For
the past several decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967,
the centrepiece of US Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship
with Israel. The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the
related effort to spread ‘democracy’ throughout the region has inflamed
Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardised not only US security but that
of much of the rest of the world. This situation has no equal in
American political history. Why
has the US been willing to set aside
its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the
interests of another state? One might assume that the bond between the
two countries was based on shared strategic interests or compelling
moral imperatives, but neither explanation can account for the
remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the US
provides.
Instead, the thrust of US policy in the
region derives
almost entirely from domestic politics, and especially the activities
of the ‘Israel Lobby’. Other special-interest groups have managed to
skew foreign policy, but no lobby has managed to divert it as far from
what the national interest would suggest, while simultaneously
convincing Americans that US interests and those of the other country –
in this case, Israel – are essentially identical.
Since the
October War in 1973, Washington has provided Israel with a level of
support dwarfing that given to any other state. It has been the largest
annual recipient of direct economic and military assistance since 1976,
and is the largest recipient in total since World War Two, to the tune
of well over $140 billion (in 2004 dollars). Israel receives about $3
billion in direct assistance each year, roughly one-fifth of the
foreign aid budget, and worth about $500 a year for every Israeli. This
largesse is especially striking since Israel is now a wealthy
industrial state with a per capita income roughly equal to that of
South Korea or Spain.
Other recipients get their money in
quarterly installments, but Israel receives its entire appropriation at
the beginning of each fiscal year and can thus earn interest on it.
Most recipients of aid given for military purposes are required to
spend all of it in the US, but Israel is allowed to use roughly 25 per
cent of its allocation to subsidise its own defence industry. It is the
only recipient that does not have to account for how the aid is spent,
which makes it virtually impossible to prevent the money from being
used for purposes the US opposes, such as building settlements on the
West Bank. Moreover, the US has provided Israel with nearly $3 billion
to develop weapons systems, and given it access to such top-drawer
weaponry as Blackhawk helicopters and F-16 jets. Finally, the US gives
Israel access to intelligence it denies to its Nato allies and has
turned a blind eye to Israel’s acquisition of nuclear weapons.
Washington
also provides Israel with consistent diplomatic support. Since 1982,
the US has vetoed 32 Security Council resolutions critical of Israel,
more than the total number of vetoes cast by all the other Security
Council members. It blocks the efforts of Arab states to put Israel’s
nuclear arsenal on the IAEA’s agenda. The US comes to the rescue in
wartime and takes Israel’s side when negotiating peace. The Nixon
administration protected it from the threat of Soviet intervention and
resupplied it during the October War. Washington was deeply involved in
the negotiations that ended that war, as well as in the lengthy
‘step-by-step’ process that followed, just as it played a key role in
the negotiations that preceded and followed the 1993 Oslo Accords. In
each case there was occasional friction between US and Israeli
officials, but the US consistently supported the Israeli position. One
American participant at Camp David in 2000 later said: ‘Far too often,
we functioned . . . as Israel’s lawyer.’ Finally, the Bush
administration’s ambition to transform the Middle East is at least
partly aimed at improving Israel’s strategic situation.
This
extraordinary generosity might be understandable if Israel were a vital
strategic asset or if there were a compelling moral case for US
backing. But neither explanation is convincing. One might argue that
Israel was an asset during the Cold War. By serving as America’s proxy
after 1967, it helped contain Soviet expansion in the region and
inflicted humiliating defeats on Soviet clients like Egypt and Syria.
It occasionally helped protect other US allies (like King Hussein of
Jordan) and its military prowess forced Moscow to spend more on backing
its own client states. It also provided useful intelligence about
Soviet capabilities.
Backing Israel was not cheap, however, and
it complicated America’s relations with the Arab world. For example,
the decision to give $2.2 billion in emergency military aid during the
October War triggered an Opec oil embargo that inflicted considerable
damage on Western economies. For all that, Israel’s armed forces were
not in a position to protect US interests in the region. The US could
not, for example, rely on Israel when the Iranian Revolution in 1979
raised concerns about the security of oil supplies, and had to create
its own Rapid Deployment Force instead.
The first Gulf War
revealed the extent to which Israel was becoming a strategic burden.
The US could not use Israeli bases without rupturing the anti-Iraq
coalition, and had to divert resources (e.g. Patriot missile batteries)
to prevent Tel Aviv doing anything that might harm the alliance against
Saddam Hussein. History repeated itself in 2003: although Israel was
eager for the US to attack Iraq, Bush could not ask it to help without
triggering Arab opposition. So Israel stayed on the sidelines once
again.
Beginning in the 1990s, and even more after
9/11, US
support has been justified by the claim that both states are threatened
by terrorist groups originating in the Arab and Muslim world, and by
‘rogue states’ that back these groups and seek weapons of mass
destruction. This is taken to mean not only that Washington should give
Israel a free hand in dealing with the Palestinians and not press it to
make concessions until all Palestinian terrorists are imprisoned or
dead, but that the US should go after countries like Iran and Syria.
Israel is thus seen as a crucial ally in the war on terror, because its
enemies are America’s enemies. In fact, Israel is a liability in the
war on terror and the broader effort to deal with rogue states.
‘Terrorism’
is not a single adversary, but a tactic employed by a wide array of
political groups. The terrorist organisations that threaten Israel do
not threaten the United States, except when it intervenes against them
(as in Lebanon in 1982). Moreover, Palestinian terrorism is not random
violence directed against Israel or ‘the West’; it is largely a
response to Israel’s prolonged campaign to colonise the West Bank and
Gaza Strip.
More important, saying that Israel and the
US are
united by a shared terrorist threat has the causal relationship
backwards: the US has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so
closely allied with Israel, not the other way around. Support for
Israel is not the only source of anti-American terrorism, but it is an
important one, and it makes winning the war on terror more difficult.
There is no question that many al-Qaida leaders, including Osama bin
Laden, are motivated by Israel’s presence in Jerusalem and the plight
of the Palestinians. Unconditional support for Israel makes it easier
for extremists to rally popular support and to attract recruits.
As
for so-called rogue states in the Middle East, they are not a dire
threat to vital US interests, except inasmuch as they are a threat to
Israel. Even if these states acquire nuclear weapons – which is
obviously undesirable – neither America nor Israel could be
blackmailed, because the blackmailer could not carry out the threat
without suffering overwhelming retaliation. The danger of a nuclear
handover to terrorists is equally remote, because a rogue state could
not be sure the transfer would go undetected or that it would not be
blamed and punished afterwards. The relationship with Israel actually
makes it harder for the US to deal with these states. Israel’s nuclear
arsenal is one reason some of its neighbours want nuclear weapons, and
threatening them with regime change merely increases that desire.
A
final reason to question Israel’s strategic value is that it does not
behave like a loyal ally. Israeli officials frequently ignore US
requests and renege on promises (including pledges to stop building
settlements and to refrain from ‘targeted assassinations’ of
Palestinian leaders). Israel has provided sensitive military technology
to potential rivals like China, in what the State Department
inspector-general called ‘a systematic and growing pattern of
unauthorised transfers’. According to the General Accounting Office,
Israel also ‘conducts the most aggressive espionage operations against
the US of any ally’. In addition to the case of Jonathan Pollard, who
gave Israel large quantities of classified material in the early 1980s
(which it reportedly passed on to the Soviet Union in return for more
exit visas for Soviet Jews), a new controversy erupted in 2004 when it
was revealed that a key Pentagon official called Larry Franklin had
passed classified information to an Israeli diplomat. Israel is hardly
the only country that spies on the US, but its willingness to spy on
its principal patron casts further doubt on its strategic value.
Israel’s
strategic value isn’t the only issue. Its backers also argue that it
deserves unqualified support because it is weak and surrounded by
enemies; it is a democracy; the Jewish people have suffered from past
crimes and therefore deserve special treatment; and Israel’s conduct
has been morally superior to that of its adversaries. On close
inspection, none of these arguments is persuasive. There is a strong
moral case for supporting Israel’s existence, but that is not in
jeopardy. Viewed objectively, its past and present conduct offers no
moral basis for privileging it over the Palestinians.
Israel is
often portrayed as David confronted by Goliath, but the converse is
closer to the truth. Contrary to popular belief, the Zionists had
larger, better equipped and better led forces during the 1947-49 War of
Independence, and the Israel Defence Forces won quick and easy
victories against Egypt in 1956 and against Egypt, Jordan and Syria in
1967 – all of this before large-scale US aid began flowing. Today,
Israel is the strongest military power in the Middle East. Its
conventional forces are far superior to those of its neighbours and it
is the only state in the region with nuclear weapons. Egypt and Jordan
have signed peace treaties with it, and Saudi Arabia has offered to do
so. Syria has lost its Soviet patron, Iraq has been devastated by three
disastrous wars and Iran is hundreds of miles away. The Palestinians
barely have an effective police force, let alone an army that could
pose a threat to Israel. According to a 2005 assessment by Tel Aviv
University’s Jaffee Centre for Strategic Studies, ‘the strategic
balance decidedly favours Israel, which has continued to widen the
qualitative gap between its own military capability and deterrence
powers and those of its neighbours.’ If backing the underdog were a
compelling motive, the United States would be supporting Israel’s
opponents.
That Israel is a fellow democracy surrounded
by
hostile dictatorships cannot account for the current level of aid:
there are many democracies around the world, but none receives the same
lavish support. The US has overthrown democratic governments in the
past and supported dictators when this was thought to advance its
interests – it has good relations with a number of dictatorships today.
Some
aspects of Israeli democracy are at odds with core American values.
Unlike the US, where people are supposed to enjoy equal rights
irrespective of race, religion or ethnicity, Israel was explicitly
founded as a Jewish state and citizenship is based on the principle of
blood kinship. Given this, it is not surprising that its 1.3 million
Arabs are treated as second-class citizens, or that a recent Israeli
government commission found that Israel behaves in a ‘neglectful and
discriminatory’ manner towards them. Its democratic status is also
undermined by its refusal to grant the Palestinians a viable state of
their own or full political rights.
A third justification is the
history of Jewish suffering in the Christian West, especially during
the Holocaust. Because Jews were persecuted for centuries and could
feel safe only in a Jewish homeland, many people now believe that
Israel deserves special treatment from the United States. The country’s
creation was undoubtedly an appropriate response to the long record of
crimes against Jews, but it also brought about fresh crimes against a
largely innocent third party: the Palestinians.
This was well
understood by Israel’s early leaders. David Ben-Gurion told Nahum
Goldmann, the president of the World Jewish Congress:
If
I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is
natural: we have taken their country . . . We come from
Israel, but two
thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been
anti-semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault?
They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country.
Why should they accept that?
Since then, Israeli
leaders have repeatedly sought to deny the Palestinians’ national
ambitions. When she was prime minister, Golda Meir famously remarked
that ‘there is no such thing as a Palestinian.’ Pressure from extremist
violence and Palestinian population growth has forced subsequent
Israeli leaders to disengage from the Gaza Strip and consider other
territorial compromises, but not even Yitzhak Rabin was willing to
offer the Palestinians a viable state. Ehud Barak’s purportedly
generous offer at Camp David would have given them only a disarmed set
of Bantustans under de facto Israeli control. The tragic history of the
Jewish people does not obligate the US to help Israel today no matter
what it does.
Israel’s backers also portray it as a
country that
has sought peace at every turn and shown great restraint even when
provoked. The Arabs, by contrast, are said to have acted with great
wickedness. Yet on the ground, Israel’s record is not distinguishable
from that of its opponents. Ben-Gurion acknowledged that the early
Zionists were far from benevolent towards the Palestinian Arabs, who
resisted their encroachments – which is hardly surprising, given that
the Zionists were trying to create their own state on Arab land. In the
same way, the creation of Israel in 1947-48 involved acts of ethnic
cleansing, including executions, massacres and rapes by Jews, and
Israel’s subsequent conduct has often been brutal, belying any claim to
moral superiority. Between 1949 and 1956, for example, Israeli security
forces killed between 2700 and 5000 Arab infiltrators, the overwhelming
majority of them unarmed. The IDF murdered hundreds of Egyptian
prisoners of war in both the 1956 and 1967 wars, while in 1967, it
expelled between 100,000 and 260,000 Palestinians from the newly
conquered West Bank, and drove 80,000 Syrians from the Golan Heights.
During
the first intifada, the IDF distributed truncheons to its troops and
encouraged them to break the bones of Palestinian protesters. The
Swedish branch of Save the Children estimated that ‘23,600 to 29,900
children required medical treatment for their beating injuries in the
first two years of the intifada.’ Nearly a third of them were aged ten
or under. The response to the second intifada has been even more
violent, leading Ha’aretz to declare that ‘the IDF
. . . is
turning into a killing machine whose efficiency is awe-inspiring, yet
shocking.’ The IDF fired one million bullets in the first days of the
uprising. Since then, for every Israeli lost, Israel has killed 3.4
Palestinians, the majority of whom have been innocent bystanders; the
ratio of Palestinian to Israeli children killed is even higher (5.7:1).
It is also worth bearing in mind that the Zionists relied on terrorist
bombs to drive the British from Palestine, and that Yitzhak Shamir,
once a terrorist and later prime minister, declared that ‘neither
Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means
of combat.’
The Palestinian resort to terrorism is wrong
but it
isn’t surprising. The Palestinians believe they have no other way to
force Israeli concessions. As Ehud Barak once admitted, had he been
born a Palestinian, he ‘would have joined a terrorist organisation’.
So if neither strategic nor moral arguments
can account for America’s support for Israel, how are we to explain it?
The
explanation is the unmatched power of the Israel Lobby. We use ‘the
Lobby’ as shorthand for the loose coalition of individuals and
organisations who actively work to steer US foreign policy in a
pro-Israel direction. This is not meant to suggest that ‘the Lobby’ is
a unified movement with a central leadership, or that individuals
within it do not disagree on certain issues. Not all Jewish Americans
are part of the Lobby, because Israel is not a salient issue for many
of them. In a 2004 survey, for example, roughly 36 per cent of American
Jews said they were either ‘not very’ or ‘not at all’ emotionally
attached to Israel.
Jewish Americans also differ on specific
Israeli policies. Many of the key organisations in the Lobby, such as
the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Conference
of Presidents of Major Jewish Organisations, are run by hardliners who
generally support the Likud Party’s expansionist policies, including
its hostility to the Oslo peace process. The bulk of US Jewry,
meanwhile, is more inclined to make concessions to the Palestinians,
and a few groups – such as Jewish Voice for Peace – strongly advocate
such steps. Despite these differences, moderates and hardliners both
favour giving steadfast support to Israel.
Not surprisingly,
American Jewish leaders often consult Israeli officials, to make sure
that their actions advance Israeli goals. As one activist from a major
Jewish organisation wrote, ‘it is routine for us to say: “This is our
policy on a certain issue, but we must check what the Israelis think.”
We as a community do it all the time.’ There is a strong prejudice
against criticising Israeli policy, and putting pressure on Israel is
considered out of order. Edgar Bronfman Sr, the president of the World
Jewish Congress, was accused of ‘perfidy’ when he wrote a letter to
President Bush in mid-2003 urging him to persuade Israel to curb
construction of its controversial ‘security fence’. His critics said
that ‘it would be obscene at any time for the president of the World
Jewish Congress to lobby the president of the United States to resist
policies being promoted by the government of Israel.’
Similarly,
when the president of the Israel Policy Forum, Seymour Reich, advised
Condoleezza Rice in November 2005 to ask Israel to reopen a critical
border crossing in the Gaza Strip, his action was denounced as
‘irresponsible’: ‘There is,’ his critics said, ‘absolutely no room in
the Jewish mainstream for actively canvassing against the
security-related policies . . . of Israel.’ Recoiling from
these
attacks, Reich announced that ‘the word “pressure” is not in my
vocabulary when it comes to Israel.’
Jewish Americans have set up
an impressive array of organisations to influence American foreign
policy, of which AIPAC is the most powerful and best known. In 1997, Fortune
magazine asked members of Congress and their staffs to list the most
powerful lobbies in Washington. AIPAC was ranked second behind the
American Association of Retired People, but ahead of the AFL-CIO and
the National Rifle Association. A National Journal study in
March 2005 reached a similar conclusion, placing AIPAC in second place
(tied with AARP) in the Washington ‘muscle rankings’.
The Lobby
also includes prominent Christian evangelicals like Gary Bauer, Jerry
Falwell, Ralph Reed and Pat Robertson, as well as Dick Armey and Tom
DeLay, former majority leaders in the House of Representatives, all of
whom believe Israel’s rebirth is the fulfilment of biblical prophecy
and support its expansionist agenda; to do otherwise, they believe,
would be contrary to God’s will. Neo-conservative gentiles such as John
Bolton; Robert Bartley, the former Wall Street Journal
editor; William Bennett, the former secretary of education; Jeane
Kirkpatrick, the former UN ambassador; and the influential columnist
George Will are also steadfast supporters.
The US form of
government offers activists many ways of influencing the policy
process. Interest groups can lobby elected representatives and members
of the executive branch, make campaign contributions, vote in
elections, try to mould public opinion etc. They enjoy a
disproportionate amount of influence when they are committed to an
issue to which the bulk of the population is indifferent. Policymakers
will tend to accommodate those who care about the issue, even if their
numbers are small, confident that the rest of the population will not
penalise them for doing so.
In its basic operations, the Israel
Lobby is no different from the farm lobby, steel or textile workers’
unions, or other ethnic lobbies. There is nothing improper about
American Jews and their Christian allies attempting to sway US policy:
the Lobby’s activities are not a conspiracy of the sort depicted in
tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. For the most
part, the individuals and groups that comprise it are only doing what
other special interest groups do, but doing it very much better. By
contrast, pro-Arab interest groups, in so far as they exist at all, are
weak, which makes the Israel Lobby’s task even easier.
The Lobby
pursues two broad strategies. First, it wields its significant
influence in Washington, pressuring both Congress and the executive
branch. Whatever an individual lawmaker or policymaker’s own views may
be, the Lobby tries to make supporting Israel the ‘smart’ choice.
Second, it strives to ensure that public discourse portrays Israel in a
positive light, by repeating myths about its founding and by promoting
its point of view in policy debates. The goal is to prevent critical
comments from getting a fair hearing in the political arena.
Controlling the debate is essential to guaranteeing US support, because
a candid discussion of US-Israeli relations might lead Americans to
favour a different policy.
A key pillar of the Lobby’s
effectiveness is its influence in Congress, where Israel is virtually
immune from criticism. This in itself is remarkable, because Congress
rarely shies away from contentious issues. Where Israel is concerned,
however, potential critics fall silent. One reason is that some key
members are Christian Zionists like Dick Armey, who said in September
2002: ‘My No. 1 priority in foreign policy is to protect Israel.’ One
might think that the No. 1 priority for any congressman would be to
protect America. There are also Jewish senators and congressmen who
work to ensure that US foreign policy supports Israel’s interests.
Another
source of the Lobby’s power is its use of pro-Israel congressional
staffers. As Morris Amitay, a former head of AIPAC, once admitted,
‘there are a lot of guys at the working level up here’ – on Capitol
Hill – ‘who happen to be Jewish, who are willing . . . to
look at
certain issues in terms of their Jewishness . . . These are
all guys
who are in a position to make the decision in these areas for those
senators . . . You can get an awful lot done just at the
staff level.’
AIPAC
itself, however, forms the core of the Lobby’s influence in Congress.
Its success is due to its ability to reward legislators and
congressional candidates who support its agenda, and to punish those
who challenge it. Money is critical to US elections (as the scandal
over the lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s shady dealings reminds us), and AIPAC
makes sure that its friends get strong financial support from the many
pro-Israel political action committees. Anyone who is seen as hostile
to Israel can be sure that AIPAC will direct campaign contributions to
his or her political opponents. AIPAC also organises letter-writing
campaigns and encourages newspaper editors to endorse pro-Israel
candidates.
There is no doubt about the efficacy of
these
tactics. Here is one example: in the 1984 elections, AIPAC helped
defeat Senator Charles Percy from Illinois, who, according to a
prominent Lobby figure, had ‘displayed insensitivity and even hostility
to our concerns’. Thomas Dine, the head of AIPAC at the time, explained
what happened: ‘All the Jews in America, from coast to coast, gathered
to oust Percy. And the American politicians – those who hold public
positions now, and those who aspire – got the message.’
AIPAC’s
influence on Capitol Hill goes even further. According to Douglas
Bloomfield, a former AIPAC staff member, ‘it is common for members of
Congress and their staffs to turn to AIPAC first when they need
information, before calling the Library of Congress, the Congressional
Research Service, committee staff or administration experts.’ More
important, he notes that AIPAC is ‘often called on to draft speeches,
work on legislation, advise on tactics, perform research, collect
co-sponsors and marshal votes’.
The bottom line is that AIPAC, a
de facto agent for a foreign government, has a stranglehold on
Congress, with the result that US policy towards Israel is not debated
there, even though that policy has important consequences for the
entire world. In other words, one of the three main branches of the
government is firmly committed to supporting Israel. As one former
Democratic senator, Ernest Hollings, noted on leaving office, ‘you
can’t have an Israeli policy other than what AIPAC gives you around
here.’ Or as Ariel Sharon once told an American audience, ‘when people
ask me how they can help Israel, I tell them: “Help AIPAC.”’
Thanks
in part to the influence Jewish voters have on presidential elections,
the Lobby also has significant leverage over the executive branch.
Although they make up fewer than 3 per cent of the population, they
make large campaign donations to candidates from both parties. The Washington
Post
once estimated that Democratic presidential candidates ‘depend on
Jewish supporters to supply as much as 60 per cent of the money’. And
because Jewish voters have high turn-out rates and are concentrated in
key states like California, Florida, Illinois, New York and
Pennsylvania, presidential candidates go to great lengths not to
antagonise them.
Key organisations in the Lobby make it their
business to ensure that critics of Israel do not get important foreign
policy jobs. Jimmy Carter wanted to make George Ball his first
secretary of state, but knew that Ball was seen as critical of Israel
and that the Lobby would oppose the appointment. In this way any
aspiring policymaker is encouraged to become an overt supporter of
Israel, which is why public critics of Israeli policy have become an
endangered species in the foreign policy establishment.
When
Howard Dean called for the United States to take a more ‘even-handed
role’ in the Arab-Israeli conflict, Senator Joseph Lieberman accused
him of selling Israel down the river and said his statement was
‘irresponsible’. Virtually all the top Democrats in the House signed a
letter criticising Dean’s remarks, and the Chicago Jewish Star
reported that ‘anonymous attackers . . . are clogging the
email inboxes
of Jewish leaders around the country, warning – without much evidence –
that Dean would somehow be bad for Israel.’
This worry was
absurd; Dean is in fact quite hawkish on Israel: his campaign co-chair
was a former AIPAC president, and Dean said his own views on the Middle
East more closely reflected those of AIPAC than those of the more
moderate Americans for Peace Now. He had merely suggested that to
‘bring the sides together’, Washington should act as an honest broker.
This is hardly a radical idea, but the Lobby doesn’t tolerate
even-handedness.
During the Clinton administration, Middle
Eastern policy was largely shaped by officials with close ties to
Israel or to prominent pro-Israel organisations; among them, Martin
Indyk, the former deputy director of research at AIPAC and co-founder
of the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP);
Dennis Ross, who joined WINEP after leaving government in 2001; and
Aaron Miller, who has lived in Israel and often visits the country.
These men were among Clinton’s closest advisers at the Camp David
summit in July 2000. Although all three supported the Oslo peace
process and favoured the creation of a Palestinian state, they did so
only within the limits of what would be acceptable to Israel. The
American delegation took its cues from Ehud Barak, co-ordinated its
negotiating positions with Israel in advance, and did not offer
independent proposals. Not surprisingly, Palestinian negotiators
complained that they were ‘negotiating with two Israeli teams – one
displaying an Israeli flag, and one an American flag’.
The
situation is even more pronounced in the Bush administration, whose
ranks have included such fervent advocates of the Israeli cause as
Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, I. Lewis (‘Scooter’) Libby,
Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and David Wurmser. As we shall see, these
officials have consistently pushed for policies favoured by Israel and
backed by organisations in the Lobby.
The Lobby doesn’t want an
open debate, of course, because that might lead Americans to question
the level of support they provide. Accordingly, pro-Israel
organisations work hard to influence the institutions that do most to
shape popular opinion.
The Lobby’s perspective prevails in the
mainstream media: the debate among Middle East pundits, the journalist
Eric Alterman writes, is ‘dominated by people who cannot imagine
criticising Israel’. He lists 61 ‘columnists and commentators who can
be counted on to support Israel reflexively and without qualification’.
Conversely, he found just five pundits who consistently criticise
Israeli actions or endorse Arab positions. Newspapers occasionally
publish guest op-eds challenging Israeli policy, but the balance of
opinion clearly favours the other side. It is hard to imagine any
mainstream media outlet in the United States publishing a piece like
this one.
‘Shamir, Sharon, Bibi – whatever those guys
want is
pretty much fine by me,’ Robert Bartley once remarked. Not
surprisingly, his newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, along
with other prominent papers like the Chicago Sun-Times and
the Washington Times, regularly runs editorials that strongly
support Israel. Magazines like Commentary, the New
Republic and the Weekly Standard defend Israel at every
turn.
Editorial bias is also found in papers like
the New York Times,
which occasionally criticises Israeli policies and sometimes concedes
that the Palestinians have legitimate grievances, but is not
even-handed. In his memoirs the paper’s former executive editor Max
Frankel acknowledges the impact his own attitude had on his editorial
decisions: ‘I was much more deeply devoted to Israel than I dared to
assert . . . Fortified by my knowledge of Israel and my
friendships
there, I myself wrote most of our Middle East commentaries. As more
Arab than Jewish readers recognised, I wrote them from a pro-Israel
perspective.’
News reports are more even-handed, in part
because
reporters strive to be objective, but also because it is difficult to
cover events in the Occupied Territories without acknowledging Israel’s
actions on the ground. To discourage unfavourable reporting, the Lobby
organises letter-writing campaigns, demonstrations and boycotts of news
outlets whose content it considers anti-Israel. One CNN executive has
said that he sometimes gets 6000 email messages in a single day
complaining about a story. In May 2003, the pro-Israel Committee for
Accurate Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) organised
demonstrations outside National Public Radio stations in 33 cities; it
also tried to persuade contributors to withhold support from NPR until
its Middle East coverage becomes more sympathetic to Israel. Boston’s
NPR station, WBUR, reportedly lost more than $1 million in
contributions as a result of these efforts. Further pressure on NPR has
come from Israel’s friends in Congress, who have asked for an internal
audit of its Middle East coverage as well as more oversight.
The
Israeli side also dominates the think tanks which play an important
role in shaping public debate as well as actual policy. The Lobby
created its own think tank in 1985, when Martin Indyk helped to found
WINEP. Although WINEP plays down its links to Israel, claiming instead
to provide a ‘balanced and realistic’ perspective on Middle East
issues, it is funded and run by individuals deeply committed to
advancing Israel’s agenda.
The Lobby’s influence extends well
beyond WINEP, however. Over the past 25 years, pro-Israel forces have
established a commanding presence at the American Enterprise Institute,
the Brookings Institution, the Center for Security Policy, the Foreign
Policy Research Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Hudson
Institute, the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis and the Jewish
Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). These think tanks
employ few, if any, critics of US support for Israel.
Take the
Brookings Institution. For many years, its senior expert on the Middle
East was William Quandt, a former NSC official with a well-deserved
reputation for even-handedness. Today, Brookings’s coverage is
conducted through the Saban Center for Middle East Studies, which is
financed by Haim Saban, an Israeli-American businessman and ardent
Zionist. The centre’s director is the ubiquitous Martin Indyk. What was
once a non-partisan policy institute is now part of the pro-Israel
chorus.
Where the Lobby has had the most difficulty
is in
stifling debate on university campuses. In the 1990s, when the Oslo
peace process was underway, there was only mild criticism of Israel,
but it grew stronger with Oslo’s collapse and Sharon’s access to power,
becoming quite vociferous when the IDF reoccupied the West Bank in
spring 2002 and employed massive force to subdue the second intifada.
The
Lobby moved immediately to ‘take back the campuses’. New groups sprang
up, like the Caravan for Democracy, which brought Israeli speakers to
US colleges. Established groups like the Jewish Council for Public
Affairs and Hillel joined in, and a new group, the Israel on Campus
Coalition, was formed to co-ordinate the many bodies that now sought to
put Israel’s case. Finally, AIPAC more than tripled its spending on
programmes to monitor university activities and to train young
advocates, in order to ‘vastly expand the number of students involved
on campus . . . in the national pro-Israel effort’.
The Lobby
also monitors what professors write and teach. In September 2002,
Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes, two passionately pro-Israel
neo-conservatives, established a website (Campus Watch) that posted
dossiers on suspect academics and encouraged students to report remarks
or behaviour that might be considered hostile to Israel. This
transparent attempt to blacklist and intimidate scholars provoked a
harsh reaction and Pipes and Kramer later removed the dossiers, but the
website still invites students to report ‘anti-Israel’ activity.
Groups
within the Lobby put pressure on particular academics and universities.
Columbia has been a frequent target, no doubt because of the presence
of the late Edward Said on its faculty. ‘One can be sure that any
public statement in support of the Palestinian people by the
pre-eminent literary critic Edward Said will elicit hundreds of emails,
letters and journalistic accounts that call on us to denounce Said and
to either sanction or fire him,’ Jonathan Cole, its former provost,
reported. When Columbia recruited the historian Rashid Khalidi from
Chicago, the same thing happened. It was a problem Princeton also faced
a few years later when it considered wooing Khalidi away from Columbia.
A
classic illustration of the effort to police academia occurred towards
the end of 2004, when the David Project produced a film alleging that
faculty members of Columbia’s Middle East Studies programme were
anti-semitic and were intimidating Jewish students who stood up for
Israel. Columbia was hauled over the coals, but a faculty committee
which was assigned to investigate the charges found no evidence of
anti-semitism and the only incident possibly worth noting was that one
professor had ‘responded heatedly’ to a student’s question. The
committee also discovered that the academics in question had themselves
been the target of an overt campaign of intimidation.
Perhaps the
most disturbing aspect of all this is the efforts Jewish groups have
made to push Congress into establishing mechanisms to monitor what
professors say. If they manage to get this passed, universities judged
to have an anti-Israel bias would be denied federal funding. Their
efforts have not yet succeeded, but they are an indication of the
importance placed on controlling debate.
A number of Jewish
philanthropists have recently established Israel Studies programmes (in
addition to the roughly 130 Jewish Studies programmes already in
existence) so as to increase the number of Israel-friendly scholars on
campus. In May 2003, NYU announced the establishment of the Taub Center
for Israel Studies; similar programmes have been set up at Berkeley,
Brandeis and Emory. Academic administrators emphasise their pedagogical
value, but the truth is that they are intended in large part to promote
Israel’s image. Fred Laffer, the head of the Taub Foundation, makes it
clear that his foundation funded the NYU centre to help counter the
‘Arabic [sic] point of view’ that he thinks is prevalent in
NYU’s Middle East programmes.
No
discussion of the Lobby would be complete without an examination of one
of its most powerful weapons: the charge of anti-semitism. Anyone who
criticises Israel’s actions or argues that pro-Israel groups have
significant influence over US Middle Eastern policy – an influence
AIPAC celebrates – stands a good chance of being labelled an
anti-semite. Indeed, anyone who merely claims that there is
an Israel Lobby runs the risk of being charged with anti-semitism, even
though the Israeli media refer to America’s ‘Jewish Lobby’. In other
words, the Lobby first boasts of its influence and then attacks anyone
who calls attention to it. It’s a very effective tactic: anti-semitism
is something no one wants to be accused of.
Europeans have been
more willing than Americans to criticise Israeli policy, which some
people attribute to a resurgence of anti-semitism in Europe. We are
‘getting to a point’, the US ambassador to the EU said in early 2004,
‘where it is as bad as it was in the 1930s’. Measuring anti-semitism is
a complicated matter, but the weight of evidence points in the opposite
direction. In the spring of 2004, when accusations of European
anti-semitism filled the air in America, separate surveys of European
public opinion conducted by the US-based Anti-Defamation League and the
Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that it was in
fact declining. In the 1930s, by contrast, anti-semitism was not only
widespread among Europeans of all classes but considered quite
acceptable.
The Lobby and its friends often portray
France as the
most anti-semitic country in Europe. But in 2003, the head of the
French Jewish community said that ‘France is not more anti-semitic than
America.’ According to a recent article in Ha’aretz, the
French police have reported that anti-semitic incidents declined by
almost 50 per cent in 2005; and this even though France has the largest
Muslim population of any European country. Finally, when a French Jew
was murdered in Paris last month by a Muslim gang, tens of thousands of
demonstrators poured into the streets to condemn anti-semitism. Jacques
Chirac and Dominique de Villepin both attended the victim’s memorial
service to show their solidarity.
No one would deny that there is
anti-semitism among European Muslims, some of it provoked by Israel’s
conduct towards the Palestinians and some of it straightforwardly
racist. But this is a separate matter with little bearing on whether or
not Europe today is like Europe in the 1930s. Nor would anyone deny
that there are still some virulent autochthonous anti-semites in Europe
(as there are in the United States) but their numbers are small and
their views are rejected by the vast majority of Europeans.
Israel’s
advocates, when pressed to go beyond mere assertion, claim that there
is a ‘new anti-semitism’, which they equate with criticism of Israel.
In other words, criticise Israeli policy and you are by definition an
anti-semite. When the synod of the Church of England recently voted to
divest from Caterpillar Inc on the grounds that it manufactures the
bulldozers used by the Israelis to demolish Palestinian homes, the
Chief Rabbi complained that this would ‘have the most adverse
repercussions on . . . Jewish-Christian relations in
Britain’, while
Rabbi Tony Bayfield, the head of the Reform movement, said: ‘There is a
clear problem of anti-Zionist – verging on anti-semitic – attitudes
emerging in the grass-roots, and even in the middle ranks of the
Church.’ But the Church was guilty merely of protesting against Israeli
government policy.
Critics are also accused of holding Israel
to
an unfair standard or questioning its right to exist. But these are
bogus charges too. Western critics of Israel hardly ever question its
right to exist: they question its behaviour towards the Palestinians,
as do Israelis themselves. Nor is Israel being judged unfairly. Israeli
treatment of the Palestinians elicits criticism because it is contrary
to widely accepted notions of human rights, to international law and to
the principle of national self-determination. And it is hardly the only
state that has faced sharp criticism on these grounds.
In the
autumn of 2001, and especially in the spring of 2002, the Bush
administration tried to reduce anti-American sentiment in the Arab
world and undermine support for terrorist groups like al-Qaida by
halting Israel’s expansionist policies in the Occupied Territories and
advocating the creation of a Palestinian state. Bush had very
significant means of persuasion at his disposal. He could have
threatened to reduce economic and diplomatic support for Israel, and
the American people would almost certainly have supported him. A May
2003 poll reported that more than 60 per cent of Americans were willing
to withhold aid if Israel resisted US pressure to settle the conflict,
and that number rose to 70 per cent among the ‘politically active’.
Indeed, 73 per cent said that the United States should not favour
either side.
Yet the administration failed to change
Israeli
policy, and Washington ended up backing it. Over time, the
administration also adopted Israel’s own justifications of its
position, so that US rhetoric began to mimic Israeli rhetoric. By
February 2003, a Washington Post headline summarised the
situation: ‘Bush and Sharon Nearly Identical on Mideast Policy.’ The
main reason for this switch was the Lobby.
The story begins in
late September 2001, when Bush began urging Sharon to show restraint in
the Occupied Territories. He also pressed him to allow Israel’s foreign
minister, Shimon Peres, to meet with Yasser Arafat, even though he
(Bush) was highly critical of Arafat’s leadership. Bush even said
publicly that he supported the creation of a Palestinian state.
Alarmed, Sharon accused him of trying ‘to appease the Arabs at our
expense’, warning that Israel ‘will not be Czechoslovakia’.
Bush
was reportedly furious at being compared to Chamberlain, and the White
House press secretary called Sharon’s remarks ‘unacceptable’. Sharon
offered a pro forma apology, but quickly joined forces with the Lobby
to persuade the administration and the American people that the United
States and Israel faced a common threat from terrorism. Israeli
officials and Lobby representatives insisted that there was no real
difference between Arafat and Osama bin Laden: the United States and
Israel, they said, should isolate the Palestinians’ elected leader and
have nothing to do with him.
The Lobby also went to work in
Congress. On 16 November, 89 senators sent Bush a letter praising him
for refusing to meet with Arafat, but also demanding that the US not
restrain Israel from retaliating against the Palestinians; the
administration, they wrote, must state publicly that it stood behind
Israel. According to the New York Times, the letter ‘stemmed’
from a meeting two weeks before between ‘leaders of the American Jewish
community and key senators’, adding that AIPAC was ‘particularly active
in providing advice on the letter’.
By late November, relations
between Tel Aviv and Washington had improved considerably. This was
thanks in part to the Lobby’s efforts, but also to America’s initial
victory in Afghanistan, which reduced the perceived need for Arab
support in dealing with al-Qaida. Sharon visited the White House in
early December and had a friendly meeting with Bush.
In April
2002 trouble erupted again, after the IDF launched Operation Defensive
Shield and resumed control of virtually all the major Palestinian areas
on the West Bank. Bush knew that Israel’s actions would damage
America’s image in the Islamic world and undermine the war on
terrorism, so he demanded that Sharon ‘halt the incursions and begin
withdrawal’. He underscored this message two days later, saying he
wanted Israel to ‘withdraw without delay’. On 7 April, Condoleezza
Rice, then Bush’s national security adviser, told reporters: ‘“Without
delay” means without delay. It means now.’ That same day Colin Powell
set out for the Middle East to persuade all sides to stop fighting and
start negotiating.
Israel and the Lobby swung into action.
Pro-Israel officials in the vice-president’s office and the Pentagon,
as well as neo-conservative pundits like Robert Kagan and William
Kristol, put the heat on Powell. They even accused him of having
‘virtually obliterated the distinction between terrorists and those
fighting terrorists’. Bush himself was being pressed by Jewish leaders
and Christian evangelicals. Tom DeLay and Dick Armey were especially
outspoken about the need to support Israel, and DeLay and the Senate
minority leader, Trent Lott, visited the White House and warned Bush to
back off.
The first sign that Bush was caving in came
on 11 April
– a week after he told Sharon to withdraw his forces – when the White
House press secretary said that the president believed Sharon was ‘a
man of peace’. Bush repeated this statement publicly on Powell’s return
from his abortive mission, and told reporters that Sharon had responded
satisfactorily to his call for a full and immediate withdrawal. Sharon
had done no such thing, but Bush was no longer willing to make an issue
of it.
Meanwhile, Congress was also moving to back
Sharon. On 2
May, it overrode the administration’s objections and passed two
resolutions reaffirming support for Israel. (The Senate vote was 94 to
2; the House of Representatives version passed 352 to 21.) Both
resolutions held that the United States ‘stands in solidarity with
Israel’ and that the two countries were, to quote the House resolution,
‘now engaged in a common struggle against terrorism’. The House version
also condemned ‘the ongoing support and co-ordination of terror by
Yasser Arafat’, who was portrayed as a central part of the terrorism
problem. Both resolutions were drawn up with the help of the Lobby. A
few days later, a bipartisan congressional delegation on a fact-finding
mission to Israel stated that Sharon should resist US pressure to
negotiate with Arafat. On 9 May, a House appropriations subcommittee
met to consider giving Israel an extra $200 million to fight terrorism.
Powell opposed the package, but the Lobby backed it and Powell lost.
In
short, Sharon and the Lobby took on the president of the United States
and triumphed. Hemi Shalev, a journalist on the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv,
reported that Sharon’s aides ‘could not hide their satisfaction in view
of Powell’s failure. Sharon saw the whites of President Bush’s eyes,
they bragged, and the president blinked first.’ But it was Israel’s
champions in the United States, not Sharon or Israel, that played the
key role in defeating Bush.
The situation has changed little
since then. The Bush administration refused ever again to have dealings
with Arafat. After his death, it embraced the new Palestinian leader,
Mahmoud Abbas, but has done little to help him. Sharon continued to
develop his plan to impose a unilateral settlement on the Palestinians,
based on ‘disengagement’ from Gaza coupled with continued expansion on
the West Bank. By refusing to negotiate with Abbas and making it
impossible for him to deliver tangible benefits to the Palestinian
people, Sharon’s strategy contributed directly to Hamas’s electoral
victory. With Hamas in power, however, Israel has another excuse not to
negotiate. The US administration has supported Sharon’s actions (and
those of his successor, Ehud Olmert). Bush has even endorsed unilateral
Israeli annexations in the Occupied Territories, reversing the stated
policy of every president since Lyndon Johnson.
US officials have
offered mild criticisms of a few Israeli actions, but have done little
to help create a viable Palestinian state. Sharon has Bush ‘wrapped
around his little finger’, the former national security adviser Brent
Scowcroft said in October 2004. If Bush tries to distance the US from
Israel, or even criticises Israeli actions in the Occupied Territories,
he is certain to face the wrath of the Lobby and its supporters in
Congress. Democratic presidential candidates understand that these are
facts of life, which is the reason John Kerry went to great lengths to
display unalloyed support for Israel in 2004, and why Hillary Clinton
is doing the same thing today.
Maintaining US support for
Israel’s policies against the Palestinians is essential as far as the
Lobby is concerned, but its ambitions do not stop there. It also wants
America to help Israel remain the dominant regional power. The Israeli
government and pro-Israel groups in the United States have worked
together to shape the administration’s policy towards Iraq, Syria and
Iran, as well as its grand scheme for reordering the Middle East.
Pressure
from Israel and the Lobby was not the only factor behind the decision
to attack Iraq in March 2003, but it was critical. Some Americans
believe that this was a war for oil, but there is hardly any direct
evidence to support this claim. Instead, the war was motivated in good
part by a desire to make Israel more secure. According to Philip
Zelikow, a former member of the president’s Foreign Intelligence
Advisory Board, the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, and now
a counsellor to Condoleezza Rice, the ‘real threat’ from Iraq was not a
threat to the United States. The ‘unstated threat’ was the ‘threat
against Israel’, Zelikow told an audience at the University of Virginia
in September 2002. ‘The American government,’ he added, ‘doesn’t want
to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell.’
On
16 August 2002, 11 days before Dick Cheney kicked off the campaign for
war with a hardline speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Washington
Post
reported that ‘Israel is urging US officials not to delay a military
strike against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.’ By this point, according to
Sharon, strategic co-ordination between Israel and the US had reached
‘unprecedented dimensions’, and Israeli intelligence officials had
given Washington a variety of alarming reports about Iraq’s WMD
programmes. As one retired Israeli general later put it, ‘Israeli
intelligence was a full partner to the picture presented by American
and British intelligence regarding Iraq’s non-conventional
capabilities.’
Israeli leaders were deeply distressed when
Bush
decided to seek Security Council authorisation for war, and even more
worried when Saddam agreed to let UN inspectors back in. ‘The campaign
against Saddam Hussein is a must,’ Shimon Peres told reporters in
September 2002. ‘Inspections and inspectors are good for decent people,
but dishonest people can overcome easily inspections and inspectors.’
At the same time, Ehud Barak wrote a New
York Times
op-ed warning that ‘the greatest risk now lies in inaction.’ His
predecessor as prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, published a similar
piece in the Wall Street Journal, entitled: ‘The Case for
Toppling Saddam’. ‘Today nothing less than dismantling his regime will
do,’ he declared. ‘I believe I speak for the overwhelming majority of
Israelis in supporting a pre-emptive strike against Saddam’s regime.’
Or as Ha’aretz reported in February 2003, ‘the military and
political leadership yearns for war in Iraq.’
As
Netanyahu suggested, however, the desire for war was not confined to
Israel’s leaders. Apart from Kuwait, which Saddam invaded in 1990,
Israel was the only country in the world where both politicians and
public favoured war. As the journalist Gideon Levy observed at the
time, ‘Israel is the only country in the West whose leaders support the
war unreservedly and where no alternative opinion is voiced.’ In fact,
Israelis were so gung-ho that their allies in America told them to damp
down their rhetoric, or it would look as if the war would be fought on
Israel’s behalf.
Within the US, the main driving force behind
the
war was a small band of neo-conservatives, many with ties to Likud. But
leaders of the Lobby’s major organisations lent their voices to the
campaign. ‘As President Bush attempted to sell the . . . war
in Iraq,’
the Forward reported, ‘America’s most important Jewish
organisations rallied as one to his defence. In statement after
statement community leaders stressed the need to rid the world of
Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction.’ The editorial goes
on to say that ‘concern for Israel’s safety rightfully factored into
the deliberations of the main Jewish groups.’
Although
neo-conservatives and other Lobby leaders were eager to invade Iraq,
the broader American Jewish community was not. Just after the war
started, Samuel Freedman reported that ‘a compilation of nationwide
opinion polls by the Pew Research Center shows that Jews are less
supportive of the Iraq war than the population at large, 52 per cent to
62 per cent.’ Clearly, it would be wrong to blame the war in Iraq on
‘Jewish influence’. Rather, it was due in large part to the Lobby’s
influence, especially that of the neo-conservatives within it.
The
neo-conservatives had been determined to topple Saddam even before Bush
became president. They caused a stir early in 1998 by publishing two
open letters to Clinton, calling for Saddam’s removal from power. The
signatories, many of whom had close ties to pro-Israel groups like
JINSA or WINEP, and who included Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, Douglas
Feith, William Kristol, Bernard Lewis, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle
and Paul Wolfowitz, had little trouble persuading the Clinton
administration to adopt the general goal of ousting Saddam. But they
were unable to sell a war to achieve that objective. They were no more
able to generate enthusiasm for invading Iraq in the early months of
the Bush administration. They needed help to achieve their aim. That
help arrived with 9/11. Specifically, the events of that day led Bush
and Cheney to reverse course and become strong proponents of a
preventive war.
At a key meeting with Bush at Camp David on
15
September, Wolfowitz advocated attacking Iraq before Afghanistan, even
though there was no evidence that Saddam was involved in the attacks on
the US and bin Laden was known to be in Afghanistan. Bush rejected his
advice and chose to go after Afghanistan instead, but war with Iraq was
now regarded as a serious possibility and on 21 November the president
charged military planners with developing concrete plans for an
invasion.
Other neo-conservatives were meanwhile at
work in the
corridors of power. We don’t have the full story yet, but scholars like
Bernard Lewis of Princeton and Fouad Ajami of Johns Hopkins reportedly
played important roles in persuading Cheney that war was the best
option, though neo-conservatives on his staff – Eric Edelman, John
Hannah and Scooter Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff and one of the most
powerful individuals in the administration – also played their part. By
early 2002 Cheney had persuaded Bush; and with Bush and Cheney on
board, war was inevitable.
Outside the administration,
neo-conservative pundits lost no time in making the case that invading
Iraq was essential to winning the war on terrorism. Their efforts were
designed partly to keep up the pressure on Bush, and partly to overcome
opposition to the war inside and outside the government. On 20
September, a group of prominent neo-conservatives and their allies
published another open letter: ‘Even if evidence does not link Iraq
directly to the attack,’ it read, ‘any strategy aiming at the
eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined
effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq.’ The letter also
reminded Bush that ‘Israel has been and remains America’s staunchest
ally against international terrorism.’ In the 1 October issue of the Weekly
Standard,
Robert Kagan and William Kristol called for regime change in Iraq as
soon as the Taliban was defeated. That same day, Charles Krauthammer
argued in the Washington Post that after the US was done with
Afghanistan, Syria should be next, followed by Iran and Iraq: ‘The war
on terrorism will conclude in Baghdad,’ when we finish off ‘the most
dangerous terrorist regime in the world’.
This was the beginning
of an unrelenting public relations campaign to win support for an
invasion of Iraq, a crucial part of which was the manipulation of
intelligence in such a way as to make it seem as if Saddam posed an
imminent threat. For example, Libby pressured CIA analysts to find
evidence supporting the case for war and helped prepare Colin Powell’s
now discredited briefing to the UN Security Council. Within the
Pentagon, the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group was charged with
finding links between al-Qaida and Iraq that the intelligence community
had supposedly missed. Its two key members were David Wurmser, a
hard-core neo-conservative, and Michael Maloof, a Lebanese-American
with close ties to Perle. Another Pentagon group, the so-called Office
of Special Plans, was given the task of uncovering evidence that could
be used to sell the war. It was headed by Abram Shulsky, a
neo-conservative with long-standing ties to Wolfowitz, and its ranks
included recruits from pro-Israel think tanks. Both these organisations
were created after 9/11 and reported directly to Douglas Feith.
Like
virtually all the neo-conservatives, Feith is deeply committed to
Israel; he also has long-term ties to Likud. He wrote articles in the
1990s supporting the settlements and arguing that Israel should retain
the Occupied Territories. More important, along with Perle and Wurmser,
he wrote the famous ‘Clean Break’ report in June 1996 for Netanyahu,
who had just become prime minister. Among other things, it recommended
that Netanyahu ‘focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq –
an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right’. It also
called for Israel to take steps to reorder the entire Middle East.
Netanyahu did not follow their advice, but Feith, Perle and Wurmser
were soon urging the Bush administration to pursue those same goals.
The Ha’aretz columnist Akiva Eldar warned that Feith and
Perle ‘are walking a fine line between their loyalty to American
governments . . . and Israeli interests’.
Wolfowitz is equally committed to Israel.
The Forward
once described him as ‘the most hawkishly pro-Israel voice in the
administration’, and selected him in 2002 as first among 50 notables
who ‘have consciously pursued Jewish activism’. At about the same time,
JINSA gave Wolfowitz its Henry M. Jackson Distinguished Service Award
for promoting a strong partnership between Israel and the United
States; and the Jerusalem Post, describing him as ‘devoutly
pro-Israel’, named him ‘Man of the Year’ in 2003.
Finally,
a brief word is in order about the neo-conservatives’ prewar support of
Ahmed Chalabi, the unscrupulous Iraqi exile who headed the Iraqi
National Congress. They backed Chalabi because he had established close
ties with Jewish-American groups and had pledged to foster good
relations with Israel once he gained power. This was precisely what
pro-Israel proponents of regime change wanted to hear. Matthew Berger
laid out the essence of the bargain in the Jewish Journal:
‘The INC saw improved relations as a way to tap Jewish influence in
Washington and Jerusalem and to drum up increased support for its
cause. For their part, the Jewish groups saw an opportunity to pave the
way for better relations between Israel and Iraq, if and when the INC
is involved in replacing Saddam Hussein’s regime.’
Given the
neo-conservatives’ devotion to Israel, their obsession with Iraq, and
their influence in the Bush administration, it isn’t surprising that
many Americans suspected that the war was designed to further Israeli
interests. Last March, Barry Jacobs of the American Jewish Committee
acknowledged that the belief that Israel and the neo-conservatives had
conspired to get the US into a war in Iraq was ‘pervasive’ in the
intelligence community. Yet few people would say so publicly, and most
of those who did – including Senator Ernest Hollings and Representative
James Moran – were condemned for raising the issue. Michael Kinsley
wrote in late 2002 that ‘the lack of public discussion about the role
of Israel . . . is the proverbial elephant in the room.’ The
reason for
the reluctance to talk about it, he observed, was fear of being
labelled an anti-semite. There is little doubt that Israel and the
Lobby were key factors in the decision to go to war. It’s a decision
the US would have been far less likely to take without their efforts.
And the war itself was intended to be only the first step. A front-page
headline in the Wall Street Journal shortly after the war
began says it all: ‘President’s Dream: Changing Not Just Regime but a
Region: A Pro-US, Democratic Area Is a Goal that Has Israeli and
Neo-Conservative Roots.’
Pro-Israel forces have long been
interested in getting the US military more directly involved in the
Middle East. But they had limited success during the Cold War, because
America acted as an ‘off-shore balancer’ in the region. Most forces
designated for the Middle East, like the Rapid Deployment Force, were
kept ‘over the horizon’ and out of harm’s way. The idea was to play
local powers off against each other – which is why the Reagan
administration supported Saddam against revolutionary Iran during the
Iran-Iraq War – in order to maintain a balance favourable to the US.
This
policy changed after the first Gulf War, when the Clinton
administration adopted a strategy of ‘dual containment’. Substantial US
forces would be stationed in the region in order to contain both Iran
and Iraq, instead of one being used to check the other. The father of
dual containment was none other than Martin Indyk, who first outlined
the strategy in May 1993 at WINEP and then implemented it as director
for Near East and South Asian Affairs at the National Security Council.
By
the mid-1990s there was considerable dissatisfaction with dual
containment, because it made the United States the mortal enemy of two
countries that hated each other, and forced Washington to bear the
burden of containing both. But it was a strategy the Lobby favoured and
worked actively in Congress to preserve. Pressed by AIPAC and other
pro-Israel forces, Clinton toughened up the policy in the spring of
1995 by imposing an economic embargo on Iran. But AIPAC and the others
wanted more. The result was the 1996 Iran and Libya Sanctions Act,
which imposed sanctions on any foreign companies investing more than
$40 million to develop petroleum resources in Iran or Libya. As Ze’ev
Schiff, the military correspondent of Ha’aretz, noted at the
time, ‘Israel is but a tiny element in the big scheme, but one should
not conclude that it cannot influence those within the Beltway.’
By
the late 1990s, however, the neo-conservatives were arguing that dual
containment was not enough and that regime change in Iraq was
essential. By toppling Saddam and turning Iraq into a vibrant
democracy, they argued, the US would trigger a far-reaching process of
change throughout the Middle East. The same line of thinking was
evident in the ‘Clean Break’ study the neo-conservatives wrote for
Netanyahu. By 2002, when an invasion of Iraq was on the front-burner,
regional transformation was an article of faith in neo-conservative
circles.
Charles Krauthammer describes this grand
scheme as the
brainchild of Natan Sharansky, but Israelis across the political
spectrum believed that toppling Saddam would alter the Middle East to
Israel’s advantage. Aluf Benn reported in Ha’aretz (17
February 2003):
Senior
IDF officers and those close to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, such as
National Security Adviser Ephraim Halevy, paint a rosy picture of the
wonderful future Israel can expect after the war. They envision a
domino effect, with the fall of Saddam Hussein followed by that of
Israel’s other enemies . . . Along with these leaders will
disappear
terror and weapons of mass destruction.
Once Baghdad fell in
mid-April 2003, Sharon and his lieutenants began urging Washington to
target Damascus. On 16 April, Sharon, interviewed in Yedioth
Ahronoth, called for the United States to put ‘very heavy’
pressure on Syria, while Shaul Mofaz, his defence minister, interviewed
in Ma’ariv,
said: ‘We have a long list of issues that we are thinking of demanding
of the Syrians and it is appropriate that it should be done through the
Americans.’ Ephraim Halevy told a WINEP audience that it was now
important for the US to get rough with Syria, and the Washington
Post
reported that Israel was ‘fuelling the campaign’ against Syria by
feeding the US intelligence reports about the actions of Bashar Assad,
the Syrian president.
Prominent members of the Lobby made the
same arguments. Wolfowitz declared that ‘there has got to be regime
change in Syria,’ and Richard Perle told a journalist that ‘a short
message, a two-worded message’ could be delivered to other hostile
regimes in the Middle East: ‘You’re next.’ In early April, WINEP
released a bipartisan report stating that Syria ‘should not miss the
message that countries that pursue Saddam’s reckless, irresponsible and
defiant behaviour could end up sharing his fate’. On 15 April, Yossi
Klein Halevi wrote a piece in the Los Angeles Times entitled
‘Next, Turn the Screws on Syria’, while the following day Zev Chafets
wrote an article for the New York Daily News entitled
‘Terror-Friendly Syria Needs a Change, Too’. Not to be outdone,
Lawrence Kaplan wrote in the New Republic on 21 April that
Assad was a serious threat to America.
Back
on Capitol Hill, Congressman Eliot Engel had reintroduced the Syria
Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act. It threatened
sanctions against Syria if it did not withdraw from Lebanon, give up
its WMD and stop supporting terrorism, and it also called for Syria and
Lebanon to take concrete steps to make peace with Israel. This
legislation was strongly endorsed by the Lobby – by AIPAC especially –
and ‘framed’, according to the Jewish Telegraph Agency, ‘by
some of Israel’s best friends in Congress’. The Bush administration had
little enthusiasm for it, but the anti-Syrian act passed overwhelmingly
(398 to 4 in the House; 89 to 4 in the Senate), and Bush signed it into
law on 12 December 2003.
The administration itself was still
divided about the wisdom of targeting Syria. Although the
neo-conservatives were eager to pick a fight with Damascus, the CIA and
the State Department were opposed to the idea. And even after Bush
signed the new law, he emphasised that he would go slowly in
implementing it. His ambivalence is understandable. First, the Syrian
government had not only been providing important intelligence about
al-Qaida since 9/11: it had also warned Washington about a planned
terrorist attack in the Gulf and given CIA interrogators access to
Mohammed Zammar, the alleged recruiter of some of the 9/11 hijackers.
Targeting the Assad regime would jeopardise these valuable connections,
and thereby undermine the larger war on terrorism.
Second, Syria
had not been on bad terms with Washington before the Iraq war (it had
even voted for UN Resolution 1441), and was itself no threat to the
United States. Playing hardball with it would make the US look like a
bully with an insatiable appetite for beating up Arab states. Third,
putting Syria on the hit list would give Damascus a powerful incentive
to cause trouble in Iraq. Even if one wanted to bring pressure to bear,
it made good sense to finish the job in Iraq first. Yet Congress
insisted on putting the screws on Damascus, largely in response to
pressure from Israeli officials and groups like AIPAC. If there were no
Lobby, there would have been no Syria Accountability Act, and US policy
towards Damascus would have been more in line with the national
interest.
Israelis tend to describe every threat in
the starkest
terms, but Iran is widely seen as their most dangerous enemy because it
is the most likely to acquire nuclear weapons. Virtually all Israelis
regard an Islamic country in the Middle East with nuclear weapons as a
threat to their existence. ‘Iraq is a problem . . . But you
should
understand, if you ask me, today Iran is more dangerous than Iraq,’ the
defence minister, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, remarked a month before the
Iraq war.
Sharon began pushing the US to confront Iran
in November 2002, in an interview in the Times.
Describing Iran as the ‘centre of world terror’, and bent on acquiring
nuclear weapons, he declared that the Bush administration should put
the strong arm on Iran ‘the day after’ it conquered Iraq. In late April
2003, Ha’aretz reported that the Israeli ambassador in
Washington was calling for regime change in Iran. The overthrow of
Saddam, he noted, was ‘not enough’. In his words, America ‘has to
follow through. We still have great threats of that magnitude coming
from Syria, coming from Iran.’
The neo-conservatives, too, lost
no time in making the case for regime change in Tehran. On 6 May, the
AEI co-sponsored an all-day conference on Iran with the Foundation for
the Defense of Democracies and the Hudson Institute, both champions of
Israel. The speakers were all strongly pro-Israel, and many called for
the US to replace the Iranian regime with a democracy. As usual, a bevy
of articles by prominent neo-conservatives made the case for going
after Iran. ‘The liberation of Iraq was the first great battle for the
future of the Middle East . . . But the next great battle –
not, we
hope, a military battle – will be for Iran,’ William Kristol wrote in
the Weekly Standard on 12 May.
The administration has
responded to the Lobby’s pressure by working overtime to shut down
Iran’s nuclear programme. But Washington has had little success, and
Iran seems determined to create a nuclear arsenal. As a result, the
Lobby has intensified its pressure. Op-eds and other articles now warn
of imminent dangers from a nuclear Iran, caution against any
appeasement of a ‘terrorist’ regime, and hint darkly of preventive
action should diplomacy fail. The Lobby is pushing Congress to approve
the Iran Freedom Support Act, which would expand existing sanctions.
Israeli officials also warn they may take pre-emptive action should
Iran continue down the nuclear road, threats partly intended to keep
Washington’s attention on the issue.
One might argue that Israel
and the Lobby have not had much influence on policy towards Iran,
because the US has its own reasons for keeping Iran from going nuclear.
There is some truth in this, but Iran’s nuclear ambitions do not pose a
direct threat to the US. If Washington could live with a nuclear Soviet
Union, a nuclear China or even a nuclear North Korea, it can live with
a nuclear Iran. And that is why the Lobby must keep up constant
pressure on politicians to confront Tehran. Iran and the US would
hardly be allies if the Lobby did not exist, but US policy would be
more temperate and preventive war would not be a serious option.
It
is not surprising that Israel and its American supporters want the US
to deal with any and all threats to Israel’s security. If their efforts
to shape US policy succeed, Israel’s enemies will be weakened or
overthrown, Israel will get a free hand with the Palestinians, and the
US will do most of the fighting, dying, rebuilding and paying. But even
if the US fails to transform the Middle East and finds itself in
conflict with an increasingly radicalised Arab and Islamic world,
Israel will end up protected by the world’s only superpower. This is
not a perfect outcome from the Lobby’s point of view, but it is
obviously preferable to Washington distancing itself, or using its
leverage to force Israel to make peace with the Palestinians.
Can
the Lobby’s power be curtailed? One would like to think so, given the
Iraq debacle, the obvious need to rebuild America’s image in the Arab
and Islamic world, and the recent revelations about AIPAC officials
passing US government secrets to Israel. One might also think that
Arafat’s death and the election of the more moderate Mahmoud Abbas
would cause Washington to press vigorously and even-handedly for a
peace agreement. In short, there are ample grounds for leaders to
distance themselves from the Lobby and adopt a Middle East policy more
consistent with broader US interests. In particular, using American
power to achieve a just peace between Israel and the Palestinians would
help advance the cause of democracy in the region.
But that is
not going to happen – not soon anyway. AIPAC and its allies (including
Christian Zionists) have no serious opponents in the lobbying world.
They know it has become more difficult to make Israel’s case today, and
they are responding by taking on staff and expanding their activities.
Besides, American politicians remain acutely sensitive to campaign
contributions and other forms of political pressure, and major media
outlets are likely to remain sympathetic to Israel no matter what it
does.
The Lobby’s influence causes trouble on
several fronts. It
increases the terrorist danger that all states face – including
America’s European allies. It has made it impossible to end the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a situation that gives extremists a
powerful recruiting tool, increases the pool of potential terrorists
and sympathisers, and contributes to Islamic radicalism in Europe and
Asia.
Equally worrying, the Lobby’s campaign for
regime change in
Iran and Syria could lead the US to attack those countries, with
potentially disastrous effects. We don’t need another Iraq. At a
minimum, the Lobby’s hostility towards Syria and Iran makes it almost
impossible for Washington to enlist them in the struggle against
al-Qaida and the Iraqi insurgency, where their help is badly needed.
There
is a moral dimension here as well. Thanks to the Lobby, the United
States has become the de facto enabler of Israeli expansion in the
Occupied Territories, making it complicit in the crimes perpetrated
against the Palestinians. This situation undercuts Washington’s efforts
to promote democracy abroad and makes it look hypocritical when it
presses other states to respect human rights. US efforts to limit
nuclear proliferation appear equally hypocritical given its willingness
to accept Israel’s nuclear arsenal, which only encourages Iran and
others to seek a similar capability.
Besides, the Lobby’s
campaign to quash debate about Israel is unhealthy for democracy.
Silencing sceptics by organising blacklists and boycotts – or by
suggesting that critics are anti-semites – violates the principle of
open debate on which democracy depends. The inability of Congress to
conduct a genuine debate on these important issues paralyses the entire
process of democratic deliberation. Israel’s backers should be free to
make their case and to challenge those who disagree with them, but
efforts to stifle debate by intimidation must be roundly condemned.
Finally,
the Lobby’s influence has been bad for Israel. Its ability to persuade
Washington to support an expansionist agenda has discouraged Israel
from seizing opportunities – including a peace treaty with Syria and a
prompt and full implementation of the Oslo Accords – that would have
saved Israeli lives and shrunk the ranks of Palestinian extremists.
Denying the Palestinians their legitimate political rights certainly
has not made Israel more secure, and the long campaign to kill or
marginalise a generation of Palestinian leaders has empowered extremist
groups like Hamas, and reduced the number of Palestinian leaders who
would be willing to accept a fair settlement and able to make it work.
Israel itself would probably be better off if the Lobby were less
powerful and US policy more even-handed.
There is a ray of hope,
however. Although the Lobby remains a powerful force, the adverse
effects of its influence are increasingly difficult to hide. Powerful
states can maintain flawed policies for quite some time, but reality
cannot be ignored for ever. What is needed is a candid discussion of
the Lobby’s influence and a more open debate about US interests in this
vital region. Israel’s well-being is one of those interests, but its
continued occupation of the West Bank and its broader regional agenda
are not. Open debate will expose the limits of the strategic and moral
case for one-sided US support and could move the US to a position more
consistent with its own national interest, with the interests of the
other states in the region, and with Israel’s long-term interests as
well.
10 March
John
Mearsheimer is the Wendell Harrison Professor of Political
Science at Chicago, and the author of The Tragedy of Great Power
Politics.
Stephen
Walt
is the Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International Affairs at
the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. His most recent book is Taming
American Power: The Global Response to US Primacy.