A significant defeat for the Zionist lobby?
I would like the headline to be a statement but it has to be a question.
As I write it looks as though the Zionist lobby realises that it overplayed its hand in smearing Chuck Hagel in the hope of causing President Obama to back off nominating him for the post defense secretary. The implication is not that the lobby’s stooges in the Senate will refrain from giving Hagel a hard time at his confirmation hearing, but that they will not risk, at least for a while, further public exposure as Israel Firsters by causing the nomination to be rejected.
How much Obama himself is to be credited with outflanking the Zionist lobby on this occasion is a good question. There is certainly a case for saying that by authorising the leaking of Hagel’s name well in advance of the presidential nomination, Obama was deliberately provoking the Zionist lobby (and its neo-con associates) confident in the knowledge that there would be enough eminent and respected Americans, including some Jewish Americans, who would come forward to defend Hagel and rubbish the Zionist lobby’s smear campaign.
There were and Justin Raimondo put it this way. “When the ultra neo-cons of the Emergency Committee for Israel launched their propaganda offensive to cleanse the body politic of Hegelian revisionism, they took their campaign to ‘Criticize Hagel, Criticize Obama’ to such ridiculously vicious lengths that they inspired a vigorous pushback from the sort of people who had put up with their nonsense for too long: grizzled veterans of the diplomatic, political, and military corps who had sat in silence during the Bush years as the neo-cons played havoc with the country’s foreign policy.”
If as seems most likely Hagel is confirmed, it will be a defeat for the Zionist lobby, but how significant will that actually be? Will it be an indication that the lobby is beginning to lose its grip and, if it is, that we can look forward to a second-term Obama making best use of his greater freedom by doing whatever is necessary to get a real Middle East peace process going?
It all depends, I think, on why, really, Obama wanted the Republican Hagel as his top man in the Pentagon.
There are some who believe that Obama sees in Hagel a man who will assist him to put America’s own best interests first by ending the Zionist lobby’s control of policy for Israel-Palestine. In this way of interpreting Obama’s motivation, great attention is paid to one particular statement Hagel made when he was a senator and which, some like to believe, inspired the president to conclude that he, Hagel, was the best man for the job. This was Hagel’s statement:
“The political reality is that … the Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people up here … I’ve always argued against some of the dumb things they do, because I don’t think it’s in the interest of Israel … I’m not an Israeli senator. I’m a United States senator. I support Israel, but my first interest is, I take an oath of office to the Constitution of the United States, not to a president, not to a party, not to Israel.”
But the prospect of having a much respected Republican ally for second-term effort to break free from the Zionist lobby’s controlling grip may not have been the main reason, or even a reason, for Obama’s decision to nominate Hagel. It could be that David Brooks hit the nail on the head in an op-ed analysis for the New York Times.
Under the headline Why Hagel Was Picked, Brooks opened up with this observation:
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