The Uproar Over The
Isreal Lobby
by
Alexander Cockburn
6 May 2006
For the past few weeks a sometimes comic debate has been simmering in
the American press, focused on the question of whether there is an
Israeli lobby and, if so, just how powerful it is.
I would have thought that to ask whether there's an Israeli lobby here
is a bit like asking whether there's a Statue of Liberty in New York
Harbor or a White House located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,
Washington, D.C. The late Steve Smith, brother-in-law of Teddy Kennedy,
and a powerful figure in the Democratic Party for several decades,
liked to tell the story of how a group of four Jewish businessmen got
together $2 million in cash and gave it to Harry Truman when he was in
desperate need of money during his presidential campaign in 1948.
Truman went on to become president and to express his gratitude to his
Zionist backers.
Since those days, the Democratic Party has long been hospitable to, and
supported by, rich Zionists. In 2002, for example, Haim Saban, the
Israel-American who funds the Saban Center at the Brooking Institute
and is a big contributor to AIPAC, gave $12.3 million to the Democratic
Party. In 2001, the magazine Mother Jones listed on its website the 400
leading contributors to the 2000 national elections. Seven of the first
10 were Jewish, as were 12 of the top 20, and 125 of the top 250. Given
this, all prudent candidates have gone to amazing lengths to satisfy
their demands.
None of this history is particularly controversial, and there have been
plenty of well-documented accounts of the activities of the Israel
Lobby down the years, from Alfred Lilienthal's 1978 study, The Zionist
Connection, to former U.S. Rep. Paul Findley's 1985 book, "They Dare To
Speak Out" to "Dangerous Liaison: The Inside Story of the U.S.-Israeli
Covert Relationship," written by my brother and sister-in-law, Andrew
and Leslie Cockburn, and published in 1991.
Three years ago, Jeffrey St. Clair and I published a collection of 18
essays called The Politics of Anti-Semitism, no less than four of which
were incisive discussions of the Israel lobby. Kathy and Bill
Christison, former CIA analysts, reviewed the matter of dual loyalty,
with particular reference to the so-called neo-cons, alternately
advising an Israeli prime minister and an American president.
Most vividly of all in our book, a congressional aide, writing
pseudonymously under the name George Sutherland, contributed a savagely
funny essay called "Our Vichy Congress." "As year chases year,"
Sutherland wrote, "the lobby's power to influence Congress on any issue
of importance to Israel grows inexorably stronger . Israel's strategy
of using its influence on the American political system to turn the
U.S. national security apparatus into its own personal attack dog -- or
Golem -- has alienated the United States from much of the Third World,
has worsened U.S. ties to Europe amid rancorous insinuations of
anti-Semitism, and makes the United States a hated bully."
So it can scarcely be said that there had been silence here about the
Israel Lobby until two respectable professors, John J. Mearsheimer and
Stephen M. Walt, the former from the University of Chicago and the
latter from Harvard, wrote their paper "The Israel Lobby and U.S.
Foreign Policy," published in longer form by the Kennedy School at
Harvard (which has since disowned it) and, after it had been rejected
by the Atlantic Monthly (which originally commissioned it), in shorter
form by the London Review of Books.
In fact, the significance of this essay rests entirely on the
provenance of the authors, from two of the premier academic
institutions of the United States. Neither of them have any tincture of
radicalism. After the paper was published in shortened form in the
London Review of Books, there was a slightly stunned silence, broken by
the screams of America's most manic Zionist, Professor Alan Dershowitz
of Harvard, who did Mearsheimer and Walt the great favor of thrusting
their paper into the headlines. Dershowitz managed this by his usual
volleys of hysterical invective, investing the paper with the fearsome
allure of that famous anti-Semitic tract, a forgery of the Czarist
police, entitled "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion." The
Mearsheimer-Walt essay was Nazi-like, Dershowitz howled, a classic case
of conspiracy-mongering, in which a small band of Zionists were accused
of steering the Ship of Empire onto the rocks.
In fact, the paper by Mearsheimer and Walt is extremely dull. The long
version runs to 81 pages, no less than 40 pages of which are footnotes.
I settled down to read it with eager anticipation but soon found myself
looking hopefully for the end. There's nothing in the paper that any
moderately well-read student of the topic wouldn't have known long ago,
but the paper has the merit of stating rather blandly some home truths
that are somehow still regarded as too dangerous to state publicly in
respectable circles in the United States.
After Dershowitz came other vulgar outbursts, such as from Eliot Cohen
in the Washington Post. These attacks basically reiterated Dershowitz's
essential theme: There is no such thing as the Israel lobby, and those
asserting its existence are by definition anti-Semitic.
This method of assault at least has the advantage of being funny, (a)
because there obviously is a Lobby -- as noted above and (b) because
Mearsheimer and Walt aren't anti-Semites any more than 99.9 percent of
others identifying the Lobby and criticizing its role. Partly as a
reaction to Dershowitz and Cohen, the Washington Post and New York
Times have now run a few pieces politely pointing out that the Israel
Lobby has indeed exercised a chilling effect on the rational discussion
of U.S. foreign policy. The tide is turning slightly.
Meanwhile, mostly on the left, there has been an altogether different
debate, over the actual weight of the Lobby in the deliberations of
those running the American Empire. This debate was rather amusingly
summed up by the Israeli writer Yuri Avneri, a former Knesset member:
"I think that both sides are right (and hope to be right, myself, too).
The findings of the two professors are right to the last detail. Every
senator and congressman knows that criticizing the Israeli government
is political suicide. . If the Israeli government wanted a law tomorrow
annulling the Ten Commandments, 95 U.S. senators (at least) would sign
the bill forthwith .
"The question, therefore, is not whether the two professors are right
in their findings. The question is what conclusions can be drawn from
them. Let's take the Iraq affair. Who is the dog? Who the tail? . The
lesson of the Iraq affair is that the American-Israeli connection is
strongest when it seems that American interests and Israeli interests
are one (irrespective of whether that is really the case in the long
run). The United States uses Israel to dominate the Middle East, Israel
uses the United States to dominate Palestine."
______________________
Alexander Cockburn is coeditor with
Jeffrey St. Clair of the muckraking
newsletter CounterPunch. He is also co-author of the new book "Dime's
Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils," available through
www.counterpunch.com.