For decades, these three have been unabashedly pro-Turkish. If
Turkey was for it, they were for it. No matter what the issue — even
one as emotional as the Armenian genocide — the big three Jewish
organizations backed Turkey to the hilt as did their Congressional
cutouts. (Not long ago, ADL fired an official in Boston for saying that
there was an Armenian genocide).

The reason. Turkey was (and, in my opinion, is) Israel’s most
powerful friend in the Muslim world. Going back to its first prime
minister, David Ben Gurion, Israel worked hard at maintaining a
strategic friendship with the Turks.

And so did Israel’s lobby in America.

By extension, the lobby did not like Greece, Greek Cyprus, or
anything the Greeks liked. The organizations loved sending delegations
to Turkey, encouraging Jewish tourism there, and celebrated Turkey as
utterly free of anti-semitism. (The Greeks were dismissed as
incorrigibly left-wing).

No more. Ever since the Turks opposed the Gaza invasion and blockade,
the lobby has been furious at Turks for their temerity. Its prime
minister even publicly admonished Shimon Peres about Gaza in Davos. And
then there was the flotilla incident (about which Turkey has infinitely
more reason to be angry about than Israel), Within the period of a few
months, Israel and its lobby turned on Turkey with a vengeance. Even the
1915 genocide that previously wasn’t a genocide became one overnight.

Now Turkey is the country the lobby loves to hate. Assuming that the
best way to stick it to Turkey is to suck up to Greece, that it what
AIPAC, AJC, and ADL are doing. In lockstep. These guys remind me of
American communists back in the 1930’s, with their sheer dexterity at
shifting policies in about an hour! How silly can you get?

Jonathan Broder writes all about it in Congressional Quarterly
(I don’t have the link because I can’t afford a subscription) but here
is a small excerpt. It is about the new lobby position on Cyprus, a
subject about which it previously showed no interest. But the new
anti-Turkish position applies across the board. (The American Jewish
Committee should be calling for renaming Istanbul any day now. Why not
Constantinople?).

Here’s Broder.

Pro-Israel powerhouses such as the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Anti-Defamation League and the American
Jewish Committee, all of which had advocated effectively for Turkey
before relations between Jerusalem and Ankara began to fray, were among
the organizations that joined forces with several Greek-American groups
to lobby for passage of the Cyprus resolution. Bilirakis said Jewish
lawmakers and members of the pro-Greece caucus teamed up to get the
resolution passed.

“Greece determined that closer relations with Israel could diminish
the strength of the Turkish-American lobby,” said Ekavi
Athanassopoulou,a political scientist at the University of Athens.

And the word is getting down to the community too. “The Greek Islands
are prettier than the Turkish islands. And Greece is Israel’s friend.”

Hilarious. The islands are all beautiful. But Greece has never been
very friendly to Israel, while Turkey always has. Besides, even if it
wanted to, Greece cannot offer Israel what Turkey can: a key friend in
the Muslim word.

Previous Israeli prime ministers would understand the necessity of
maintaining good solid ties with Turkey. After all, they worked for
decades to build them. But not Netanyahu and his sidekick, Avigdor
Lieberman. Their foreign policy is all about self-pity, resentment, and
spite. In this case, they are spiting themselves and hurting Israel.

And their pet lemmings — the “pro-Israel” lobby that is anything but — are running off the cliff with them.

For Israel’s sake, these people need to grow up. Israel should be friendly with Greece. But it needs to be friendly to Turkey. Is that too hard to grasp?