US media shun Mideast conference

A well attended conference was held earlier this month at the prestigious National Press Club, one block away from the White House, featuring 15 prominent speakers; among them, American Arabs, American Jews and Israelis, who discussed “The Israel Lobby: Is it good for US? Is it good for Israel?”

The last panel of three speakers focused on “Is there an Iraq-Iran continuum?”

The nine-hour session was not, however, reported in the US media. Not in The Washington Post, not in The New York Times, not in any other national newspaper, nor on the television network known as C-Span, a private, non-profit cable network, despite the fact that several prominent journalists and former congressmen and UN officials were participating.

The conference organisers were the Washington-based Institute for Research: Middle East Policy and the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (WRMEA), an eight issues a year magazine that was founded in 1982 by the American Educational Trust that was established by retired foreign service officers “to provide the American public with balanced and accurate information concerning US relations with Middle Eastern states”.

The magazine’s masthead stresses that “as a solution to the Palestinian-Israeli dispute it endorses UN Security Council Resolution 242’s land-for-peace formula, supported by nine successive US presidents”.

Delinda C. Hanley, WRMEA’s news editor, said in an e-mail that last March, the American press “blanketed America with speeches from the annual meeting of the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), not to mention Israel Prime Minister (Benjamin) Netanyahu’s speech on Capitol Hill [and] you would think our ‘free press’ would spare a few minutes or paragraphs to an alternative view … seeking to shine a light on the Israel lobby’s shady activities”.

She wondered whether Israel’s “watchdogs” like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and other pro-Israel lobbyists “outraged at last year’s events convinced C-Span and other journalists to stay away?

Was it behind “behind the scenes” censorship that created a news blackout, she wondered.

(The whole conference can still be watched on <http://www.israellobbyus.org/> www.IsraelLobbyUS.org <http://www.israellobbyus.org/> . An edited You-Tube video will be available in a few weeks.)

The first speaker and a conference organiser, Grant Smith, the director of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy, maintained that 60.7 per cent of Americans do not currently support the level of aid to Israel — $3 billion — labelling it “as either much too much, or too much aid”, that 68 per cent of Americans believe that resolutions condemning Palestinians do not represent American views, and the majority of Americans do not take one side in regard to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

His point is that “it takes large amounts of money and political clout to pass legislation in the midst of public opposition.”

Former US Congressman Nick Rahal (D-WV), protesting the recent performance of the Israeli prime minister in Congress over the talks with Iran declared: “The message we are sending is that we trust the [Israeli] prime minister of another country before we trust the leader of our own —what is that saying to other countries? We can’t be trusted!”

Rahal added that the “unconditional support for Israel and the blank-check mentality is not in America’s national interest. If it were, why would we need such a well-organised and well-oiled special interest group to pressure Congress?”

Former UN Special Rapporteur in the Middle East Richard Falk focused on the “weakening and discrediting” efforts in the Palestine-Israel conflict, complaining that despite recent US tensions with the Israeli prime minister over his speech before Congress, Secretary of State John Kerry bragged that “we have intervened on Israel’s behalf a couple of hundred times in over 75 forums within the UN”.

He added: “The UN has increasingly been neutralised in any effort to produce sustainable peace that is just for both peoples. It is the UN that failed the Palestinian people when the British gave up their colonial mandate and dumped the future of Palestine into the hands of the UN. Over 65 years, it failed to realise the right of self-determination for the Palestinian people that every other major people on the globe achieved.”

Gideon Levy, a long-time columnist for the liberal Israeli daily Haaretz, came up with the unexpected as he spoke “in desperation of a society that had lost all connection with the world”.

He said: “We have to face reality, and reality is that there is no chance from within the Israeli society. No way.… The only hope is for an international intervention, and the only hope is from this place, from Washington, from the United States, from the European Union. Only from there.

 “Because Israeli society is today by far too brainwashed. Life in Israel by far too good. Israel, let’s face it, a society which lives in denial, totally disconnect from reality. Would it be a private person, I would recommend either medication or hospitalisation. Because people who lose connection to reality might be very dangerous to themselves or to society. And the Israeli society lost connection with reality, it lost connection with the reality in its backyard… with international environment.”

Levy denounced the role of the Israeli lobby in creating this mess and the two-state solution.

“I truly believe the two state solution is dead. I think that this train left the station. I think that all those who talk about the two-state solution do so deliberately only to gain more time in order to base the occupation even deeper and deeper.”

He did not offer any suggestions for the future, however, recognising that “Israeli society has surrounded itself with shields, with walls, not just physical walls but also mental walls”.

The writer is a Washington-based columnist.