This morning’s Standard-Times contained an article about the removal of a billboard by Outdoor Media referencing the 1967 USS Liberty incident, in which an American ship was attacked by Israel and 34 U.S. sailors were killed. The Johnson administration immediately suppressed the story and it is still relatively unknown. The Standard-Times article quotes the New England Defamation League, which attacks the group that placed the ad (“If Americans Only Knew”) for alleged “antisemitism.” No other view was presented in the article.
Interested readers can find a curated version of the story at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Liberty_incident or at the group’s website http://www.ifamericansknew.org/us_ints/ussliberty.html.
Without a doubt “If Americans Only Knew” is confrontational – as is PETA, who also unsuccessfully waded into local billboard marketing with disastrous results. But if you actually visit their website instead of merely taking the ADL’s word for it, it’s clear that their issues are with American foreign policy around Israel and Palestine. They leave generalizations about Jews to people like Donald Trump.
It is hardly surprising that the Defamation League would come down on the side of censorship. The ADL in recent years has expanded its definition of antisemitism to include criticism of Israel and it has become primarily a mouthpiece for the Israeli foreign ministry. In 2008, when it served Israel’s interests to be less hostile to Turkey, the ADL denied the Armenian genocide. Now, at a time that Jews are better-integrated into American society than ever before, the ADL has turned away from defending Jewish Americans to defending Israel’s militarism and occupation.
But the Israel-Palestine issue is not going away. More than ever, it is a valid foreign policy debate, just as American militarism is. Last year the [U.S.] Congressional Research Service reported that “Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II. To date, the United States has provided Israel $124.3 billion (current, or non-inflation-adjusted, dollars) in bilateral assistance. Almost all U.S. bilateral aid to Israel is in the form of military assistance…”
I can think of many better uses for that money – and it is certainly worth debating.
We can pretend all we want that Israel is a beleaguered little David fighting off Arab Goliaths day and night – or we can acknowledge that, like us, Israel has turned its back on its founders’ ideals and has become an ugly xenophobic nation – with an equally ugly dependency on militarism and an occupation habit. But it’s hard for Americans to criticize Zionism when we so enthusiastically embrace our own American Exceptionalism.
Still, if we are looking for an explanation for the unrelenting efforts to censor the debate on Israel and Palestine, we need only look in the mirror. This – as Walter Russell Mead wrote in “Foreign Affairs” many years ago – is the real reason we cannot bear criticism of Israel: they’re just too much like us.
Besides, who really wants to look in that mirror?
This was published in the Standard Times on April 13, 2016
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20160413/opinion/160419873
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