threat, that the Iranian regime is radical, but not suicidal; that if it is building weapons of mass destruction (WMD), it is in self-defense.

So why all the hype? Why the deception? The reasons are many, but they come down to money, politics, and security.

After the briefing Kney-Tal shared with me that if Iran were to have nuclear weapons Israel would lose its role as the regional superpower. "We are afraid that it will give Iran more leverage to empower its clients, "he said, referring to Hizbullah and Syria.

In other words, Iranian nukes would prevent Israel from acting as the neighborhood bully and Israel would have to think twice before it attacked its neighbors.

Yet it wasn't until last month that a senior Israeli official, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, acknowledged that Israel did not fear an Iranian attack. The Iranian regime was "radical", he said in a speech at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, but not meshugeneh (the Yiddish word for crazy).

As retired Brigadier General Uzi Eilam describes in his recently published book, "Eilam's Arc", money and politics--not security--are the key reasons for the scare. The "defense establishment is sending out false alarms in order to grab a bigger budget," said the former Director-General of Israel's Atomic Energy Commission.

Moreover, some Israeli politicians are using Iran to divert attention away from problems at home. Not only does it make them more popular among the population--Israelis understandably feel more at home in the role of victims--but it also focuses the attention away from the country's internal problems which are not being solved: poverty, racial strife, and lack of peace with its neighbors. Finally, the ‘Holocaust-is-around-the-corner' doomsday prophecy, putting Israel in the traditional Jewish role of the oppressed, gives Israeli leaders more clout when pushing for gestures from friendly countries abroad.

Interestingly, Netanyahu has tempered his own doomsday prophecies. At the recent AIPAC conference he said that Iran "might be tempted" to use nuclear weapons. It is possible that if the Israeli Foreign Ministry intelligence department is aware that Iran does not pose an existential threat, then the US and European countries have come to the same conclusion. That would take the punch out of Israel's prophecies.

Now Israel is warning that Iran could share WMD knowledge with non-state actors who will use it against Israel and other countries: "Our world would never be the same," said Netanyahu at AIPAC.

If Israel really does fear this prospect it needs the help of its allies, either to pressure or persuade Iran. So when Vice President Biden comes to town it is best not to embarrass him with the announcement of settlement expansions and then insist on making more announcements that deepen the rift; when Turkish television broadcasts a television series depicting Israel in anugly manner, best not to humiliate the Turkish ambassador on Israeli television; when the Secretary General of the UN visits, best to send someone to greet him at the airport, and not just the security guards; and when Israel wants to make a revenge assassination for the killing of Israeli soldiers, best to let it go, rather than use fake passports of your allies (or don't get caught).

Israel's recent behavior is not conducive to achieving its stated goals. It must reassess its priorities and decide whether a settlement in the West Bank, the humiliation of diplomats, and the killing of an arms smuggler are more important than its security.

At the end of the day, Israel needs help if it wants to remain the only kid on the block with a big stick.

Is Apartheid an "American value"? So why support Israel?

No solution can be found while America maintains its ambiguous status with Israel and keeps its fingers all over the Palestine situation. If America were to detach itself completely, the problem would become resolvable since large swathes of the globe earnestly wish it so. Americans are very bad at letting things take their course, they forever fiddle and make adjustments until their involvements begin to resemble an episode of Rowan Atkinson’s Mr Bean. I am quite serious about this; a bit of the mañana, mañana would not go amiss. Think of Iran, which has been around over 2500 years, and Obama issuing them deadlines that dissipate like morning mist.

Richard Cohen maintains that you have "for some time been carrying on a running dialogue with almost anyone to make the point that supporting Israel is not in America's best interest." Before we proceed, we need to define terms. Everything in this quote seems fairly straightforward, except the word "supporting". What does it mean? It can mean anything from telling Israel "don't worry, be happy" as it is subjected to a nuclear strike, all the way to sending the entire US GNP to Israel. I think it's only reasonable to assume, however, that Cohen means the present level of US support, so perhaps should have said that you make the point that "continuing to support Israel" is not in America's best interest.

OK, now that we've clarified that, let's examine the points you provide from your book to try to refute Cohen's contention:

* "We do not call for abandoning the U.S. commitment to Israel-indeed, we explicitly endorse coming to Israel's aid if its survival were ever in jeopardy." (p. 18).

* "As we have noted repeatedly, there is a strong moral case for supporting Israel's existence, and we believe the United States should remain committed to coming to Israel's aid if its survival were in jeopardy." (p. 338).

* "In effect, the United States should give Israel a choice: end its self-defeating occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and remains a close U.S. ally, or remain a colonial power on its own." (p. 344).

* "It is time for the United States to treat Israel not as a special case but as a normal state, and to deal with it much as it deals with any other country." (p. 341).

Does any of the above refute Cohen's contention that you maintain that continuing to support Israel is not in America's best interest? Let's examine the first two quotes - they say that the US should stand ready to come to Israel's aid should her existence be threatened. Is that the same as continuing our current level of support for Israel? Of course not. Standing ready in such a fashion is essentially having a relationship similar to that with any of our NATO allies. Presently we do not support those allies to the extent that we support Israel, thus those two quotes do nothing to refute Cohen's contention. Let's look at quote #3. There you state that we should not only discontinue our present support of Israel, but should also discontinue being an ally of Israel unless certain conditions that you establish are fulfilled. Since our present support of Israel is obviously not contingent upon those conditions, this quote does nothing to refute Cohen. Finally, in quote #4, you state that we should deal with Israel as we deal with any other country. Dealing with Israel as we do with any other country would clearly be substantially less supportive than the way we deal with Israel today, so your quote #4 in fact supports Cohen's contention.

I must say that I am astonished that a Professor at Harvard University has posted something so easily refuted as the above.