The Independent (subscription required: don’t bother) chose today to illustrate a self-serving and repellent Robert Fisk interview with Stephen Walt (as in the infamous Mearsheimer/Walt paper on ‘The [Jewish] Lobby’ in America) with a picture of the American flag in which the stars of the union are replaced by Stars of David, under the headline: 'The United States of Israel?'

The image makes the claim that America is run by the Jews. As such, it is merely a variant on the ‘Jewish conspiracy’ theory that has long been a defining feature of anti-Jewish prejudice. In these degraded times this particular trope, which once would have caused any publication which printed it to be treated as racist or a Nazi-style pariah, has become a commonplace of mainstream media discourse because now it is Israel which is treated as a Nazi-style pariah; and so vicious libels against the Jews are regarded as fair comment. (The illustration calls to mind the notorious New Statesman ‘Kosher Conspiracy’ cover which portrayed a Star of David piercing the UK flag, and also a previous illustration in the Independent which was almost identical.) David T at Harry’s Place neatly juxtaposes the Independent illustration with near-identical ones on neo-Nazi and other racist websites. Thus our anti-racist, multicultural media.

With egregious disingenuousness, Walt tries in the interview to wriggle away from the devastating and prolific deconstruction of his paper’s truly lamentable absence of scholarship and clear evidence of prejudice by pretending that it had only suggested there was an Israel/Jewish lobby in America in the same way that there were countless other lobbies. But of course, that was not the thrust of the paper at all. Were it so, it would not have singled out the Jewish/ Israel lobby for particular scrutiny as being of extraordinary power and influence over American foreign policy. That assertion is not true, just as the many statements it made about Israel’s behaviour were not true either. America supports Israel because a) it considers this to be in America’s interests and b) because so many Americans are evangelical Christians, for whom Israel has a special (and for Jews, not always comfortable) significance.

The idea that America’s Jews have had more influence over the policy of the United States than the Arab oil lobby has had is, of course, ludicrous. And as anyone who has addressed an audience of American Jews on the east or west coast rapidly discovers, to support Bush or the war in Iraq is often to provoke a hostile reaction, since American Jews overwhelmingly vote Democrat (supporting the party that is most lukewarm towards Israel), have views on Bush which are unprintable and did not generally support the war in Iraq. Yes, American Jews do form a lobby. But the idea that they have unparalleled power over the US administration and form a malign conspiracy that spans Jerusalem and Washington merely exists in the imagination of those for whom the Jews pose some kind of problem.

But now there’s an extra twist. Since the Mearsheimer/Walt paper claimed that the hallmark of the Jewish lobby was its incontinent use of the charge of antisemitism whenever Israel was criticised (a claim that is a regular but nevertheless outright lie) -- thus, in effect, concealing the 'crimes' of Israel -- the effect has been to tar any identification of anti-Jewish prejudice with that brush even where the prejudice is actual and blatant, as in the Mearsheimer/Walt paper.

Thus for a Jew to call the libellous assertion of a uniquely powerful Jewish lobby by its proper name of anti-Jewish prejudice is held to demonstrate the power of that very same Jewish lobby, thus proving that the libel was not a libel at all but true. So in Fisk’s article, Walt sighs over the inevitability that his claim of singular power for The [Jewish] Lobby would provoke the charge of anti-Jewish prejudice -- thus proving the truth of his own claim. It therefore follows that no protest can be made by Jews against anti-Jewish prejudice – at least where Israel is concerned -- without this being said to demonstrate that the supposed prejudice is in fact no more than the freshly-revealed truth. QED.

So a perfect circle is joined, and Jews are now faced with the invidious choice: do they call by their proper name the libels that are being used to defame them and uniquely single out Israel for delegitimisation, a response which will inevitably lead to their own further defamation; or do they seek to head off those noxious consequences by keeping quiet, thus allowing bigotry its loathesome victory? Neat, eh? Has there ever been a people in the history of this planet who are thus permanently trapped in such an infernal vice between the rocks and hard places of hatred?

But a simple question for all those Independent readers and others who really, genuinely believe that the Jews wield a sinister global influence of cosmically staggering proportions: if their influence is so vast, how come they remain, uniquely in the world, mired in a fifty-year struggle for survival against people who are determined to exterminate them, who have murdered large numbers of them and who show no sign of ever stopping doing so, due in large measure to the implacable indifference, ambivalence or hatred displayed towards them by the world over which they are reported to wield the said cosmic influence? Just what kind of a two-bit cosmically powerful lobby is this?

As the old joke might have it: two Jewish prisoners starving in a Soviet labour camp are reading an article by Robert Fisk about how the Jews control America (ok, a few liberties have been taken).

The first Jew beams and says, ‘What a wonderful article! I can’t wait to read another one by him! He’s definitely my favourite writer!’

The second Jew says: ‘Are you out of your mind?! The article is a monstrosity! How can you say such a thing?’

‘Because,’ says the first, ‘when I read what he writes it makes me believe for a moment that we Jews run the world’.

Posted by melanie at April 27, 2006