The Rag Blog

CAIRO, Egypt — In Iran, a large red icon pops up on computer screens. In Syria, there’s a discreet note from the filter. Other Arab nations display “blocked” in bold lettering or issue crafty “page not found” replies.

However the censors put it, the message is clear: You’re not permitted to see this Web site.

Governments in the Middle East are stepping up a campaign of censorship and surveillance in an effort to prevent an estimated 33.5 million Internet users from viewing a variety of Web sites whose topics range from human rights to pornography. As a result, millions of Middle Easterners are finding it harder by the day to access popular news and entertainment sites such as Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Flickr.

Five of the world’s top-13 Internet censors are in the Middle East, according to the most recent report from Reporters Without Borders, the journalism advocacy group that lobbies against Web censorship.

“The Web makes networking much easier, for political activists as well as teenagers,” Reporters Without Borders said in its annual report for 2007. “Unfortunately, this progress and use of new tools by activists is now being matched by the efforts of dictatorships to fight them. Dictators, too, have entered the world of Web 2.0.”

Internet regulations vary widely across the Middle East. Predictably, the most authoritarian governments have the most aggressive filters, but even some without advanced censorship systems have prosecuted bloggers for controversial postings on religion or politics.

Just as Internet users have banded together on social networking sites to challenge the wave of censorship, the region’s governments also are uniting to share filtering software and the latest online surveillance technology, activists said.

“Now there’s some common work among the Arab governments to censor the Internet. They’re acting like they’re fighting terrorists,” said Ihab al Zalaky, the managing editor of a respected Egyptian newspaper and the chief author of a comprehensive report last year on regional Internet censorship. “There’s no good news. They’re all making it harder for people to access the Internet.”

Only four Arab countries have little or no filtering: Lebanon, Morocco, Jordan and Egypt — but Egyptian politicians are considering a law that would criminalize some online activity.

At the other end of the spectrum are Saudi Arabia and Syria, consistently described by human rights groups as the most hostile toward the Internet. The rest of the region falls somewhere in between, with governments importing the latest technology to narrow the number of sites available to the public and drafting laws to curb online dissent.

The prohibitions have led to an explosion in circumventors, proxy servers that allow Internet users to bypass workplace or government filters. In cyber cafes from Damascus to Dubai, patrons furtively browse blocked sites and swap Web addresses for the latest “proxies.”

The most tech-savvy young Arabs and Iranians use new proxies every day, trying to stay a step ahead of government censors.

“We’ve seen on the one hand an increase in Internet usage throughout the region and, in reaction to that, we’ve seen governments getting more sophisticated in how they arrest people and censor online content,” said Nadim Houry, a Human Rights Watch researcher for Lebanon and Syria. “It’s sort of the traditional cat-and-mouse game.”

Last month, Syrian authorities banned several more sites, including the book and music vendor Amazon.com. The government reportedly uses a filtering system called Thundercache to block content from sites such as Blogspot, Hotmail, Skype and YouTube. Many Arabic-language news sites also are banned.

In Iraq and the Palestinian territories, the Internet is policed mainly by the owners of Internet cafes and by Internet users themselves, according to monitoring groups. In both places, Islamist militants have attacked Internet cafes, accusing patrons of looking at pornography or chatting with members of the opposite sex.

In Iraq, the U.S. military is the only official Internet censor — operational security measures prevent American troops from using some sites and commanders have shut down cyber cafes in areas where insurgents use the Internet to share intelligence and plot attacks.

More typical is the censorship that’s spreading throughout Arab states in North Africa. Tunisian authorities block several sites, human rights workers said, but they’ve also begun to hold the owners of Internet cafes liable if political activists use their establishments to post critical news about the government.

After years of Internet freedom, Sudan reportedly has purchased a state-of-the-art blocking program that prohibits access to political sites and literary works that range from racy fiction to a book that the government deemed offensive to Islam’s Prophet Muhammad. Morocco, Algeria and Libya also have come under fire from human rights watchdogs because of their prosecution of online dissidents.

In Egypt, the Arab world’s most populous nation and home to an estimated 6 million Internet users, the government offers cheap dial-up browsing to anyone with a telephone line and authorities do little or no filtering, so video-sharing platforms, social-networking sites, most opposition sites and pornography are all easily accessible.

But police have rounded up at least three bloggers and harassed many more in recent years, according to Reporters Without Border. Activists also fear more filtering after an Egyptian court last year ruled that authorities could block, suspend or shut down any Web site that could pose a threat to “national security,” vague wording that could lead to criminal charges for dozens of Egyptian bloggers.

Abdel Moneim Mahmoud, 28, has been arrested and harassed by Egyptian authorities several times in connection with his blog promoting the Muslim Brotherhood, a powerful Sunni Islamist opposition group. Because he uses Blogspot, the U.S.-based weblog platform, the Egyptian government hasn’t been able to block his blog without banning the site altogether.

“They threatened, ‘If you don’t stop blogging, we will arrest you’ every month,” Mahmoud said. “Police officers ask about specific things on our blogs when they call us in for investigation. They use IP-address tracking to find out who is writing which blog.”

Iran’s hard-line Shiite Muslim leadership is another zealous censor of the Internet. The government boasts of filtering 10 million “immoral” Web sites in addition to all the major social networking outfits and dozens of pages about religion or politics.

For the past year, according to human rights groups, Iranian authorities also have zeroed in on online publications dealing with women’s rights. Two prominent “cyber feminists” were arrested in the past month on charges of distorting public opinion and drawing negative publicity to Iran through the postings on the Web.

Across the Persian Gulf from Iran, the Arabian Peninsula is home to some of the world’s most stringent censors, with Saudi Arabia at the top of the list. Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman are among other Gulf countries that filter online content.

Even in a place as glitzy and modern as Dubai, the regional shopping hub in the United Arab Emirates, a strict filtering system targets pornographic and political sites. Dubai residents can drink and party all night long, but they’re not allowed to read about such exploits on some blogs penned by Western expatriates.

Earlier this year, residents were outraged by tentative plans to extend the censorship to so-called free zones, where media and multinational companies can — for now — surf the Web unfiltered. Foreign workers in Dubai have decried the ban on voice software such as Skype, which allows them to call home for free. Critics call it economic censorship of the Internet, an attempt by state-backed telecommunications firms to build their revenue from international calls.

The ultraconservative Saudi government, a close U.S. ally, blocks thousands of Web sites that deal with pornography, religion, politics and human rights. Medical students at Saudi universities have complained that they can’t even access scientific sites to study human anatomy.

Fed up with the growing list of banned sites, a 25-year-old finance student named Hani Noor helped his cousin to create a Facebook group called, “We All Hope They Don’t Block Facebook in Saudi Arabia.” As of Monday, the group had 225 members and a message board that focused on tips for the best proxies to get around government bans.

Noor, however, hit on an even better solution: he signed up for satellite Internet, which means his connection is now free from the long arm of the Saudi censors.

“I’m off the hook,” Noor said with a triumphant laugh in a telephone interview from his home in Saudi Arabia. “We are winning. They’re blocking, but we’ve always found a way to overcome it.”

A net of lies has been spun over our heads and it’s been glued over the earth like a heavy fog. It makes it impossible to see through it to the real world that is out there somewhere. We are blindly walking around in the mist breathing in the poison that is belching out of our loudspeakers, feeding us the steady diet of fear and hatred for the other, making us see what’s around us in black and white, draining all things of the colors that make for beauty and compassion.

Far above our heads the vultures are circling, ready to pounce on their prey whenever they see someone weak and helpless. The vultures are devoid of any sort of feeling, in the same way the roaring noise around our heads is constantly centered on making us immune to the needs of the other, making us deaf to the cries of despair from the suffering people and blind to the destruction wrought upon the worthy goals and efforts that once filled their lives.

The vultures are running the world and their rule has only one purpose, making sure that the people are deaf and blind. That they are ignorant of the injustice and inequality that are the centerpieces of world domination. That they are ignorant of the rights they have been deprived of. That they are ignorant of the fairy land of beauty and love which used to be theirs.

The people have no rights and no goals. They are just forced to listen to the ceaseless noise that reshapes their views of what is of any value on this earth, the inanities that fill our ears with roaring noise, making us believe that white is good and black is bad. That buying is good but being on the dole is bad. That the West is good and the East is bad. That Christians are good but Moslems are bad. That wealth should be praised but poverty should be punished.

The vultures keep their counsels and they all approve of the basic principles. Invading and destroying a country is good if the people don’t do the bidding of the Big Vulture. Buying up countries that can be made to support the Big Vulture is praiseworthy. Even if it means that it harms the lives of the ignorant people at home who have to pay out the millions and billions to the client nations. Ruining countries that have riches that the vultures want to get their claws on is good, as long as those countries are defenseless and can’t fight back.

The vultures use their force to control us, to make our lives empty save for the fear and hatred that fit their objectives. Once the world is filled with robots, leader robots and follower robots, it will be much easier to control. Robots don’t rebel.

LITTLE BOXES

Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky tacky,
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same.
There’s a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one,
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

And the people in the houses
All went to the university,
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same,
And there’s doctors and lawyers,
And business executives,
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

And they all play on the golf course
And drink their martinis dry,
And they all have pretty children
And the children go to school,
And the children go to summer camp
And then to the university,
Where they are put in boxes
And they come out all the same.

And the boys go into business
And marry and raise a family
In boxes made of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.
There’s a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one,
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

“Where the dead are ghosts on the fragile abacus used to calculate loss, to estimate tragedy.” – from “Body Count,” by poet Persis Karim

The narrative in the media these days is the success of the U.S. “surge,” which has poured an additional 30,000 U.S. troops into Iraq since early January 2007. In early December, war critic and close ally of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi U.S. Rep. John Murtha (D-Penn.) said, “I think the surge is working.”

Polls indicate that concern over the economy has replaced the war as the major issue for voters and that, while a majority of Americans want the troops out, those saying that things are going better jumped from 33 percent to just under 50 percent.

Are they going better? Car bombings, sectarian violence, and attacks on U.S. troops are down, although 2007 has been the deadliest year of the war for the Americans. But does the reduced violence have anything to do with the “surge”?

As Patrick Cockburn of The Independent points out, Americans and the U.S. media tend to “exaggerate the extent to which the U.S. is making the political weather and is in control of events there.”

Take the attacks on Americans, which are down. The Sunni-based resistance carried out the majority of those. Sunnis, who constitute 5 million of Iraq’s 27 million people (there are 16 million Shi’ites and five million Kurds), dominated the country under Saddam Hussein.

Initially the Sunnis formed an alliance with al-Qaeda that turned out to be a disaster. Al-Qaeda, an extremist Sunni organization, targeted Shi’ites, whom it considers heretics. The relentless bombings and shootings culminating in the 2006 bombing of the Golden mosque in Samarra, spurred Shi’ite militias, such as Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, to counterattack.

The Sunnis suddenly found themselves fighting a two-front war against the Americans and the Shi’ites, a war they cannot win. They soon were driven out of large sections of Baghdad by the Shi’ites while absorbing massive casualties from the U.S. military campaign.

These defeats forced the Sunnis to turn on al-Qaeda and to reach a détente with the U.S. In return, the new Sunni militias – like the Baghdad Brigade, the Knights of Ameriya, and the Guardians of Ghazaliya – were given vehicles, uniforms, flak jackets and $300 a month for each member by the Americans. Starting months before the “surge,” the so-called “Sunni awakening” soon fielded 77,000 militia members, larger than the 60,000-member Mahdi Army and half the size of the Iraqi army.

But according to the Sunday Times, many of these Sunnis were formerly al-Qaeda members, and the current “truce” with the Americans is little more than a tactical maneuver to buy time. “Of course the coming war is with the [Shi’ite] militias,” Baghdad Brigade intelligence officer Abu Omar told the Times. “God willing, we will defeat them and get rid of them just as we did with al-Qaeda.”

The flashpoint may come if the Shi’ite-Kurdish government of Prime Minster Nouri al-Maliki drags its feet in integrating the Sunni militias into the security forces. “If the government continues to reject them [the Sunni militias],” says Baghdad Brigade commander Abu Maroff in the Sunday Times, “let it be clear this brigade will eventually take its revenge.”

Baghdad is calmer because the city has gone from one of mostly mixed neighborhoods to a city of rigid ethnic enclaves guarded by sectarian militias. While this has reduced the level of violence in the short run, it hardly bodes well for the future.

In short, the “surge” has very little to do with the reduction of violence in Baghdad and virtually nothing to do with the relative peace in Western Iraq. Both are the quiet that follows in the wake of ethnic cleansing.

Iraq’s south has been mostly calm, but once again, this has nothing to do with the “surge.” The U.S. has few forces in the region, and the British have been driven out of Basra. They are currently bunkered down in an airport. Underneath the apparent calm is tension between rival Shi’ite factions, in particular al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army and the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council’s (SIIC) Badr Brigade. Sadr’s forces generally represent the bulk of the Shi’ite masses. The SIIC has fewer followers but much more money than the Badr Brigade and, more importantly, the support of the U.S. Army.

Following a major shoot-out in August between the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigade in Karbala, Sadr and SIIC head Abdul Aziz al-Hakim signed a cease-fire. For Sadr, the truce has more to do with avoiding a fight with the SIIC while the latter can call on the U.S. to back it up than with any sudden conversion to the “surge.” Speaking in a mosque on Dec. 7, al-Sadr told the Americans, “Get out of our land. We don’t need you or your armies, the armies of darkness; not your planes, tanks, policies, meddling, democracy, fake freedom.”

The recent car bombings in the southern provincial capital, Amarah, were not the work of al-Qaeda – which has no presence in the largely Shi’ite south – but a sign of growing tension between rival Shi’ite groups. At stake is regional control over Iraq’s oil revenues and control of the country’s only port, Basra.

With the recent cross-border attack by Turkey, as well as growing internal tensions in the region, the peace in the north has all the stability of a powder magazine. Iraq’s north has been a place of relative calm since the invasion because it is controlled by the powerful Kurdish militia, the peshmerga. But violence is on the increase, in part because insurgents driven out of Baghdad have moved north. For example, attacks in Mosul during November jumped from 80 to 106 a week.

The most volatile issue in the north is Kurdish autonomy and a future referendum that will decide who controls the oil-rich city of Kirkuk and the strategic city of Mosul. An autonomous Kurdish region is something most Arab Iraqis – and all of Iraq’s neighbors – oppose. The Turks, Syrians, and Iranians worry that an autonomous “Kurdistan” will stir up similar moves for autonomy in their countries. And the Baghdad government fears that it will lose the revenues from the northern oil fields.

“We are now funding all the major Iraqi warring parties, the Sunnis, the Shias, and the Kurds,” says former CIA and National Security Agency official Bruce Reidel. “They are happy to take our weapons and our money, but they’ve not necessarily brought into the same strategy as we have.”

While the U.S. will have to begin drawing down troops this coming June, the Bush administration says it intends to remain in Iraq. Last month Bush and Maliki signed an agreement that, according to the Financial Times, “paves the way for a possible long-term U.S. presence in Iraq.”

Certainly the U.S. embassy in Baghdad is being built with that in mind. When finished, the $736 million project will cover 104 acres, with 21 buildings reinforced against bombs and mortars. The huge complex will cost $1.2 billion a year to run.

According to an ABC/BBC/NHK poll, with the exception of the Kurdish north, Iraqis not only oppose the U.S. presence, 57 percent of them support attacks against coalition forces. Even the Maliki government has to tread softly in this area. Speaking to the press last week, Iraqi National Security Adviser Mowaffaq al-Rubaie said, “Permanent forces or bases in Iraq for any foreign forces is a red line that cannot be accepted by any nationalist Iraqi.”

The success of the “surge” is an illusion. “Nothing is resolved in Iraq,” says Cockburn. “Power is wholly fragmented. The Americans will discover, as the British learned to their cost in Basra, that they have few permanent allies in Iraq. It has become a land of warlords in which fragile cease-fires might last for months and might equally collapse tomorrow.”

Dec. 6 (Bloomberg) — From a Baghdad woman’s despairing comment, Iraqi author Haifa Zangana found an epigraph for the insecurity and erosion of human rights in her country: “Today is worse than yesterday, and yesterday was worse than the day before.”

Imprisoned and tortured for opposing Saddam Hussein’s regime, Zangana was freed from Abu Ghraib after a relative who served as a bodyguard for the dictator secured her release. She now works as a journalist in London.

Her most recent book is “City of Widows: An Iraqi Woman’s Account of War and Resistance.” She details how women’s rights have suffered under the occupation and how violence has left 1 million widows to lead Iraqi households.

Zangana, 57, is slight, parts her wispy gray hair down the middle and conveyed an air of quiet determination as we spoke at Chicago’s InterContinental Hotel. I started by asking her what image of life in Iraq was emerging from the blogs by women there.

Zangana: Girls more than boys are the real losers. Their families fear for their safety so they are kept at home. The fear is of kidnapping, shooting, one family taking revenge on another, car bombs. You name it, it’s there. The minute you step outside your house, you are targeted one way or another. Education is disappearing. The number of kids attending school this year is 30 percent of what it used to be. It’s taking us back to the 1930s.

Crofts: Has the role of Iraqi women in resistance been under-reported or misstated by Western media?

Wrong Women

Zangana: The picture, to start, was very confused because they mixed up Afghani women with Iraqi women. Or at least they selectively chose Iraqi women as victims and as waiting to be liberated from a male chauvinistic society. In Iraq, women were more or less equal to men. They were encouraged to develop. Iraqi women were far ahead compared with other Arab countries. The stereotype doesn’t fit.

Crofts: Is life in Iraq now worse than under Saddam Hussein?

Zangana: Women are saying it is worse in a way because they are losing their freedom of movement and their lives. There have been 1 million civilians killed. Iraqi families consist on average of seven members, the parents and five children.

The killing of every man means a widow left on her own to care and look after and feed five people, plus the extended family. In Baghdad alone there are 300,000 widows.

There is no welfare state or protection net. They are still relying on monthly food rations established under Saddam’s regime and which are still feeding 16 million Iraqis. The rations consist of a couple of kilos of lentils, sugar, baby milk, flour, oil for cooking.

End of Occupation

Crofts: Do you see a decline in violence if foreign troops exit Iraq?

Zangana: The end of the occupation is imminent. It’s only a matter of when and how. We read history and no occupation lasted forever. It is costing us lives and the Americans lives and the British lives. This is needless for all parties involved.

Al-Qaeda came with the occupation. If the foreign troops leave, the main reason for the violence will leave and perhaps we will have the chance to rebuild the country. This is the only solution for Iraq, America and the stability of the region.

Crofts: What role are the nongovernmental agencies playing in Iraq today?

Zangana: Most of the organizations are dealing from a distance, almost by remote control, from Syria, Jordan and even Egypt. Many pulled out after the explosion at the United Nations (U.N. headquarters in Baghdad’s Canal Hotel in August 2003). They are not really in touch except for Oxfam and the International Red Cross.

The Iraqi Red Crescent is doing a fantastic job, but doctors are targeted too. We have lost 80 percent of our medical staff. We are left with whoever has no choice but to stay.

“City of Widows: An Iraqi Woman’s Account of War and Resistance” is published by Seven Stories Press (150 pages, $20).

Hope is an orientation, a way of scanning the wall for cracks — or building ladders — rather than staring at its obdurate expanse. It’s a worldview, but one informed by experience and the knowledge that people have power; that the power people possess matters; that change has been made by populist movements and dedicated individuals in the past; and that it will be again.

Dissent in this country has become largely a culture of diagnosis rather than prescription, of describing what is wrong with them, rather than what is possible for us. But even in English, a robust minority tradition can be found. There are a handful of books that I think of as “the secret library of hope.” None of them deny the awful things going on, but they approach them as if the future is still open to intervention rather than an inevitability. In describing how the world actually gets changed, they give us the tools to change it again.

Here, then, are some of the regulars in my secret political library of hope, along with some new candidates:

Monks, Slaves, Prisoners and the Power from Beneath

When the monks of Burma/Myanmar led an insurrection in September simply by walking through the streets of their cities in their deep-red robes, accompanied by ever more members of civil society, the military junta which had run that country for more than four decades responded with violence. That’s one measure of how powerful and threatening the insurrection was. (That totalitarian regimes tend to ban gatherings of more than a few people is the best confirmation of the strength that exists in unarmed numbers of us.)

After the crackdown, after the visually stunning, deeply inspiring walks came to a bloody end, quite a lot of mainstream politicians and pundits pronounced the insurrection dead, violence triumphant — as though this play had just one act, as though its protagonists were naïve and weak-willed. I knew they were wrong, but the argument I rested on wasn’t my own: I went back to Jonathan Schell’s The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People, by far the most original and ambitious of the many histories of nonviolence to appear in recent years.

When it came out as the current war began in the spring of 2003, the book was mocked for its dismissal of the effectiveness of violence, but Schell’s explanation of how superior military power failed abysmally in Vietnam was a prophesy waiting to be fulfilled in Iraq. Schell himself is much taken with the philosopher Hannah Arendt, whom he quotes saying, in 1969:

“To substitute violence for power can bring victory, but the price is very high; for it is not only paid by the vanquished, it is also paid by the victor in terms of his own power.”

I hope that his equally trenchant explanation of the power of nonviolence is fulfilled in Burma. Schell has been a diligent historian and philosopher of nuclear weapons since his 1982 bestseller The Fate of the Earth, but this book traces the rise of nonviolence as the other half of the history of the violent twentieth century.

That’s what books in a library of hope consist of — not a denial of the horrors of recent history, but an exploration of the other tendencies, avenues, and achievements that are too often overlooked. After all, to return to Burma, much has already changed there since September: Burma’s greatest supporter, China, has been forced to denounce the crackdown and may be vulnerable to more pre-Olympics pressure on the subject; India has declared a moratorium on selling arms to the country; a number of companies have withdrawn from doing business there; and the U.S. Congress just unanimously passed a bill, HR 3890, to increase sanctions, freeze the junta’s assets in U.S. institutions, and close a loophole that allowed Chevron to profit spectacularly from its business in Burma.

Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi was elected as Burma’s head of state in 1990 and has, ever since, been under house arrest or otherwise restricted. She nonetheless remains the leader of, as well as a wise, gentle, fearless voice for, that country’s opposition. Since the uprising, her silencing has begun to dissolve amid meetings with a UN envoy and members of her own political party; some believe she may be on her way to being freed. The Burmese people were hit with hideous, pervasive violence, but they have not surrendered: small acts of resistance and large plans for liberation continue.

The best argument for hope is how easy it ought to be for the rest of us to raise its banner, when we look at who has carried it through unimaginably harsh conditions: Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom recounts his unflagging dedication to his country’s liberation (imperfect though it may still be); Rigoberta Menchu dodged death squads to become a champion of indigenous rights, a Nobel laureate, and a recent presidential candidate in Guatemala; Oscar Oliveira proved that a bunch of poor people in Bolivia can beat Bechtel Corporation largely by nonviolent means, as he recounts in !Cochabamba!; and Nobel Laureate and Burmese national icon Aung San Suu Kyi radiates — even from the page — an extraordinary calm and patience, perhaps the result of her decades of Buddhist practice. She remarks, toward the end of The Voice of Hope, a collection of conversations with her about Burma, Buddhism, politics, and her own situation, “Yes I do have hope because I’m working. I’m doing my bit to try to make the world a better place, so I naturally have hope for it. But obviously, those who are doing nothing to improve the world have no hope for it.”

For a book about those who did their bit beautifully long ago, don’t miss Adam Hochschild’s gripping Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves. It begins with a handful of London Quakers who decided in the 1780s to abolish the institution of slavery in the British Empire and then, step by unpredictable step, did just that. It’s an exhilarating book simply as the history of a movement from beginning to end, and so suggests how many other remarkable movements await their historian; others, from the women’s movement to rights for queers to many environmental struggles, still await their completion. If only people carried, as part of their standard equipment, a sense of the often-incremental, unpredictable ways in which change is wrought and the powers that civil society actually possesses, they might go forward more confidently to wrestle with the wrongs of our time, seeing that we have already won many times before.

Indians, Environmentalists, and Utopians

One spectacular book along these lines already exists: Charles Wilkinson’s Blood Struggle: The Rise of Modern Indian Nations. For us non-native people, Native Americans became far more visible during the huge public debates around the meaning of the Quincentennial of 1992 — the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in this hemisphere. They reframed the history of the Americas as one of invasion and genocide, rather than discovery and development. But the story was not a defeatist one; simply in being able to tell their own stories and reshape their histories, native people of the Americas demonstrated that they were neither wholly conquered, nor eradicated; and, since then, the history of the two continents has been radically revised and indigenous peoples have won back important rights from Bolivia to Canada.

In the United States that reclaiming of power, pride, land, rights, and representation began far earlier, as Wilkinson’s book relates. A law professor and lawyer who has worked on land and treaty-rights issues with many tribes, he begins his story of ascendancy with the 1953 decision by the U.S. government to “terminate” the tribal identities, organizations, and rights of Native Americans and push them to melt into the general population. This represented an aggressive attempt at erasure of the many distinct peoples of this continent and their heritage. Told to disappear, “Indian leaders responded and by the mid-1960s had set daunting goals… at once achieve economic progress and preserve ancient traditions in a technological age…. Against all odds, over the course of two generations, Indian leaders achieved their objectives to a stunning degree.”

Wilkinson’s monumental history of the past half-century concludes:

“By the turn of this century Indian tribes had put in place much of the ambitious agenda that tribal leaders advanced in the 1950s and 1960s. They stopped termination and replaced it with self-determination. They ousted the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] as the reservation government and installed their own sovereign legislatures, courts, and administrative agencies. They enforced the treaties of old and, with them, the fishing, hunting and water rights. Nowhere have these changes been absolute and pure. In most cases the advances represent works in progress, but they have been deep and real.”

Late this November, Canada set aside 25 million acres of boreal forest as a preserve to be managed, in part, by the Native peoples of the region, a huge environmental victory for the largest remaining forest on Earth — and for all of us. How did it happen?

I am still looking for an environmental history with the strength and focus of Blood Struggle or Bury the Chains. An exhilarating 2006 article in Orion magazine by Ted Nace describes how a bunch of North Dakota farmers killed off Monsanto’s plans to promote the growing of genetically altered wheat worldwide. The essay concludes:

“On May 10, 2004, Monsanto bowed to the prevailing political sentiment. It issued a curt press release announcing the withdrawal of all its pending regulatory applications for [its genetically altered] Roundup Ready wheat and the shifting of research priorities to other crops.”

We need books on victories like this, books that tell us how this dam was defeated, this river brought back from being a sewer, that toxin banned, that species rebounded, that land preserved.

In fact, a broader history with some of those threads did appear this year, geographer Richard Walker’s The Country in the City: The Greening of the San Francisco Bay Area. It describes generations of struggle to preserve something of the richness of this extraordinarily diverse region by defeating some of the most awful proposals most of us have never heard of — to, for example, completely fill in the San Francisco Bay — back in an era when water and wetlands were just real estate waiting to happen.

The book does justice to a whole unexpected category of unsung heroines — the often-subversive affluent ladies who have done so much for the environment and the community — then moves on to document the emerging environmental justice movement that took on toxins, polluters, and the overlooked question of what ecology really means for the inner city. It’s a great, hopeful history of a region that has long created environmental templates and momentum for the rest of the nation — and Walker makes it clear that this trend was not inevitable, but the result of hard work by stubborn visionaries and organizers.

A decade ago, Alan Weisman wrote a profile of a town in the inhospitable savannah of eastern Colombia, a miraculous community in which that unfortunate nation’s turmoil and our age’s environmental destruction was replaced by a green, utopian approach that involved reinventing the roles of both technology and community. It worked, though Weisman ended his 1997 book, Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World, on a prophetic note of caution:

“[The] fading of the Cold War has revealed clearly that a far more incandescent and protracted battle — a potentially apocalyptic resource war — has been stealthily gathering intensity throughout the latter part of the twentieth century…. Yet a place like Gaviotas bears witness to our ability to get it right, even under seemingly insurmountable circumstances.”

Weisman’s deservedly successful 2007 bestseller, The World Without Us, takes an extreme approach to getting it right, by showing how the planet might — in part — regenerate itself if we were to go away, all of us, for good. The chapters on nuclear waste and plastic are dauntingly grim, but the descriptions of New York City reverting to nature go two steps past Mike Davis’s Dead Cities in praise of entropy, weeds, and the power of natural processes to take back much of the Earth as soon as we let go.

While Gaviotas stands out as a rare, realized utopia, our choices among the unrealized ones — except as literature — are legion. In 2007, I finally got around to reading what has already become my favorite utopian novel: William Morris’ News from Nowhere. Best known during his life as a poet, Morris is, unfortunately, now mostly remembered for his wallpaper. He designed it as part of his lifelong endeavor to literally craft an alternative to the brutality and ugliness of the industrial revolution through the artisanal production of furniture, textiles, and books — all as models of what work and its fruits could be.

That attempt had its political and literary faces, which is to say that Morris was also a prolific writer and an ardent revolutionary. He was more anarchist than socialist, as well as an antiquarian, a translator of Icelandic sagas, and so much more. News from Nowhere, published in 1890, portrays his ideal London in the far-distant future of 2102, a century and a half after “the revolution of 1952.”

It’s a bioregional and anarchic paradise: The economy is localized, work is voluntary, money is nonexistent and so is hunger, deprivation, and prison. The industrial filth of London has vanished, and the river and city are beautiful again. (They were far filthier in Morris’ time, when every home burned coal, while sewage and industrial effluents flowed unfiltered into the Thames.)

Most utopias, of course, aren’t places you’d actually want to live. Admittedly, Morris’ is a little bland and mild, as life on earth without evil and struggle must be. But his utopia is prophetic, not dated, close to many modern visions of decentralized, localized power, culture, and everyday life. It is, in short, an old map for a new world being born in experiments around the globe.

Dreams on the Southern Horizon

Morris provided the name for the present-day News from Nowhere Collective, a group that has edited one of the more rambunctious handbooks for activists in recent times, We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism. A visually delicious, horizontally formatted little chunk of a book, it features a lot of photographs, a running timeline of radical victories in our era, and short, punchy essays from people immersed in changing the world all over that world (from Quebec and Nigeria to Bolivia and Poland). Playful, subversive, and far-reaching, the book — even four years after its publication — demonstrates the scope of constructive change and activism around the planet.

There are other such handbooks, including my brother David’s Globalize Liberation: How to Uproot the System and Build a Better World, out from City Lights Books a few years ago. It was in the course of editing some of the essays in that book that I discovered the beautiful, hopeful voice of Marina Sitrin, a sociologist, human rights lawyer, and activist who has spent a great deal of time among the utopian social movements of Argentina. Her encounters become ours in her new book Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina.

That country’s sudden economic collapse and political turmoil in December of 2001 was largely overlooked here, but the crisis begat an extraordinary grassroots response — about as far from shock and paralysis as you can imagine. Neighborhoods gathered in popular assemblies to protest the political structure, and then stayed together to feed each other during the fiscal crisis; factory workers took over shuttered factories and ran them as cooperatives; the poor organized and mobilized; but more than these concrete actions, Argentinean society itself changed.

People began to talk across old divides and create new words for what mattered now — none more valuable than horizontalidad, which Sitrin translates as “horizontalism,” a direct and radically egalitarian participatory democracy, and politica afectiva, the politics of affection, or love. The 2001 crisis was soon transformed into an opportunity to overcome the legacy of the terrifying years of the Argentinean military dictatorship, to step out of the isolation and disengagement that fear had produced, to reclaim power and reinvent social ties. With this, Argentina moved a little further away from hell and a little closer to utopia.

It’s not a coincidence that Weisman’s Gaviotas is in South America (though it is a surprise that it’s in Colombia). After all, the most powerful voice coming from the Spanish-speaking majority of the Americas is that of the Zapatistas, and Our Word Is Our Weapon: Selected Writings of Subcommandante Insurgente Marcos, edited by Juana Ponce de Leon, is still the best English-language introduction to that indigenous movement’s non-indigenous spokesman and raconteur Subcommandante Marcos. Via his poetic, playful, subversive, and ferociously hopeful manifestoes, tirades, allegories, and pranks, he has reinvented the language of politics, pushing off the drab shore of bureaucracy and cliché, sailing toward something rich and strange.

Ponce De Leon’s book, however, only covers the first several years of Marcos’s contributions. City Lights recently brought out his The Speed of Dreams: Selected Writings 2001-2007. On page 102, he advises an indigenous audience: “It is the hour of the word. So then, put the machete away, and continue to hone hope.” By page 349, he’s quoting a possibly fictional elderly couple in San Miguel Tzinacapan, who say, “The world is the size of our effort to change it.”

Not that all resistance, all hope, comes from the south. It can be found everywhere, or at least on many edges, margins, and in many overlooked zones — and one of the most exhilarating histories of it is The Many Headed-Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker. Their book traces a plethora of acts of resistance to capitalism, exploitation, authoritarianism and the generally sorry lot meted out to the poor in the eighteenth century. That resistance was exuberant, inventive, and occasionally ferocious, and it found its own utopias. The book begins with a 1609 shipwreck in Bermuda, in which the shipwrecked sailors and passengers begin to form their own convivial utopia that the Virginia Company forcibly disbanded. The Many Headed Hydra covers some of the same ground — and ocean routes — as Hochschild’s book, and they make good joint reading.

I wish Linebaugh’s The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All was out in time for this list, but look for it in February. (I read it in manuscript for the University of California Press, loved it, and learned a lot from it.) Beginning with Bush’s breach not just of the Constitution, but of Magna Carta’s grant of habeas corpus, Linebaugh returns to that moment at Runnymede when King John was forced to concede rights to England’s citizens. Linking that despot to the one in the White House, he ventures back and forth between the two times to explore the once evolving — and now revolving or maybe even regressing — territory of rights and liberties.

The Climate of Change

One thing becoming increasingly clear in this millennium: Human rights and the environment are all tangled up with each other — and not only in environmental injustice hotspots like Louisiana’s Cancer Alley or oily places like Nigeria. Democracy and an empowered citizenry are the best tools we have to make progress on climate change in this country. The issue of climate change may be global, but in the U.S. a lot of the measures that matter are being enacted on the local level by cities, towns, regions, and states. Together, they have pushed far ahead of the recalcitrant federal government in trying to take concrete measures that could make a difference. Global measures matter, but so do local ones: The change here is likely to come as much from the bottom up as the top down.

One common response to climate change is to try to limit your own impact — by consuming less. An issue, for instance, that’s front and center in Britain but hardly on the table in the U.S., is taking fewer airplane trips. (The state of California, however, did recently start looking into ways to regulate and reduce airplane carbon emissions.) So there’s personal virtue, which matters. Then there’s agitating and organizing like crazy, which might matter more. Certainly, Bill McKibben makes a rousing case for it in his introduction to Ignition: What You Can Do to Fight Global Warming and Spark a Movement. The book, edited by Jonathan Isham and Sissel Waage, covers a lot of ground when it comes to how policy gets made and how to make it yourself, as does McKibben’s own Fight Global Warming Now: The Handbook for Taking Action in Your Community.

Maybe the best news of 2007 is that we’re finally doing something about the worst news ever: that we’ve royally screwed up the climate of this planet. After all, the rest of that news is: We still have a chance to mitigate how haywire everything goes, even though no one is yet talking about what a world of low to zero carbon emissions would look like.

Maybe one thing we really need (just to be a little more visionary and less grim about the subject) is a modern version of News from Nowhere portraying what a good life involving only a small carbon footprint might mean — most likely a more localized, less consuming life with some cool technological innovations, including many we already have (some of which are described in Weisman’s Gaviotas). In ceasing the scramble for things, there would be real gains; we’d gain back time for sitting around talking at leisure about politics and the neighbors, for wandering around on foot — and for reading. But you don’t have to wait for everything to change: change it yourself by seizing these pleasures now.

Rebecca Solnit blurbed a lot of books this year, wrote the foreword for Marisa Handler’s Loyal to the Sky, and provided editorial services on another book of her brother’s, this time with conscientious objector Aimee Allison: the counter-recruitment manual Army of None. Her own book for 2007 is Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics, a collection of 36 essays including several that first appeared as Tomdispatches. She is the author of Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities.

Rebecca Solnit’s Secret Library of Hope:

Jonathan Schell, The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People;
Aung San Suu Kyi, The Voice of Hope;
Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves;
Charles Wilkinson, Blood Struggle: The Rise of Modern Indian Nations;
Richard Walker, The Country in the City: The Greening of the San Francisco Bay Area;
Alan Weisman, The World Without Us;
William Morris, News from Nowhere;
News from Nowhere Collective, We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism;
Marina Sitrin, Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina;
Subcommandante Insurgente Marcos, The Speed of Dreams: Selected Writings 2001-2007;
Peter Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All;
Jonathan Isham and Sissel Waage, editors (introduction Bill McKibben), Ignition: What You Can Do to Fight Global Warming and Spark a Movement.

The nation had been listless, while in the White House
All the shredders were shredding, fed by the Mouse.
The Department of Justice did not have a care,
Full knowing that Congress would never go there.

The Cabinet was smirking, with zero street creed,
While visions of dollarplums danced in their heads,
And Bush in his flight suit, Dick spewing crap,
Called for “the faithful” to cover their back.

When from out on the lawn there arose such a clatter –
‘Twas an army of citizens (as if THEY would matter ! )
Junior and Cheney were up in a flash,
And out the back exit they hustled their trash.

Trucks took the shredding away to a dump.
And Junior was giggling, like a lame frat-boy chump.
When, what to their wondering eyes should appear,
But Statuesque Liberty… and for all to hear

She roared at the duo: that they made her SICK
The scoundrels, they trembled (especially Dick).
And, with her bald eagle, she barked out the blame,
At appointees and annointees, she called them by name.

“Out, Dubya! Out, Cheney! Out, Rice and Mukasey!
Out all you enablers, crooked and lazy.
You’ve ruined our nation, with your greed and your gall!
Now move away! Get away! Run away all ! ”

Junior was frightened. He squealed like a sow.
Cheney repeated “Feets, fail me not now!”
So into the White House, they ran and they hid.
They both called their lawyers. What lies would they bid?

But then, in a twinkling, they saw in the hall
A figure approaching, in red, he stood tall.
He had a white beard, wore a star spangled hat….
And he sneered at the duo… “Now Uncle’s at bat!”

He was dressed in our flag, from his head to his feet,
But our flag was all tattered from lies and deceit.
And he stared at the culprits… “You Boys know who I am?”
They both dumbly nodded. Then said Uncle Sam:

“To the heart of our laws, you have turned a deaf ear.
You’ve squandered our power. You’ve made people fear
For their lives and their families. You’ve tortured the facts.
And innocent people… you Criminal Hacks.”

Then Sam went still further, rolled paper in hand.
“It’s OUR Constitution! OUR law, for OUR land!
This land isn’t your land. This land isn’t mine.
It belongs to the people. And you’re out of line!

“They’ll no longer listen to vows learned by rote.
In next year’s election, they’ll turn out and vote.
They’ll fix up this nation. They’ll bring freedom back.
You’ll no longer torture. We’re out of Iraq!”

Old Dick tried to argue, but as the Veep rose
Sam launched a Left, right upside Cheney’s nose.
While Bush began spinning, and whined in a swirl
Sam opened the window and spoke to the world:

“Mind Yer Old Uncle! Ms. Liberty, too.
We’ll be back in ‘08, with OUR wrecking crew.”
And the people all cheered as Sam called through the night:
“Don’t give up on freedom. Don’t give up this fight!”

I was so relieved when the Eid passed without dramatic incidents, I was glad that the 50 explosive car attack was just a rumor, thank god that no innocents were killed and Iraqis were able to celebrate their holidays without tragedies.

I was watching TV few days ago when I saw a show that really got my attention, it was on Alarabyia satellite news channel, it was about how AlQaeda had a great influence inside the American jails in Iraq and there was statements from witnesses who were prisoners in these jails, they described how the conditions are, and what is really happening there, it was a real shock to me ….. here is a small part of the show ….. I’ll write about the important things they mentioned ….. I haven’t translated it in the video but I’ll talk about many thing that they said ….. they brought four witnesses and they talked about things I didn’t think was possible, and I believe many don’t know these things too.

Alqaeda is in total control over the American prisons, they have organized cells, they sentence people (prisoners) by laws they make, they kill and torture and there is nothing anyone can do, they even have swords which they use to chop prisoners and cut their heads, they have a Jihad prince who is guarded by many members, who gives orders like he is an army general.

This is the season of frenetic shopping, but for a devious few people it’s also the season of spirited shopdropping.

Otherwise known as reverse shoplifting, shopdropping involves surreptitiously putting things in stores, rather than illegally taking them out, and the motivations vary.

Anti-consumerist artists slip replica products packaged with political messages onto shelves while religious proselytizers insert pamphlets between the pages of gay-and-lesbian readings at book stores.

Self-published authors sneak their works into the “new releases” section, while personal trainers put their business cards into weight-loss books, and aspiring professional photographers make homemade cards — their Web site address included, of course — and covertly plant them into stationery-store racks.

“Everyone else is pushing their product, so why shouldn’t we?” said Jeff Eyrich, a producer for several independent bands, who puts stacks of his bands’ CDs — marked “free” — on music racks at Starbucks whenever the cashiers look away.

Though not new, shopdropping has grown in popularity in recent years, especially as artists have gathered to swap tactics at Web sites like Shopdropping.net, and groups like the Anti-Advertising Agency, a political art collective, do training workshops open to the public.

Retailers fear the practice may annoy shoppers and raise legal or safety concerns, particularly when it involves children’s toys or trademarked products.

“Our goal at all times is to provide comfortable and distraction-free shopping,” said Bethany Zucco, a spokeswoman for Target. “We think this type of activity would certainly not contribute to that goal.” She said she did not know of any shopdropping at Target stores.

But Packard Jennings does. An artist who lives in Oakland, Calif., he said that for the last seven months he had been working on a new batch of his Anarchist action figure that he began shopdropping this week at Target and Wal-Mart stores in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“When better than Christmas to make a point about hyper-consumerism?” asked Mr. Jennings, 37, whose action figure comes with tiny accessories including a gas mask, bolt cutter, and two Molotov cocktails, and looks convincingly like any other doll on most toy-store shelves. Putting it in stores and filming people as they try to buy it as they interact with store clerks, Mr. Jennings said he hoped to show that even radical ideology gets commercialized. He said for safety reasons he retrieves the figures before customers take them home.

Jason Brody, lead singer for an independent pop-rock band in the East Village, said his group recently altered its shopdropping tactics to cater to the holiday rush.

Normally the band, the Death of Jason Brody, slips promotional CD singles between the pages of The Village Voice newspaper and into the racks at large music stores. But lately, band members have been slipping into department stores and putting stickers with logos for trendy designers like Diesel, John Varvatos and 7 for All Mankind on their CDs, which they then slip into the pockets of designer jeans or place on counters.

“Bloomingdale’s and 7 for All Mankind present the Death of Jason Brody, our pick for New York band to watch in 2008,” read a sticker on one of the CDs placed near a register at Bloomingdales. “As thanks for trying us on, we’re giving you this special holiday gift.” Bloomingdales and 7 for All Mankind declined to comment.

For pet store owners, the holidays usher in a form of shopdropping with a touch of buyer’s remorse. What seemed like a cute gift idea at the time can end up being dumped back at a store, left discretely to roam the aisles.

“After Easter, there’s a wave of bunnies; after Halloween, it’s black cats; after Christmas, it’s puppies,” said Don Cowan, a spokesman for the store chain Petco, which in the month after each of those holidays sees 100 to 150 pets abandoned in its aisles or left after hours in cages in front of stores. Snakes have been left in crates, mice and hamsters surreptitiously dropped in dry aquariums, even a donkey left behind after a store’s annual pet talent show, Mr. Cowan said.

Bookstores are especially popular for self-promotion and religious types of shopdropping.

At BookPeople in Austin, Tex., local authors have been putting bookmarks advertising their own works in books on similar topics. At Mac’s Backs Paperbacks, a used bookstore in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, employees are dealing with the influx of shopdropped works by local poets and playwrights by putting a price tag on them and leaving them on the shelves.

At Powell’s Books in Portland, Ore., religious groups have been hitting the magazines in the science section with fliers featuring Christian cartoons, while their adversaries have been moving Bibles from the religion section to the fantasy/science-fiction section.

This week an arts group in Oakland, the Center for Tactical Magic, began shopdropping neatly folded stacks of homemade T-shirts into Wal-Mart and Target stores in the San Francisco Bay Area. The shirts feature radical images and slogans like one with the faces of Karl Marx, Che Guevara and Mikhail Bakunin, a Russian anarchist. It says, “Peace on Earth. After we overthrow capitalism.”

“Our point is to put a message, not a price tag, on them,” said Aaron Gach, 33, a spokesman for the group.

Mr. Jennings’s anarchist action figure met with a befuddled reaction from a Target store manager on Wednesday in El Cerrito, Calif.

“I don’t think this is a product that we sell,” the manager said as Mr. Jennings pretended to be a customer trying to buy it. “It’s definitely antifamily, which is not what Target is about.”

One of the first reports of shopdropping was in 1989, when a group called the Barbie Liberation Organization sought to make a point about sexism in children’s toys by swapping the voice hardware of Barbie dolls with those in GI Joe figures before putting the dolls back on store shelves.

Scott Wolfson, a spokesman for the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission, said he was not sure if shopdropping was illegal but that some forms of it could raise safety concerns because the items left on store shelves might not abide by labeling requirements and federal safety standards.

Ryan Watkins-Hughes, 28, a photographer from Brooklyn, teamed up with four other artists to shopdrop canned goods with altered labels at Whole Foods stores in New York City this week. “In the holidays, people get into this head-down, plow-through-the-shopping autopilot mode,” Mr. Watkins-Hughes said “‘I got to get a dress for Cindy, get a stereo for Uncle John, go buy canned goods for the charity drive and get back home.’”

“Warhol took the can into the gallery. We bring the art to the can,” he said, adding that the labels consisted of photographs of places he had traveled combined with the can’s original bar code so that people could still buy them.

It has been 21 months since John Mearsheimer and Steve Walt published their article “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” in The London Review of Books and four months since their publication of a book by the same name. Their main arguments are that unconditional U.S. support for the Israeli government has harmed U.S. interests in the Middle East and that American organizations allied with the Israeli government have been the primary influence regarding the orientation of U.S. Middle East policy. As a political scientist and international relations scholar specializing in the United States role in the Middle East, I certainly had no disagreements with their first contention. I took strong exception to their second, however.

There is no denying that the Israel Lobby can be quite influential, particularly on Capitol Hill and in its role in limiting the broader public debate. However, I found it incredibly naïve to assume that U.S. policy in the Middle East would be significantly different without AIPAC and like-minded pro-Zionist organizations. In response to what I saw as a rather simplistic and reductionist understanding of U.S. foreign policy by these prominent center-right international relations scholars, I wrote the article The Israel Lobby: How Powerful is It Really?

While most the criticisms of Mearsheimer and Walt’s article came from right-wing apologists of the Israeli government, many long-time critics of U.S. support for Israeli occupation, repression, colonization and related policies against their neighbors raised concerns as well. My article became one of the more widely-circulated and detailed critiques from the left.

My analysis drew profoundly negative reaction from those who insisted that it was not oil interests, military contractors, ideological imperialists, and related powerful sectors of America’s ruling class who were responsible for the U.S. invasion of Iraq and other tragic manifestations of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, but was instead the responsibility of a rich cabal of Jews who manipulated the Bush administration to engage in policies it would not have otherwise supported. I was denounced for propagating left-wing “lies” and “myths” by examining some of the broader structural, ideological, economic and institutional inherencies in U.S. foreign policy instead of acknowledging that it was all the fault of the Jews.

Just as the hysterical reaction from right-wing Zionist circles seemed to some to vindicate Mearsheimer and Walt’s arguments that an all-powerful Israel Lobby stifles legitimate debate about U.S. policy toward Israel and the broader Middle East, the reaction to my critique seemed to some to vindicate the notion that those who put the blame on the Israel Lobby are prone to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

Mearsheimer and Walt’s book certainly does not fall into the anti-Semitic rants of many of their supporters. Like their original article, however, the book is still fundamentally flawed.

Simplistic Understanding

The Israel Lobby is seemingly powerful because it converges with more powerful interests driving U.S. policy, particularly the drive for hegemonic domination of the oil-rich Persian Gulf. Even when the Lobby was significantly weaker than it is now, U.S. foreign policy toward the Middle East was the largely the same.

Mearsheimer and Walt, along with their defenders, fail to make the distinction between the undeniable impact the Lobby has had on limiting debate regarding U.S. policy toward Israel and the assertion that it is the major defining force behind U.S. policy in the Middle East. As Professor Joseph Massad at Columbia University – who has been subjected to vicious attacks from right-wing Zionist groups – puts it, the Israel Lobby is responsible for “the details and intensity but not the direction, content, or impact of such policies.” Indeed, as I pointed out in my original article, U.S. policy toward both Israel/Palestine and the region as a whole is quite consistent with U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America, Southern Africa, Southeast Asia and elsewhere. The consequences are more serious for Americans at home (for example, no Vietnamese or Nicaraguans ever flew airplanes into buildings), but they are not fundamentally different.

Any serious review of U.S. foreign policy in virtually every corner of the globe demonstrates how the United States props up dictatorships, imposes blatant double-standards regarding human rights and international law, supports foreign military occupations (witness East Timor and Western Sahara), undermines the authority of the UN, pushes for military solutions to political problems, transfers massive quantities of armaments, imposes draconian austerity programs on debt-ridden countries through international financial institutions, and periodically bombs, imposes sanctions, stages coups, and invades countries that don’t accept U.S. hegemony. If U.S. policy toward the Middle East was fundamentally different than it has been toward the rest of the world, Mearsheimer and Walt would have every right to look for some other sinister force leading the United States astray from its otherwise benign foreign policy agenda.

In many respects, their argument is nothing new. A small group of former State Department officials and former Republican congressmen at such publications as the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and organizations like the Center for the National Interest shares Mearsheimer and Walt’s critique of U.S. Middle East policy and their failure to acknowledge the nature of America’s hegemonic designs in the region and beyond. As political scientist Asad AbuKhalil – the self-described “angry Arab” currently serving as a visiting professor at the University of California in Berkeley – describes it, such analysis “absolves the Bush administration, any administration, from any responsibility because they become portrayed as helpless victims of an all-powerful lobby.”

I have been familiar with the work of Mearsheimer and Walt for many years. Professor Mearsheimer and I both received our doctorates from Cornell University’s Department of Government (which, incidentally, did not offer a single course dealing with the Middle East.) They are considered two of the countries leading scholars in the field of international relations from the “realist” tradition. While I do not believe they are motivated by a conscious anti-Semitism or any innate hostility toward Israel, their perspective has nevertheless been compromised by another kind of ideological bias.

As political scientists, Mearsheimer and Walt should recognize that American foreign policy is a result of a complex mix of ideological prejudices, bureaucratic processes, domestic politics, group-think, and more. The interplay of these different factors has been the subject of some of the most acclaimed studies of the discipline, including Graham Allison’s Essence of Decision, regarding the decision-making within the Kennedy administration during the Cuban missile crisis (which, ironically, is the first book Stephen Walt reportedly read as a graduate student at Berkeley.)

Putting most of the blame on the Israel Lobby is reductionism at its worst, taking just one vector of power and influence and turning into a monocausal theory. It is overly simplistic in that it embraces a naively pluralistic understanding of political power, denying the deeper power structures that drive U.S. policy in the Middle East. Indeed, I wish their analysis were correct, since a single, powerful lobby would be a much simpler problem to overcome.

Both authors blindly accept a number of naíve and demonstrably false assumptions regarding America’s role in the world. For example, they assert that the foreign policy of the United States — the world’s number one arms supplier for dictatorial regimes — “…is designed to promote democracy abroad” and the U.S. effort to spread democracy throughout the Middle East “has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion.” The reality, of course, is just the opposite: it has been U.S. support for the majority of the dictatorships in that part of the world that has primarily contributed to anti-American sentiment.

According to the disturbing nativism implied in Mearsheimer and Walt’s thesis, foreigners and those allied to their interest by ethnic or ideological connections undermine the benign instincts of America’s leaders. In doing so, the two analysts create an artificial duality with the Israel lobby on one side and U.S. national interest on the other. As such, if the pursuit of certain policies ends up being bad for the United States, it must have been the result of those with ulterior motives forcing American leaders to do so, not the well-documented hubris of the current administration. In defense of Bush, whom they insist has “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind,” they ignore his stubborn resistance to any facts that contradict his rigid ideological convictions, his choice to ignore public opinion calling for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq and other changes in policies, and his dismissal of the opinions of allies whose support is so crucially needed in these dangerous times.

Iraq

In an article published four weeks prior to the start of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in the monthly magazine Tikkun, I predicted that sooner or later, the American public would realize that a U.S. invasion of Iraq had been a disaster. I also argued that there might be some in the foreign policy establishment who would revert to the time-honored tradition of blaming the Jews as a means of deflecting attention away from those who really have power in order to avoid a critical re-evaluation of America’s role in the world.

Sure enough, as public opinion polls show more and more Americans are recognizing that the Iraq War was essentially about oil, Mearsheimer and Walt – in defense of the foreign policy establishment they have served so well – are eager to shift attention toward nefarious foreign-influenced forces as being responsible for the Bush administration’s disastrous decision to invade and occupy Iraq. In reality, however, while guilty of advocating many immoral, illegal and dangerous policies over the years, the Israel Lobby was not a major factor in the decision to go to war.

Not only have there been a plethora of books and articles on the decision-making in the lead-up to the war in which it appears that Israel was not a major factor, it has since been revealed that then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon specifically warned Bush against occupying Iraq or invading Iraq without an exit strategy. The Israeli prime minister also feared that an insurgency could radicalize the region and spill over Iraq’s borders. Israeli Ambassador to the United States Danny Ayalon was even instructed by Sharon to tell visiting Israelis not to encourage a U.S. invasion of Iraq for fear that its likely failure would be blamed on Israel. Israeli officials also warned the Bush administration that invading Iraq could destabilize the region, in large part due to concern that it would strengthen Iran, which the Israelis considered the primary threat. For example, in a visit to Washington in February 2002, both Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his Defense Minister Fouad Ben-Eliezer emphasized their concern that “Iran is more dangerous than Iraq.”

Indeed, as far back as the aftermath of the 1991 war, the head of the Israeli military intelligence revealed in an interview that Iraq was no longer a threat to Israel.

Interestingly, Mearsheimer and Walt acknowledge that the Israelis were initially skeptical about the administration’s obsession with “regime change” in Iraq, and they present very little evidence of active support by the Lobby for the war. At most, they point out that mainstream U.S. Zionist leaders “refused to speak out.” Indeed, a careful reading of their book reveals that they present no real evidence that Israel was the principal backer of long-planned invasion. Israeli officials came on board only after the decision had been made, apparently with the promise that Iran would become the next target. In other words, the Israeli government and the Israel Lobby were willing to use their clout to help their friends in the White House garner support from the public and Congress for a decision which the Bush administration had already made on its own. Given Bush’s strong support for Israel’s acts of aggression, they were willing to return the favor. This is very different, however, than somehow being responsible for the decision itself.

The Role of Neoconservatives

Mearsheimer and Walt highlight what they claim to be the affinity for Israel by influential neo-conservatives as a major factor in the U.S. decision to invade Iraq. In particular, they cite the efforts of the neo-cons behind the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). In reality, however, those who made up PNAC and other neo-conservatives opposed Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq because they feared it would challenge U.S. hegemony in the region, which was always their priority. For example, in the introduction to the influential 2000 PNAC report Rebuilding America’s Defenses, they explicitly spelled out the neo-conservative agenda: “At present the United States faces no global rival. America’s grand strategy should aim to preserve and expand this advantageous position as far into the future as possible.” The strong support by PNAC members and other neo-cons of Israel only goes as far as they see American and Israeli interests converging. They have not been major supporters of Israel, for example, when the right-wing has not been in power there. And even under the rightist prime minister Ariel Sharon, most Israeli government officials – with a few notable exceptions – saw Israel’s political and strategic interests at odds with the grandiose American neo-conservative designs on Iraq.

Indeed, the Defense Guidance Plan of 1992, rejected by the senior Bush administration as being too extreme but adopted in large part by his son’s administration, also makes clear that the primary concerns of the neo-conservatives was advancing U.S. hegemony, not supporting Israel. The role for Israel, at least under its right-wing governments, was as an important ally in that struggle for American primacy in the Middle East and beyond, but not the main focus, which they spelled out quite clearly: “In the Middle East and Southwest Asia, our overall objective is to remain the preeminent outside power in the region and preserve US and Western access to the region’s oil.”

The evolution of PNAC is based on – in the words of their initial statement of principles – “A Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity.” Throughout the group’s published statements, American primacy, not Israeli primacy, is their focus. Mearsheimer and Walt cite the 1996 paper written for a right-wing Israeli think tank by two leading American Jewish neo-cons – Douglas Feith and David Wurmser – which encouraged Israel to make a “clean break” with the Oslo Peace Process and rely more on force to advance its objectives, including the removal of Saddam Hussein. However, if one actually reads the paper, it is a clear call for Israel to break from the U.S.-led peace process and the perceived restraints on Israeli actions by the U.S. government, then under the leadership of the more moderate Clinton administration. It was not a call for the United States to take risky initiatives at the behest of Israel. Similarly, the paper demonstrates how, rather than being a case of the Israelis getting the neo-cons to pressure the United States to change its policies to a more hard-line position, it was American neo-cons pressuring Israel to change its policies to a more hard-line position.

The people behind PNAC and other neo-conservatives were indeed allied with more traditional conservatives like former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney to push the United States to take a more assertive position in the region. This was not in support of Israel, but to establish “full spectrum dominance” by the United States over any international or regional rival, in the Middle East or anywhere else. For example, Feith, frequently cited as someone supposedly willing to put Israel’s interests ahead of America’s, used his post as under-secretary of defense for policy during the first term of the Bush administration to sanction and eventually order the purge of top Israeli Defense officials, over the protests of the Israeli government, for their decision to upgrade Harpy drones for China, which the Bush administration deemed a threat to U.S. strategic dominance in East Asia.

In any case, the neo-conservatives were not nearly as “profoundly important” as Mearsheimer and Walt pretend they are in shaping U.S. Middle East policy under the current Bush administration. Their primary role has been to provide the intellectual framework and rationalizations for policies – motivated by a number of strategic, economic and ideological factors – that would likely have been pursued in any case.
Indeed, one of the major fallacies of Walt and Mearsheimer’s book is the assumption that access and connections equal control over policy. For example, they describe in detail the activities of pro-Israel think tanks like the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), emphasizing how WINEP has employed a number of former government officials. They are unclear as to how these activities translate into influence on policy, however, or how this translates into influence on the president or secretary of state, or any other key decision-maker. An influential group may convince a president to appoint one of their people to an assistant secretary position in the Defense Department or State Department, but that doesn’t mean they control policy, which is ultimately determined by the president and others at the top, who make their decisions based on what they – rightly or wrongly – believe to be in the best interest of the United States.

Other Middle East Policies

There are also serious questions regarding Mearsheimer and Walt’s argument that, were the Lobby not so powerful, U.S. policy toward the region would somehow be “more temperate,” as if the United States has pursued temperate policies in Central America, Southeast Asia, and other regions where perceived strategic, geopolitical and economic interests were at stake. For example, they insist that without the Lobby, “the United States would almost certainly have a different and more effective Iran Policy,” ignoring the Bush administration’s propensity to take similarly rigid and uncompromising posture toward Cuba and other so-called “rogue states.”

Mearsheimer and Walt blame U.S. support for Israel’s war on Lebanon during the summer of 2006 as another example of the Lobby’s power, ignoring that it was the United States that pushed Israel to attack Lebanon in the first place as a proxy war against Iran and Syria. Indeed, the desperate effort by the Bush administration to blame the Iranian and Syrian governments for the conflict illustrates that U.S. support for the Israeli offensive – which ended up being a major strategic setback for the Israelis – was motivated primarily by perceived U.S. regional interests than by concern for Israel’s right to self-defense.

Similarly, a strong case can be made that the United States’ unremitting hostility toward Hamas playing any role in Palestinian self-governance is less a reflection of the power of the Lobby than, as with the case of Hezbollah in Lebanon, it is of the U.S. obsession with preventing any anti-American Islamist group in the Middle East from exercising effective governance.

There is no question that the Israel Lobby has worked hard and largely successfully to garner congressional support, even from otherwise liberal Democrats, to support the Bush administration in its policies towards Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran. However, Mearsheimer and Walt have yet to make a convincing case that the Bush administration’s policies towards these and other Middle Eastern countries would be very different without it.

The Lobby and Israel Policy

As I acknowledged in my original article, the Israel Lobby is far more influential regarding U.S. policy toward Israel than in the broader Middle East, but Mearsheimer and Walt grossly exaggerate their role regarding U.S.-Israeli relations as well.

The authors are particularly inaccurate in their assessment regarding the influence of the Lobby on the executive branch, which is primarily responsible for foreign policy, where lobbyists of all kinds tend to have less influence than they do in Congress. For example, the two presidents who most dramatically shifted U.S. policy in a more “pro-Israel” direction were Richard Nixon and George W. Bush, who were less dependent on Jewish voters and campaign contributions from pro-Israel Political Action Committees (PACs) and individuals than any modern presidents. Nixon’s tilt toward Israel was a result of his belief that that country, having proven itself more powerful than any combination of Arab armies in the 1967 war, would be an important Cold War asset. In a similar vein, Bush has seen Israel’s right-wing government as a natural ally in his “war on terror.”

The U.S.-Israeli alliance is based primarily on strategic considerations rather than a powerful lobby. In my original critique, I cited a number of examples illustrating that whenever the president has deemed U.S. interests to be at variance with Israeli interests, U.S. national interest has prevailed. More recent examples include President Bush successfully blocking Israel’s lucrative plan to upgrade Venezuela’s F-16 fighters and his refusal to provide massive financial “compensation” for Israel’s disengagement from the occupied Gaza Strip and possible further disengagements from the West Bank.

Of course, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and related groups have been primarily responsible for Congress passing a number of resolutions by overwhelming bipartisan majorities every session declaring its support for particular Israeli policies, including defending and covering up for blatant Israeli violations of international humanitarian law. However, virtually all of these are non-binding resolutions. When AIPAC has tried to get Congress to force the president’s hand through binding legislation – such as the periodic attempts mandating that the United States move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem – they almost always fail.

One of the major arguments regarding the supposed power of the Lobby is through the contributions of its allied political action committees (PAC). In 2006, “pro-Israel” PACs and individuals are estimated to have contributed more than $9 million to party coffers and Congressional campaigns. While that is certainly a significant amount, it ranks significantly below that of PACs and individuals supporting the interests of lawyers ($58 million), retirees ($36 million), the real estate industry ($33 million), health professionals ($32 million), securities and investment firms ($29 million), the insurance industry ($21 million), commercial banks ($16 million), the pharmaceutical industry ($14 million), electrical utilities ($12 million), the oil and gas industry ($11 million), and the computer industry ($10 million), among others. Even contributions given in support of unions representing public sector workers, the building trades, and transportation workers each were significantly higher than the total contributions given in support of the Israeli government. Indeed, if political contributions made that big a difference, one would assume that – given that nine of the top 20 PACs are affiliated with labor unions – U.S. government policy would be solidly behind working people and far more hostile to the interests of powerful corporations. In any case, with rare exceptions, PACs allied with the Israel Lobby generally do not contribute more than 10% of the total amount raised by a given campaign.

True, there are cases when members of Congress critical of unconditional U.S. support for Israeli policies lost re-election bids – such as Rep. Paul Findley and Rep. Cynthia McKinney. But, as I illustrated in my original article there were other far more significant sources of support for opponents and reasons for their defeat than the “pro-Israel” PACs. Furthermore, it is important to note that the vast majority of House members who refuse to follow AIPAC’s line are easily re-elected. For example, every Democratic member of Congress who refused to support the July 2006 House resolution supporting Israel’s attacks on Lebanon, subjected to vigorous lobbying by AIPAC, was re-elected by a larger margin than they were two years earlier.

It is also important to recognize the broad array of interests that find it advantageous to exaggerate the Lobby’s power. Some members of Congress and their aides want to deflect criticism from progressive constituents opposed to their support for the occupation and other Israeli policies. Some foreign service officers want to do the same to foreign leaders by making the U.S. government appear to be a hostage to special interests beyond the administration’s control. There are also the constituent components of the Lobby itself, which find it useful for fundraising purposes and as a means of intimidating members of Congress. There are Jews who find the idea of having such power and influence a liberating antidote to centuries of oppression. And, of course, there are bigots who find the exaggeration of Jewish power and influence a highly-effective means of spreading their anti-Semitic ideology.

As a result, while it is important to acknowledge where the Israel Lobby does indeed have clout, it is also important to be wary of the multiplicity of reasons why so many people would, consciously or unconsciously, tend to overstate its influence.

Consistency in Policy

A number of examples given by Mearsheimer and Walt regarding the unique influence of the Israel Lobby when, examined more closely, do not appear to be unique at all.

One example they give of the Lobby’s supposed power was the failure of the Bush administration to more harshly criticize the Israeli government for ordering a missile strike on the home of a Hamas leader in June 2003. Yet, U.S. support for the assassinations of alleged terrorist leaders is not a policy that comes about as a result of Israeli influence. For example, earlier that year, the U.S. government itself ordered a missile attack on an automobile in Yemen that killed an alleged al-Qaeda leader and five others.

Mearsheimer and Walt also claim that the failure of the United States to follow through on previous U.S. commitments to enforce a promised Israeli freeze on its illegal settlements in the West Bank was a response to pressure by the Lobby, ignoring the fact that the United States has never pressured Turkey, Morocco, or Indonesia to freeze their settlements in their occupied territories, which are also illegal.

The authors try to make the case that more moderate elements within the administration, such as Secretary of State Powell, lost out to hardliners like Cheney and Rumsfeld on policy decisions involving Israel as a result of pressure from the Israel Lobby. Rather than being proof of the power of the Lobby, however, it is more accurately just one of many examples in which Powell came out on the losing end of power struggles within the administration, most of which involved issues unrelated to Israel. In addition, the authors fail to consider that Cheney and Rumsfeld might have been motivated by their own ideological preconceptions.

This underscores another major fallacy of Mearsheimer and Walt: their claim that, “For past several decades, the centerpiece of U.S. Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with Israel.” Any serious look at U.S. diplomatic history in the region, however, underscores the primacy of access to Persian Gulf oil as well as support for strategic allies – of which Israel is perceived to be the most important, but not the only one – to counter Communist and left-wing nationalist forces in earlier decades and, more recently, anti-American Islamic extremism. Instead of recognizing that the United States uses Israel to strengthen its domination of the region, however, Mearsheimer and Walt insist that it is the other way around. In one sense, it is not an either/or proposition. As the leftist Israeli journalist Uri Avnery put is, “The U.S. uses Israel to dominate the Middle East, Israel uses the U.S. to dominate Palestine.” It is a quid pro quo the United States is quite willing to accept. Mearsheimer and Walt are essentially correct in observing that the United States doesn’t gain much by Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians. But history shows it hasn’t actually significantly hurt U.S. relations with its Arab allies, who are quite willing to give lip service to the Palestinian cause but see maintaining a close strategic relationship with the United States as more important. While Mearsheimer and Walt are certainly correct that U.S. support for the Israeli government has greatly harmed popular perceptions of the United States within the Arab and Islamic world and has contributed to the rise of anti-American extremism, the failure of the U.S. government to be more sensitive to this fact is more a reflection of the longstanding historic tendency to downplay the importance of the masses relative to their governments than an example of the Israel Lobby somehow forcing the United States to pursue policies against its own interests.

Corporate Influences in Israel Policy

In their lengthy book, Mearsheimer and Walt largely ignore the influence of the military-industrial complex in the close U.S.-Israeli relationship. For example, the authors note that “The US has provided Israel with nearly $3 billion to develop weapons systems, and given it access to such to-drawer weaponry as Blackhawk helicopters and F-16 jets…,” with the assumption that this is the result of the Israel Lobby. They fail to mention, however, that Sikorsky, manufacturers of Black Hawk helicopters, lobbied vigorously for these arms transfers and that Lockheed Martin, manufacturer of the F-16s and the nation’s largest defense contractor, donated more than $1 million to the campaigns of members of relevant Congressional committees alone. Both companies have a “revolving door” relationship with Pentagon, as former top procurement officers are immediately offered lucrative jobs upon their retirement to lobby their former colleagues.

Mearsheimer and Walt downplay this role of American arms manufacturers by noting that Israel is allowed to spend up to one-quarter of its military aid domestically. However, even that 75% is far more than any other country receives. Even “domestic” Israeli arms production involves the purchase of American parts and includes lucrative partnerships with American firms. Furthermore, this U.S. military assistance to Israel makes it possible for the United States to then sell arms to Arab countries concerned about countering perceived strategic vulnerabilities as a result of Israeli procurement of American armaments.

The combined U.S. foreign aid currently provided to the governments of Egypt and Colombia, which – like the Israeli government – engage in serious human rights abuses, is close to the amount of aid received by the Israeli government. Yet neither of these two countries has a massive lobby working on its behalf or an influential ethnic community that identifies with those states.

It is also important to note that the United States spends far more money to fund its far-flung bases in the Arab world than it does to support Israel and that Americans spend 50 times as much annually on the war in Iraq than on aid to Israel.
Similarly, while the authors are quick to note how a number of think tanks supportive of a militaristic U.S. policy have a disproportionate number of Jews in influential positions, they fail to mention that their boards of directors also include non-Jewish representatives from major arms manufacturers such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Cypress International, which presumably have other motivations for supporting a militaristic U.S. policy in the Middle East.

The Role of Ideology

Another factor overlooked by Mearsheimer and Walt is the role of ideology and prejudice. Most detailed studies of the Bush White House, for example, reveal that the president has a genuine ideological affinity with Israel, which he has spoken of publicly on a number of occasions. And such a bias is not just among right-wing fundamentalist Christians like Bush.

The sentimental attachment many Americans – particularly liberals of the post-World War II generation – have for Israel should not be underestimated and goes a long way in explaining why so many otherwise liberal members of Congress and other influential left-of-center voices take positions that even within Israel itself would be considered to be on the right-wing of the political spectrum. There is a great appreciation for Israel’s internal democracy, progressive social institutions (such as the kibbutzim), the relatively high level of social equality, and Israel’s important role as a sanctuary for an oppressed minority group that spent centuries in the Diaspora. Through a mixture of guilt regarding Western anti-Semitism, personal friendships with Jewish Americans who identify strongly with Israel, and fear of inadvertently encouraging anti-Semitism by criticizing Israel, American liberals show an enormous reluctance to acknowledge the seriousness of Israeli violations of human rights and international law. Many American liberals of this generation have an idealist view of Israel that is both as sincere and inaccurate as the idealized view of Stalin’s Russia embraced by an earlier generation of American leftists or that of various Third World revolutionary regimes by many in my generation. To many Americans who are middle aged and older, Israel is still seen as it was portrayed in the idealized and romanticized 1960 movie Exodus, starring a young Paul Newman.

Contributing to this view is the widespread racism in American society against Arabs and Muslims, often encouraged in the media. Such racist attitudes toward Arab and Muslim peoples (i.e., the only language they understand is force), particularly since 9/11, is a phenomenon that – while certainly encouraged by elements of the Israel Lobby – has unfortunately been deeply rooted in American society, and Western culture in general, for centuries. This is compounded by the identification many Americans have with Zionism in the Middle East as a reflection of their own historical experience in North America as immigrants and pioneers. In both cases, European migrants – many of whom were escaping religious persecution – built a new a nation based upon noble, idealistic values while simultaneously suppressing and expelling the indigenous population seen as violent and “primitive.” The strong identification Americans have with Israel, then, is less the fact that it is a Jewish state as it is perceived as a Western state.

The exaggerated view of the power of the Lobby also becomes self-fulfilling. Peace and human rights activists and their organizations tend to be far more forgiving of Democratic candidates who take right-wing positions regarding Israel than they do of any other issue because they have come to believe these candidates are supposedly powerless to stand up to the Lobby and therefore should be absolved of any responsibility. As a result, since these politicians do not have to worry about pressure from the other direction, giving in to the demands of the Lobby becomes the path of least resistance. This is why quotes by leaders of the Lobby used by Mearsheimer and Walt to illustrate their supposed influence, rather than providing proof of their power, are more likely deliberate hyperbole to scare off challenges.

Before the Lobby even bothers to mobilize around a particular issue, pre-emptive censorship takes place. For example, host organizations have canceled scheduled events on the excuse that they might result in protests from the Jewish community, even in cases where no organized opposition had yet emerged. Recent examples include the postponement of the play “My Name is Rachel Corrie” by the New York Theater Workshop; the cancellation of an appearance at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs by Mearsheimer and Walt; the cancellation of a speech by former South African Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu at St. Thomas University in Minneapolis; and the denial of venue of a scheduled concert by Lebanese folk musician Marcel Khalife by the Joan Kroc Theater in San Diego. In each case, the sponsoring or hosting organization did not buckle to protests, but made their decision based simply on private concerns expressed by certain members of the Jewish community about the possibility that there would be protests.

The Default Explanation

In Mearsheimer and Walt’s world view, the Israel Lobby becomes the default explanation for every wrong turn the United States has made in the Middle East. They have a hard time accepting the possibility that those who have led the United States into these tragic misadventures could be acting out of sincere, however seriously misguided, conviction.

Given that their flawed arguments have already gotten far more support and attention than they deserve – with their book on bestseller lists and their being granted major forums in towns and cities across the country – it is ironic that they insist they have been “stifled.” Nor do they acknowledge that forums that have denied them a podium may have chosen to do so because they recognize that their work is fundamentally flawed and not because of pressure from the Lobby.

The fact that so many people have so easily bought into Mearsheimer and Walt’s transparently superficial arguments may be indicative of a subtle but pervasive anti-Semitism in American society, even among supposed progressives. Or perhaps it’s just a kind of naive liberalism that finds it psychologically more comfortable to blame immoral, irrational, and dangerous policies on a small group of bad guys rather than take a more systemic, radical critique of the nature of U.S. imperialism. Of course, the same kind of simple-minded, superficial arguments have been leveled against Mearsheimer and Walt. Abraham Foxman’s reply, The Deadliest Lies: The Israel Lobby and the Myth of Jewish Control is an even worse piece of analysis.

There is no question that the Israel Lobby is one important factor influencing U.S. policy in the Middle East, particularly regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is not, however, the only factor or the most important factor.

There is also no question that the Israel Lobby has made informed debate on U.S. support for Israeli policy far more difficult than it would be otherwise and, as a result, has made it much harder for peace and human rights activists to make as much headway in challenging U.S. policy as we would otherwise be able to do. However, while this is certainly not insignificant, this is very different than the assertion of Mearsheimer and Walt that U.S. policy would be considerably more enlightened without the Lobby’s influence.

Their book and article and the debate surrounding them has been a distraction from the serious re-evaluation of U.S. Middle East policy so desperately needed.

Stephen Zunes is Middle East editor for Foreign Policy in Focus. He is a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco and chair of its Middle East Studies program.

Three quarters of the world’s countries have signed an international agreement to ban antipersonnel landmines. The Ottawa Mine Ban Treaty – to never again use, produce, acquire, or export these so-called “hidden killers” of civilians – reached its 10th anniversary this month. But the United States is still not a signatory.

Unfortunately this “just say no” approach to international treaties has become a pattern for the US, especially under the Bush administration. This trend must change. The president’s successor should make it a high priority for the US to rejoin the world and reassume the country’s role as a globally respected leader.

In some cases the rationale for US opposition is tied to security, economic, or legal considerations. But in all cases the unifying principle behind the Bush administration’s refusal to join these treaties seems to be ideological – not wanting to encumber the US with further international obligations or to constrain America’s freedom of action.

This “America unbound” approach is making the US the odd man out on critical global issues. In March of this year, a new human rights treaty was opened for signature at the United Nations, the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The convention would ensure that people around the world with disabilities enjoy the same rights as everyone else to equal protection before the law, and in work and education opportunities.

Entry into force of the new treaty would give those disabled by land mines – an estimated 473,000 people worldwide – as well as others injured by weapons of war an important boost in their efforts to rebuild shattered lives.

The treaty had the largest number of first-day signatories in the history of the UN – 81. Today that number is 119. The US is not one of them.

Nor was the US a participant at a conference concluded this month in Vienna. Some 130 nations attended to consider an international treaty banning cluster bombs, which “cause unacceptable harm to civilians.” Once dropped, these munitions scatter hundreds of bomblets over a wide area. Many don’t explode (the failure rate is up to 30 percent) and instead linger on as de facto land mines.

The use of these weapons is rising, as is the civilian toll. In the 2006 “summer war” in Lebanon, UN officials estimate, the Israeli military dropped at least 1.2 million cluster bomblets on southern Lebanon, most of them manufactured in the US. Human Rights Watch says the munitions have killed or injured more than 250 people in Lebanon since then.

Instead of sending delegates to the Vienna meeting, the Bush administration says it will seek to regulate the use of cluster munitions in another forum known as the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW). Described by The Economist as “a ponderous process, going on since 1980,” the CCW normally takes years to produce results, if then.

Ironies abound in this record of the US standing aside from international attempts to establish legally binding norms and obligations to safeguard civilians from the effects of war and its aftermath. Although not a signatory to the land-mine ban, the US is the largest financial contributor for land-mine clearing and victim assistance around the world. The UN convention to protect the rights of the disabled is patterned after landmark legislation first passed by the US in 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act.

But perhaps the greatest irony is that the US is missing the opportunity to take credit for much of the good that it does around the world. Instead of garnering appreciation, the US engenders resentment for its continued practice of “American exceptionalism.”

That resentment spilled over at the recent Bali conference on global warming, where obstructionist tactics by the US delegation were met by boos from other delegates and a threatened European boycott of the Bush administration’s climate conference in Hawaii next month. With the diplomatic equivalent of a gun to its head, the US showed a bit more flexibility. But it remained adamant in its refusal to join a global pact to cut greenhouse-gas pollution. Instead, the US said these goals should be “aspirational.”

“Just saying no” is not the kind of leadership that many expect of the US, either at home or abroad. By joining other countries to establish mutually binding agreements, the US could seize the opportunity to demonstrate that it is truly committed to working with the international community to solve global problems.