All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
And our next guest today is MJ Rosenberg.
He is Senior Foreign Policy Fellow at Media Matters Action Network.
Previously worked on Capitol Hill for various Democratic members of the House and Senate for 15 years.
He was also a Clinton political appointee at USAID.
In the early eighties, he was editor of AIPAC's weekly newsletter, Near East Report.
And from 1998 to 2009, he was director of policy at Israel Policy Forum.
You can find him nowadays writing for aljazeera.net.
And as I think I just said, the Huffington Post.
And Talking Points Memo.
And Talking Points Memo.
I was about to ask actually, if you were still writing for them.
Yeah, I am.
Yes.
You just Google up MJ Rosenberg and you'll find plenty to read in a lot of great places.
And a couple of very important ones recently are on Israel and Palestine.
Barack Obama is Rick Perry.
And then there's one that we're featuring on the front page today at antiwar.com, which is called, if Tom Friedman can say it, you can too.
And of course, we've been willing to say it here on this show and that antiwar.com for a long time.
But we're all very happy to have Tom Friedman's permission, aren't we?
Yeah, exactly.
Okay.
And now what is it?
That Tom Friedman said that makes it okay now?
Well, it was okay before, but what Tom Friedman is, because he is so utterly pro-Israel and is so well known as being close to the Israelis, that when he came out and said last Sunday, not yesterday, but the one before that, in his column that the problem with America's Middle East policy is they were owned lock, stock and barrel by the pro-Israel lobby.
That was like, wow, Tom Friedman said that?
I mean, I say that, you say that, Scott.
Tom Friedman doesn't say that.
And so my point was, well, if he's saying it now, now that means that everybody can say it.
That means that there's a whole new kind of understanding, or we could build a whole new understanding out there about how US foreign policy in the Middle East works.
His point is this whole, you know, the Obama administration's courting of AIPAC and the pro-Israel lobby is bad for Israel, bad for Palestine, and most of all, bad for the United States.
And he says, it's the lobby.
In fact, I think the other way to sum up his column would be called, it's the lobby, stupid.
And you know, right.
I've been saying that for years, but hey, he's Tom Friedman.
Well, and that really is the important point too, is the way he frames it is why would Obama be doing something that's bad for Israel and bad for the United States?
It's because of Israel's lobby in the United States and everybody knows that, which I'm sure Mearsheimer and Walt and yourself and Phil Weiss and everybody else will be getting a lot of apologies in your emails about all those terrible things they've said about it.
Oh yeah.
Maybe those other guys are getting apologies.
I'm sure not getting the apologies.
The people who are part of that lobby, they don't apologize for anything.
They don't ever concede they're wrong.
They have been, so basically this thing didn't start yesterday.
They have been, I've been involved with this stuff for so long.
And I remember, you know, this is just sums up the stupidity of these people that way back in 1971, when Israel still occupied Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, the then president of Egypt, Ammar Sadat, sent word to the Nixon administration that if Israel would pull back two miles from the bank of the Suez Canal, he would sign a peace treaty with Israel and there would be no more war between the two countries.
So Nixon administration dispatched their assistant secretary named Joe Sisko to go to Israel and tell the prime minister of Israel, Golda Meir, you know, you just need to pull back two miles and Sadat, you'll have the first peace treaty with Egypt.
And they said, well, we'd rather be on the banks of the canal.
And he said, well, then Sadat's going to have no alternative but to go to war.
And they all laughed and said, these Arabs can't go to war.
What happened was exactly two years later, the Egyptians attacked across the canal and they didn't just take two miles, you know, they didn't just go two miles, they took the entire Sinai Peninsula was lost to Israel and Israel lost 3000 dead.
Did AIPAC ever apologize for the ones that were telling the Nixon administration, don't you dare pressure them this way?
Did they ever, you know, I mean, did anyone ever apologize to those 3000 people?
Yeah.
In fact, I think I remember a piece that you wrote maybe a year or so ago about the peace, Nix were right all along.
And you give 10 examples or so.
Yeah.
Just that kind of thing where the right wing pro war Israel lobby in DC put pressure on America to stop putting pressure on Israel to do the right thing.
And so the war party got their way and everything turned out worse time and again.
Time again.
And this one right now we're in this situation now and, you know, this, you know, with them pushing this Iran war stuff to this, this Iran, you know, AIPAC and the whole rest of that lobby or, you know, it's not just AIPAC, but AIPAC still the part of it.
I mean, if Israel, if Israel does attack Iran, that very likely will lead ultimately to the end of Israel completely.
It'll be gone because the war, because what would happen was the entire Muslim world would rise up down Israel then.
I mean, Israel, Israel situation is more and more isolated.
The lesson they need right now is to go to war with Iran.
But these people want it.
And it's like, what are they thinking about?
Do they ever think about it?
If there's a war on Hezbollah to launch thousands of missiles at Israel itself, people will die.
Or do these people sitting in Washington DC making lots of money at their jobs being lobbyists just not care?
Not that they just don't care about Palestinians.
They don't care about the Israelis either.
Well, it's sickening.
Were you surprised, or I guess this wasn't a surprise to you when Grant F.
Smith came out with those IRS documents that showed that there were just two people who were the major donors to AIPAC?
Yeah, I know.
I, you know, and I worked there.
I mean, my views, I used to have fairly standard views on the Israel-Palestinian conflict until 1993.
Once the Palestinians recognized Israel, I figured, okay, that's it.
So I, and I broke with AIPAC at that point because they, they still wanted to maintain the, you know, maintain the hostility.
So anyway, but I still follow them really closely.
You know, I worked there.
I mean, I was, yeah, that was like amazing to me.
I mean, you know, how was it?
But you know, they've got, you know, they've got lots of small donors too.
I mean, look, look, every couple of weeks they send out another one of these heart-rending letters to, basically to old Jewish people in places like Florida saying, if you don't send AIPAC money, Israel's going to be destroyed.
I mean, I don't know how much money they raise that way too.
But as far as big donors, no, no, they, they, they don't have many.
And if they have a, and they, but their power now is mainly through the fact that they direct, it's illegal, but they do it anyway, because they direct donors to the Democratic Party.
And they tell, you know, they're telling these donors, look, you warned the White House that if Obama doesn't stick with us a hundred percent, we're going Republican.
And that's, you know, and Obama has been intimidated consistently.
He's backed down on that settlement issue over and over again because of these AIPAC donors and people inside the White House too, like this Dennis Ross, who's an AIPAC guy, like Raul Emanuel was an AIPAC guy.
I got to say, this is not the Jewish community they represent.
They represent a small group of people who are right-wing on Israel.
I don't even call them pro-Israel.
I would say they're pro-occupation, pro-status quo.
It's, and Obama despises it.
Well, and in your article here at, it's at the Huffington Post and at aljazeera.net on Israel and Palestine, Obama's Rick Perry, you bring attention to this article about how 70 percent of Israelis are willing to go along and, I guess, accept the idea of a Palestinian state.
We're talking about Netanyahu and his people over in, you know, his political allies over there in Israel and his buddies among the neoconservative movement here in America and the Israel lobby.
And does anybody else agree with their consensus about how the world is supposed to work here, other than Barack Obama?
It's amazing.
It's the right wing.
It's, you know, sorry, 70 percent, according to the Hebrew University poll, 70 percent of Israelis say the United, if the United Nations votes for Palestinian state, Israel should just accept it, recognize it, and, you know, make peace with it.
But that, you know, Netanyahu's against that because, you know, in his right-wing crowd, because they're all pro-settlements.
And that's the same position as the AIPAC crowd here and the neocons.
All right.
Well, we'll have to hold it right there and go out to this break.
We're talking with MJ Rosenberg.
He used to edit AIPAC's newsletter.
Don't keep saying that.
I'm sorry.
I miss it.
Anyway, we'll be right back, y'all.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
Talking with MJ Rosenberg from Media Matters and The Huffington Post and Al Jazeera.net and all over the internet.
Talking Points memo also.
And the guys in the chat room, fill me in on what you said at the end that I didn't hear.
Oh, no.
It's just I'm very self-conscious about the fact that I used to work at AIPAC.
And I have to say, the fact that I not only worked at AIPAC, but left there on very good terms and now are totally 100% against what they stand for, gives me, I think, kind of credibility to drive them crazy.
They're not going to label me anti-Israel or anti-anything.
Yeah, it also makes the point that, you know, this isn't personal.
This is just about what you think is right and what they do.
And they being, again, as you said before, quite accurately, I think, a very small percentage of any community anywhere in the world.
Exactly.
But, you know, I always like to remind people, you know, I do believe that the lobby controls our foreign policy on Israel-Palestine.
But I also think, and as you think of anti-war.com, people all think our government is run top to bottom by lobbies and by who has the most money.
So I never want to be seemingly, oh, I'm sealing out the, you know, the Israel lobby.
They're no better and no worse than the rest of them.
Right.
Well, actually, right before I brought you on, that was my last rant.
I had no connection with the Israel lobby at all.
In fact, that was the one I left out was the foreign lobbies in my rant.
Yeah, the only difference is the foreign thing adds a particularly unpleasant aspect.
Yeah, it certainly does.
I was just saving it for this interview.
Well, look, and in this article, you say, despite all the hype that people are hearing, that Barack Obama is hands down the most pro-Israel president ever.
Yeah.
How can you say that?
Come on.
Well, first of all, I'm using the term pro-Israel the way that AIPAC and those people use the term, because I don't consider a pro-Israel to support policies that are destructive to Israel.
Pro the prime minister of Israel and what he wants.
Yeah, that's right.
But as far as the president who has given the least resistance to anything a prime minister of Israel wants is Barack Obama.
Much the most relevant example is George W.
Bush.
George W.
Bush.
You know, we now do this big report about these fifty five bunker busting bombs that Obama provided to Israel so that Israel could, if need be, attack Iran.
George W.
Bush refused to do that.
It took Obama to do it, not only to do it, but the craziest thing yet, to leak to a reporter for the administration, leak to a reporter that we provided this weaponry, which, of course, is great for us in that region of the world and with the Iranians to let this be known already.
But George W.
Bush was the one who said to the Israelis and to Dick Cheney, his own vice president, at the end of the last administration, I'm not giving you permission to fly over Iraq to bomb Iran.
So I mean, and he convened a gigantic peace conference.
We've never done that.
We had a peace conference in Aqaba.
He's the first president.
I mean, I can't stand George W.
Bush, but I'm just using as an example.
Obama is much more, much, much more, quote unquote, pro-Israel than any other president ever.
He never says no to anything.
Well, and the way you write in this article, too, he's really helped Netanyahu paint the Israeli state, the people of Israel, into a pretty bad corner on this issue now with the proposed statehood of Palestine and the future of so-called peace negotiations over there.
Yeah, well, you know, Israel is totally isolated now.
I mean, look what's happened.
I mean, you know, Turkey has been Israel's ally, you know, since 1948.
And now, you know, Prime Minister Erdogan says that, you know, that friendship is, you know, forget it.
I mean, he sees it as beyond repair.
You know, the, you know, and you think about, you know, you remember with the Turkish ship, you know, nine Turks got killed.
One of them, though, was an American citizen of Turkish background.
United States would generally, in any other situation, protest the killing of an American.
Not one word came out from the administration, this administration, protesting the killing by the Israelis on the high seas of an American citizen.
I mean, you know, it's all about campaign and campaign money and all this kind of thing.
So you put national security, you know, at risk just so you can impress who?
The Israeli right and a tiny percent of Americans who are so right wing on Israel that they won't vote or give money if they think that Obama in any way disagrees with Israel.
Joe Biden has the all time best phrase he always uses about our relationship with Israel.
He says there must be no, he always says it twice, there must be no daylight, no daylight between Israel and the United States.
What does that mean?
We wouldn't say that about Canada.
Well, yeah, I mean, and it never seems to mean we are going to get them to agree with what we think is best at all.
It's all about falling in line with them.
That's right.
It means no daylight between what they want and what we'll do.
Yeah.
There's not even an implication in there that has to do with our best interest at all.
No, just whatever it is, we can afford to sacrifice it for them.
Basically.
Exactly.
Total one way street.
The alliance, they always talk about one way street.
Well, it really goes to show the corruption of the standard narrative of retail Democratic politics in America.
I mean, Democratic Party politics, but just, you know, electoral politics in America where Barack Obama, it's in his political interest to brag that he's selling bunker buster bombs to Israel for use against Iran, where the Chuck Todd version of reality would have it.
Why that would hurt his base of antiwar people and people who at least used to lean antiwar and the Democratic Party.
But of course, according to his calculation, they don't matter one bit compared to trying to have a couple of talking points for the Israel lobby to send out.
It's crazy.
It's crazy.
I mean, you know, I guess we could say here it's just the general thing of selling out the base.
I mean, you know, the American Jewish community and that's who we're basically talking about.
You talk about Israel voters is the most progressive white.
I mean, African-Americans are voted higher numbers for Barack Obama, but only about a little bit.
American Jews voted 78 percent for Barack Obama.
American Jews don't vote on the basis of Israel.
They vote on the basis of progressive issues.
So he's so so and there are polls that show that only 3 percent vote on the basis of Israel.
So you have all 78 percent of Jews vote because they're, you know, because they're, you know, because they're concerned for social programs, ignoring those to cater to these really rich people who's only concerned in Israel.
And for a lot of them, they're cutting their taxes, too.
I mean, it's just like this is Democratic politics.
I got to say, the Democratic Party is worse on this than the Republicans because these pro-Israel donors tend not to be Republicans.
So they don't have much leverage with the Republicans.
Republicans talk a good game, but the Democrats who deliver 100 percent of what Netanyahu wants.
I mean, it's really it's it's ridiculous.
Well, in your experience, what percentage of the political pressure is due to, say, for example, that particular brand of Christian rightist who are trying to force Jesus to come back sooner and all that John Hagee stuff?
That doesn't have any impact on the Democratic Party at all.
Well, I mean, in D.C.
In general, it was since the power players on Israel are Democrats.
Those people don't count.
But and so you see what percentage of influence does it have on Eric Cantor and John Boehner?
Some, not much.
I mean, you know, they're trying to what the Republicans are trying to do is to, you know, just to pull off the Jewish donors.
Those people aren't donors.
It's an important thing to remember about our politics now.
It's not about votes anymore.
It's about money.
Right.
So we're talking about evangelical Christians.
Well, what?
OK, you know, evangelical Christians represent a group of people typically, I think, that are thought of as easy to organize and get out to vote.
And even they don't really count compared to who can just donate to get the stuff on TV for the general.
Well, also because they vote Republican regardless.
Right.
Because, you know, they don't love, you know, they you know, loving Israel is one thing, but they don't love Israel as much as they hate the idea of, let's say, gay marriage.
I mean, so they're sort of like locked into the Republican Party.
This whole thing that we're of, you know, courting the lobby, that's, you know, I mean, this whole thing Obama's doing and all that.
And it's it's about, you know, wealthy people within the within the what's the pro-Israel community and that's also the Jewish community.
It's not I mean, I don't pay that much attention to what Republicans are out there with Herman Cain says on this or Rick Santorum or even Mitt Romney or any of them.
It's basically this is a game inside the Democratic Party.
And in fact, the president of the United States is Democrat now.
So the policies we're seeing, these are these are policies of the Democratic Party pushing Obama to the right and making sure that he stays on the right.
It's not just AIPAC, but it's also House Democrats.
House Democrats are, to a large extent, they're almost an adjunct of the pro-Israel lobby.
And I'm talking about the biggest liberals in the House, too.
I don't think you can pull a name out of your or anyone's favorite House Democratic or even Senate liberal who does not push Obama to do 100 percent what he wants.
All right, well, I'm sorry we're out of time because actually we could continue this conversation forever and ever.
I'll just have to have you back all the time.
Call me any time.
All right.
Thanks very much for your time.
OK, MJ Rosenberg, everybody.
Find him at the Huffington Post, at Media Matters, dot org, at Al Jazeera dot net.
The latest one is on Israel and Palestine.
Obama is Rick Perry.
