[WCUSP] Does the Israeli tail wag the American dog

[yvonne simmons]

Thursday March 01, 2007 
Christisons: Does the Israeli Tail Wag the American
Dog?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



If the United States is unable to distinguish the
world’s or its own real needs from those of another
state and that state’s lobby, then it simply cannot
say that it always acts in its own best interests.  


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By Kathleen and Bill Christison 

A quarter century ago, the executive director of AIPAC
—the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee—established an analytical unit inside the
organization to write in-depth advocacy papers for
policymakers.  The year was 1981, the president was
Ronald Reagan, and AIPAC had just lost a hard-fought
battle in Congress over the sale of AWACS surveillance
aircraft to Saudi Arabia.  The AIPAC leader was an
energetic former congressional aide named Thomas Dine,
who used the setback to build AIPAC into a formidable
political force.  Over the next few years, Dine
quadrupled AIPAC’s grassroots membership as well as
its budget and aggressively expanded contacts with
Congress and policymakers.  He set out to supply
politicians with analyses geared toward advancing
Israeli interests, in the stated belief that anyone
who wrote papers read by policymakers would
effectively “own” the policymakers.

This was a seminal moment in the decades-long growth
of the lobby’s influence on US Middle East policy,
often to the detriment of US national interests.  Many
have characterized the relationship between what the
United States does in the Middle East and what the
lobby wants it to do as a case of the Israeli tail
wagging the US dog.  Israel and its US supporters,
although constituting the junior partner in the
relationship, are seen as virtually dictating policy
to whatever administration and Congress are in power. 
There are myriad examples of this dynamic, most
notably Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which
dragged the US into a disastrous intervention, and
Israel’s invasion of the West Bank in 2002, during
which Prime Minister Ariel Sharon openly and
repeatedly defied President George Bush’s demand for a
withdrawal.  Others maintain that the tail-wagging is
the other way around: that the United States, as the
superpower, patron of Israel, and its major aid donor,
is unmistakably the senior partner and the dog that
wags the tail.  The question, therefore, is which is
the accurate assessment, or is the cynical view of
Israeli commentator Michel Warschawski correct, that
“there is neither a dog nor a tail, but one global war
of re-colonization, and one aggressive monster with
two ugly heads”?

Silence Broken 

Despite the growing power of the Israel lobby, and the
growing convergence of US and Israeli efforts toward
global and regional Middle East domination, public
debate over the size and substance of the lobby’s role
in US policymaking was almost non-existent until two
political scientists, John Mearsheimer of the
University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard
University, issued an 81-page report in March 2006
analyzing lobby strength.  Mearsheimer, the R. Wendell
Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political
Science, and Walt, Belfer Professor of International
Affairs, are leading proponents of the realist school
of foreign policy, which argues that states act to
further military and economic power rather than pursue
idealism and ethics.  Their report sparked widespread
interest when it was published in abbreviated form in
the London Review of Books.  Defining the lobby
broadly as “the loose coalition of individuals and
organizations who actively work to shape US foreign
policy in a pro-Israel direction,” Mearsheimer and
Walt conclude that the thrust of US policy in the
Middle East is overwhelmingly the result of the
lobby’s activities.  They observe that, while other
lobbies and interest groups have also demonstrated an
ability to skew policy, “no lobby has managed to
divert US foreign policy as far from what the American
national interest would otherwise suggest, while
simultaneously convincing Americans that US and
Israeli interests are essentially identical.”

The report aroused instantaneous and vocal opposition
from the very individuals whom the authors identify as
members of the lobby.  Harvard law professor Alan
Dershowitz, a vociferous advocate of Israel, called
the authors “liars” engaging in “crass bigotry” and
likened their arguments to neo-Nazi propaganda, filled
with “thinly veiled charges of Jewish control of
American thought” reminiscent of The Protocols of the
Elders of Zion.  Abraham Foxman and his
Anti-Defamation League (ADL) charged that the report’s
main thesis “is the embodiment of classic, anti-Jewish
conspiracy theory.”

Most criticism from Israel’s strongest advocates
fails, however, to address the principal points of the
Mearsheimer-Walt study: that influential elements in
the United States—non-Jews as well as Jews—who have as
a primary objective the advancement of Israeli
interests have gained undue influence over US Middle
East policy and use this influence to tilt policy
toward Israel in ways that are contrary to US national
interests.  Instead, critics argue off the point,
raising straw men that distract from the report’s main
thesis. 

The accusation that Mearsheimer and Walt are
“anti-Semitic” is the charge most commonly heard from
supporters of Israel across the political spectrum. 
Not coincidentally, it is also a line of attack long
used by the lobby to silence and indeed attack anyone
who dares question Israeli policies or the United
States’ close ties to Israel.  The question of
anti-Semitism was addressed during a major debate in
New York in September that pitted Mearsheimer and two
allies against a former Israeli official and two
policymakers from the Clinton administration, Dennis
Ross and Martin Indyk.  These three opponents of
Mearsheimer, although clearly supporters of Israel,
are generally regarded as centrists, neither
particularly hard-core like Dershowitz nor rightwing,
but all three echoed Dershowitz in charging that the
report “lowers itself to the level of anti-Semitism”
or “has connotations of anti-Semitism,” simply because
it discusses the role of some Jews in positions of
power and influence.  

This debate around anti-Semitism is a diversion from
the main issue and is undoubtedly intended as such. 
The New York panel spent fully one-third of its
allotted time examining whether Mearsheimer and Walt
are anti-Semitic before getting to any substantive
analysis of the report’s conclusions and evidence. 
Criticism of former President Jimmy Carter’s book
Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid follows the same
pattern.  Critics charge poor scholarship or hint at
anti-Semitism because Carter uses the term “apartheid”
to describe Israel’s policies in the occupied
Palestinian territories.  Many, including the
Democratic Party leadership, have criticized the book,
but few have provided evidence to support their
charges or seriously examined the evidence behind
Carter’s thesis. 

A member of the New York panel who spoke in support of
the Mearsheimer-Walt report, New York University
professor Tony Judt, has written about the crippling
effect that Americans’ induced fear of being labeled
anti-Semitic has had on public discourse about
anything relating to Israel and ultimately on policy. 
During the panel discussion, he highlighted the
phenomenon by observing that, although there are
“hundreds of distorting lobbies” in the US, the Israel
lobby is the only one that not only acts energetically
in pursuit of its cause, “but acts constantly and very
effectively to silence criticism of its cause.”  In a
similar vein, Mearsheimer observed in an interview
with Mother Jones that the main reason the strong
affinity between the US and Israel continues is the
absence of open and candid discussion about the
relationship.  There would be far less sympathy for
Israel, he said, if Americans knew what Israelis are
doing in the occupied territories.  “In essence,
America’s present relationship with Israel could not
withstand public scrutiny.”

Jimmy Carter’s book makes a major effort to provide
more scrutiny, but its success is so far uncertain. 
Scott Ritter, who worked closely with Israel as a
military intelligence officer and as a UN weapons
inspector in Iraq, reiterates both Judt’s and
Mearsheimer’s observations in his new book Target
Iran.  While many nations maintain active lobbies in
the US, he writes, none has “the scope and clout” of
the Israel lobby and none operates in its “brazen
manner.”  Ritter foresees a potentially catastrophic
US-Israeli confrontation with Iran and believes the
only way to avoid this will be by bringing the nature
of the US-Israeli relationship into the national
discourse, fundamentally re-examining why the US
operates in “continued national impotence as another
nation, Israel, dictates national security policy for
all America.”

In a 2003 critique of Israel and the U.S.-Israeli
relationship in the New York Review of Books, Judt
touched on what Mearsheimer and Walt later laid out as
their principal thesis.  Judt wrote that Israel
continued “to mock its American patron” by building
illegal settlements even as the US was pushing the
“Roadmap” peace plan calling for a freeze on
settlement construction.  Israel had reduced the
powerful president of the United States, he said, to a
“ventriloquist’s dummy, pitifully reciting the Israeli
cabinet line.”  Its behavior “has been a disaster for
American foreign policy.”  The United States’
unconditional support for Israel “is the main reason
why most of the rest of the world no longer credits
our good faith.”

James Abourezk knows the lobby well.  A US senator
from South Dakota from 1972-1978, Abourezk says, from
his experience in Congress, that “the support Israel
has in that body is based completely on political
fear”—fear that “anyone who does not do what Israel
wants done” will be defeated by the lobby.  Abourezk
reinforces the point about the lobby’s efforts to
silence.  “Even one voice is attacked,” he writes, “on
grounds that if Congress is completely silent on the
issue, the press will have no one to quote, which
effectively silences the press as well.  Any
journalists or editors who step out of line are
quickly brought under control by well organized
economic pressure against the newspaper caught
sinning.”  Jimmy Carter has described a similar
phenomenon in recent commentaries, noting that AIPAC’s
“extraordinary lobbying efforts” have silenced all
debate in policymaking councils, in Congress, and in
the media about Israeli policies.

Abourezk describes pressure tactics that were already
in full swing before AIPAC set out to “own”
policymakers, and Carter has made it clear that the
lobby’s stranglehold on discourse and on
decisionmaking has tightened.  The pro-Israeli tilt
that has, to one degree or another, been
characteristic of most administrations and most
Congresses since Israel’s creation was clearly not
Dine’s invention or a phenomenon that emerged only in
the 1980s.  But Dine institutionalized the process,
strengthening it significantly.

In 1984, in addition to the internal analytical unit,
AIPAC spun off another body, the Washington Institute
for Near East Policy (WINEP), that remains a
pre-eminent think tank—one that has placed its
analysts in policymaking jobs in several
administrations.  Dennis Ross, who was the senior
Middle East policymaker in the administrations of
George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, came from WINEP and
returned there after leaving government service. 
Martin Indyk, an original member of AIPAC’s analytical
unit and WINEP’s first director, entered a senior
policymaking position in the Clinton administration
from there.  Mearsheimer and Walt correctly describe
both men as situated “at the core of the lobby.”

This assertion addresses a critical aspect of the
lobby question by emphasizing the reality that the
lobby has in recent decades actually become a part of
various administrations.  The lobby is also not
confined to the formal Jewish-American organizations
such as AIPAC and the ADL and think tanks like WINEP
and JINSA, the Jewish Institute for National Security
Affairs, but also includes numerous individuals who
work on Israel’s behalf and encompasses the very large
fundamentalist Christian right.  The Christian right
strongly supports Israel’s continued control over the
West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem as the essential
prerequisite to the so-called Millennium, when they
believe Jesus Christ will reappear.  During the last
several years in particular, the Christian right has
used its vast numbers to lobby both the administration
and Congress in support of Israel’s policies and in
opposition to any proposal that would require Israeli
concessions.

The kind of blunt pressure on decisionmakers that
Abourezk describes is only one way in which the
organized lobby operates.  The bond between Israel and
the US has always had its grounding as much in soft
emotions as in the hard realities of geopolitical
strategy.  Over the years since Israel’s creation,
there has been a pervasive atmosphere in which Israel
is simply assumed to be so close to the US, its
interests so closely intertwined with American
interests, that it is accepted almost as a part of the
US.

The lobby reinforces this sentiment, channeling it
into institutional ways of involving ordinary
Americans in supporting Israel.  Jeffrey Blankfort, a
northern California radio host and long-time
commentator on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and
other Middle East issues, points out, for instance,
that 1,700 unions in the US own more than $5 billion
of Israel bonds.  This effectively obliges the unions
to support Israel, Blankfort believes, making the
American labor movement a part of the lobby.  It is
one reason that the organized left in the United
States has opposed making the Palestine issue part of
the anti-war movement.  Many states and universities
also invest in Israel bonds, as well as in Israeli
companies, giving these local governments and
institutions an interest in supporting Israel’s
policies in order to keep the Israeli economy going.

The pervasiveness of the lobby’s influence makes Tony
Judt’s reference to the US president as a
“ventriloquist’s dummy” particularly apt.  As Walt
pointed out in a Mother Jones interview, no matter
what Israel does, the United States continues to
support it.  “They continue to build settlements even
though every president since Lyndon Johnson has
thought that was a bad idea.  They spy on us
routinely.  They’ve given or sold American military
technology to other countries.  Also
they have
conducted a wide variety of human rights violations,
and yet none of those activities ever slows down
American support.”  For the last several decades,
AIPAC has frequently involved itself directly in the
legislative process, writing legislation relating to
the Middle East and pushing a series of anti-Arab,
pro-Israeli resolutions that state the stance of the
Senate and the House on various issues, such as
Israel’s construction of the separation wall and
Israel’s summer 2006 attack on Lebanon.  AIPAC often
boasts that it vets and exerts influence over
presidential candidates.  During the 2004 presidential
campaign when Howard Dean issued a mild and seemingly
non-controversial call for an “even-handed” US policy
toward the Arab-Israeli conflict, he was roundly
condemned by the lobby and by fellow Democrats, and he
quickly dropped the call.  Long-serving congressmen
who deviate are targeted for electoral defeat.  In the
1980s, Representative Paul Findley and Senator Charles
Percy, who had each served multiple terms in Illinois,
were defeated through the efforts of AIPAC after both
spoke out in favor of negotiating with the PLO.  More
recently, Georgia’s Cynthia McKinney has twice been
the target of AIPAC’s electoral interference.

The list goes on.  Israel and its lobby have been the
policy initiators, the US the follower, in Israel’s
1967 war, its 1982 invasion of Lebanon, its 2002
invasion of the West Bank, its 40-year
settlement-construction enterprise in the occupied
Palestinian territories, its disproportionate attacks
on Palestinians, its assault on Lebanon.  The scope of
the lobby’s infiltration of government policymaking
councils has been unprecedented during the current
Bush administration, and there is strong evidence that
neo-conservatives inside the administration—whose ties
to Israel’s right wing are undeniable—were the
architects of the invasion of Iraq and of the
administration’s push to “transform” the Middle East
and spread “democracy” throughout the region. 
Mearsheimer and Walt assert that the Iraq war was “at
least partly intended to improve Israel’s strategic
position”—a reality that would seem to be confirmed by
the fact that some of these same neo-cons authored a
strategy paper, entitled “A Clean Break,” in the
mid-1990s for then Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu, laying out a plan for attacking Iraq that
was later pushed when the neo-cons entered the Bush
administration.  The strategy was designed explicitly
to assure Israel’s regional dominance, to undermine
the Oslo peace process, and to relieve Israel of
pressure to make concessions to the Palestinians.

One of the authors, David Wurmser, remains in
government as Vice President Richard Cheney’s Middle
East adviser; the others, Richard Perle and Douglas
Feith, were closely involved in Iraq war planning as,
respectively, an adviser to the Pentagon and an
undersecretary of defense.  Almost all the other
neo-cons, both Jews and non-Jews, have also compiled
long records of advocacy on behalf of Israel.  These
include Paul Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams, John Bolton,
and their cheerleaders on the sidelines such as
William Kristol, Robert Kagan, Norman Podhoretz, the
late Jeane Kirkpatrick, and numerous rightwing,
pro-Israeli think tanks in Washington.

In response to the lobby’s pressure on legislators and
policymakers, the US has given Israel massive amounts
of military and economic aid over the years. 
Mearsheimer and Walt cite statistics from the US
Agency for International Development indicating that
between 1976 and 2003, the US gave Israel a total of
$140 billion in aid, in constant 2003 dollars.  One
economist, Thomas Stauffer, who has long tracked aid
to Israel, put the figure much higher in 2002,
estimating a total of $240 billion in the preceding 30
years, adjusted to current dollars.  Israel now
receives an automatic $2-3 billion annually in grant
aid, mostly military, in addition to large increments
of additional aid to compensate for the cost to Israel
of such actions as the Lebanon war and the Gaza
withdrawal.

Defining the National Interest

The truly important part of the debate over the
lobby’s power swirls around the issue of national
interests—what constitutes national interests, who
determines them, and whether real national interests
are harmed by the lobby.  A group of commentators and
analysts on the left who are highly critical of
Israel’s policies have nonetheless been dismissive of
the notion that the lobby has particular influence
over policy.  Their arguments center on the issue of
what actually constitutes the US national interest. 
Noam Chomsky has frequently indicated that Middle East
policy is determined largely by what he calls the
“tight state-corporate linkage” where domestic power
is concentrated—in other words, the
military-industrial complex working in cooperation
with the government, whose special interests, Chomsky
believes, ultimately define US national interests. 
The Israel lobby has some impact on determining policy
in Chomsky’s estimation, but to a far lesser extent
and generally only insofar as the lobby’s interests
conform to corporate-government interests.

Chomsky and the other left critics of the lobby study
essentially believe that US policy has always been
directed at the advancement of US imperial and
corporate interests, and that Israel, far from leading
the US into harmful policies and foreign adventures,
has always done the US bidding.  The US would pursue
its imperial objectives even without Israel, and it
has pursued these in areas outside the Middle East,
such as Chile, Indonesia, Central America, and
elsewhere, without benefit of any lobby.  The Israel
lobby, in this view, functions as merely a handy
adjunct to US policy, not an agent with any control or
particular influence.

One thing this argument ignores, however, is that the
lobby and its close ties to US arms makers strengthen
the ability of the military-industrial complex to
control what are defined as US national interests. 
The Israel lobby holds unquestionable sway over many
individual congressmen and executive branch officials,
including in the White House, making it difficult for
anyone to influence the alleged national interests of
the US in ways that the lobby might feel weakened
Israel’s uniquely special relationship with the US. 
Any debate involving this taboo subject, even
indirectly, would almost certainly be quashed before
it started, buried under paeans for Israel from both
Republicans and Democrats.  

Afif Safieh, the head of the Palestine Liberation
Organization Mission in Washington, makes another
point.  He calls the approach of Chomsky and others on
the left a “mechanistic” view that does not allow for
the fact that each situation has its own specificity,
the specificity in this case being that the junior
partner can often “hijack” and “monopolize”
decisionmaking on Middle East issues.  The left’s
argument comes from a kind of determinism that assumes
US policy has rarely if ever deviated from a clearly
laid-out imperial strategy designed to promote
corporate interests.

But simply because the US overthrew a government
deemed inimical to American business interests in
Chile or supported a dictator in Indonesia where the
oil industry had interests does not prove that
whenever Israel has attacked Arab countries, as with
Egypt in 1967 and Lebanon in 1982, it was acting to
serve the United States or was, as Chomsky has
alleged, performing a “huge service to the
US-Saudis-Energy corporations by smashing secular Arab
nationalism.”  Israel in no way serves to ensure US
access to or control over the Middle East’s oil
resources, nor does it work in conjunction with the
oil industry.

There is no denying the intricate interweaving of the
US military-industrial-financial complex with Israel’s
military, industrial, and financial interests, as
Chomsky and others on the left contend, but rather
than a relationship in which Israel does the bidding
of the US corporate-government conglomeration, in
reality the entanglement is much more one between two
independent players.  And the lobby essentially
functions to sustain and manipulate the entanglement. 
Blankfort maintains that the influence of the lobby
“is actually underestimated.  Not only does it keep
Congress in thrall to its demands on issues pertaining
to Israel and the Middle East in general, it also
serves, less conspicuously, as a powerful lobbying
force for maintaining America’s high levels of
military spending and for integrating the Israeli arms
industry with that of the US.”  This integration,
Blankfort says, “goes a long way to explain why there
has been no significant opposition to the annual
military budget from any sector of Congress.”

Israel and its lobby work hand in glove with the US
arms industry to advance their combined, usually
compatible interests.  The relatively few powerful,
wealthy families that dominate the Israeli arms
industry are just as interested in pressing for
aggressively militaristic US and Israeli foreign
policies as are the CEOs of US arms corporations.  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.  The relationship is
symbiotic, and the lobby cooperates intimately to keep
it alive; lobbyists can go to many in Congress and
tell them credibly that if aid to Israel is cut off,
thousands of arms-industry jobs in their districts
will be lost.  The lobby does not simply passively
support the desires of the military-industrial
complex.  It actively twists arms in Congress and the
administration to perpetuate acceptance of certain
“national interests” that many Americans believe is
wrong.

A Two-Headed Monster

As Tony Judt noted, much of the rest of the world now
“no longer credits our good faith.”  Strong US support
for Israel has long roiled Arab public opinion, but
since the collapse of the peace process and the start
of the Palestinian intifada and Israel’s harsh
crackdown in September 2000, opinion polls in Arab and
Muslim countries have repeatedly shown strong and
growing distrust of the United States, linked
principally to US support for Israel’s oppression of
the Palestinians and more recently to the Iraq war. 
Hostile attitudes reach into the 70-80 percent range
in many Arab countries.  Similar, although not as
strong or pervasive, distrust of the US emerges in
polls in Europe.  The growing anti-US sentiment
resulting from the close US relationship with Israel
is a principal emphasis in the Mearsheimer-Walt
report.  The authors point out at the opening of their
report that Bush administration policies, heavily
influenced by the Israel lobby, have helped produce a
“resilient insurgency in Iraq, a sharp rise in world
oil prices, and terrorist bombings in Madrid, London,
and Amman.”  The United States’ “unwavering” support
for Israel, they write, has “inflamed Arab and Islamic
opinion and jeopardized US security.”  They believe
the US has actually set aside its own security to
advance the interests of another state.

The obvious result has been more terrorism against the
US and its allies.  Osama bin Laden’s videos and taped
statements from the 1990s talk about the Palestinians
and his anger with the US because of its alliance with
Israel.  His anger and that of other radical Islamists
is on behalf of Muslims who have been killed and
exploited by the US, Israel, and the West for decades,
and Palestinians are perhaps the most prominent among
these.  His anger is shared by millions of the
oppressed, and he can attract the radicals among them
to his struggle on the basis of his stance as a
defender of Palestinians and all oppressed Muslims. 
This is a danger to the United States, arising
directly from the strong US-Israel tie and the lobby’s
strenuous efforts to sustain it, that cannot be
underestimated.

The tragedy of the present situation is that it has
become impossible to separate Israeli from alleged US
interests—that is, not what should be real US national
interests, but the selfish and self-defined “national
interests” of the political-corporate-military complex
that, in conjunction with the lobby, dominates the
Bush administration, Congress, and both major
political parties.  The specific groups that now
dominate the government are the globalized arms,
energy, and financial industries, and the entire
military establishments, of the US and of
Israel—groups that have quite literally hijacked the
government and stripped it of most vestiges of
democracy.  The “aggressive monster with two ugly
heads” that Michel Warschawski speaks of is a reality.

This convergence of manipulated “interests” has a
profound effect on US policy choices in the Middle
East.  If the United States is unable to distinguish
the world’s or its own real needs from those of
another state and that state’s lobby, then it simply
cannot say that it always acts in its own best
interests.  In the face of the massive human rights
violations being committed against Palestinians today,
the failure to recognize this reality is where those
who belittle the lobby’s power and accept US Middle
East policy as simply an unchangeable part of a
longstanding strategy are particularly dangerous.
 
-Bill Christison is a former 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. Kathleen Christison is a former
CIA political analyst and has worked on Middle East
issues for 30 years.  She is the author of Perceptions
of Palestine and The Wound of Dispossession.

(Journal of the Mental Environment - March/April 2007)





 
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