The Rise
of the Israel Lobby:A
Measure of Its Power
by Kathleen and Bill
Christison
24 May 2006
[Ten,
even five
years ago, a fierce public debate over the nature and activities of the
Israeli lobby would have been impossible. It was as verboten as the use
of the word Empire to describe the global reach of the United States.
Through its disdain for the usual proprieties decorously observed by
Republican and Democratic administrations in the past, the Bush
administration has hauled many realities of our political economy
center stage. Open up the New York
Times or the Washington Post
these
days and there may well be another opinion column about the Lobby.
CounterPunch
has hosted some of the most vigorous
polemics on the
Lobby. In May we asked two of our most valued contributors, Kathy and
Bill Christison, to offer their evaluation of the debate on the Lobby’s
role and power. As our readers know, Bill and Kathy both had
significant careers as CIA analysts. Bill was a National Intelligence
Officer. In the aftermath of the September, 2001, attacks we published
here his trenchant and influential essay on “the war on terror”. Kathy
has written powerfully both here and on on our website on the topic of
Palestine. Specifically on the Lobby they contributed an unsparing
essay on the topic of “dual loyalty” which can be found in our
CounterPunch
collection, "The
Politics of Anti-Semitism."
In mid May they sent us
their measured
assessment, rich in historical
detail. We are delighted to print it here in its entirety, which means
our subscribers get the bonus of an 8-page issue. Which is the tail?
Which is the dog? asked Uri Avnery here, a few issues back, apropos the
respective roles of the Israel Lobby and the US government in the
exercise of US policy in the Middle East. Here’s an answer that will be
tough to challenge. Alexander Cockburn & Jeffrey St.Clair]
John Mearsheimer and Stephen
Walt, the University of Chicago and Harvard political scientists who
published in March of this year a lengthy, well documented study on
the pro-Israel lobby and its influence on U.S. Middle East policy in
March , have already accomplished what they intended. They have
successfully called attention to the often pernicious influence of the
lobby on policymaking. But, unfortunately, the study has aroused more
criticism than debate not only the kind of criticism one would
anticipate from the usual suspects among the very lobby groups
Mearsheimer and Walt described, but also from a group on the left that
might have been expected to support the study’s conclusions.
The
criticism has been partly silly, often
malicious, and almost entirely off-point. The silly, insubstantial
criticisms such as former presidential adviser David Gergen’s
earnest comment that through four administrations he never observed an
Oval Office
decision that tilted policy in favor of Israel at the expense of U.S.
interests can easily be dismissed as nonsensical . Most of the
extensive malicious criticism, coming largely from the hard core of
Israeli supporters who make up the very lobby under discussion and led
by a hysterical Alan Dershowitz, has been so specious and sophomoric,
that it too could be dismissed were it not for precisely the pervasive
atmosphere of reflexive support for Israel and silenced debate that
Mearsheimer and Walt describe.
Most disturbing and
harder to dismiss is the criticism of the
study from the left, coming
chiefly from Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein, and abetted less
cogently by Stephen Zunes of Foreign Policy in Focus and Joseph Massad
of Columbia University. These critics on the left argue from a
assumption that U.S. foreign policy has been monolithic since World War
II, a coherent progression of decision-making directed unerringly at
the advancement of U.S. imperial interests. All U.S. actions, these
critics contend, are part of a clearly laid-out strategy that has
rarely deviated no matter what the party in power. They believe that
Israel has served throughout as a loyal agent of the U.S., carrying out
the U.S. design faithfully and serving as a base from which the U.S.
projects its power around the Middle East. Zunes says it most clearly,
affirming that Israel “still is very much the junior partner in the
relationship.” These critics do not dispute the existence of a lobby,
but they minimize its importance, claiming that rather than leading the
U.S. into policies and foreign adventures that stand against true U.S.
national interests, as Mearsheimer and Walt assert, the U.S. is
actually the controlling power in the relationship with Israel and
carries out a consistent policy, using Israel as its agent where
possible.
Finkelstein summarized the critics’ position in a recent CounterPunch
article (“The Israel Lobby,” May 1,
emphasizing that the issue
is not whether U.S. interests or those of the lobby take precedence but
rather that there has been such coinci
dence of U.S. and
Israeli interests over the decades that for the most part basic U.S.
Middle East policy has not been affected by the lobby. Chomsky
maintains that Israel does the U.S. bidding in the Middle East in
pursuit of imperial goals that Washington would pursue even without
Israel and that it has always pursued in areas outside the Middle East
without benefit of any lobby. Those goals have always included
advancement of U.S. corporate-military interests and political
domination through the suppression of radical nationalisms and the
maintenance of stability in resource-rich countries, particularly oil
producers, everywhere. In the Middle East, this was accomplished
primarily through Israel’s 1967 defeat of Egypt’s Gamal Abdul Nasser
and his radical Arab nationalism, which had threatened U.S. access to
the region’s oil resources. Both Chomsky and Finkelstein trace the
strong U.S.-Israeli tie to the June 1967 war, which they believe
established the close alliance and marked the point at which the U.S.
began to regard Israel as a strategic asset and a stable base from
which U.S. power could be projected throughout the Middle East.
Joseph Massad
(“Blaming the Israel Lobby,” CounterPunch, March 25/26) argues along
similar lines, describing developments in the Middle East and around
the world that he believes the U.S. engineered for its own benefit and
would have carried out even without Israel’s assistance. His point,
like Chomsky’s, is that the U.S. has a long history of overthrowing
regimes in Central America, in Chile, in Indonesia, in Africa, where
the Israel lobby was not involved and where Israel at most assisted the
U.S. but did not benefit directly itself. He goes farther than Chomsky
by claiming that with respect to the Middle East Israel has been such
an essential tool that its very usefulness is what accounts for the
strength of the lobby. “It is in fact the very centrality of Israel to
U.S. strategy in the Middle East,” Massad contends with a kind of
backward logic, “that accounts, in part, for the strength of the
pro-Israel lobby and not the other way around.” (One wonders why, if
this were the case, there would be any need for a lobby at all. What
would be a lobby’s function if the U.S. already regarded Israel as
central to its strategy?)
The principal problem
with these arguments from the left is that
they assume a continuity
in U.S. strategy and policymaking over the decades that has never in
fact existed. The notion that there is any defined strategy that links
Eisenhower’s policy to Johnson’s to Reagan’s to Clinton’s gives far
more credit than is deserved to the extremely ad hoc, hit-or-miss
nature of all U.S. foreign policy. Obviously, some level of imperial
interest has dictated policy in every administration since World War II
and, obviously, the need to guarantee access to vital natural resources
around the world, such as oil in the Middle East and elsewhere, has
played a critical role in determining policy. But beyond these evident,
and not particularly significant, truths, it can accurately be said, at
least with regard to the Middle East, that it has been a rare
administration that has itself ever had a coherent, clearly defined,
and consistent foreign policy and that, except for a broadly defined
anti-communism during the Cold War, no administration’s strategy has
ever carried over in detail to succeeding administrations.
The ad hoc nature of
virtually every administration’s policy
planning process cannot be overemphasized. Aside from the strong but
amorphous political need felt in both major U.S. parties and nurtured
by the Israel lobby that “supporting Israel” was vital to each party’s
own future, the inconsistent, even short-term randomness in
the detailed Middle East
policymaking of successive administrations has been remarkable. This
lack of clear strategic thinking at the very top levels of several new
administrations before they entered office enhanced the power of
individuals and groups that did have clear goals and plans already in
hand such as, for instance, the pro-Israeli Dennis Ross in both
the first Bush and the Clinton administrations, and the strongly
pro-Israeli neo-cons in the current Bush administration.
The critics on the left
argue that because the U.S. has a history of opposing and frequently
undermining or actually overthrowing radical nationalist governments
throughout the world without any involvement by Israel, any instance in
which Israel acts against radical nationalism in the Arab world is,
therefore, proof that
Israel is doing the United States’ work for it . The critics generally
believe, for instance, that Israel’s political destruction of Egypt’s
Nasser in 1967 was done for the U.S. Most if not all believe that
Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon was undertaken at U.S.behest, to
destroy the PLO.
This kind of
argumentation assumes too much on a presumption of policy coherence.
Lyndon Johnson most certainly did abhor Nasser and was not sorry to see
him and his pan-Arab ambitions defeated, but there is absolutely no
evidence that the Johnson administration ever seriously planned to
unseat Nasser, formulated any other action plan against Egypt, or
pushed Israel in any way to attack. Johnson did apparently give a green
light to Israel’s attack plans after they had been formulated, but this
is quite different from initiating the plans. Already mired in Vietnam,
Johnson was very much concerned not to be drawn into a war initiated by
Israel and was criticized by some Israeli supporters for not acting
forcefully enough on Israel’s behalf. In any case, Israel needed no
prompting for its pre-emptive attack, which had long been in the works.
Indeed, far from Israel functioning as the junior partner carrying out
a U.S. plan, it is clear that the weight of pressure in 1967 was on the
U.S. to go along with Israel’s designs and that this pressure came from
Israel and its agents in the U.S. The lobby in this instance as
broadly defined by Mearsheimer and Walt: “the loose coalition of
individuals and organizations who actively work to shape U.S. foreign
policy in a pro-Israel direction” was in fact a part of Johnson’s
intimate circle of friends and advisers. These included the number-two man at the
Israeli embassy, a
close personal friend;
the
strongly pro-Israeli Rostow brothers, Walt and Eugene, who were part of
the national security bureaucracy in the administration; Supreme Court
Justice Abe Fortas; U.N. Ambassador Arthur Goldberg; and numerous
others who all spent time with Johnson at the LBJ Ranch in Texas and
had the personal access and the leisure time in an informal setting to
talk with Johnson about their concern for Israel and to influence him
heavily in favor of Israel. This circle had already begun to work on
Johnson long before Israel’s pre-emptive attack in 1967, so they were
nicely placed to persuade Johnson to go along with it despite Johnson’s
fears of provoking the Soviet Union and becoming involved in a military
conflict the U.S. was not prepared for.
In other words,
Israel was beyond question the
senior partner in this particular policy initiative; Israel made the
decision to go to war, would have gone to war with or without the U.S.
green light, and used its lobbyists in the U.S. to steer Johnson
administration policy in a pro-Israeli direction.
Israel’s attack on the
U.S. naval vessel, the USS Liberty, in the midst of the
war an attack conducted in broad daylight that killed 34 American
sailors was not the act of a junior partner. Nor was the U.S.
cover-up of this atrocity the act of a government that dictated the
moves in this relationship.
The evidence is equally
clear that Israel was the prime mover in
the 1982 invasion of Lebanon and led the U.S. into that morass, rather
than the other way around. Although Massad refers to the U.S. as
Israel’s master, in this instance as in many others including 1967,
Israel has clearly been
its own master. Chomsky argues in support of his case that Reagan
ordered Israel to call off the invasion in August, two months after it
was launched. This is true, but in fact Israel did not pay any
attention; the invasion continued, and the U.S. got farther and farther
embroiled.
When, as occurred
in Lebanon, the U.S. has blundered into
misguided adventures to support Israel or to rescue Israel or to
further Israel’s interests, it is a clear denial of reality to say that
Israel and its lobby have no
significant influence on U.S. Middle East policy. Even were there not
an abundance of other examples, Lebanon alone, with its long-term
implications, proves the truth of the Mearsheimer-Walt conclusion that
the U.S. “has set aside its own security in order to advance the
interests of another state” and that “the overall thrust of U.S. policy
in the region is due almost entirely to U.S. domestic politics, and
especially to the activities of the ‘Israel Lobby.’”
As a general proposition,
the left critics’ argumentation is
much too limiting. While there is no question that modern history is
replete, as they argue, with examples of the U.S. acting in corporate
interests overthrowing nationalist governments perceived to be
threatening U.S. business and economic interests, as in Iran in
1953, Guatemala in 1954,
Chile in 1973, and elsewhere this frequent convergence of
corporate with government interests does not mean that the U.S. never
acts in other than corporate interests. The fact of a strong
government-corporate alliance does not in any way preclude
situations even in the Middle East, where oil is obviously a
vital corporate resource in which the U.S. acts primarily to
benefit Israel rather than serve any corporate or economic purpose.
Because it has a deep emotional aspect and involves political,
economic, and military ties unlike those with any other nation, the
U.S. relationship with Israel is unique, and there is nothing in the
history of U.S. foreign policy, nothing in the government’s
entanglement with the military-industrial complex, to prevent the lobby
from exerting heavy influence on policy. Israel and its lobbyists make
their own “corporation” that, like the oil industry (or Chiquita Banana
or Anaconda Copper in other areas), is clearly a major factor driving
U.S. foreign policy.
There is no
denying the intricate interweaving of the U.S.
military-industrial complex with Israeli military-industrial interests.
Chomsky acknowledges
that there is “plenty of conformity” between the lobby’s position and
the U.S. government-corporate linkage and that the two are very
difficult to disentangle. But, although he tends to emphasize that the
U.S. is always the senior partner and suggests that the Israeli side
does little more than support whatever the U.S. arms, energy, and
financial industries define as U.S. national interests, in actual fact
the entanglement is much more one between equals than the raw strengths
of the two parties would suggest. “Conformity” hardly captures the
magnitude of the relationship. Particularly in the defense arena,
Israel and its lobby and the U.S. arms industry work hand in glove to
advance their combined, very compatible interests. The relatively few
very powerful and wealthy families that dominate the Israeli arms
industry are just as interested in pressing for aggressively
militaristic U.S. and Israeli foreign policies as are the CEOs of U.S.
arms corporations and, as globalization has progressed, so have the
ties of joint ownership and close financial and technological
cooperation among the arms corporations of the two nations grown ever
closer. In every way, the two nations’ military industries work
together very easily and very quietly, to a common end. The
relationship is symbiotic, and the lobby cooperates intimately to keep
it alive; lobbyists can go to many in the U.S. Congress and tell them
quite credibly that if aid to Israel is cut off, thousands of
arms-industry jobs in their own districts will be lost. That’s power.
The lobby is not simply passively supporting whatever the U.S.
military-industrial complex wants. It is actively twisting arms
very successfully in both Congress and the administration to
perpetuate acceptance of a definition of U.S. “national interests” that
many Americans believe is wrong, as does Chomsky himself.
Clearly, the advantages in the relationship go in both directions:
Israel serves U.S. corporate interests by using, and often helping
develop, the arms that U.S. manufacturers produce, and the U.S. serves
Israeli interests by providing a constant stream of high-tech equipment
that maintains Israel’s vast military superiority in the region.
But simply because the U.S. benefits from this relationship, it cannot
be said that the U.S. is Israel’s master, or that Israel always does the
U.S. bidding, or that the lobby, which helps keep this arms alliance
alive, has no significant power. It’s in the nature of a symbiosis that
both sides benefit, and the lobby has played a huge role in maintaining
the interdependence.
The left’s
arguments also tend to be much too conspiratorial.
Finkelstein, for instance, describes a supposed strategy in which the
U.S. perpetually undermines Israeli-Arab reconciliation because it does
not want an Israel at peace with its neighbors, since Israel would then
loosen its dependence on the U.S. and become a less reliable proxy.
“What use,” he asks, “would a Paul Wolfowitz have of an Israel living
peacefully with its Arab neighbors and less willing to do the U.S.’s
bidding?”
Not only does this
give the U.S. far more credit than it has
ever deserved for long-term strategic scheming and the ability to carry
out such a conspiracy, but it begs a very important question that
neither Finkelstein nor
the other left critics, in their dogged effort to mold all developments
to their thesis, never examine: just what U.S.’s bidding is Israel
doing nowadays?
A lthough the leftist
critics speak of Is-rael as a base from
which U.S. power is projected throughout the Middle East, they do not
clearly explain how this works. Any strategic value Israel had for the
U.S. diminished drastically with the collapse of the Soviet Union. They
may believe that Israel keeps Saudi Arabia’s oil resources safe from
Arab nationalists or Muslim fundamentalists or Russia, but this is
highly questionable.
Israel
clearly did us no good in Lebanon, but
rather the U.S. did Israel’s bidding and fumbled badly, so this cannot
be how the U.S. uses Israeli to project its power.
In Palestine,
Finkelstein himself acknowledges that the U.S. gains nothing from the
occupation and Israeli settlements, so this can’t be where Israel is
doing the U.S.’s bidding. (With this acknowledgement, Finkelstein,
perhaps unconsciously, seriously undermines his case against the
importance of the lobby, unless he somehow believes the occupation is
only of incidental significance, in which case he undermines the thesis
of much of his own body of writing.)
Owning the Policymakers.
In the clamor
over the Mearsheimer-Walt study, critics on both the left and the right
have tended to ignore the slow evolutionary history of U.S. Middle East
policymaking and of the U.S. relationship with Israel. The ties to
Israel and earlier to Zionism go back more than a century, predating
the formation of a lobby, and they have remained firm even at periods
when the lobby has waned. But it is also true that the lobby has
sustained and formalized a relationship that otherwise rests on
emotions and moral commitment. Because the bond with Israel has been a
steadily evolving continuum, dating back to well before Israel’s formal
establishment, it is important to emphasize that there is no single
point at which it is possible to say, this is when Israel won the
affections of America, or this is when Israel came to be regarded as a
strategic asset, or this is when the lobby became an integral part of
U.S. policymaking.
The
left critics of the lobby study mark the
Johnson administration as
the beginning of the U.S.-Israeli alliance, but almost every
administration before Johnson’s, going back to Woodrow Wilson,
ratcheted up the relationship in some significant way and could
justifiably claim to have been the progenitor of the bond.
Significantly, in almost all cases, policymakers acted as they did
because of the influence of pro-Zionist or pro-Israeli lobbyists:
Wilson would not have supported the Zionist enterprise to the extent he
did had it not been for the influence of Zionist colleagues like Louis
Brandeis; nor would Roosevelt; Truman would probably not have been as
supportive of establishing a Jewish state without the heavy influence
of his very pro-Zionist advisers.
After the Johnson
administration as well, the relationship has
continued to grow in
remarkable leaps. The Nixon-Kissinger regime could claim that they were
the administration that cemented the alliance by exponentially
increasing military aid from an annual average of under $50
million in military credits to Israel in the late 1960s to an average
of almost $400 million and, in the year following the 1973 war, to $2.2
billion. It is not for nothing that Israelis have informally dubbed
almost every president since Johnson with the notable exceptions
of Jimmy Carter and the senior George Bush as “the most
pro-Israeli president ever”; each one has achieved some landmark in the
effort to please Israel.
The U.S.-Israeli bond has
always had its grounding more in soft
emotions than in the hard realities of geopolitical strategy. Scholars
have always described the tie in almost spiritual terms never applied
to ties with other nations. A Palestinian-French scholar has described
the United States’ pro-Israeli tilt as a “predisposition,” a natural
inclination that precedes any consideration of interest or of cost.
Israel, he said, takes
part in the very “being” of American society and therefore participates
in its integrity and its defense.
This is not simply the biased
perspective of a Palestinian.
Other scholars of varying political inclinations have described a
similar spiritual and cultural identity: the U.S. identifies with
Israel’s “national style”; Israel is essential to the “ideological
prospering” of the U.S.; each country has “grafted” the heritage of the
other onto itself. This applies even to the worst aspects of each
nation’s heritage. Consciously or unconsciously, many Israelis even
today see the U.S. conquest of the American Indians as something
“good,” something to emulate and, which is worse, many Americans even
today are happy to accept the “compliment” inherent in Israel’s effort
to copy us.
This is no ordinary
state-to-state rela-tionship, and the lobby does not function
like any ordinary lobby.
It is not a great exaggeration to say that the lobby could not thrive
without a very willing host that is, a series of U.S.
policymaking establishments that have always been locked in to a
mindset singularly focused on Israel and its interests and, at
the same time, that U.S. policy in the Middle East would not possibly
have remained so singularly focused on and so tilted toward Israel were
it not for the lobby. One thing is certain: with the possible
exceptions of the Carter and the first Bush administrations, the
relationship has grown noticeably closer and more solid with each
administration, in almost exact correlation with the growth in size and
budget and political clout of the pro-Israel lobby.
All
critics of the lobby study have failed to
note a critical point during the Reagan administration, surrounding the
debacle in Lebanon, when it can reasonably be
said that policymaking
tipped over from a situation in which the U.S. was more often the
controlling agent in the relationship to one in which Israel and its
advocates in the U.S. have increasingly determined the course and the
pace of developments. The organized
lobby,
meaning AIPAC and the several formal Jewish American organizations,
truly came into its own during the Reagan years with a massive
expansion of memberships, budgets, propaganda activities, and contacts
within Congress and government, and it has been consolidating power and
influence for the last quarter century, so that today the broadly
defined lobby, including all those who work for Israel, has become an
integral part of U.S. society and U.S. policymaking.
The situation
during the Reagan administration demonstrates very clearly the
closeness of the bond. The events of these years illustrate how an
already very Israel-centered mindset in the U.S., which had been
developing for decades, was transformed into a concrete,
institutionalized relationship with Israel via the offices of Israeli
supporters and agents in the U.S.
The seminal event in the growth
of AIPAC and the organized lobby
was the battle over the administration’s proposed sale of AWACS
aircraft to Saudi Arabia in 1981,
Reagan’s first year in office. Paradoxically, although
AIPAC lost this battle in a head-on struggle with Reagan and the
administration, and the sale to the Saudis went forward, AIPAC and the
lobby ultimately won the war for influence. Reagan was determined that
the sale go through; he regarded the deal as an important part of an
ill-conceived attempt to build an Arab-Israeli consensus in the Middle
East to oppose the Soviet Union and, perhaps even more important, saw
the battle in Congress as a test of his own prestige. By winning the
battle, he demonstrated that any administration, at least up to that
point, could exert enough pressure to push an issue opposed by Israel
through Congress, but the struggle also demonstrated how exhausting and
politically costly such a battle can be, and no one around Reagan was
willing to go to the mat in this way again. In a real sense, despite
AIPAC’s loss, the fight showed just how much the lobby limited
policymaker freedom, even more than 20 years ago, in any transaction
that concerned Israel.
The AWACS imbroglio galvanized
AIPAC into action, at precisely
the time the administration was subsiding in exhaustion, and under an
aggressive and energetic leader, former congressional aide Thomas Dine,
AIPAC quadrupled its budget, increased its grassroots support
immensely, and vastly expanded its propaganda effort. This
last and perhaps most
significant accomplishment was achieved when Dine established an
analytical unit inside AIPAC that published in-depth analyses and
position papers for congressmen and policymakers. Dine believed that
anyone who could provide policymakers with books and papers focusing on
Israel’s strategic value to the U.S. would effectively “own” the
policymakers.
With the rising
power and influence of the
lobby, and following the
U.S. debacle in Lebanon which began with Israel’s 1982 invasion
and ended for the U.S. with the withdrawal of its Marine contingent in
early 1984, after the Marines had become involved in fighting to
protect Israel’s invasion force and 241 U.S. military had been killed
in a truck bombing the Reagan administration effectively handed
over the policy initiative in the Middle East to Israel and its
American advocates.
Israel and its agents
began, with amazing effrontery, to
complain that the U.S. failure to clean up in Lebanon was interfering
with Israel’s own designs there from which arrogance Reagan and
company concluded, in an astounding twist of logic, that the only way
to restore stability was through closer alliance with Israel. As a
result, in the fall of 1983 Reagan sent a delegation to ask
the Israelis
for
closer strategic ties, and shortly thereafter forged a formal strategic
alliance with Israel with the signing of a “memorandum of understanding
on strategic cooperation.” In 1987, the U.S. designated Israel a “major
non-NATO ally,” thus giving it access to military technology not
available otherwise. The notion of demanding concessions from Israel in
return for this favored status such as, for instance, some
restraint in its settlement-construction in the West Bank was
specifically rejected. The U.S. simply very deliberately and abjectly
retreated into policy inaction, leaving Israel with a free hand to
proceed as it wished wherever it wished in the Middle East and
particularly in the occupied Palestinian territories.
Even Israel, by all accounts, was surprised by this demonstration of
the United States’ inability to see beyond Israel’s interests. Prime
Minister Menachem Begin had attempted from early in the Carter
administration to push the notion that Israel was a strategic Cold War
asset to the U.S. but, because Israel did not in fact perform a
significant strategic role for the U.S. and was in many ways more a
liability than an asset, Carter never paid serious attention to the
Israeli overtures. Begin feared that the United States’ moral and
emotional commitment to Israel might ultimately not be enough to
sustain the relationship through possible hard times, and so he
attempted to put Israel forward as a strategically indispensable ally
and a good investment for U.S. security, a move that would essentially
reverse the two nations’ roles, altering the relationship from one of
Israeli indebtedness to the U.S. to one in which the United States was
in Israel’s debt for its vital strategic role.
Carter was having none of
this, but the notion of strategic
cooperation germinated in Israel and among its U.S. supporters until
the moment became ripe during the Reagan administration. By the end of
the Lebanon mess, the notion that the U.S. needed
Israel’s friendship had
so taken hold among the Reaganites that, as one former national
security aide observed in a stunning upending of logic, they began to
view closer strategic ties as a necessary means of “restor[ing] Israeli
confidence in American reliability.” Secretary of State George Shultz
wrote in his memoirs years later of the U.S. need “to lift the
albatross of Lebanon from Israel’s neck.” Recall, as Shultz must not
have been able to do, that the debt here was rightly Israel’s: Israel
put the albatross around its own neck, and the U.S. stumbled into
Lebanon after Israel, not the other way around.
AIPAC and the neo-conservatives
who rose to prominence during
the Reagan years played a major role in building the strategic
alliance. AIPAC in particular became in every sense of the word a
partner of the
U.S. in
forging Middle East policy from the mid-1980s on. Thomas Dine’s vision of
“owning”
policymakers by providing them with position papers geared to Israel’s
interests went into full swing. In 1984, AIPAC spun off a think tank,
the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, that remains one of the
pre-eminent think tanks in Washington and that has sent its analysts
into policymaking jobs in several administrations. Dennis Ross, the
senior Middle East policymaker in the administrations of George H.W.
Bush and Bill Clinton, came from the Washington Institute and returned
there after leaving the government. Martin Indyk, the Institute’s first
director, entered a top policymaking position in the Clinton
administration from there.
Today,
John Hannah, who has served on Vice
President Cheney’s national security staff since 2001 and succeeded
Lewis Libby last year as Cheney’s leading national security adviser,
comes from the Institute. AIPAC also continues to do its own analyses
in addition to the Washington Institute’s. A recent Washington
Post profile
of Steven Rosen, the former senior AIPAC foreign policy analyst who is
about to stand trial with a colleague for receiving and passing on
classified information to Israel, noted that two decades ago Rosen
began a practice of lobbying the executive branch, rather than simply
concentrating on Congress, as a way, in the words of the Post article,
“to alter American foreign policy” by “influencing government from the
inside.” Over the years, he “had a hand in writing several policies
favored by Israel.”
In the Reagan years,
AIPAC’s position papers were particularly
welcomed by an administration already more or less convinced of
Israel’s strategic value and obsessed with impeding Soviet advances. Policymakers
began negotiating
with AIPAC before presenting legislation in order to help assure
passage, and Congress consulted the lobby on pending legislation.
Congress eagerly embraced almost every legislative initiative proposed
by the lobby and came to rely on AIPAC for information on all issues
related to the Middle East. The close cooperation between the
administration and AIPAC soon began to stifle discourse inside the
bureaucracy. Middle East experts in the State Department and other
agencies were almost completely cut out of decision-making, and
officials throughout government became increasingly unwilling to
propose policies or put forth analysis likely to arouse opposition from
AIPAC or Congress. One unnamed official complained that “a lot of real
analysis is not even getting off people’s desks for fear of what the
lobby will do”; he was speaking to a New York Times correspondent,
but otherwise his complaints fell on deaf ears.
This kind of pervasive influence, a chill on discourse inside as well
as outside policymaking councils, does not require the sort of
clear-cut, concrete pro-Israeli decisions in the Oval Office that David
Gergen naively thought he should have witnessed if the lobby had any
real influence. This kind of influence, which uses friendly persuasion,
along with just enough direct pressure, on a broad range of
policymakers, legislators, media commentators, and grassroots activists
to make an impression across the spectrum, cannot be defined in terms
of narrow, concrete policy commands, but becomes an unchanging,
unchallengeable mindset, a sentimental environment that restricts
debate, restricts thinking, and determines actions and policies as
surely as any command from on high. When Israel’s advocates, its
lobbyists, in the U.S. become an integral part of the policymaking
apparatus, as they have particularly since the Reagan years and
as they clearly have been during the current Bush administration
there is no way to separate the lobby’s interests from U.S. policies.
Moreover, because Israel’s strategic goals in the region are more
clearly defined and more urgent than those of the United States,
Israel’s interests most often dominate.
Chomsky himself acknowledges that the lobby plays a significant part in
shaping the political environment in which support for Israel becomes
automatic and unquestioned. Even Chomsky believes that what he calls
the intellectual political class is a critical, and perhaps the most
influential, component of the lobby because these elites determine the
shaping of news and information in the media and academia. On the other
hand, he contends that, because the lobby already includes most of this
intellectual political class, the thesis of lobby power “loses much of
its content”. But, on the contrary, this very fact would seem to prove
the point, not undermine it. The fact of the lobby’s pervasiveness, far
from rendering it less powerful, magnifies its importance tremendously.
Indeed, this is the crux
of the entire debate. It is the very
power of the lobby to continue shaping the public mindset, to mold thinking and, perhaps most
important, to instill fear of deviation that brings this intellectual
political class together in an unswerving determination to work for
Israel. Is there not a heavy impact on Middle East policymaking when,
for instance, a lobby has the power to force the electoral defeat of
long-serving congressmen, as occurred to Representative Paul Findley in
1982 and Senator Charles Percy in 1984 after both had deviated from
political correctness by speaking out in favor of negotiating with the
PLO? AIPAC openly crowed about the defeat of both men both
Republicans serving during the Republican Reagan administration, who
had been in Congress for 22 and 18 years respectively. Similarly, does
not the media’s silence on Israel’s oppressive measures in the occupied
territories, as well as the concerted, and openly acknowledged, efforts
of virtually every pro-Israeli organization in the U.S. to suppress
information and quash debate on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, have
an immense impact on policy? Today, even the most outspoken of leftist
radio hosts and other commentators, such as Randi Rhodes, Mike Malloy,
and now Cindy Sheehan, almost always avoid talking and writing about
this issue.
Does not the massive effort by
AIPAC, the Washington Institute,
and myriad other similar organizations to spoon-feed policymakers
and congressmen
selective information and analysis written only from Israel’s
perspective have a huge impact on policy? In the end, even Chomsky and
Finkelstein acknowledge the power of the lobby
in
suppressing discussion and debate about Middle East policy. The
mobilization of public opinion, Finkelstein writes, “can have a real
impact on policy-making which is why the Lobby invests so much
energy in suppressing discussion.” It is difficult to read statement
except as a ringing acknowledgement of the massive and very central
power of the lobby to control discourse and to control policymaking on
the most critical Middle East policy issue.
Interchangable Interests.
The principal
problem with the left critics’ analysis is that it is too rigid. There
is no question that Israel has served the interests of the U.S.
government and the military-industrial complex in many areas of the
world by, for instance, aiding some of the rightist regimes of Central
America, by skirting arms and trade embargoes against apartheid South
Africa and China (until the neo-conservatives turned off the tap to
China and, in a rare disagreement with Israel, forced it to halt), and
during the Cold War by helping, at least indirectly, to hold down Arab
radicalism. There is also no question that, no matter which party has
been in power, the U.S. has over the decades advanced an essentially
conservative global political and pro-business agenda in areas far
afield of the Middle East, without reference to Israel or the lobby.
The U.S. unseated Mossadegh in Iran and Arbenz in Guatemala and Allende
in Chile, along with many others, for its own corporate and political
purposes, as the left critics note, and did not use Israel.
But these
facts do not minimize the power the
lobby has exerted in countless instances over the course of decades,
and particularly in recent years, to lead the U.S. into situations that
Israel initiated, that the U.S. did not plan, and that have done harm,
both singly and cumulatively, to U.S. interests.
One need only ask whether
particular policies would have been adopted in the absence of pressure
from some influential persons and organizations working on Israel’s
behalf in order to see just how often Israel or its advocates in the
U.S., rather than the United States or even U.S. corporations, have
been the policy initiators. The answers give clear evidence that a
lobby, as broadly defined by Mearsheimer and Walt, has played a
critical and, as the decades have gone on, increasingly influential
role in policymaking.
For instance, would Harry Truman have been as supportive of
establishing Israel as a Jewish state if it had not been for heavy
pressure from what was then a very loose grouping of strong Zionists
with considerable influence in policymaking circles? It can reasonably
be argued that he might not in fact have supported Jewish statehood at
all, and it is even more likely that his own White House advisers
all strong Zionist proponents themselves would not have twisted
arms at the United Nations to secure the 1947 vote in favor of
partitioning Palestine if these lobbyists had not been a part of
Truman’s policymaking circle. Truman himself did not initially support
the notion of founding a state based on religion, and every national
security agency of government, civilian and military , strongly opposed
the partition of Palestine out of fear that this would lead to warfare
in which the U.S. might have to intervene, would enhance the Soviet
position in the Middle East, and would endanger U.S. oil interests in
the area. But even in the face of this united opposition from within
his own government, Truman found the pressures of the Zionists among
his close advisers and among influential friends of the administration
and of the Democratic Party too overwhelmingly strong to resist.
Questions like this arise for virtually every presidential
administration. Would Jimmy Carter, for instance, have dropped his
pursuit of a resolution of the Palestinian problem if the Israel lobby
had not exerted intense pressure on him? Carter was the first president
to recognize the Palestinian need for some kind of “homeland,” as he
termed it, and he made numerous efforts to bring Palestinians into a
negotiating process and to stop Israeli settlement-building, but
opposition from Israel and pressures from the lobby were so heavy that
he was ultimately worn down and defeated.
It is also all but
impossible to imagine the U.S. supporting
Israel’s actions in the occupied Palestinian territories without
pressure from the lobby. No conceivable U.S. national interest
served even in the United States’ own myopic view by its
support for Israel’s harshly oppressive policy
in the West Bank and
Gaza, and furthermore this support is a dangerous liability. As
Mearsheimer and Walt note, most foreign elites view the U.S. tolerance
of Israeli repression as “morally obtuse and a handicap in the war on
terrorism,” and this tolerance is a major cause of terrorism against
the U.S. and the West. The impetus for oppressing the Palestinians
clearly comes and has always come from Israel, not the United States,
and the impetus for supporting Israel and facilitating this oppression
has come, very clearly and directly, from the lobby, which goes to
great lengths to justify the occupation and to advocate on behalf of
Israeli policies.
It is tempting, and not at
all out of the realm of possibility,
to imagine Bill Clinton having
forged a final Palestinian-Israeli peace agreement were it not for the
influence of his notably pro-Israeli advisers. By the time Clinton came
to office, the lobby had become a part of the policymaking apparatus,
in the persons of Israeli advocates Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk, both
of whom entered government service from lobby organizations. Both also
returned at the end of the Clinton administration to organizations that
advocate for Israel: Ross to the Washington Institute and Indyk to the
Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy, which is
financed by and named for a notably pro-Israeli benefactor. The scope
of the lobby’s infiltration of government policymaking councils has
been unprecedented during the current Bush administration. Some of the
left critics dismiss the neo-cons as not having any allegiance to
Israel; Finkelstein thinks it is naïve to credit them with any
ideological conviction, and Zunes claims they
are
uninterested in benefiting Israel because they are not religious Jews
(as if only religious Jews care about Israel). But it simply ignores
reality to deny the neo-cons’ very close ties, both ideological and
pragmatic, to Israel’s right wing.
Both Finkelstein
and Zunes glaringly fail to mention the strategy paper that several
neo-cons wrote in the mid-1990s for an Israeli prime minister, laying
out a plan for attacking Iraq these same neo-cons later carried out
upon entering the Bush administration. The strategy was designed both
to assure Israel’s regional dominance in the Middle East and to enhance
U.S. global hegemony. One of these authors, David Wurmser, remains in
government as Cheney’s Middle East adviser one of several
lobbyists inside the henhouse. The openly trumpeted plan, crafted by
the neo-cons, is to “transform” the Middle East by unseating Saddam
Hussein, and the notion, also openly touted, that the path to peace in
Palestine-Israel ran through Baghdad grew out of the neo-cons’
overriding concern for Israel. Both Finkelstein and Zunes also fail to
take note of the long record of advocacy on behalf of Israel that
almost all the neo-cons (Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith,
David Wurmser, Elliott Abrams, John Bolton, and their cheerleaders on
the sidelines such as William Kristol, Robert Kagan, Norman Podhoretz,
Jeane Kirkpatrick, and numerous right-wing, pro-Israeli think tanks in
Washington) have compiled over the years. The fact that these
individuals and organizations are all also advocates of U.S. global
hegemony does not diminish their allegiance to Israel or their desire
to assure Israel’s regional hegemony in alliance with the U.S.
The claimed
interchangeability of U.S. and Israeli
interests and the fact that certain individuals for whom a
primary objective is to advance Israel’s interests now reside inside
the councils of government proves the truth of the
Mearsheimer-Walt’s principal conclusion that the lobby has been able to
convince most Americans, contrary to reality, that there is an
essential identity of U.S. and Israeli interests and that the lobby has
succeeded for this reason in forging a relationship of unmatched
intimacy. The “overall thrust of policy” in the
Middle East, they observe
quite accurately, is “almost entirely” attributable to the lobby’s
activities. The fact that the U.S. occasionally acts without reference
to Israel in areas outside the Middle East, and that Israel does
occasionally serve U.S. interests rather than the other way around,
takes nothing away from the significance of this conclusion.
The tragedy of the
present situation is that it has become
impossible to separate Israeli from alleged U.S. interests that
is, not what should be real U.S. national interests, but the selfish
and
self-defined “national interests” of the political-corporate-military
complex that dominates the Bush administration, Congress, and both
major political parties. The specific groups that now dominate the U.S.
government are the globalized arms, energy, and financial industries,
and the entire military establishments, of the U.S. and of
Israel groups that have quite literally hijacked the government
and stripped it of most vestiges of democracy.
This convergence of manipulated
“interests” has a profound
effect on U.S. policy
choices in the Middle East. When a government is unable to distinguish
its own real needs from those of another state, it can no longer be
said that it always acts in its own interests or that it does not
frequently do grave damage to those interests. Until the system of
sovereign nation-states no longer exists and that day may never
come no nation’s choices should ever be defined according to the
demands of another nation. Accepting a convergence of U.S. and Israeli
interests means that the U.S. can never act entirely as its own agent,
will never examine its policies and actions entirely from the vantage
point of its own long-term self interest, and can, therefore, never
know why it is devising and implementing a particular policy. The
failure to recognize this reality is where the left critics’ belittling
of the lobby’s power and their acceptance of U.S. Middle East policy as
simply an unchangeable part of a longstanding strategy is particularly
dangerous.
___________
Kathleen
Christison is the author of Perceptions
of
Palestine,
which analyzes the evolution of U.S. policy on the Palestine issue over
the last century and in the process traces the exponential growth since
World War I in the influence on policymakers of Israel’s powerful
American advocates.
Bill Christison was a senior official
of the CIA. He served as a
National Intelligence Officer and as Director of the CIA’s Office of
Regional and Political Analysis. He is a contributor to Imperial
Crusades,
CounterPunch’s history of the
wars on Iraq and
Afghanistan.
They
can be reached at kathy.bill@christinson-santafe.com