It’s important enough when such a major figure within the financial world as George Soros points out the obvious, that the USA is being extraordinarily influenced by lobbyists for this foreign nation halfway around the world.
It’s all the more impactful because Soros himself is Jewish.
The financier and philanthropist George Soros has entered the debate about US policy on Israel, accusing the Bush administration of adopting a hopeless strategy towards the Palestinians partly because of the influence wielded in Washington by a pro-Israel lobby.
In an article in the New York Review of Books, he accuses the Washington-based American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) of being “remarkably successful” in suppressing criticism of US-Israeli policy towards the Palestinians.
Mr 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 the Israeli and US governments that the Palestinian unity government cannot be recognised because it includes Hamas. His argument that this amounts to a policy blunder is contentious, but it is his comments on how such an approach came to be dominant within Washington that are being seen as the most controversial.
Mr Soros criticised Aipac, America’s largest pro-Israel lobby, which works with Democrats and Republicans in Congress and has 100,000 members nationally.
Mr Soros, who is Jewish, argues Aipac has exceeded its mission by intervening in 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”.
In his article, Mr Soros also says that Alvin Rosenfeld, writing on behalf of the American Jewish Committee, argues 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’.”
Prof Rosenfeld, who teaches in the English and Jewish studies departments of Indiana University, said yesterday 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 Prof Rosenfeld sitting in his office in a midwest college has the power to stifle the free speech of a George Soros is simply absurd,” Prof Rosenfeld said.