What Influences US Foreign Policy on Israel?
In this fascinating audio clip from 2007 long time peace activist and journalist Jeffrey Blankfort debates scholar Stephen Zunes on questions which the majority of the Left either reject without serious consideration or brush off with simplistic supplements posing as answers. These questions include: what has been influencing US Foreign Policy on Israel during all these years? Can Zionists be progressives? What role does the Israel Lobby play in the US?
Writes Blankfort:
It is impossible for Stephen Zunes to have it both ways. Describing Israel’s establishment as “an example of global affirmative action” would generally be interpreted as being supportive of its coming into being. While he has said that it was a disaster for the Palestinians, does he support the Palestinian right of return and a single state as means for rectifying that wrong? The alternative, of course, is maintaining Israel as Jewish majority state. What is Zunes’s position?…
Finally, does Zunes see the organized Jewish community, that is, de facto, the Jewish component of the Zionist lobby, as having any culpability for its decades of unconditioned support for Israel, for its decades of occupation and dispossession of the Palestinians and for its wars and occupation of Lebanon? This is an important question which up to now Zunes has gone to great pains to avoid answering.
