The Israel debate and the failure of J Street

The liberal alternative to the right-wing "pro-Israel" lobby is missing its chance to change the debate

By Alex Kane

Bill Kristol

Topics:Israel, War Room

The Emergency Committee for Israel, an advocacy group launched by Bill Kristol and other neoconservative activists, and J Street, the 2-year-old outfit that bills itself as a liberal “pro-Israel, pro-peace” voice, recently aired dueling ads about Joe Sestak, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Pennsylvania.

The Emergency Committee went first, with a menacing spot that asked, “Does congressman Joe Sestak understand Israel is America’s ally?” J Street’s defensive response was telling. “In Congress, Sestak consistently votes to aid Israel,” the group informed Pennsylvanians.

The ad, needless to say, didn’t bother to question why the U.S. should be spending so much money on Israel in the first place. So much for challenging the assumptions of the pro-Israel establishment.

J Street, which launched in April 2008 to great fanfare under the helm of Jeremy Ben-Ami, a former advisor to President Bill Clinton, was founded in part to “ensure a broad debate on Israel and the Middle East in national politics and the American Jewish community.” That debate has largely been dominated by unquestioning supporters of Israel and all its actions.

But despite the hysterical rhetoric from the likes of Alan Dershowitz and Commentary magazine, who like to claim that J Street is agitating for radical policy change, the new group has done little to broaden the constricted U.S. debate over Israel/Palestine.

Instead, J Street has largely given a liberal cover to more right-wing groups like the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, whose line seems to be one of supporting Israel no matter what.

The Goldstone report, a landmark U.N. document that accused both Israel and Hamas of committing war crimes during the 2008-09 Israeli assault on Gaza, and the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement that seeks to pressure Israel to live up to its obligations under international law, are two areas where the J Street line has differed little from AIPAC.

The debate over the Goldstone report was an early indicator of things to come for J Street. When a largely fact-free congressional resolution denouncing the report was about to pass, J Street, which aired some concerns about the resolution and urged Congress to modify it, still ultimately agreed with the thrust of it: “J Street supports passage of a resolution by the U.S. Congress calling for the United States to oppose and work actively to defeat one-sided and biased action in the United Nations when it comes to Israel and the Goldstone Report.” That statement was similar to AIPAC’s position on the report, who called it “deeply flawed” and “rigged.”

J Street’s acquiescence to the establishment line on Israel/Palestine reached its zenith during the University of California at Berkeley debate in March/April 2010 over a student effort to divest from two companies that profit from the Israeli occupation of Palestine. When the president of the student government at Berkeley vetoed the measure, which was passed earlier by an overwhelming margin, J Street joined AIPAC, the Anti-Defamation League and the local Israeli consul general in pressuring the student government. J Street joined a wide coalition of groups such as the David Project and the Jewish National Fund that authored a letter labeling the divestment measure as “misleading” and “dishonest.” (J Street’s president, Jeremy Ben-Ami, has since said that the group won’t be signing on to similar letters with “organizations like that in group settings again.”) Their effort worked — a measure to override the veto failed by just one vote.

This timidity has earned J Street harsh criticism from the left. An Israeli-authored letter circulated on an activist listserv called on the group to “stop trying to gain political capital at the expense of dedicated peace activists.”

It is also creating a vacuum that older, more left-leaning groups like Jewish Voice for Peace are poised to fill. This third pole, which has emerged underneath the surface, is challenging the pro-Israel lobby’s hold on the debate. The future battle, especially in the Jewish-American community, will not be J Street vs. AIPAC, but rather the pro-Israel lobby vs. critical Jewish groups who are questioning the desirability of the U.S.-Israel “special relationship.”

The divestment debate at Berkeley and the criticism of J Street is a prominent example of the new battle that is coming to a head within the Jewish community over Israel/Palestine and the Palestinian-led call to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel. The BDS movement started in 2005, and calls on global civil society to use the tactics of boycotting, divesting and sanctioning Israel until it adheres to its obligations under international law. The movement demands that Israel withdraw from the occupied Palestinian territories, implement equal rights for Palestinian citizens of Israel and recognize the “right of return” for Palestinian refugees and their descendants who fled or were expelled from Palestine during the 1947-49 Israeli-Arab War.

The debate over BDS is heating up. Recently, Jacob Weisberg, the editor in chief at Slate, called the BDS movement “a weapon designed not to bring peace but to undermine [Israel]” and “hard to disassociate from anti-Semitism.” The smearing of the BDS movement as anti-Semitic, though, is increasingly losing credibility, especially because groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace and others are backing aspects of the movement. In its latest issue, Tikkun magazine published a debate on BDS between Ben-Ami, Jewish Voice for Peace’s Rebecca Vilkomerson and others, an indication of the growing importance of the movement.

During the Tikkun debate, Ben-Ami argued that those opposed to the Israeli occupation should not engage in BDS tactics that alienate Israelis and should instead “double down on our movement to try to get particularly President Obama to be deeply and actively engaged to outline what a solution is.” But with peace talks at a standstill, and President Obama averse to pressuring Israel, the BDS movement will only gain steam — with or without J Street on board.

The momentum was evident just a few months ago, after the Israeli Navy raided an aid flotilla on its way to Gaza and killed nine people, when a wave of music acts honored the cultural boycott, and garnered attention from major media outlets like the Associated Press and CNN.

While it’s hard to predict when mainstream discourse will allow candid discussion about Israel/Palestine, cracks in the wall are appearing, and they’re only going to get bigger.

: Alex Kane is a 21-year-old college student, journalist and blogger based in New York City. He is a reporter for the Indypendent, and a frequent contributor to Mondoweiss. His articles have also appeared in Common Dreams, Electronic Intifada, Extra! and Palestine Chronicle. He blogs at alexbkane.wordpress.com. Follow him on Twitter here. More Alex Kane

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Israelis prepare for war with Iran

Even ex-Mossad chief who opposes an attack on Iran seems to have given up

By Larry Derfner

Ex-Mossad chief Meir Dagan no longer warns against attacking Iran (Credit: AP/Dan Balilty/Reuters/Baz Ratner)

Topics:Iran, Israel

JERUSALEM — After bombs went off near Israeli embassies in New Delhi and Tbilisi, and a man with an Iranian passport accidentally blew himself up in Bangkok, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu couldn’t let the opportunity pass. Yediot Aharonot, the country’s most widely read newspaper, reported Wednesday:

An updated list of talking points distributed by the national advocacy desk in the Prime Minister’s Office sought to connect the wave of terror with the international community’s efforts at tightening sanctions on Iran, and also to prepare the ground for a military option to stop Iran’s nuclear program.

According to Yediot, the new talking points read: “Iran and Hizbullah are behind these terror attempts. If this is what Iran is doing now, imagine what it will do if its nuclear arms project reaches the goal.” The tabloid’s story was headlined “Iran’s long arm,” and the subhead read, “Israel to the world: ‘Terror acts show nuclear Iran cannot be allowed.’” The story’s ominous tone meshed perfectly with the talking points.

Israel’s whole body politic – politicians, media, influential public figures and public at large – is now leaning into a war with Iran. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s recently reported opinion that Israel would likely strike between April and June is shared, give or take a month or two, by countless others.

The consequences of such an attack range from a bilateral missile war and intensified international terror attacks, to a regional war involving weapons of mass destruction. Israel may not pull the trigger, of course. But at this point, that seems the only realistic working assumption.

Israeli talking points are coming faster and sharper. Iran’s nuclear project is marching toward the “zone of immunity,” says Defense Minister Ehud Barak. “It is our duty to rely on ourselves when we are concerned with a threat to our very existence,” says Netanyahu. Their apparent aim is to create an aura of inevitability around an imminent Israeli strike. Leading the drive, Netanyahu and his one-time army commando unit leader, Barak, want full support at home and no serious opposition from the U.S. if and when they send the jet bombers on their mission. Naturally, they would prefer that the U.S. do the job – inflicting lasting damage on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure could well be beyond Israel’s military capability – but from here, at least, the American military option looks unlikely, certainly within a time frame Israel accepts.

Some skeptics think Netanyahu and Barak may just be engaging in psychological warfare aimed at keeping Western economic pressure on Iran, the goal being to force or scare the Tehran regime into giving up its pursuit of nuclear weapons, which it denies pursuing. But it’s hard to imagine anything short of visibly destroyed hardware on a massive scale that might convince Israel’s leadership that the nuclear threat had been lifted.

Yet while there is skepticism about the leadership team’s true intentions, there is virtually none being expressed here about the wisdom of going to war. The paucity of dissent is remarkable, not to say depressing, in a country that prides itself on being a “vibrant democracy.”

At the end of last week, the media were talking about which towns had good bomb shelters and air raid sirens and which didn’t. The likelihood that Israel would soon be attacking Iran had begun to sink in. An antiwar demonstration was held across the boulevard from the Defense Ministry compound in Tel Aviv. About 25 people showed up. They held signs that read, “Don’t bomb – talk” to the evening rush hour traffic going past. One driver honked.

I asked a sidewalk passerby, a woman in her mid-20s pushing a baby carriage, what she thought of a possible government decision to bomb Iran. “They sit up there, they’re smarter than me, whatever they decide, I’ll support,” she said. A fellow of about 20 on a skateboard said: “I’m not for war, I’m against war. But if somebody is going to attack you, if your enemy is going to attack, don’t you think you have to attack him first, for the sake of survival?” I asked if he thought Iran would attack Israel first. “I don’t know, I’m not privy to all the information. But good luck,” he said, and skated off.

For all the famous outspokenness of Israeli politicians, not one is speaking out against an attack, not from the moderate opposition nor the “peace camp.” Peace Now, a group that has organized huge demonstrations going back 30 years against the Lebanon War and the occupation, has said not a word about the extraordinarily high-risk war of choice that looms in the very near future.

The news media, with the exception of the liberal Ha’aretz newspaper, is fully on board. The mainstream media reflect and reinforce public opinion, which shows weariness with settlement-building and settlers, but automatic support for any decision taken in the name of security, especially in the face of a nuclear threat from a regime like Iran’s.

The tone is set by the red-on-black scare headlines in the tabloids and the grim facial expressions and bracing reports from correspondents on Channel 2, which dominates TV news. On the night of the Bangkok bombing, Ehud Ya’ari, dean of the country’s so-called Arab affairs correspondents, reported that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was expected on Wednesday to inaugurate the uranium enrichment facility in Fordo, a site built deep underground in the side of a mountain. “Thus,” said Ya’ari, “Iran’s nuclear project enters what Defense Minister Ehud Barak calls the ‘zone of immunity.’” Draw your own conclusions, folks.

Except for Gideon Levy at Ha’aretz, no well-known newspaper columnist or TV commentator has come out against a war; nearly all are worried and noncommittal. But one of the most influential columnists, Yediot’s Sever Plocker, a passionate centrist with long-standing contacts around the Israeli establishment, wrote a column Tuesday titled “Israel won’t blink first.” Declaring that “the State of Israel, as the national home of the Jews, has decided to prevent Iran from possessing nuclear weapons,” Plocker maintained that unless Iran freezes its nuclear weapons program and allows international inspectors into the underground sites and even the “secret” ones, “zero hour” will soon arrive. “No begging will stop Israel at that point. There will be a war,” he wrote.

Meanwhile, the literary triumvirate of Amos Oz, David Grossman and A.B. Yehoshua, Israel’s loftiest voices of peace and enlightenment, have remained silent. President Shimon Peres, who has put his days as a peacemaker far behind him, is warning only about the dangers of a nuclear Iran and not at all about those of an Israeli attack.

So what’s going on? What is this lockstep march to war in a country that made peace with Egypt and Jordan; that at times tried to make peace with the Palestinians; that absorbed missile attacks from Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War yet held its fire at America’s behest; that had “warriors for peace” in the Prime Minister’s Office, “peace governments” and a “peace camp”?

It’s all gone. Since the Palestinian intifada ended the “peace process” in 2000, Israelis blame everything that goes wrong, every political dispute, violent or nonviolent, completely on the other side. No politician, commentator or other public figure who seeks mainstream approval can be thought of as “weak on security” or “naïve about the Arabs.”

Yet the reaction to the Iranian nuclear threat has deeper roots than that. While Netanyahu is known for his Holocaust analogies on this issue, his predecessors going back to Yitzhak Rabin 20 years ago have all lobbied the world to stop Iran from going nuclear, which has been marked “unacceptable.” Since Menachem Begin ordered the 1981 attack on Iraq’s reactor (over the opposition of Peres and war heroes Moshe Dayan and Ezer Weizman), Israel has lived by the doctrine that no enemy in the Middle East will have nuclear weapons. After the 1981 attack, it acted on this doctrine a second time in 2007, under Prime Minister Ehud Olmert (and defense minister Barak), with the airstrike on Syria’s embryonic nuclear facility.

So the issue for Israel isn’t just the Iranian regime’s jihadist craziness and Holocaust denial. Israel bombed the Iraqi reactor when Saddam Hussein was the Reagan administration’s man in the Gulf against Iran. It bombed the Syrian installation before Bashar Assad started slaughtering Syrians en masse, when he was offering Israel land-for-peace negotiations.

While it’s true that Iran isn’t just any Middle Eastern enemy, the Israeli doctrine applies to all of them.

Only one person has made a real effort to reverse the country’s course, and lately he’s given up, too. At the start of last year, upon finishing his legendary tenure as Mossad chief, Meir Dagan, then the country’s unchallenged supreme warrior, did the unprecedented. He began speaking out openly against an attack on Iran, calling it “the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard,” and warning that afterward, “the regional challenge that Israel would face would be impossible.” He was going public, he explained, because “there is no one to stop Bibi and Barak” from undertaking such a “dangerous adventure” now that he and the other military and intelligence chiefs, who had the clout to rein in the political leadership, were retiring.

Last week, after months of silence, Dagan resurfaced to announce he’s heading a new NGO to change Israel’s parliamentary system – an old chestnut of the good government movement that seems conspicuously irrelevant now. For nearly a year, Dagan raised a flag, and when he saw hardly anyone behind him, he lowered it. A few high-level ex-warriors, including two former army chiefs of staff, warned against the consequences of attacking Iran. But these were isolated remarks that got very little attention; in the public’s mind, the antiwar movement began and ended with one man.

I asked a retired army general who agrees with Dagan’s views why he and the many others like him didn’t get together and sign a letter in a major newspaper, or hold a press conference, or do something that might start a public debate over this fairly fateful matter; after all, Israelis listen to generals. He replied that he and his fellows didn’t have the information that those around the cabinet table had, they didn’t know if the government really intended to order an attack, and they didn’t want to take the chance that this was all “psychological warfare,” which they would be undercutting if they spoke out.

“You have to understand,” he said, “Israel is a small community, everybody knows everybody else’s opinion, so you have to be responsible. That’s the way I was educated.”

No opposition – that’s what Netanyahu and Barak want, and at home, that’s what they’re getting.

As for opposition from the Obama administration, it has been awfully muted. The Republican presidential candidates (with the exception of Ron Paul) have been gung-ho, which has much to do with the administration’s wariness toward Israel in this election year. But then how strong an argument for restraint can the administration make to the Israelis, after repeating for years that a nuclear Iran is “unacceptable” and that “all options are on the table”?

: Larry Derfner is an Israeli journalist who writes for +972 Magazine and American Jewish publications. More Larry Derfner

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When Iran and Israel were friendly

As the two countries prepare for war, a forgotten history of collaboration

By Jordan Michael Smith

Israeli diplomat's car damaged in an explosion in India.. (Credit: AP/Mustafa Quraishi)

Topics:Middle East, Iran, Israel

The explosions in Bangkok on Tuesday that destroyed an Israeli diplomat’s car escalated the already-dangerous situation between Iran and Israel. Israel’s defense minister connected the attacks with others on Israeli embassy personnel in India and Georgia. “Israel will act methodically and take strong yet patient action against the international terrorism that originates in Iran,” warned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. For its part, the Iranian regime strongly rejected the charges, angrily claiming the attacks were the work of Israel itself. Each week seems to bring fresh evidence that a full-blown Iranian-Israeli war is growing more likely, a conflict that could engulf the entire Middle East and draw in the United States.

Yet it would be a mistake to believe that Israel and Iran are eternal enemies. In fact, these two countries that despise each other so much — Iran’s Supreme Leader recently called Israel a “cancer” — were once allies. This is not ancient history. Both pre- and post-Revolutionary Iran had extensive military and economic ties with the Jewish state. As recently as two decades ago, each country considered the other a vital friend in a region filled with hostile enemies. Conflict between the two may be bitter, but it is not, and never was, inevitable.

Iran informally recognized Israel in 1950, becoming the first Muslim-majority country after Turkey to do so. With few allies in the region, Israel welcomed Iran’s modest support. That support increased when England and the United States overthrew a democratically elected government in Iran in 1953, installing in its place a more Western-friendly regime. The new regime, headed by the Shah, was so aligned with the United States that a deal was stuck granting the Persian nation a huge nuclear energy program, as well as large quantities of plutonium and enriched uranium — two pathways to a nuclear bomb.

The Israeli-Iranian alliance was a part of the Shah’s pro-Western orientation. “The Shah looked at Israel as a way to establish friendly relations with the U.S.,” says the Rand Corp.’s Dalia Dassa Kaye, co-author of a recent monograph on Iranian-Israeli relations. Israel saw Iran as a way to escape its regional isolation. “They were bound by common enemies: the Soviet Union, and Arab nationalism, especially Iraq,” says Kaye.

The alliance, though never formalized or publicized because of Israel’s unpopularity in the region, consisted of deep intelligence and arms cooperation, as well as oil sharing. In the late 1950s, Israel, Iran and Turkey formed a trilateral intelligence alliance and performed counterterrorism intelligence operations. In the early 1960s, they teamed up to support Iraqi Kurds fighting the central regime. According to Kaye’s research, “Tehran and Tel Aviv developed a close military and intelligence relationship that would continue to expand until the Islamic revolution.”

The extent of this alliance should not be exaggerated. The Shah kept Iran’s relationship with Israel secretive for fear of rousing his own anti-Israeli population as well as those of Iran’s neighbors. Instead, “the alliance was based on the perception of common threats,” says Trita Parsi, author of a prizewinning book on relations between Israel, Iran and the United States. But the threats emanating from the Soviet Union, Iran and the Arab bloc were perceived as so serious that they outlasted the Shah’s overthrow in 1979.

The Islamist government that took power in Iran in 1979 was deeply hostile to all things Western, Zionism not least among them. And yet, the requirements of Iranian national interest trumped ideology to force the Islamic government to cooperate with the hated Jewish state on a number of issues. Once the U.S.-supported Iraqi government invaded Iran, the Persian state turned to Israel for much-needed arms. Phantom fighter planes and weapons for the Iranian army were sent by Israel. One estimate puts Israel’s arms sales to Iran at $500 million annually.

In the mid-1980s Israel was the conduit between Iran and the Reagan administration during the illicit Iran-Contra affair in which the Reagan administration sold weapons to the Iranians and used the proceeds to fund the anti-communist insurgency in Nicaragua. Even as it was relying more on Israel for arms in its war, the Iranian regime increased its poisonous rhetoric attacking the Jewish state, just as the Shah had done. According to the Iranian-born Parsi, such rhetoric was meant to maintain credibility in the wider Muslim world, but wasn’t matched by action. “Israel is Iran’s best friend and we do not intend to change our position,” Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said in 1987.

Two events caused the gradual splitting between the erstwhile allies. First, the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, removing the greatest threat outside of the region to both nations’ security. Second, the weakening of Iraq during the Persian Gulf War diluted its menace. Simply put, Iran and Israel needed each other less, as both were more secure in the post-Cold War world. As Parsi wrote in “The Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the United States,” “the common threats that for decades had prompted the two states to cooperate and find common geo-strategic interests — in spite of Iran’s transformation into an Islamist anti-Zionist state — would no longer exist.”

The Israelis, who had long ignored Iranian rhetoric, decided it needed to be taken seriously, especially in light of the Islamic state’s support for Hamas and Hezbollah. Iran worried about Israel’s growing power and wanted to assert power in the region. “Iran once had a more pragmatic leadership and policies,” says Kaye. The marginalization of the reformers that were popular in the 1990s meant that the extremist factions in the leadership became dominant. America’s invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 2003 removed that country’s threat to Israel, leaving it with Iran as the most menacing nation in the region.

Now, Iran and Israel seem headed for war. One of those countries, or possibly the United States, will take an action that its opponent sees as requiring a military response. Assassinations of scientists and diplomats are bad enough, but a full-scale war could be the greatest disaster of the young 21stcentury, a battle between well-armed bitter enemies who once found it possible to coexist.

: Jordan Michael Smith writes about U.S. foreign policy for Salon. He has written for the New York Times, Boston Globe and Washington Post. More Jordan Michael Smith

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Adelson’s other pet project: The Israeli right

Newt's billionaire backer poured tens of millions into a media campaign to get Netanyahu elected prime minister

By Noga Tarnopolsky, GlobalPost

Sheldon Adelson (Credit: AP Photo/Vincent Yu)

Topics:GlobalPost, Israel, Newt Gingrich

This article originally appeared on GlobalPost.

JERUSALEM — As more and more people wonder how long Newt Gingrich will persevere against the growing inevitability of a Mitt Romney victory, one man appears to be holding firm: Sheldon Adelson, the Las Vegas casino mogul who just poured another $5 million into Gingrich’s coffers.

Superficially, the two men appear to have little in common. Gingrich, 69, is a lifelong politician and consummate Washington insider whose trajectory has famously taken him through three wives and three religious renderings: the Lutheranism of his birth, the adaptable Southern Baptism of most of his adult life, and now, a Bible-thumping new Catholicism.

Adelson, 78, born to Jewish Ukrainian immigrants in Dorchester, Mass., crawled his way out of the New England working class and, in addition to his vast wealth, is known for a stable and enduring second marriage to Miriam Ochshorn Adelson, with whom he has two children.

She is apparently the key to the one subject that links the two men, the country of her birth, Israel.

According to most reports, Adelson got to his mid-50s before ever really thinking about Israel. Then, a single trip to the Jewish homeland changed his life. When he got back to the United States, the divorced Adelson started telling friends he was interested in meeting an Israeli wife. A mutual friend set him up with Miriam, a physician and expert on addictions. Together they have developed two principal enduring passions and philanthropic commitments: centers for the treatment of drug addicts, and Israel.

The Adelsons have always maintained a mainstream but clearly right-wing line regarding Israel. They are major supporters of the American Israel Political Action Committee, of Birthright, an organization that brings Jewish youth on “roots” trip to Israel, and they love Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s conservative prime minister, as well as Gingrich, who has long been a fervent defender of Israel.

Not much is known about Gingrich in Israel, but it is thanks to support from Adelson that, in Israeli media reports, he is almost universally referred to as “Netanyahu’s friend.” There is no public information confirming an actual bond between the prime minister and the former speaker of the House, but Netanyahu is, coincidentally, a thrice-married politician known for a messy personal life and for playing to his religious and conservative base.

And both men benefit greatly from Adelson’s support.

It was in order to help a future Netanyahu candidacy that Adelson, in 2007, established Israel Hayom (Israel Today) a daily tabloid newspaper that quickly rose to have the widest circulation in the country. The newspaper was founded on the conviction, widespread among the Israeli right-wing since Netanyahu’s first term in office in the mid-90s, that the media held a deep-seated antipathy to Netanyahu.

A much-repeated rumor, impossible to verify, has it that Adelson has told Israeli friends he is happy to lose even $150 or $200 million dollars on the venture.

Conservative estimates hold that for now, he has lost at least several tens of millions of dollars. The paper boasts an extensive and expensive list of journalists and analysts, it is printed in massive quantities and distributed widely and for free, yet it does not display advertising in sufficient quantities to offset significant costs. It is a rich man’s luxury.

Israelis uncomfortable with the paper’s big shadow have bestowed it with a jokey moniker, Bibiton, a play on Netanyahu’s nickname, Bibi, and on the Hebrew word for newspaper, Iton.

On Thursday, new revelations about just how deeply Netanyahu is entwined with the Adelson’s newspaper came to light, and now threaten to blow open an unsavory, and perhaps illegal, link between the American billionaire and the prime minister.

Israel’s Channel 10 revealed Wednesday night that Dror Eydar, a media columnist for the Adelson-owned daily, who frequently pens irate articles accusing the Israeli media of an anti-Netanyahu bias, is simultaneously on the prime minister’s payroll, as a speechwriter and adviser.

This is the first indication that a direct connection may exist between the prime minister’s staff and the paper, which while right-wing and pro-Netanyahu, has always maintained a line of neutrality.

It remains unclear just how much the scandal will affect one of the largest media outlets in the country, but some expect there will be resignations from within the prime minister’s office.

To entertain the notion of how big a player the Israel Hayom is in the diminutive and struggling Israeli media market, the mere question of where Israel Hayom is printed is a matter of life or death for several other daily newspapers. Israel HaYom is now printed at the presses owned by the liberal, intellectual and highly regarded Ha’aretz, ideologically Israel Hayom’s antagonist.

The owner of a rival paper, the popular, mass distribution daily Ma’ariv, is known to be vying for the printing contract, which is worth about 100 million shekels, or about $27 million. Whatever Adelson decides could determine, at the twitch of his wrist, the fate of either of these established, traditional national papers.

Not the least of the issues that create unease among wide swathes of Israelis is the fact that Adelson, a controversial and enigmatic whale that has taken virtual residence in the local media pond, is a foreigner residing abroad. He has never pretended to be an Israeli. But whatever decision he makes, in the words of Ma’ariv columnist and Channel 10 analyst Ofer Shelah, “is not a decision for which he will pay any price. We will. Yet the future of pluralism in the Israeli media market may reside in his hands.”

Mordechai Kremnitzer, a professor of law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and an expert on the media, points out two positive aspects of Adelson’s emergence on the Israeli scene.

“After many years in which the Israeli right wing claimed it was discriminated against by what was perceived as a generally left-wing media, and after many years in which this was a real perception held by many Israelis, now it is very difficult to make that case. Israel Hayom has the largest readership in the nation, and it is without question a right-wing operation.”

Secondly, in Israel’s very small and concentrated media market, with very few published papers, “the simple addition of another one is a positive thing.”

“The problem,” he said, however, “is that because the paper is distributed for free, the pressure this puts on other papers — that are already struggling to survive — is huge. This could even cause the collapse of another newspaper or papers, and if that happens, it should be viewed with real concern. It would be very negative, principally because it would not be the result of free competition among outlets, but it would simply be a consequence of the huge amount of money Adelson has at his disposal.”

An additional and related concern, Kremnitzer said, is the influence a foreign citizen can acquire on the free market of opinions in Israel.

“And even more worrisome than that is the question of the independence of the prime minister’s judgment when he becomes dependent on a person who is not an Israeli citizen and on a source of funds that is foreign,” he said.

No Israeli law restricts foreign ownership of media outlets, and Adelson’s activities are not challenged even when they are called into question for influencing Israel’s democracy.

“In my opinion, everything Sheldon Adelson has done is completely legal and legitimate,” said Moshe Negbi, a legal analyst for the Voice of Israel radio and a professor of communications at Hebrew University. “I’m sure Sheldon Adelson is not operating for any personal advantage. He does not personally need Netanyahu. He’s not advancing his own interests. I think he believes with his whole heart that Netanyahu is the best medicine for all of Israel’s problems. He has very right-wing views in many areas, and it is his right. In addition, he is willing to spend his own money to advance his ideas and his ideology.”

“It is part of his freedom of expression to use his money to advance his opinions. It’s the same as Amos Shocken, [the owner of Ha’aretz] who I admire greatly, who is willing to lose a lot of money to advance his point of view,” Negbi added.

Negbi’s concern lies with the “inability of the capitalist, democratic system to find the tools to regulate censorship that is brought on by business people who deal in media. There is no legal way to say to a person with money how he can manage his own property.”

“A generation ago, the concern was with governments’ attempts to control opinion. Now, the person who controls such a popular paper has tremendous power over what the public hears and does not hear, and therefore over the public’s political opinions.”

The issue is worldwide, but Israel’s case, according to Negbi, is particularly extreme due to its size. Israel’s total population is 7.5 million people, about the population of northern California’s Bay Area.

Despite the legal propriety of his actions, Adelson, who is accustomed to operating with a very wide berth, occasionally skirts the customs and ethics of Israel’s media world in a manner that raises eyebrows, or sometimes, causes fury.

The latest revelations made by Channel 10, a struggling commercial network known for a bold and authoritative investigative style, are only the latest in a series of skirmishes that threaten his reputation in Israel.

Last September its news division broadcast a critical but unchallenged profile of Adelson’s global casino operations. In reaction, Adelson threatened to sue. Both Channel 10’s news director and its legal counsel examined the claim and determined that no apology was due. But Channel 10 shareholder Ronald Lauder, another conservative American Republican and a friend of Adelson, thought otherwise and ordered that an apology be extended.

When the apology was issued on the main news broadcast last week, outrage ensued, including the resignation of two senior Channel 10 executives.

“This is exactly the crux of the matter,” Shelah, the columnist, said. “The media is at its knees and apologizing for something its professional authorities determined required no apology because they depend on the ongoing financial stream from someone who is a non-resident of the state. In this case, two of them.”

“That two people live in the US and have a relationship does not bother me. And Adelson was just normal in demanding an apology he did not deserve. But the problem was Lauder, who forced this behavior on Channel 10,” he added.

Lauder, of the Lauder cosmetics fortune and a former ambassador to Austria, is also president of the World Jewish Congress and is, like Adelson, close to Netanyahu. In 2011 alone, he pumped an estimated $16 million into Channel 10 to keep it operational.

The realization that in a moment of pique Adelson was able to rock Israel’s entire media world and possibly impact upon a government decision regarding debt relief for Channel 10 caused a nationwide shudder and reconsideration of his influence.

The latest revelations are sure to underscore the concern, expressed by Kremnitzer, the law professor, that Adelson may influence day to day decisions in the prime minister’s office.

“If Channel 10 were obliged to apologize for a broadcast not due to proper procedure like the correction of a mistaken pronouncement, this is clearly a grave abuse of the power of influence. This is what I mean when I say ‘negative and dangerous,’” he said.

The scandals have caused much worried flippancy in Israel about the political Kabuki theater Adeslon may have been dreaming up this winter, in which Gingrich and Netanyahu, both his protégés, could have a run at running a new US-Israel relationship.

“We are a very little country. And into this crucible Sheldon Adelson arrives, with a legitimate motivation. He sees a leftist liberal media and says, ‘I will establish a right-wing conservative balance,’ you know — fair and balanced — and balance out the media market. It’s all well, except for the problem that invariably arises when someone who literally has no budget limits is willing to invest his unending amount of money in Israel,” Shelah said. “What do you do then?”

: More Noga Tarnopolsky

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What the Adelsons will want for their money

The $10 million in pro-Newt money that transformed the GOP primary appears to be all about US policy toward Israel

VIDEO

By Justin Elliott

Sheldon Adelson and his wife Miriam Ochsorn Adelson (Credit: AP/Vincent Yu)

Topics:Newt Gingrich, 2012 Elections, Israel-Palestine, Israel

Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and his wife Miriam have transformed the Republican primary by pumping $10 million into a pro-Newt Gingrich super PAC, thereby enabling his surge against Mitt Romney. So it’s surprising that comments Gingrich made last week about what the Adelsons expect in exchange for their money haven’t gotten more attention.

Ted Koppel asked Gingrich the key question: what do the Adelsons get if you win?

Gingrich, in response, suggested it all comes down to U.S. policy toward Israel.

Here’s the video, via Mondoweiss:

Koppel: But there has to be a so-what at the end of it. So if you win, what does Adelson get out of it?

Gingrich. Well, he knows I’m very pro-Israel. And that’s the central value of his life. I mean, he’s very worried that Israel is going to not survive.

That’s in line with what we know about the Adelsons, who have supported Israeli settlements in the West Bank and once pulled their money out of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) because of that group’s putative softness on the concept of a peace deal with Palestinians.

ABC, meanwhile, reports that “a source close to” Adelson says he wants “nothing” in exchange for his contributions. That claim doesn’t amount to much, especially coming from an anonymous source.

The latest $5 million to the pro-Newt super PAC was donated by Miriam Adelson, who is reportedly a dual citizen of the United States and Israel. And here, as reported in the New Yorker, is a small but telling example of how Miriam previously interacted with the recipients of the Adelsons’ largesse:

The Adelsons seem not to take their power for granted. Recently, Miriam told an associate, “I had a CD on Islamic jihad. I brought it to the [Bush] White House and told the chief of staff, ‘I would like the President to see this.’ It really is amazing that we have this influence.”

And here is another episode from that New Yorker article in which Sheldon personally leaned on the president:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was organizing a major conference in the United States, in an effort to re-start the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and her initiative had provoked consternation among many rightward-leaning American Jews and their Christian evangelical allies. … A short, rotund man, with sparse reddish hair and a pale countenance that colors when he is angered, Adelson protested to Bush that Rice was thinking of her legacy, not the President’s, and that she would ruin him if she continued to pursue this disastrous course. Then, as Adelson later told an acquaintance, Bush put one arm around his shoulder and another around that of his wife, Miriam, who was born in Israel, and said to her, “You tell your Prime Minister that I need to know what’s right for your people—because at the end of the day it’s going to be my policy, not Condi’s. But I can’t be more Catholic than the Pope.”

So the idea that the Adelsons expect “nothing” from the recipients of their millions is belied by their previous behavior.

Gingirch himself seems to have gone through a transformation on the Israel-Palestine question. As Wayne Barrett recently documented, Gingrich was as recently as 2005 praising the Palestinians, referring to “their ancestral lands” in historic Palestine, and, amazingly, inveighing against “the desire of some Israelis to use security as an excuse to grab more Palestinian land.”

That’s the type of language – Gingrich even used the phrase Israeli “land grab” in that 2005 essay – one wouldn’t hear even from alleged anti-Israel radical Barack Obama.

Fast forward to the current election cycle, of course, and Gingrich has veered way to the right, famously questioning the very peoplehood of the Palestinians and blasting calls to end Jewish settlements as a “suicidal step” for Israel. (Adelson, by the way, personally praised Gingrich’s claim that the Palestinians are an “invented people.”)

It’s very difficult to determine whether the Adelsons’ money prompted the shift or has simply reinforced it. In any case, you can be sure Gingrich won’t be talking about the Palestinians’ “ancestral lands” any time soon.

: Justin Elliott is a Salon reporter. Reach him by email at jelliott@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @ElliottJustin More Justin Elliott

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Ex-AIPAC flack loses gig over “anti-Semites” flap

The Truman National Security Project expels Josh Block after he attacked progressive writers as anti-Semitic

By Justin Elliott

Josh Block

Topics:Israel-Palestine, Israel, AIPAC

Politico’s Ben Smith reports today that the Truman National Security Project has severed ties with one of its fellows, former AIPAC spokesman Josh Block, following a multi-week flap in which Block attacked several progressives because of their writings on Israel-Palestine.

Smith reports:

The decision to expel Block appears, first hinted at by Greg Sargent, aimed at sending a message of solidarity with the other progressive groups, which have been infuriated by the attacks, and at defending allies from being criticized as anti-Israel at a moment of intense and often partisan debate on the issue.

“This has nothing to do with your policy views, and is a decision solely made on the basis of the need for this community to privilege the ability to debate difficult topics freely, without fear of mischaracterization or character attacks,” [Truman founder Rachel Kleinfeld] said in the email [to Block].

Truman is a Washington-based “leadership institute” which cultivates a network of young fellows who “advance strong progressive national security policy.” Block’s position was unpaid; he says he attended one Truman meeting per year. (Also worth noting: Center for American Progress chairman John Podesta is on Truman’s advisory board.)

Now Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol is expressing outrage at Truman’s move:

The Truman Project says that it seeks to advance a ”strong progressive national security policy,” and claims to represent mainstream liberal and Democratic foreign policy thinking. Doesn’t the expulsion of Block suggest that it is now impossible to be unapologetically pro-Israel—and publicly hostile to those who are anti-Israel—and remain a member in good standing of the liberal and Democratic foreign policy establishment?

But missing here is any mention of what really got the Truman folks upset at Block. As I reported earlier this month, Block had sent out an email to a neoconservative listserv in which he said, referring to writers at the Center for American Progress and Media Matters, “These are the words of anti-Semites, not Democratic political players.” That was further than Block had gone publicly and it was a particularly serious charge; he also urged journalists on the listerv to “amplify” the attacks.

Truman spokesman David Solimini told me that the anti-Semitism charges from Block were particularly troubling.

“Josh was removed from our community because he’s unable to differentiate between an honest debate and a personal attack,” Solimini said. “There is real anti-semitism in the world and we can’t debase the term by using it for everyone who disagrees with us on Israel policy.”

Solimini added: “There is a clear pattern here. Over time many of our community members had come to realize Josh isn’t interested in an honest debate.”

Block, in an email to Salon, responded:

As the Simon Wiesenthal Center made clear, the ideas and words used and promoted by people at CAP and Media Matters included “dangerous political libels and toxic anti-Jewish prejudice.” If there is no room in their organization for those who would raise alarms about that and similar language, that is their choice, and says far more about them than me.

But misrepresenting my comments and suggesting that my pointing to such speech constituted a ‘personal attack’ is laughable and the height of hypocrisy. Apparently Simon Wiesenthal wouldn’t be welcome there either.