Re: [Marxism] The Israel Lobby

[Marvin Gandall <marvgandall@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

(Excellent article by Columbia Prof. Joseph Massad in Al-Ahram Weekly,
courtesy of the Electronic Intifada. Ignore the misleading introductory
sub-head by the Al-Ahram editor; Massad, a prominent target of the Israel
lobby, explains why the lobby is NOT driving US foreign policy, although
there is a convergence of interests. Massad turns Mearsheimer-Walt on their
heads much as Marx did Hegel on a grander scale, but this should not obscure
the fact that the M-W article, as was the case with Hegel, also represents
an advance over what has come before, and has opened the kind of wider
discussion in which interventions like Massad's can have more of an impact.)
=================================
Blaming the lobby
By Joseph Massad
Al-Ahram Weekly
23-29 March 2006

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/787/op35.htm

Unless the Jewish lobby loosens its grip on Washington's foreign policy, the
US should expect a change in its standing among Arabs, writes Joseph Massad

In the last 25 years, many Palestinians and other Arabs, in the United
States and in the Arab world, have been so awed by the power of the US
pro-Israel lobby that any study, book, or journalistic article that exposes
the inner workings, the substantial influence, and the financial and
political power of this lobby have been greeted with ecstatic sighs of
relief that Americans finally can see the "truth" and the "error" of their
ways.

The underlying argument has been simple and has been told time and again by
Washington's regime allies in the Arab world, pro-US liberal and Arab
intellectuals, conservative and liberal US intellectuals and former
politicians, and even leftist Arab and American activists who support
Palestinian rights, namely, that absent the pro- Israel lobby, America would
at worst no longer contribute to the oppression of Arabs and Palestinians
and at best it would be the Arabs' and the Palestinians' best ally and
friend. What makes this argument persuasive and effective to Arabs? Indeed,
why are its claims constantly brandished by Washington's Arab friends to
Arab and American audiences as a persuasive argument? I contend that the
attraction of this argument is that it exonerates the United States'
government from all the responsibility and guilt that it deserves for its
policies in the Arab world and gives false hope to many Arabs and
Palestinians who wish America would be on their side instead of on the side
of their enemies.

Let me start with the premise of the argument, namely its effect of shifting
the blame for US policies from the United States onto Israel and its US
lobby. According to this logic, it is not the United States that should be
held directly responsible for all its imperial policies in the Arab world
and the Middle East at large since World War II, rather it is Israel and its
lobby who have pushed it to launch policies that are detrimental to its own
national interest and are only beneficial to Israel. Establishing and
supporting Arab and other Middle East dictatorships, arming and training
their militaries, setting up their secret police apparatuses and training
them in effective torture methods and counter-insurgency to be used against
their own citizens should be blamed, according to the logic of these
studies, on Israel and its US lobby. Blocking all international and UN
support for Palestinian rights, arming and financing Israel in its war
against a civilian population, protecting Israel from the wrath of the
international community should also be blamed not on the United States, the
studies insist, but on Israel and its lobby. Additionally, and in line with
this logic, controlling Arab economies and finances, dominating key
investments in the Middle East, and imposing structural adjustment policies
by the IMF and the World Bank which impoverish the Arab peoples should also
be blamed on Israel, and not the United States. Finally, starving and then
invading Iraq, threatening to invade Syria, raiding and then sanctioning
Libya and Iran, besieging the Palestinians and their leaders must also be
blamed on the Israeli lobby and not the US government. Indeed, over the
years, many pro-US Arab dictators let it leak officially and unofficially
that their US diplomat friends have told them time and again how much they
and "America" support the Arab world and the Palestinians were it not for
the influence of the pro- Israel lobby (sometimes identified by the American
diplomats in more explicit "ethnic" terms).

While many of the studies of the pro-Israel lobby are sound and full of
awe-inspiring well- documented details about the formidable power commanded
by groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and its
allies, the problem with most of them is what remains unarticulated. For
example, when and in what context has the United States government ever
supported national liberation in the Third World? The record of the United
States is one of being the implacable enemy of all Third World national
liberation groups, including European ones, from Greece to Latin America to
Africa and Asia, except in the celebrated cases of the Afghan
fundamentalists' war against the USSR and supporting apartheid South
Africa's main terrorist allies in Angola and Mozambique (UNITA and RENAMO)
against their respective anti-colonial national governments. Why then would
the US support national liberation in the Arab world absent the pro-Israel
lobby is something these studies never explain.

The United States has had a consistent policy since World War II of fighting
all regimes across the Third World who insist on controlling their national
resources, whether it be land, oil, or other valuable minerals. This extends
from Iran in 1953 to Guatemala in 1954 to the rest of Latin America all the
way to present-day Venezuela. Africa has fared much worse in the last four
decades, as have many countries in Asia. Why would the United States support
nationalist regimes in the Arab world who would nationalise natural
resources and stop their pillage by American capital absent the pro-Israel
lobby also remains a mystery unexplained by these studies.

Finally, the United States government has opposed and overthrown or tried to
overthrow any regime that seeks real and tangible independence in the Third
World and is especially galled by those regimes that pursue such policies
through democratic elections. The overthrow of regimes from Arbenz to
Goulart to Mossadegh and Allende and the ongoing attempts to overthrow
Chavez are prominent examples, as is the overthrow of nationalist regimes
like Sukarno's and Nkrumah's. The terror unleashed on populations who
challenged the US-installed friendly regimes from El Salvador and Nicaragua
to Zaire to Chile and Indonesia resulted in the killing of hundreds of
thousands, if not millions by repressive police and militaries trained for
these important tasks by the US. This is aside from direct US invasions of
South East Asian and Central American countries that killed untold millions
for decades.

Why would the US and its repressive agencies stop invading Arab countries,
or stop supporting the repressive police forces of dictatorial Arab regimes
and why would the US stop setting up shadow governments inside its embassies
in Arab capitals to run these countries' affairs (in some cases the US
shadow government runs the Arab country in question down to the smallest
detail with the Arab government in question reduced to executing orders) if
the pro-Israel lobby did not exist is never broached by these studies let
alone explained. The arguments put forth by these studies would have been
more convincing if the Israel lobby was forcing the United States government
to pursue policies in the Middle East that are inconsistent with its global
policies elsewhere. This, however, is far from what happens. While US
policies in the Middle East may often be an exaggerated form of its
repressive and anti- democratic policies elsewhere in the world, they are
not inconsistent with them.

One could easily make the case that the strength of the pro-Israel lobby is
what accounts for this exaggeration, but even this contention is not
entirely persuasive. One could argue (and I have argued elsewhere) that it
is in fact the very centrality of Israel to US strategy in the Middle East
that accounts, in part, for the strength of the pro-Israel lobby and not the
other way around. Indeed, many of the recent studies highlight the role of
pro-Likud members of the Bush administration (or even of the Clinton
administration) as evidence of the lobby's awesome power, when, it could be
easily argued that it is these American politicians who had pushed Likud and
Labour into more intransigence in the 1990s and are pushing them towards
more conquest now that they are at the helm of the US government.

This is not to say, however, that the leaders of the pro-Israel lobby do not
regularly brag about their crucial influence on US policy in Congress and in
the White House. That they have done regularly since the late
1970s. But the lobby is powerful in the United States because its major
claims are about advancing US interests and its support for Israel is
contextualised in its support for the overall US strategy in the Middle
East. The pro- Israel lobby plays the same role that the China lobby played
in the 1950s and the Cuba lobby still plays to this day. The fact that it is
more powerful than any other foreign lobby on Capitol Hill testifies to the
importance of Israel in US strategy and not to some fantastical power that
the lobby commands independent of and extraneous to the US "national
interest." The pro-Israel lobby could not sell its message and would not
have any influence if Israel was a communist or anti-imperialist country or
if Israel opposed US policy elsewhere in the world.

Some would argue that even though Israel attempts to overlap its interests
with those of the US, that its lobby is misleading American policy- makers
and shifting their position from one of objective assessment of what is
truly in America's best interest and that of Israel's. The argument runs as
follows: US support for Israel causes groups who oppose Israel to hate the
US and target it for attacks. It also costs the US friendly media coverage
in the Arab world, affects its investment potential in Arab countries, and
loses its important allies in the region, or at least weakens these allies.
But none of this is true. The United States has been able to be Israel's
biggest backer and financier, its staunchest defender and weapon-supplier
while maintaining strategic alliances with most if not all Arab
dictatorships, including the Palestinian Authority under both Yasser Arafat
and Mahmoud Abbas.

Moreover, US companies and American investments have the largest presence
across the Arab world, most prominently but not exclusively in the oil
sector. Also, even without the pathetic and ineffective efforts at US
propaganda in the guise of the television station Al-Hurra, or Radio Sawa
and the now-defunct Hi magazine, not to mention US-paid journalists and
newspapers in Iraq and elsewhere, a whole army of Arabic newspapers and
state-television stations, not to mention myriad satellite television
stations celebrate the US and its culture, broadcast American programmes,
and attempt to sell the US point of view as effectively as possible
encumbered only by the limitations that actual US policies in the region
place on common sense. Even the offending Al-Jazeera has bent over backwards
to accommodate the US point of view but is constantly undercut by actual US
policies in the region. Al-Jazeera, under tremendous pressure and threats of
bombing from the United States, has for example stopped referring to the US
occupation forces in Iraq as "occupation forces" and now refers to them as
"coalition forces". Moreover, since when has the US sought to win a
popularity contest among the peoples of the world? Arabs no more hate or
love the United States than do Latin Americans, Africans, Asians, or even
and especially Europeans.

Finally we come to the financial argument, namely that the US gives an
inordinate amount of money to Israel -- too exorbitant a cost that is out of
proportion to what the US gets in return. In fact, the United States spends
much more on its military bases in the Arab world, not to mention on those
in Europe or Asia, than it does on Israel. Israel has indeed been very
effective in rendering services to its US master for a good price, whether
in channelling illegal arms to central American dictatorships in the 1970s
and 1980s, helping pariah regimes like Taiwan and apartheid South Africa in
the same period, supporting pro-US, including Fascist, groups inside the
Arab world to undermine nationalist Arab regimes, from Lebanon to Iraq to
Sudan, coming to the aid of conservative pro- US Arab regimes when
threatened as it did in Jordan in 1970, and attacking Arab nationalist
regimes outright as it did in 1967 with Egypt and Syria and in 1981 with
Iraq when it destroyed that country's nuclear reactor. While the US had been
able to overthrow Sukarno and Nkrumah in bloody coups, Nasser remained
entrenched until Israel effectively neutralised him in the 1967 War.

It is thanks to this major service that the United States increased its
support to Israel exponentially. Moreover, Israel neutralised the PLO in
1982, no small service to many Arab regimes and their US patron who could
not fully control the organisation until then. None of the American military
bases on which many more billions are spent can claim such a stellar record.
Critics argue that when the US had to intervene in the Gulf, it could not
rely on Israel to do the job because of the sensitivity of including it in
such a coalition which would embarrass Arab allies, hence the need for
direct US intervention and the uselessness of Israel as a strategic ally.
While this may be true, the US also could not rely on any of its military
bases to launch the invasions on their own and had to ship in its army.
American bases in the Gulf did provide important and needed support but so
did Israel.

AIPAC is indeed powerful insofar as it pushes for policies that accord with
US interests and that are resonant with the reigning US imperial ideology.
The power of the pro-Israel lobby, whether in Congress or on campuses among
university administrators, or policy-makers is not based solely on their
organisational skills or ideological uniformity. In no small measure, anti-
Semitic attitudes in Congress (and among university administrators) play a
role in believing the lobby's (and its enemies') exaggerated claims about
its actual power, resulting in their towing the line. But even if this were
true, one could argue, it would not matter whether the lobby has real or
imagined power. For as long as Congress and policy-makers (and university
administrators) believe it does, it will remain effective and powerful. I of
course concede this point.

What then would have been different in US policy in the Middle East absent
Israel and its powerful lobby? The answer in short is: the details and
intensity but not the direction, content, or impact of such policies. Is the
pro- Israel lobby extremely powerful in the United States? As someone who
has been facing the full brunt of their power for the last three years
through their formidable influence on my own university and their attempts
to get me fired, I answer with a resounding yes. Are they primarily
responsible for US policies towards the Palestinians and the Arab world?
Absolutely not.

The United States is opposed in the Arab world as elsewhere because it has
pursued and continues to pursue policies that are inimical to the interests
of most people in these countries and are only beneficial to its own
interests and to the minority regimes in the region that serve those
interests, including Israel. Absent these policies, and not the pro-Israel
lobby which supports them, the United States should expect a change in its
standing among Arabs. Short of that, the United States will have to continue
its policies in the region that have wreaked, and continue to wreak, havoc
on the majority of Arabs and not expect that the Arab people will like it in
return.

* The writer is associate professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual
history at Columbia University. His recent book The Persistence of the
Palestinian Question was published by Routledge



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