The financier and philanthropist George Soros has entered the debate about United States policy on Israel, accusing George Bush’s administration of adopting a hopeless strategy towards the Palestinians partly because of the influence wielded in Washington by the pro-Israeli lobby.
Soros leapt into one of the US’s most contentious debates with an article in the New York Review of Books in which he launches an attack on the pro-Israel lobby. He specifically accuses the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), a Washington-based group, of being ”remarkably successful” in suppressing criticism of US-Israeli policy towards the Palestinians.
Soros, a billionaire investor who rose to prominence when he was seminal in forcing the pound out of the European exchange rate mechanism on Black Wednesday in 1992, posits his argument on a critique of the prevailing view within both the Israeli and US governments that the Palestinian unity government cannot be recognised because it includes Hamas. His argument that this approach amounts to a major policy blunder is contentious, but his comments on how such an approach came to be dominant within Washington are being seen as the most controversial.
Soros concentrates his fire on Aipac, the largest and most influential pro-Israel lobby group in the US, which works with both Democratic and Republican members of Congress and has more than 100 000 members nationally. The New York Times has classed Aipac as the ”most important organisation affecting America’s relationship with Israel” and its pull among senior politicians was displayed at its annual conference last month when speakers included the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, the Democratic speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid, who leads the Democrats in the Senate.
Soros, who is Jewish, argues that Aipac has exceeded its mission by intervening in political debates over Iran, the failed appointment of the neocon John Bolton as US ambassador to the UN, and its earlier enthusiastic support of the Iraq invasion. He also says the group has had a dampening effect on debate about Israel and the Palestinians because it has ”gone on the offensive, accusing the so-called progressive critics of Israel’s policies of fomenting anti-Semitism and endangering the very existence of the Jewish state”.
Soros says that Alvin Rosenfeld, writing on behalf of the American Jewish Committee, argued that to condemn Israeli action without historic and political context that might account for such actions is unacceptable. ”Rosenfeld resorts, without any personal knowledge of the people he attacks, to primitive accusations of self-hatred, lumping all these critics together as people who are ‘proud to be ashamed to be Jews’.”
Professor Rosenfeld, who teaches in the English and Jewish studies departments of Indiana University, said that his writing had been misrepresented. He had never used the term ”self-hatred”, he said, and the ”proud to be ashamed” quote came from the English lawyer and writer Anthony Julius, who had been referring to other individuals. ”That he could suggest that a Professor Rosenfeld sitting in his office in a Midwest college has the power to stifle the free speech of a George Soros is simply absurd,” he said. Soros said he was anxious about the reaction he would receive from his article. ”Anybody who dares to dissent may be subjected to a campaign of personal vilification,” he writes.
He refers to an attack on him recently in the New Republic magazine which suggested he had been a ”young cog in the Hitlerite wheel” when he was a child — a false representation, Soros says, of the way his father arranged for him to have a false identity and pose as the godson of a non-Jew in Hungary, saving his life. – Guardian Unlimited Â