Daily Blague

Contrary to first impressions, this entry is not about Israel. Not really.

In The New York Times on 19 April, Tony Judt published an Op-Ed piece, "A Lobby, Not a Conspiracy," urging Americans - insiders and regular folk alike - to debate this country's policies regarding Israel, which, as a recent report in the London Review of Books by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt makes painfully clear, have been protected from discussion by an extremely powerful "Israel Lobby." Mr Judt writes,

But above all, self-censorship is bad for the United States itself. Americans are denying themselves participation in a fast-moving international conversation. Daniel Levy (a former Israeli peace negotiator) wrote in Ha'aretz that the Mearsheimer-Walt essay should be a wake-up call, a reminder of the damage the Israel lobby is doing to both nations. But I would go further. I think this essay, by two "realist" political scientists with no interest whatsoever in the Palestinians, is a straw in the wind.

Having fallen behind in my reading, I hadn't got to the report, and it's very likely that I wouldn't have read it without Mr Judt's prodding. It's not that I'm not interested, it's that I'm long since convinced that our Near East foreign policy has been hijacked by a group of Americans whose loyalty to the United States is clearly not undivided. Messrs Mearsheimer and Walt (at Chicago and the Kennedy School respectively) back up their argument with a lot of facts and figures, but this only makes the blatancy of the operation more depressing. They conclude with the argument that it is the Israel Lobby, and nobody much else, that's behind the push to take some sort of pre-emptive action against Iran.

Well, I'm not going to belabor this point. Whether or not there's a powerful Israel Lobby is not a matter of argument to me, and, as a New Yorker, I'm used to ritual kowtowing to Jewish sensibilities on the part of all civic leaders. What I do fear is that the excesses of Israel Lobby policies is going to breed some genuine anti-Semitism in this country. The LRB report - what a scandal that, whatever its merits, it hasn't been published here! - brings one to the point of wondering if certain Jews and their evangelical sympathizers aren't out to fulfill the libels of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

This isn't what's really on my mind, though. What's on my mind is the fact, never quite stated by the report, that the Israel Lobby, like all lobbies, commands what power it exercises largely by means of campaign contributions. And where do these campaign moneys go? Dash me if more than half the money doesn't wind up on television spots (often produced by lobbyists who take a commission of the production costs, thus recouping part of their outlay). And television spots are only as important as the intelligence with which they are received by the public. In the course of my lifetime, I've watched television hone its powers of dumbing down even as it flatters. Flattery is arguably the most effective dumbing-down tool in existence.

So, don't flatter yourself. Don't suppose that you're clear-headed enough to resist the spuriosities of campaign ads. They're not aimed at your head. They're aimed much lower than that, especially at the insecurities that you don't like to acknowledge. They are wholly corrupt, and you can no more consume them without consequence than you can drink a shaker of martinis without getting drunk. To those who say, "But what can I do?" I reply, "Don't watch television." Yes - making campaign contributions, even writing letters and volunteering to canvass the wards sounds easier. But as a young man who was here the other night agreed with me, the longer you go without watching television, the harder it is to go back to. It becomes less tempting every day that you don't watch it, and inevitably you find other, more satisfying occupations. Television may be good for invalids, and for people of unusually low intelligence. Now you can flatter yourself.

(Tip: watching movies is a great substitute. Just stay away from anything pretending to be factual.)