There are many known facts to support these four thesis:
- Israel claims a historic right to conquer and to ethnic cleanse the Jordan West Bank – the Bush administration does support and furthers this;
- the Zionist lobby in the U.S has achieved an extremely high influence level;
- Israel is nurtured as a strategic asset for U.S. interests in the Middle East;
- the U.S. administration did recommend and expected Israel to "crush" Hisbullah "without inhibitation".
If a critic of AIPAC’s role in U.S. policy would say such, the AIPAC and the ADL would be quick to brand that person as a defaming anti-semite.
But what do they say about a Jewish attorney from Maryland claiming the above in a Haaretz OpEd?
Since June 1967, there has been rigorous debate about the wisdom of retaining the territories that came into Israel’s hands in the Six-Day War. Yet, almost no individual with a whit of appreciation for Jewish history would deny the essential right of the Jewish people to return and repopulate these territories that already millennia ago served as the cradle of the Jewish people.
[…]
American support for Israel’s claim to Judea and Samaria reached its crescendo in President George Bush’s April 14, 2004 letter to then prime minister Sharon, acknowledging that it would be "unrealistic to expect … a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949 …"This U.S. support for Israel did not arise in a vacuum. Israel’s protectors in the United States, in the plethora of Jewish organizations that dot the American landscape and at the grass-roots level, have relentlessly struggled to shore up this support.
[…]
In a similar vein, consecutive Israeli governments and their U.S. supporters have worked for decades to ensure that Americans recognize the support that Israel provides in the Middle East. Through careful coordination – from important contacts at Defense Department levels, to meticulously managed visits to Israel by members of Congress, as well as by way of grass-roots lobbying and advocacy – Israel’s role as a reliable ally and strategic asset of the United States had become an almost unassailable truth.
[…]
Short of erecting a billboard on Rehov Kaplan, it would have been difficult for the Bush administration to have more strongly communicated to the Israeli government its desire for the Israel Defense Forces to crush – forcefully, vigorously and without inhibition – Hezbollah’s forces.
Though the ADL may not touch this, the Arab press will definitly reprint the appropriate sections for a wider digestion.
Who’s interest is furthered here?