<html>
<body>
<font size=3><br><br>
</font><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4 color="#990000">Weekend
Edition<br>
</font><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4>June 16/18,
2006<br><br>
</font><h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=5 color="#990000"><b>
*** CounterPunch Special Report***<br><br>
<br>
</font>Its Origins and
Growth</i></b></h1><font size=3>
<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/" eudora="autourl">
http://www.counterpunch.org/<br>
</a></font><h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=5 color="#990000">
<b>The Power of the Israel
Lobby</b></font></h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=5>By
KATHLEEN and BILL CHRISTISON<br>
</font><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4 color="#990000"><b>
Former CIA analysts<br><br>
</b></font>
<dl>
<dd><font face="Verdana" size=2>Editors' Note: 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</i> 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 over the recent
past and there, like as not, is another opinion column about the
Lobby.<br><br>
<dd>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 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 bed found in our CounterPunch collection,
<a href="http://www.easycarts.net/ecarts/CounterPunch/CP_Books.html">The
Politics of Anti-Semitism</a>.<br><br>
<dd>In mid May they sent us the detailed, measured commentary, rich in
historical detail, that we are delighted to print below in its entirety.
Which is the tail? Which is the dog? asked Uri Avnery in our newsletter,
a few issues back, apropos the respective roles of the Israel Lobby and
the US in the exercise of US policy in the Middle East. Here's an answer
that will be tough to challenge.<br><br>
<dd>-- A.C./J.S.C.<br><br>
</font>
</dl><font face="Verdana" size=6 color="#990000">J</font>
<font face="Verdana" size=2>ohn Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, the
University of Chicago and Harvard political scientists who published in
March of this years 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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
Finkelstein summarized the critics' position in a recent CounterPunch
article ("The Israel Lobby," May 1,
<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/finkelstein05012006.html" eudora="autourl">
http://www.counterpunch.org/finkelstein05012006.html</a>), emphasizing
that the issue is not whether U.S. interests or those of the lobby take
precedence but rather that there has been such coincidence 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
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0520217187/counterpunchmaga">
<img src="http://www.counterpunch.org/../christison.gif" alt="[]"></a>
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.<br><br>
Joseph Massad ("Blaming the Israel Lobby," CounterPunch, March
25/26,
<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/massad03252006.html" eudora="autourl">
http://www.counterpunch.org/massad03252006.html</a>) 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?)<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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</i>, 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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.'"<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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 clearly played a huge role in maintaining the
interdependence.<br><br>
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?<br><br>
Although the leftist critics speak of Israel 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.)<br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000">Owning the
Policymakers<br><br>
</b></font>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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
This is no ordinary state-to-state relationship, 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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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 just 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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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</i> 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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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 government service. Martin Indyk, the
Institute's first director, entered a senior policymaking position in the
Clinton administration from there.<br><br>
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</i> 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</i> 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."<br><br>
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</i> correspondent, but otherwise his complaints fell
on deaf ears.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
<font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000">Interchangeable
Interests<br><br>
</b></font>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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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</i> of Israel
groups that have quite literally hijacked the government and stripped it
of most vestiges of democracy.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
Kathleen Christison</b> is a former CIA political analyst and has worked
on Middle East issues for 30 years. She is the author of
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0520217187/counterpunchmaga">
Perceptions of Palestine</a> and
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/097125480X/counterpunchmaga">
The Wound of Dispossession</a>.<br><br>
Bill Christison</b> 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</i>, CounterPunch's history of the wars on Iraq and
Afghanistan.<br><br>
They can be reached at
<a href="mailto:kathy.bill@christison-santafe.com">
kathy.bill@christison-santafe.com</a>.<br><br>
<x-sigsep><p></x-sigsep>
<font size=3 color="#FF0000">The Freedom Archives<br>
522 Valencia Street<br>
San Francisco, CA 94110<br>
(415) 863-9977<br>
</font><font size=3>
<a href="http://www.freedomarchives.org/" eudora="autourl">
www.freedomarchives.org</a></font></body>
</html>