Among major nations, only the U.S. and Israel voted against a UN General Assembly vote criticizing Israel’s action in Gaza.  The U.S. is alone among major nations in its one-sided actual (as distinct from rhetorical) support for Israel, no matter what it does.  U.S. policy now threatens regional and perhaps wider war.  In some circles in the U.S. now, to be critical of Israel is to be anti-Semitic. This charge, once enough to silence many critics, is losing  its impact.

AIPAC is gearing up its formidable fundraising apparatus to raise money for primary challengers to Democrats who are critical of Israel’s present war against Hamas and its unwillingness to come to terms with Palestine.  These primaries will be an important test of whether there is a shift in American public opinion on this conflict—both viewpoint and salience to the voter of the issue.

On October 27, 2023, the Assembly overwhelmingly adopted a resolution offered by an Arab group of nations. The 193-member world body adopted the resolution by a vote of 120-14 with 45 abstentions after rejecting a Canadian amendment backed by the United States to unequivocally condemn the Oct. 7 “terrorist attacks” by Hamas and demand the immediate release of hostages taken by Hamas.

Then on December 12, the UN General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to demand a humanitarian cease-fire in Gaza.

The U.S. had to veto the UN Security Council resolution condemning all violence against civilians in the Israel-Hamas war. This is not the first time our country has used its veto power to support Israel.

What is now different is that the almost-automatic favoring of Israel in the U.S. is shaken.  Remembering the Holocaust and supporting Israel as a homeland for the Jewish people is not the same as uncritical support for Israel no matter what it does.  Netanyahu’s disproportionate violence in response to the horrible Hamas attack of October 7 is leading to second thoughts on the part of many Americans.

Only the U.S. is in a position to effectively put pressure on Israel’s policymakers by placing a hold on arms funding and shipments until a cease-fire takes place.  Following that, the U.S., along with others, must then play an honest broker role in bringing about negotiations between the parties that ends in a solution supported by each.

The question is whether those supporting a just settlement to the conflict between Israel and Palestine will develop a focus on what U.S. foreign policy toward that conflict will be, or will continue to argue about the attack of October 7 and Israel’s response to it.  That is a no-win argument.  People on either side of it can endlessly draw upon history going back to pre-Christian times to support Israel or Palestine.

Precedent:  Vietnam Hearings.  January 24, 1966

Here’s the Official Senate Report on the periodic Fulbright hearings on the Vietnam War.

Early in 1966, a journalist who had interviewed more than 200 U.S. troops in Vietnam wrote to Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman J. William Fulbright. The reporter explained, “The war is not going well. The situation is worse than reported in the press and worse, I believe, than indicated in intelligence reports.” A recent military buildup seemed to be having little effect. One officer told the reporter, “If there is a God, and he is very kind to us, and given a million men, and five years, and a miracle in making the South Vietnamese people like us, we stand an outside chance—of a stalemate.”

On January 24, 1966, Secretary of State Dean Rusk appeared before a closed hearing of Fulbright’s committee. His assessment: “If the U.S. and its allies remained firm, the communists would eventually give up in Vietnam.” Rusk’s testimony convinced Fulbright that the administration of President Lyndon Johnson was blinded by its “anticommunist assumptions.”

Attempting to forestall a buildup of American forces, Fulbright launched a high-profile series of widely televised public “educational” hearings in February 1966. The all-star cast of witnesses included retired generals and respected foreign policy analyst George Kennan.

Kennan advised that the United States withdraw “as soon as this could be done without inordinate damage to our prestige or stability in the area” to avoid risking war with China. His testimony prompted an angry President Johnson to order FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to investigate whether Fulbright was “either a communist agent or a dupe of the communists.”

Conducted in the Senate Caucus Room, the hearings reached their most dramatic phase when Secretary Rusk and General Maxwell Taylor arrived to lay out the administration’s case. Fulbright shifted from his earlier role as a benign questioner of supportive witnesses to a grim prosecutor, his dark glasses set resolutely against the glare of television lights.

The February hearings did not immediately erode Senate support for Johnson’s war policies. They did, however, begin a significant shift in public opinion. In the four weeks that spanned the hearings, the president’s ratings for handling the war dropped from 63 percent to 49 percent. The testimony of George Kennan and other establishment figures had made it respectable to question the war.

Fulbright’s biographer concludes that the hearings “opened a psychological door for the great American middle class. It was Fulbright’s ability to relate to this group, as well as his capacity for building bridges to conservative Senate opponents of the war, such as Richard Russell, that would make him important to the antiwar movement.

Now

Now is the time for a broadly-based group of labor, professional, religious, political, business and civic leaders, joined by notables, scholars, athletes and celebrities, to call for hearings on the efficacy of American foreign policy.  A statement they sign could read something like this:

The United States Senate should hold hearings on the efficacy of United States post-Cold War and post-9/11 foreign policy.  Having defeated the Communist bloc and its allies in the Cold war, U.S. political leaders promised an era of peace, freedom and economic development.  We have seen little to fulfill that promise.

The United States is the single-most militarily powerful nation in the world.  Our war and peace policy may outweigh in its consequences the policies of the rest of the world put together.  It is time for a public review, discussion and debate on those policies.

We, the undersigned, call upon the US Senate to initiate such hearings, asking the question, “Is It time for a New American Foreign Policy?”

The first round of hearings could be on Israel-Hamas-Palestine.  But the broader question now has an opportunity to be raised as left, right and center critics of our role in both Ukraine and Palestine, are now challenging the post-9/11 foreign policy consensus.

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