The Truth About Congessional Pro-Israel Theater
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
Here is how the pro-Israel theater works.
Every other country has its American embassy in its
capital. Except Israel. Every few years, Congress
would bring up a bill or a resolution calling or
even mandating that the embassy be moved to
Jerusalem. Even politicians not known for their
great love of the Jewish State would vote for it.
Some like Biden or Kerry would even sponsor them.
The bill would have a loophole allowing a president
to waive it in the interests of national security,
which he always did, even when he had promised to
move the embassy to Jerusalem in his campaign.
The politicians were happy. The pro-Israel lobby got
to justify its budget. Some Jews however were
baffled why the embassy never seemed to get moved.
A similar farce would play out on other issues like
cutting off aid to the PLO. There would be a bill
and then a waiver and everyone would issue the
appropriate press releases. And terrorists would go
on killing people and then getting paid salaries
with money provided by US taxpayers.
Iran's nukes are the acid test. This is the one that
matters. It's the one that activists are frantically
fighting for.
But Congress is not about to override the White
House on Iran, no more than it wanted to on
Jerusalem or the PLO. The Republicans certainly
didn't want to be put in the position where their
vote against Iran might actually count. And then
Obama would blame them.
That's what the Iran Nuclear Review Act was for.
It sets up a grand theatrical production in which
Republicans damage Democrats by splitting the Jewish
vote without any of it actually mattering. Everyone
gets to posture, to play their parts, not to get
anything done, but to advance their own careers.
Some Democrats will 'choose' Israel over Iran and
win the undying affection of Jews. Others will back
Obama to the cheers of the left. The Republicans
will chortle over the split in the Dems. A few who
know better, like Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz, will
grind their teeth at the betrayal.
AIPAC will once again nobly lose, while increasing
its donations and membership. The Republican Jewish
Coalition will point to this as proof that the GOP
is more pro-Israel. J Street will use the number of
Jewish Democrats who defected to the Iran side as
evidence that they won.
Obama will do what he intended to do all along. And
all this will turn out to have been the same hollow
charade as the votes over recognizing Jerusalem as
Israel's capital or defunding the PLO.
The game is rigged. It's been rigged all along.
Some Congressmen really do believe in what they're
doing. There are a few "righteous men in Sodom", but
for the most part Congress is a way of moving money
around, of making speeches without taking
responsibility, of making grand gestures that don't
rock the boat.
The Republican Party is indeed more pro-Israel
ideologically, but Republican ideology is
hypothetical. While the Democrats turn left, the
Republicans turn in circles. The left acts on its
ideology, the right talks about it.
The most pro-Israel Democratic administration was
LBJ's. The most anti-Israel Democratic
administration was Obama's. With a certain amount of
wavering, the trend between those two markers has
been negative.
The most anti-Israel Republican administration was
Eisenhower's. The most pro-Israel was Bush II's. The
trend here has mostly been positive.
But while there's no limit to how anti-Israel the
Democrats can go, there is a hard limit on how
pro-Israel the Republicans can go. And Bush II was
probably it.
The pro-Israel politics of Republican presidents,
like the rest of their conservative ideological
commitments, is more talk than reality. You can get
a Republican president to say nice things about
Israel, small government, the value of life,
religious freedom and all that, but you can't get
him to do anything about it, like moving the
embassy, ending the funding of terrorism or ending
the pressure on Israel to comply with assorted PLO
demands. That and 5 bucks might get you a cup of
coffee on Capitol Hill.
When I encourage Jews to go Republican, it's not
because it will usher in a glorious pro-Israel era.
It's because being associated with a Democratic
Party dancing to the fiddle of the left is deeply
corrosive. Being around the left is damaging. It's a
destructive movement that poisons everything it
touches.
Especially people.
Maybe the GOP can become what it should be. We
should certainly work toward that. And the first
step is to be realistic about what it is and what it
does.
The Republican Party tells conservatives what they
want to hear while taking its marching orders from
an infrastructure of advisers, experts and
consultants who urge it to implement the same old
bad ideas while lying to the public.
That is how we got here in more ways than one.
Republican politicians want to win elections without
changing anything. They want to do the 'sensible'
thing which means keeping up the status quo and not
rocking the boat. The only way to do that is by
lying a lot.
Some Democrats, perversely the ones who actually
have retained some sense of right and wrong, are the
same way.
So are most organizations. At the end of day
everyone just wants to collect their paycheck, put
in the same hours they did yesterday following a
familiar work routine, and go home.
It's human nature.
Our enemies have taken advantage of that. They have
taken over the system step by step, by exploiting
the apathy of the system in the traditional manner
of the left, be the first to show up, be the last to
leave, organize, lie, aid your comrades and drive
out any form of opposition.
We have been lulled to sleep by the promises and
lies of those we thought were on our side.
If we're going to change anything, let's deal with
these realities. There are no easy solutions. Our
friends have no appetite for a fight and our enemies
control the high ground. The cavalry isn't coming.
We can change things as long as we are determined to
really shake things up.
And that means realizing that much of what we've
been investing our energy in has been theater, not
truth. We can't change things until we stop letting
ourselves be fooled.
None of this means that we should stop fighting the
Iran nuke deal.
The harder we fight it, the more significant it will
be when the deal comes apart. We don't want this to
be another North Korea in which the opposition goes
down the memory hole. We need to be able to say that
we fought this disaster ever step of the way and
called it out for what it was.
Because this is the beginning, not the end.
The deal is not impossible to stop. It's just
impossible to stop playing by the rules of the GOP
and Democrats. It's impossible to stop by playing
out a game whose outcome was predetermined by Obama,
the GOP and the Democrats. That game was over before
it started.
It is important for people to understand that. It's
not just the Iran deal where the outcome was known
ahead of time. It's true for most pro-Israel efforts
in Congress that bump up against the two-state
solution. It's true for most conservative political
efforts for that matter.
Playing that game makes lobbyists, consultants and
politicians look good. And we pay them and lose.
Nothing will change until we make it clear that we
understand the game and that we want real change,
not more theater. The left didn't get its change by
playing by the same old rules.
Neither will we.
Change happens when politicians recognize that they
will be held accountable and that their lies and
games have been exposed. It happens when they are
forced to realize that the people not only see
through them, but that they're angry and their anger
will impact their support and their opposition.
Everything else is business as usual. And business
as usual is what got us here.
It's time for the lies to end and for the truth to
be heard. It's time to end the fake votes, the fake
resolutions, the theater whose weekly productions
change, but whose theme is the same.
There are politicians who want to fight and
politicians who want to appear to be fighting. The
latter have done more damage than any enemy by
draining time and energy, providing false
reassurances and empty hopes. It's time to bring the
curtain down on their latest production in which a
big chunk of Congress walks away hiding a smirk
after having pulled off its latest scam.