Walter Russell Mead has another long post up about Israel and anti-Semitism which touches on some of the questions I raised here. It's well worth reading in full and again, he makes a number of points I agree with. To wit:
'Iâ??m not trying to grade the incommensurable suffering of people around the world, but if we compare the attention and care that the international community has extended to the Palestinians with our attention and support for other victims in other places, a disturbing pattern emerges. Whatever the wrongs of Israelâ??s occupation policy â?? and I agree that there are some â?? the Palestinians, especially in the West Bank but even in Gaza, live much better than many people in the world whose suffering attracts far less world attention â?? and whose oppressors get far less criticism. I would much rather be a Palestinian, even in Gaza, than a member of a minority tribe in the hills of Myanmar, or almost anyone in the Eastern Congo or Darfur. Millions of children in Pakistan and Indonesia have less food security, less educational opportunity and less access to health services than Palestinians who benefit from UN services (to which the United States is historically the largest single contributor) that poor people in other countries can only dream of.
'
This is obviously true. It's especially in the Arab world, where the treatment of the Palestinians is subjected to no end of scrutiny while the grotesque human rights abuses of Arab regimes, Sudan, etc., are studiously ignored or minimized. Sri Lanka recently experienced a massive humanitarian catastrophe following a campaign against Tamil insurgents, and few people worked up much outrage about it (something that miffed Kevin quite a bit).
But I think there's a very important distinction here that Mead skips right over: by virtue of its aid and diplomatic support, the U.S. is implicated in Israel's behavior in a way that it simply is not with other countries. So one can agree with Mead, as I do, that Israel's treatment of the Palestinians does not rise to the world-historical level and nonetheless still argue that American policy toward Israel needs to be considered on the basis of that treatment (or more accurately, the ramification that that treatment has for American security).
This of course leads to the question of whether Israel's actions with respect to the Palestinians are having any negative impact on American security. This isn't physics, where cause and effect are as clear as billiard balls bouncing off one another, but there is a sufficient body of thought that does posit a direct link that it's worth taking seriously. Supporters of Israel - such as Dennis Ross and David Makovksy - acknowledged in their book that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a major grievance in the Arab world and contributes to the terrorist threat we face, which is why attempting to solve the conflict is such an urgent priority. The 9/11 Commission referenced the radicalizing effect of the conflict. Other analysts, such as Peter Bergen, who have studied terrorism have cited the existence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a contributing factor to the rise of anti-American terrorism. And clearly, the conflict is a staple of al Qaeda propaganda. To take one recent example, Humam al-Balawi the Jordian bomber who killed 7 CIA officers in Khost, Afghansitan cited the war in Gaza as a catalyst of his radicalism.
At a minimum it suggests to me that violence in the Congo - which, we all agree, is objectively worse than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in terms of the humanitarian toll - is nonetheless not as relevant to American security as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is. And I think that fact goes much further than anti-Semitism to explain the disproportionate emphasis given to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, at least in the United States.
Mead has promised some further posts on the subject but he notes that:
'The core points I want to make arenâ??t about whether American foreign policy toward Israel is a good thing or not, but this debate is so politicized that if you criticize the thesis that American policy toward Israel represents the power of American Jews people assume that you are part of the lobby. '
But why exempt a critical issue here? Isn't it just as important to debate the actual merits of our policy and not only whether people hold anti-Semitic views about its origins? I agree that it's important to root out and expose anti-Semitism wherever it rears its ugly head. But as Mead acknowledged in his post, one can be critical of aspects of U.S. policy towards Israel and not be an anti-Semite. So why not address the arguments of those critics too? If all you're going to do is flag the anti-Semitic critics and arguments and pass lightly over the ones that aren't, you set up a debate that defacto paints all critics of American policy toward Israel as anti-Semites.