Why not ask a lobbyist?

In the wake of L’Affaire Freeman, the National Journal is asking experts to talk about what might bring about rational debate on Israel.

The editors abjure the term "Israel lobby" because it is lazy, and good for them, but then they ask this:

It seems that Washington cannot have a no holds-barred discussion of policy toward Israel and Palestine — like Israel’s politicians and press do domestically every hour of every day — without someone here being labeled an anti-Semite terrorist sympathizer on the one hand, or a toadie for a brutal and apartheid-like system run by right wing nuts in Tel Aviv, on the other.

First, so what? The nature of debate is that it invites extremes. Do extremists truly inhibit debate? The answers on the NJ forum suggest not.

Second, while they have on board at least a couple of members of  the "bash Israel defenders as toadies" faction, where are the strident Israel defenders? No, the eminently sensible Dov Zakheim – who, as he notes, took on pro-Israel acitivists when he crushed the Lavi project in one of his previous Pentagon capacities – does not count. Where’s Mort Klein? JINSA?

Zakheim, like the editors, suggests removing name-calling from the debate in order to move forward, and he calls both sides on it:

Take, for example, the accusation that American policy regarding Israel is driven by people whose loyalty is dual, and therefore suspect. Even when not named, the inference is clearly to Jews. Yet it is well-known that the majority, perhaps the overwhelming majority, of Evangelicals, unstintingly support the State of Israel, many of them taking a harder line on the withdrawal from the Occupied Territories than both the majority of Israelis and the majority of Jewish Americans. Since Evangelicals outnumber the Jewish American community by at least an order of magnitude, it is arguable that more Evangelicals are hard line on the issue of withdrawal than are Jews. Yet, other than their loyalty to the Bible, to what do Evangelicals have any loyalty other than to America? Attacking Jews for supposedly harboring dual loyalties is therefore not only is misplaced, it is the kind of slur that inhibits rational debate.

Jews will react to this, and other innuendos with an emotion that overshadows all else. However much the Holocaust may have become a yawn, or boring to some, for Jewish Americans whose parents, or grandparents, or relatives perished even as the world closed its doors to Jewish refugees from Europe, the Holocaust is a grim reminder that “mere” anti-Semitic words and publications that colored Central European politics at the turn of the twentieth century led to genocide a few decades later. Any attack on Jews as an entity will evoke an overreaction every time.

There likewise can be no rational debate if it involves attacks on individuals, regardless of what side of the debate they are on. Who, after all, are the so-called “Arabists?” Are they supporters of Egypt and Jordan, who have peace treaties with Israel? Or of the several of the Gulf and North African Arab states, who have economic relations with Israel? The term is a slur, as is the broad-brush use of the term “neo-Con” with which to tar any Jew supporting, or worse, serving in, the Bush Administration. Both sets of slurs appear with increasing frequency in the blogosphere, and they render rational debate virtually impossible.

So, to sum up a long entry: don’t generalize, about US policy in the Middle East; about groups supporting or opposing that policy; or about individuals that may or may not have taken a policy position, but who, for a variety of reasons, are assumed to have done so. Once the generalizations end, rational debate can begin.

Michael Scheuer, the former CIA analyst and Israel basher who looks so Jewish it must keep him up nights, thinks it’s just terrible to call folks anti-Semites, but calling them traitors is just dandy:

There is indeed an identifiable fifth column of pro-Israel U.S. citizens — I have described them here and elsewhere as Israel-Firsters — who have consciously made Israel’s survival and protection their first priority, and who see worth in America only to the extent that its resources and manpower can be exploited to protect and further the interests of Israel in its religious war-to-the-death with the Arabs. These are disloyal citizens in much the same sense that the Civil War’s disloyal northern "Copperheads" sought to help the Confederates destroy the Union. The Israel-Firsters help Israel suborn U.S. citizens to spy for Israel; they use their fortunes and political action organizations to buy U.S. politicians with campaign donations; and most of all they use their ready access to the media to disguise their own disloyalty by denigrating as anti-Semites or appeasers fellow citizens who dare to challenge them.