[DEBATE] : On Israel Lobby conspiracies

[Ran Greenstein]

There are two items here, neither one of which is a 
direct response to Petras, but to the much more mild 
version of the Israel Lobby thesis. They can serve as 
an effective refutation of Petras as well, though I 
must confess to not having had the stomach to read him 
beyond the first couple of paragraphs (no need to eat 
the whole egg to realize it's rotten)

=====================

"The Israel Lobby" in Perspective
Middle East Report 243, Summer 2007

Mitchell Plitnick and Chris Toensing

Mitchell Plitnick is director of education and policy 
at Jewish Voice for Peace. Chris Toensing is editor of 
Middle East Report. 

Vice President Dick Cheney addresses the American 
Israel Public Affairs Committee's 2007 Policy 
Conference in Washington. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty 
Images)John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt´s 82-page 
paper "The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy" has 
entered the canon of contemporary political culture in 
the United States. So much, positive and negative, has 
been written about the March 2006 essay that the phrase 
"the Mearsheimer-Walt argument" is now shorthand for 
the idea that pro-Israel advocates exert a heavy-and 
malign-influence upon the formulation of US Middle East 
policy. To veteran students of Middle East affairs, 
this idea is hardly new, of course. But the fact that 
two top international relations scholars affiliated 
with the University of Chicago and Harvard University´s 
Kennedy School of Government, respectively, have 
espoused this analysis has lent it unprecedented 
currency. Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish a 
book-length version of the professors´ argument in late 
2007. Along with President Jimmy Carter´s volume 
Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, "The Israel Lobby" (as 
the paper is commonly known) has opened up a debate 
that many members of the lobby have long sought to 
suppress.

Like Carter, Mearsheimer and Walt have faced ugly and 
unsubstantiated allegations of racism for drawing 
attention to the imbalance in US Middle East policy and 
the lobby´s clout. Walt´s Harvard colleague Alan 
Dershowitz labeled them "bigots" and "liars," and the 
Anti-Defamation League accused them of promulgating "a 
classical conspiratorial anti-Semitic analysis invoking 
the canards of Jewish power and Jewish control." Reams 
of angry newsprint later, these kneejerk cries of anti-
Semitism have not registered, and for good reason. 
Plainly, a lobby that is universally recognized by 
Washington insiders-and even promotes itself-as one of 
the few most powerful in the country is influential.[1] 
Saying so cannot be inherently anti-Semitic.

The related allegation of sloppy research is also 
silly. In December 2006, Mearsheimer and Walt released 
a point-by-point rebuttal, perhaps not coincidentally 
also 82 pages long, of the charges of poor scholarship 
leveled by Benny Morris, Martin Kramer and others. 
Almost every charge was a misreading of the original 
paper. Nor is "The Israel Lobby" "piss-poor, monocausal 
social science," as political scientist and blogger 
Daniel Drezner would have it. On the contrary, the text 
is full of caveats and qualifiers.

The essential flaw in the Mearsheimer-Walt argument is 
not, as many critics have said, the authors´ 
exaggeration of the pro-Israel lobby´s power, for 
although the authors do this in some instances, the 
thrust of their argument remains sound. It is not even 
their inattention to the other factors that have 
historically defined the US interest in the Middle East 
for the bipartisan foreign policy establishment. 
Rather, the most serious fault lies in the professors´ 
conclusion-soothing in this day and age-that US Middle 
East policy would become "more temperate" were the 
influence of the Israel lobby to be curtailed. This 
conclusion is undercut by the remarkable continuities 
in US Middle East policy since the Truman 
administration, including in times when the pro-Israel 
lobby was weak. And other factors-chiefly the drive for 
hegemony in the Persian Gulf-have also embroiled the US 
in plenty of trouble.

The Cold War Prism
Mearsheimer and Walt issue a broad indictment of their 
subject. "No lobby," they write, "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." Has the lobby´s 
influence always explained US support for Israel? This 
question is crucial because it helps to define the 
extent to which that influence explains US policy 
toward Israel today.

>From the day in 1948 that President Harry Truman 
announced his support for the creation of a Jewish 
state in Palestine, Israel has held a special place in 
the hearts and minds of many Americans, Jewish and 
otherwise. The fledgling state was more European than 
Middle Eastern in orientation, providing common 
cultural ground. The mythos surrounding the creation of 
Israel and the sympathy generated by the horrifying 
tragedy of the Holocaust played major roles in shaping 
popular American sympathy in the 1960s and 1970s, when 
the "special relationship" between Israel and the US 
was cemented.[2] Christians, including many African-
Americans, responded warmly to the narrative wherein a 
plucky people, fleeing horrific persecution and age-old 
prejudice, made the desert bloom in the Holy Land and 
stoutly defended their new polity against all 
comers.[3] 

On the official level, Israel found its early sources 
of support elsewhere, while working tirelessly to build 
support in the United States.[4] After Israel´s 
decisive victory over neighboring Arab states in 1967, 
the US committed itself more and more to what might be 
called "the Israel track." The reason, however, was 
neither a domestic lobby nor a sentimental soft spot 
among policymakers for the Jewish state. The reason was 
that policymakers saw the Middle East through the prism 
of the Cold War.[5] 

Concern about Soviet backing for Egypt had led Lyndon 
Johnson, while a Congressman, to oppose President 
Dwight Eisenhower´s determination to force Israel to 
pull out of the Sinai and away from the Suez Canal in 
1956, without some move toward changing the status 
quo.[6] The outcome of the 1967 war, entailing the 
humiliation of Soviet-allied Egypt and Syria, 
strengthened President Johnson´s conviction that Israel 
was a useful Cold War asset. After the war, an 
anonymous State Department official told the press: 
"Israel has probably done more for the United States in 
the Middle East in relation to money and effort than 
any of our so-called allies elsewhere around the globe 
since the end of the Second World War. In the Far East 
we can get almost no one to help us in Vietnam. Here 
the Israelis won the war singlehandedly, have taken us 
off the hook and have served our interests as well as 
theirs."[7] Aspiring chief executive Richard Nixon-also 
not known for philo-Semitism-supported Israel 
vigorously on the 1968 campaign trail, pursuant to a 
visit to Israel the previous June, when he met wounded 
Egyptian soldiers in an Israeli hospital. There he 
wrote down an Egyptian tank commander´s complaint: 
"Russia is to blame. They furnished the arms. We did 
the dying."[8] 

Under the quintessential Cold Warrior Nixon and his 
foreign policy doyen Henry Kissinger, US material aid 
to Israel rose precipitously, and diplomatic support 
was vastly strengthened. By the Nixon Doctrine of 1969, 
developed in reaction to the Vietnam quagmire, the US 
would project its power abroad through regional proxies 
rather than American troops. Israel, Saudi Arabia and 
the Shah´s Iran were chosen in the Middle East. Israel 
promptly proved its worth by helping King Hussein of 
Jordan in brutally stamping out a Palestinian rebellion 
in 1970, stabilizing a key Western ally in the region 
at the expense of the PLO, seen in Washington as a 
Soviet proxy. In 1973, Nixon and Kissinger agreed to a 
major airlift of munitions to Israel toward the tail 
end of that year´s Arab-Israeli war. Though the US paid 
dearly for that decision with the Arab oil embargo, the 
next year, aid to Israel topped $2 billion. As in 
subsequent years, much of this aid was pumped back into 
the US economy in the form of arms purchases, giving 
the American arms industry a strong interest in the US-
Israeli strategic alliance. Nixon´s was a path born of 
Cold War strategy and opposition to Arab 
nationalism-perceived as a threat to oil-rich Saudi 
Arabia-not the efforts of a lobby.[9] 

Mearsheimer and Walt acknowledge that Israel "may have 
been a strategic asset during the Cold War," but they 
insist on counting the costs, like the expense of the 
aid and the economic damage wrought by the 1973 
embargo. These costs are viewed as penalties of 
supporting Israel rather than the expected price to pay 
in the Cold War calculus of Nixon and Kissinger. Israel 
attained its place in US Cold War strategy by its 1967 
victory and its ability to stand against Soviet Arab 
proxies in a way Arab countries could not have done. 
However questionable the strategy might have been, the 
support of Israel did not come about due to the actions 
of a lobby.

The Rise of the Israel Lobby
The major institutions of the Israel lobby arose during 
the Reagan years to defend the US-Israeli strategic 
alliance forged in the wake of the 1967 war. The most 
prominent such institution is the American Israel 
Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). According to its 
website, AIPAC boasts a $47 million annual budget and 
"100,000 members in all 50 states." In 2001, Fortune 
ranked AIPAC fourth most powerful among all lobbying 
groups. It is routinely in the top five, and is usually 
the only foreign policy lobby on the entire list. 
Although AIPAC itself does not directly engage in 
campaign contributions, it sets the agenda for the many 
pro-Israel PACs that do, and it has further mounted 
well-documented campaigns against members of Congress 
it judges insufficiently supportive of Israel. The 
Reagan administration was also intimately connected to 
the Christian Coalition, and many figures from that 
administration, both Christian and Jewish, have 
resurfaced in the administration of George W. Bush. 
>From the 1980s on, there can be no doubt that these two 
major players in lobbying on behalf of hardline Israeli 
policies have been highly influential, especially in 
Congress.[10] 

Arguably, as Mearsheimer and Walt contend, the likes of 
AIPAC and the Christian right have been necessary for 
keeping the special relationship intact, for the end of 
the Cold War threw Israel´s usefulness into a different 
light. There was no Soviet Union to compete with, and 
pan-Arab nationalism was largely a lost cause. But 
concern remained that nationalist or Islamist forces 
might win control of oil-producing Arab states. The 
role Israel played in smashing Arab nationalists was 
and is still valued in Washington. Israeli military and 
intelligence assistance has been well-documented in 
Latin America and other parts of the world.[11] In the 
Middle East, where US intelligence weaknesses are 
glaring, Israel plays a virtually irreplaceable role, 
with its population of native speakers of Arabic. 
Additionally, support for Israel, while somewhat 
diminished by the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the 
1987-1993 Palestinian intifada and the 2006 Lebanon 
war, remains quite strong among Americans to this day. 
Americans generally do not support blind backing of 
whatever Israel does, but the positive disposition 
toward Israel is a factor in the minds of decision-
makers.[12] While it is perhaps impossible to separate 
that positive disposition from the activities of the 
Israel lobby, the fact that Mearsheimer and Walt 
themselves speak of their concern for Israel 
demonstrates that there is much more to it than mere 
promotion and advocacy.

It is also important that resolving the issues of 
Israeli occupation and Palestinian statelessness has 
never been an end in itself for Washington, but simply 
a means toward other policy goals. Peace initiatives 
are thus much more vulnerable to derailment by domestic 
forces.

Finally, one should note that US responses to Israeli 
demands are not always absolutely positive. From 
Reagan´s sale of AWACS planes to Saudi Arabia to the 
first Bush administration´s threat to withhold loan 
guarantees from Israel, there are scattered examples of 
Israel and the pro-Israel lobby proving unable to veto 
executive branch decisions. Ongoing disputes over 
Israeli arms sales to China (and previously to India), 
the current Bush administration´s quiet non-response to 
Israeli requests for financial compensation for its 
Gaza "withdrawal" and its message to the Olmert 
government that it should not ask for funding for its 
"convergence plan" are additional examples. Pro-Israel 
lobbyists bitterly opposed many of these US moves, as 
they do any hint of US "pressure" on Israel to resolve 
its conflict with the Palestinians.

Palestine in Global Strategy
To what extent does the Israel lobby shape US Middle 
East policy today? Mearsheimer and Walt´s argument is 
strongest when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian 
conflict. During the Cold War, when Nixon and Reagan 
were implacably hostile to the PLO as overly friendly 
to the Soviets, support for Israel against the 
Palestinians fit into a broader US strategy. Since the 
Soviet Union´s demise, however, Washington has derived 
scant benefit from its pro-Israel leanings to balance 
the undoubted cost, especially in anger at the US among 
Arabs and Muslims. For this reason, the administrations 
of Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton 
exerted considerable diplomatic energy to broker an 
Israeli-Palestinian settlement. To the extent that the 
failure of this diplomacy was caused by systemic 
favoritism shown to Israeli negotiating positions, the 
Israel lobby and US officials linked to the pro-Israel 
Washington Institute for Near East Policy must bear a 
great deal of the blame. The lobby was also an 
important factor weakening-or eviscerating-US 
opposition to Israeli "facts on the ground" that 
prejudiced the outcome of a future final status 
settlement in Israel´s favor.

George W. Bush´s foreign policy team assumed office 
with a different mindset than its predecessors´. The 
passions aroused by occupation and Palestinian 
suffering in the Arab and Muslim world were not a 
strategic factor in the Bush team´s worldview, for they 
had exacted no pound of flesh from the US since the 
1973 embargo, an experiment the Bush team rightly 
calculated the oil-producing Arab states were loath to 
repeat. The Bush White House´s default position was to 
ignore the simmering intifada, leaving Israel a free 
hand in its harsh military measures, just as pro-Israel 
Republicans on the Christian right demanded.

Mearsheimer and Walt actually give the Bush 
administration too much credit, when they write: "It is 
now largely forgotten, but in the fall of 2001, and 
especially in the spring of 2002, the Bush 
administration tried to reduce anti-American sentiment 
in the Arab world and undermine support for alQaeda, 
by halting Israel´s expansionist policies in the 
Occupied Territories and advocating the creation of a 
Palestinian state." What they are describing was a 
short-lived revival of Clinton-era thinking, as 
personified by Secretary of State Colin Powell, after 
the September11, 2001 attacks required the US to seek 
greater Arab cooperation in the "war on terror." Prior 
to September 11, the Bush administration had scarcely 
budged from Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon´s 
position that any resumption of substantive Israeli-
Palestinian talks would have to wait until there was 
utter "calm"-as defined by Israel-in Israel-Palestine. 
Afterward, to rally Arab support, Powell began stating 
forgotten US commitments to achieve a "settlement 
freeze," and even mentioned the term "peace plan." The 
US never followed through, however. Mearsheimer and 
Walt argue that this is because the Israel lobby had 
"swung into action" to re-equate Palestinian leader 
Yasser Arafat with Osama bin Laden. Another, more 
plausible explanation, given the Bush administration´s 
predilections, is that Arab states freely cooperated in 
rounding up radical Islamists even without the 
semblance of a "peace process" in Israel-Palestine. 
There was no cost to untying Sharon´s hands once more 
that would outweigh the benefit of pleasing Bush´s pro-
Israel supporters.

There is universal agreement that the policy debate 
initially held between Powell, on the one hand, and 
Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defense Secretary 
Donald Rumsfeld, on the other, ended in victory for the 
Cheney-Rumsfeld camp. And all the evidence suggests 
that Cheney and Rumsfeld are motivated by their own 
ideology, not by the lobby´s pressure.

At any rate, by 2002 the White House´s commitment to 
renewing Israeli-Palestinian talks was long gone. Bush 
waited several days after the beginning of Operation 
Defensive Shield, the massive Israeli tank invasion of 
the West Bank in March-April 2002 that targeted 
numerous Palestinian Authority installations, before 
dispatching Powell to the region. Mearsheimer and Walt 
cite the Powell mission as evidence of a commitment to 
evenhandedness, but they do not mention that Powell 
took "the slow boat to Tel Aviv," stopping first in 
Rabat and Cairo. With encouragement from other US 
officials, Israel interpreted the delay in Powell´s 
arrival as carte blanche to escalate its offensive.[13] 
These events, as well as subsequent Bush administration 
neglect of the Israeli-Palestinian portfolio, bespeak a 
White House that does not need lobbying to let Israel 
drive events, so long as this does not complicate 
other, more pressing US interests.

The Attack-Iraq Caucus
The Bush administration´s real interest in 2001 was the 
Persian Gulf, specifically Saddam Hussein´s Iraq. In 
their most explosive argument, Mearsheimer and Walt 
state that "the war [in Iraq] was due in large part to 
the Lobby´s influence, especially the neo-conservatives 
within it." They then follow the trail of statements 
from neo-conservatives advocating the forcible removal 
of Saddam Hussein´s regime, and tie this advocacy to 
devotion to Israel.

Here they run into problems of direct evidence. It is 
easy to show the neo-conservatives´ affinity for 
Israel-actually, the Israeli right-but the professors 
have not made the case that this affinity was a 
"necessary, if not sufficient cause" of the 2003 
invasion. Nor is it even clear that love for Israel 
motivated the pro-war impulses of the neo-conservatives 
themselves. For instance, the professors adduce the so-
called "Clean Break Paper" of 1996, which was put 
together by a "study group" featuring key Bush 
administration hawks David Wurmser and Douglas Feith, 
and saw removing Saddam Hussein as a key Israeli goal, 
to bolster their theory. The central theme of this 
paper, however, is promoting Israel as a regional 
hegemon independent of the US. Far from encouraging US 
action in the service of Israeli interests, this paper 
was entirely rooted in the idea that Israel must 
quickly wean itself off US support and exert its proven 
ability to dominate the region militarily on its 
own.[14] 

Mearsheimer and Walt are not the first to point to the 
activities of the Project for a New American Century 
(PNAC) as especially revelatory. The genealogy of 
PNAC´s ideas, however, suggests a much broader set of 
motivations than loyalty to Israel. PNAC made its debut 
in 1997 by issuing a statement of principles decrying 
drift in US foreign and defense policy and calling 
instead for "a Reaganite policy of military strength 
and moral clarity." The statement was signed by six 
hawkish politicians, most notably Cheney and Rumsfeld. 
Among the signatories who were soon to be household 
names were I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby and Paul 
Wolfowitz.[15] 

Next came two letters, one addressed to Bill Clinton 
and the second posted to the House and Senate majority 
leaders. The occasion for the PNAC letters was the 
pending failure of containment in ensuring that Iraq 
was not reconstituting its banned arsenal. In a speech 
in 1997, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright had made 
clear that regime change was containment´s real agenda, 
saying that the US would back sanctions "as long as it 
takes" to usher in "a successor regime" that would 
comply with UN resolutions.[16] 

PNAC´s concern was the fate of US Middle East policy 
goals, not the integrity of UN resolutions. "It hardly 
needs to be added," they wrote to Clinton, "that if 
Saddam does acquire the capability to deliver weapons 
of mass destruction...the safety of American troops in 
the region, of our friends and allies like Israel and 
the moderate Arab states, and a significant portion of 
the world´s supply of oil will all be put at hazard." 
Unless Saddam´s regime was taken out, "We will have 
suffered an incalculable blow to American leadership 
and credibility; we will have sustained a significant 
defeat in our worldwide efforts to limit the spread of 
weapons of mass destruction.... This could well make 
Saddam the driving force of Middle East politics." The 
hawks gathered by PNAC did not fear Iraq´s putative 
weapons; they feared the potential of an "uncontained" 
Iraq to disrupt US hegemony in the region.

At one level, the PNAC letters did not diverge from 
previous articulations of US interests in the Middle 
East. A September1978 Joint Chiefs of Staff memorandum 
listed three strategic goals for the US in the region: 
"to assure continuous access to petroleum resources, to 
prevent an inimical power or combination of powers from 
establishing hegemony and to assure the survival of 
Israel as an independent state in a stable relationship 
with contiguous Arab states." Kenneth Pollack, who ran 
Iraq policy at Clinton´s National Security Council and 
then authored a book-length case for invading Iraq in 
2002, writes that these goals "have guided US policy 
ever since."[17]

But the PNAC letters about Iraq sprung from a deeper 
ideological well. The introduction to PNAC´s full-
length report, Rebuilding America´s Defenses, published 
in 2000, summarized the group´s agenda: "At present the 
United States faces no global rival. America´s grand 
strategy should aim to preserve and expand this 
advantageous position as far into the future as 
possible." PNAC recommended adding $15-20 billion in 
defense spending annually, "restoring" the size of the 
active-duty military to 1.6 million personnel and 
"selectively" modernizing military hardware.[18] 

Most of the PNAC members are staunchly and vocally pro-
Israel. What unites the neo-conservatives with their 
traditional Cold Warrior confréres Cheney and Rumsfeld 
is not Israel, however, but a common set of ideas about 
US power. The convergence of interests first appeared 
in the aborted Defense Policy Guidance of 1992. This 
document is the Pentagon´s classified internal 
assessment, made every two years, of comprehensive 
military strategy. In 1992, the task fell to Paul 
Wolfowitz, who set about conceiving a justification for 
maintaining the military at something approaching Cold 
War strength. He delegated the actual writing of the 
Defense Policy Guidance to his top aide Libby, who in 
turn passed it off to his colleague Zalmay Khalilzad. 
What Khalilzad came up with stunned Washington when the 
draft was leaked to the press: The US was uniquely 
qualified to be the sole superpower, and to maintain 
that status, the US should actively block the rise of 
any possible rival.[19] 

Khalilzad was specific: "In the Middle East and 
Southwest Asia, our overall objective is to remain the 
predominant outside power in the region and preserve US 
and Western access to the region´s oil." The White 
House swiftly disowned the document, but it found an 
appreciative reader in Dick Cheney. "You´ve discovered 
a new rationale for our role in the world," Khalilzad 
recalls being told by his boss.[20] Rebuilding 
America´s Defenses cites the 1992 Defense Policy 
Guidance as its primary intellectual inspiration.[21] 
When the Cheney Defense Department was reunited in the 
administration of George W. Bush, much of this 
"inspiration" made its way into the 2002 National 
Security Strategy. Together with Washington´s long-
standing interest in Persian Gulf oil, the genealogy of 
PNAC suggests that the decision to invade Iraq was 
determined by grand ambitions for US power-not a 
"desire to make Israel more secure," as Mearsheimer and 
Walt assert.

Wanted: A Counterweight
In the 15 months since the publication of "The Israel 
Lobby," history has thrown up a series of Rorschach 
blots in which it is possible to see confirmation or 
refutation of the Mearsheimer-Walt thesis. While Israel 
bombarded and invaded Gaza in the summer of 2006, 
following the capture of a single Israeli soldier, the 
Bush administration sat on its hands. The White House 
continues to hew to Israel´s position that "there is no 
partner" on the Palestinian side as long as Hamas has 
ministers in the Palestinian Authority. Is this because 
the lobby will not permit otherwise, or because the 
Bush administration is bent on preventing any Islamist 
movement from exercising effective governance, lest 
movements elsewhere take heart? For 34 days in the 
summer of 2006, Israel bombed and shelled Lebanon while 
Washington actively blocked a ceasefire in the name of 
Israel´s "right to defend itself." Certainly AIPAC and 
the Christian right were pushing the same line, but 
President Bush´s immediate casting of blame upon Iran 
and Syria for provoking the war suggested a deeper-
seated agenda than solidarity with Israel. There is 
reason to believe that Bush green-lighted Israel´s 
assault to neutralize an Iranian ally in advance of 
eventual US strikes upon Iran´s nuclear facilities. 
Certainly, it appears that the US only dropped its 
resistance to a ceasefire when Israel proved incapable 
of defeating Hizballah quickly. In 2007, despite the 
belligerent clamor from AIPAC and other elements of the 
Israel lobby, the prospect of an attack on Iran seems 
to have faded. But the key factor here is the deepening 
disaster in Iraq and the constraints it imposes.

Mearsheimer and Walt have taken a courageous step, one 
that their professional positions certainly did not 
require and that opened them up to vociferous 
criticism-most of it hysterical and unfair. Others 
should take the professors up on their challenge to 
open up a debate that has not occurred broadly enough 
in the past (and this review is offered in that 
spirit).

The influence of the Israel lobby should neither be 
underestimated nor overstated. It is not some 
omnipotent force that can turn the world´s sole 
superpower against its own perceived interests. The 
lobby derives its strength, in some measure, from being 
largely unopposed in Washington. Israel will remain a 
strong US ally, for many reasons, for the foreseeable 
future. But that need not mean that the US cannot 
pressure Israel into the compromises required for a 
just peace with the Palestinians. This can happen if a 
counterweight to the Israel lobby is built. But such a 
counterweight is only effective if it understands what 
its opponent can and cannot accomplish. In this task, 
the Mearsheimer-Walt paper is a good foundation upon 
which rational discussion can build.

Endnotes

[1] For a detailed history of various pro-Israel 
lobbying groups, see J. J. Goldberg, Jewish Power: 
Inside the American Jewish Establishment (Boston: 
Addison-Wesley, 1996) and Edward Tivnan, The Lobby: 
Jewish Political Power and American Foreign Policy (New 
York: Simon and Schuster, 1987).
[2] See, for example, Peter Novick, The Holocaust in 
American Life (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1999).
[3] See the work of Melani McAlister, especially "A 
Cultural History of the War Without End," Journal of 
American History (September 2002), and her book, Epic 
Encounters: Culture, Media and US Interests in the 
Middle East, 1945-2000 (Berkeley, CA: University of 
California Press, 2001).
[4] For detailed histories of the early development of 
the "special relationship" between the US and Israel 
see the works of Abraham Ben-Zvi, particularly Decade 
of Transition: Eisenhower, Kennedy and the Origins of 
the American-Israeli Alliance (New York, NY: Columbia 
University Press, 1998) and John F. Kennedy and the 
Politics of Arms Sales to Israel (London: Frank Cass 
Publishers, 2002). For a more concise review, see Avi 
Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World, pp. 
200-217 and other parts.
[5] See, among others, William B. Quandt, Peace 
Process: American Diplomacy and the Arab-Israeli 
Conflict Since 1967 (third edition) (Berkeley, CA: 
University of California Press, 2005), Shlaim and Be-
Zvi cited above and William B. Quandt, Decade of 
Decisions: American Policy Toward the Arab-Israeli 
Conflict, 1967-1976 (Berkeley, CA: University of 
California Press, 1977).
[6] Quandt, Peace Process), p. 52.
[7] US News and World Report, June 19, 1967, quoted in 
Joel Beinin, "The United States-Israeli Alliance," in 
Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon, eds. Wrestling with 
Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the 
Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (New York: Grove Press, 
2003), p. 42.
[8] Gershom Gorenberg, The Accidental Empire: Israel 
and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (New York: 
Times Books, 2006), p. 57.
[9] Interestingly, in this period, Kissinger helped to 
propagate in Arab capitals the notion that Jewish 
campaign donors were behind US assistance to Israel. 
During a December 17, 1975 meeting with Saadoun 
Hammadi, then foreign minister of Iraq, he said: "[Our 
backing for Israel] originated in American domestic 
politics.... So it was not an American design to get a 
bastion of imperialism in the area. It was much less 
complicated. And I would say that until 1973 the Jewish 
community had enormous influence." Memorandum of 
conversation between Kissinger and Hammadi, Paris, 
December 17, 1975. Accessible through the National 
Security Archive.
[10] For insights into how the lobby wields power in 
Congress, see Michael Massing, "The Storm Over the 
Israel Lobby," New York Review of Books, June 8, 2006.
[11] Noam Chomsky, Fateful Triangle: The US, Israel and 
the Palestinians (Boston: South End Press, 1999), pp. 
15, 21, 24-26.
[12] For an excellent overview of post-September 11 
American attitudes toward Israel, see 
http://www.pipa.org/OnlineReports/IsPal_Conflict/IsPal_
May02/IsPal_May02_rpt.pdf
[13] Charles D. Smith, "The `Do More´ Chorus in 
Washington," Middle East Report Online, April 15, 2002.
[14] The full text of the paper can be found online at 
http://www.iasps.org/strat1.htm.
[15] The full list of signatories includes six 
politicians: Jeb Bush, governor of Florida and 
presidential brother, Cheney, 2000 Republican 
presidential candidate Steve Forbes, former Vice 
President Dan Quayle, Rumsfeld and former Rep. Vin 
Weber (R-MN), now an extremely well-connected 
Washington lobbyist. Three other signatories became 
senior officials in the Bush administration: Libby, 
Wolfowitz and Elliott Abrams, now in charge of Middle 
East policy at the National Security Council. Lower-
ranking Bush officials who signed the statement are 
State Department Counselor Eliot Cohen, Undersecretary 
of State for Democracy and Global Affairs Paula 
Dobriansky, Aaron Friedberg, a Princeton professor who 
served in Cheney´s office from 2003-2005 as deputy 
assistant for national security, ex-ambassador to Iraq 
Zalmay Khalilzad and Peter Rodman, an assistant 
secretary of defense. Four signatories worked at the 
Pentagon or the NSC under Reagan or Bush the Elder: 
Frank Gaffney, Fred C. Iklé, Stephen P. Rosen and Henry 
Rowen. Neo-conservative intellectuals and academics who 
signed are Midge Decter, Francis Fukuyama, Donald Kagan 
and Norman Podhoretz. Rounding out the list are three 
conservative Catholic or evangelical culture warriors: 
Gary Bauer, William J. Bennett and Catholic theologian 
George Weigel.
[16] Associated Press, March 27, 1997.
[17] Kenneth Pollack, The Threatening Storm: The Case 
for Invading Iraq (New York: Random House, 2002), p. 
15. Pollack has since penned another book, The Persian 
Puzzle, which argues against an attack on Iran.
[18] Project for a New American Century, Rebuilding 
America´s Defenses (Washington, DC, September 2000), 
pp. ii, iv.
[19] James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of 
Bush´s War Cabinet (New York: Viking, 2004), pp. 
198-210.
[20] Ibid., p. 211.
[21] Rebuilding America´s Defenses, p. ii.

=================

The Israel Lobby
Stephen Zunes 
Tikkun, November/December 2007

The overbearing power and McCarthyite tactics wielded 
by the American Jewish establishment against critics of 
Israeli government policies-particularly against 
prominent Jewish progressives like Michael Lerner-has 
made critical discourse about U.S. support for the 
Israeli government extremely difficult. As a result, it 
is all too easy to buy into the arguments put forward 
by John Mearsheimer and Steve Walt in their newly-
released book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy 
(Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007) that the `Israel 
Lobby´ is primarily responsible for the tragic course 
taken in U.S. Middle East policy. The Tikkun Community 
has recently sponsored a series of public events with 
the authors, and Rabbi Lerner wrote a lengthy piece in 
the September/Octo-ber issue of this magazine largely 
defending their perspective.

As a political scientist and international relations 
scholar specializing in the United States´ role in the 
Middle East, I must disagree. I am in no way denying 
that the Israel Lobby can be quite influential, 
particularly on Capitol Hill and in its role in 
limiting the broader public debate. However, it would 
be naíve to assume that U.S. policy in the Middle East 
would be significantly different without AIPAC and 
like-minded pro-Zionist organizations.

As leading scholars in my field, I have been familiar 
with the work of these two distinguished professors for 
many years. Professor Mearsheimer and I both received 
our doctorates from Cornell University´s Department of 
Government (which, incidentally, did not offer a single 
course dealing with the Middle East). While I do not 
believe they are motivated by a conscious anti-Semitism 
or any innate hostility toward Israel, their 
perspective has nevertheless been compromised by 
another kind of ideological bias.

Mearsheimer and Walt are prominent figures in the 
`realist´ school of international relations, which 
discounts international law, human rights, and other 
legal and moral concerns in foreign policy, downplays 
diplomacy not backed by military force, belittles the 
United Nations and other intergovernmental 
organizations, and dismisses the growing role of 
international non-governmental organizations and 
popular movements.

With some notable exceptions, Mearsheimer and Walt have 
been largely supportive of U.S. foreign policy during 
the Cold War and subsequently. For example, during the 
1980s, Mearsheimer-a graduate of West Point-opposed 
both the proposed nuclear weapons freeze and the 
proposed no-first-use nuclear policy. A critic of 
nonproliferation efforts, Mearsheimer has defended 
India´s atomic weapons arsenal and has even called for 
the spread of nuclear weapons to non-nuclear states 
such as Germany and Ukraine. He was also an outspoken 
supporter of the 1991 U.S.-led Gulf War.

Both authors blindly accept a number of naíve and 
demonstrably false assumptions regarding America´s role 
in the world. For example, they assert that the foreign 
policy of the United States-the world´s number one arms 
supplier for dictatorial regimes- "...is designed to 
promote democracy abroad" and U.S. efforts in the 
Middle East "to spread democracy throughout the region 
ha[ve] inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion." The reality, 
of course, is just the opposite: it has been U.S. 
support for the majority of the dictatorships in that 
part of the world which has primarily contributed to 
anti-American sentiment.

It is always welcome and significant when traditional 
conservatives, hawks, realists, and others in the 
foreign policy establishment speak out against specific 
negative manifestations of U.S. foreign policy, such as 
when Mearsheimer and Walt joined a number of other 
prominent center-right figures in academia in opposing 
the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. They have also 
correctly recognized how unconditional U.S. support for 
many of the more controversial policies of the Israeli 
government is contrary to the long-term strategic 
interests of the United States.

However, such realist opposition grows not out of 
concern over any of the important moral or legal issues 
but out of a rational calculation that a particular war 
could lead to greater instability and thereby run 
counter to America´s national security interests.

In other words, both of them have a vested interest in 
absolving from responsibility the foreign policy 
establishment that they have served so loyally all 
these years. Israel and its supporters are essentially 
being used as convenient scapegoats for America´s 
disastrous policies in the Middle East. And though they 
avoid falling into simplistic, anti-Semitic, 
conspiratorial notions regarding Jewish power and 
influence for the failures of U.S. Middle East policy, 
it is nevertheless disturbing that the primary culprits 
they cite are largely Jewish individuals and 
organizations.

In many respects, their argument is nothing new. This 
exaggerated view of the Israel Lobby has been made for 
years by the small group of former State Department 
officials and former Republican Congressmen one finds 
in such publications as the Washington Report on Middle 
East Affairs and organizations like the Center for the 
National Interest who share Mearsheimer and Walt´s 
failure to acknowledge the nature of America´s 
hegemonic designs in the Middle East and beyond. As 
political scientist Asad AbuKhalil, the self-described 
`angry Arab´ currently serving as a visiting professor 
at UC Berkeley, puts it, such analysis "absolves the 
Bush administration, any administration, from any 
responsibility because they become portrayed as 
helpless victims of an all-powerful lobby." Similarly, 
Columbia University Professor Joseph Massad-who 
regularly endures attacks by the Israel Lobby for his 
defense of Palestinian rights-contends that the 
attraction of Mearsheimer and Walt´s 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."

Mearsheimer and Walt, along with their defenders, fail 
to make the distinction between the undeniable fact 
that `the Lobby´ has limited debate (particularly 
within the Jewish community) regarding U.S. policy 
toward Israel and the question as to whether it is the 
major reason for U.S. policy being the way it is. As 
Professor Massad puts it, the Israel Lobby is 
responsible for "the details and intensity but not the 
direction, content, or impact of such policies." 
Indeed, as I pointed out in my article "Is the Israel 
Lobby Really That Powerful?" [Tikkun, July/August 
2006], U.S. policy toward both Israel/Palestine and the 
region as a whole is quite consistent with U.S. foreign 
policy toward Latin Amer-ica, Southern Africa, 
Southeast Asia, and elsewhere. The consequences are 
more serious (for example, no Vietnamese or Nicaraguans 
ever flew airplanes into buildings), but they are not 
fundamentally different.

Any serious review of U.S. foreign policy in virtually 
any corner of the globe demonstrates how the United 
States props up dictatorships, imposes blatant double-
standards regarding human rights and international law, 
supports foreign military occupations (witness East 
Timor and Western Sahara), undermines the authority of 
the United Nations, pushes for military solutions to 
political problems, transfers massive quantities of 
armaments, imposes draconian austerity programs on 
debt-ridden countries through international financial 
institutions, and periodically imposes sanctions, 
bombs, stages coups, and invades countries that don´t 
accept U.S. hegemony. If U.S. policy toward the Middle 
East was fundamentally different than it is toward the 
rest of the world, Mearsheimer and Walt would have 
every right to look for some other sinister force 
leading the United States astray from its otherwise 
benign foreign policy agenda. Unfortunately, however, 
U.S. policy toward the Middle East is remarkably 
similarly to U.S. foreign policy elsewhere in the 
world.

It is certainly true that the United States is, in the 
words of Mearsheimer and Walt, "out of step" with the 
vast majority of the international community on the 
question of Is-rael and Palestine. Yet the United 
States is also out of step with the vast majority of 
the international community regarding the treaty 
banning land mines, the International Criminal Court, 
the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, and the embargo 
against Cuba. Similarly, two decades ago the United 
States was also out of step with the vast majority of 
the international community in regard to the mining of 
Nicaraguan harbors and support for the Contra 
terrorists, as well as opposition to sanctions against 
the apartheid regime in South Africa and allying with 
Pretoria in supporting the UNITA rebels in Angola.

Mearsheimer and Walt correctly observe how Washington´s 
support for Israel despite its human rights abuses 
against the Palestinians "makes it look hypocritical 
when it presses other states to respect human rights," 
but there is no mention of the equally hypocritical 
U.S. support for Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Oman, Morocco, 
and other repressive Arab regimes. Similarly, they are 
accurate in observing how "U.S. efforts to limit 
nuclear proliferation appear equally hypocritical given 
its willingness to accept Israel´s nuclear arsenal." 
But is this any more hypocritical than signing a 
nuclear cooperation agreement with India or selling 
sophisticated nuclear-capable fighter bombers to the 
Pakistani government in spite of those countries´ 
nuclear arsenals?

As a result, the idea that U.S. policy would somehow be 
"more temperate," (again to use the words of Walt and 
Mearsheimer) were the Lobby not so powerful falsely 
assumes that U.S. policy toward other Third World 
regions in which the United States had strong 
strategic, geo-political and economic interests has 
historically been more temperate than it has been in 
the Middle East. This is particularly important to keep 
in mind given that their argument about the Lobby´s 
influence goes beyond that of Israel and Palestine to 
include the rest of the Middle East as well, including 
the Persian Gulf region, in which the United States has 
had hegemonic designs since before modern Israel came 
into being.

As I observed in my Tikkun article on this subject last 
year, while Congress is undeniably greatly influenced 
by the Lobby, Congress usually doesn´t make foreign 
policy, traditionally the prerogative of the executive 
branch.

There is little question that it is the pressure put 
forward by AIPAC which is primarily responsible for 
Congress passing a number of resolutions by 
overwhelming bipartisan majorities every session, 
declaring its support for particular Israeli policies, 
including defending and covering up for blatant Israeli 
violations of international humanitarian law. However, 
virtually all of these are non-binding resolutions. 
When AIPAC has tried to get Congress to force the 
president´s hand through binding legislation-such as 
the periodic attempts mandating that the United States 
move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem-they almost 
always fail.

In any case, it is incorrect to assume that most 
members of Congress stridently defend the policies of 
the Israeli government because their careers would be 
at stake if they did otherwise. Indeed, the majority of 
the most outspoken congressional champions of the 
Israeli government are from some of the safest 
districts in the country and need no support from 
pro-Israel political action committees (PACs) or Jewish 
donors in order to be re-elected. In last year´s 
article, I examined a number of cases in which members 
of Congress allegedly had been defeated as a result of 
their standing up to AIPAC and made the case that their 
position on Is-rael was actually just one, and not the 
most significant, factor in their defeat.

In 2006, `pro-Israel´ PACs and individuals are 
estimated to have contributed more than $9 million to 
party coffers and congressional campaigns. While that 
is a significant amount, it ranks significantly below 
that of PACs and individuals supporting the interests 
of lawyers ($58 million), retirees ($36 million), real 
estate interests ($33 million), health professionals 
($32 million), securities and investment interests ($29 
million), the insurance industry ($21 million), 
commercial banks ($16 million), the pharmaceutical 
industry ($14 million), the defense industry ($13 
million), electrical utilities ($12 million), the oil 
and gas industry ($11 million), and the computer 
industry ($10 million), among others. If campaign 
contributions had such a direct impact on policy as 
Walt and Mearsheimer claim, Congress should therefore 
have a strong and consistent pro-labor agenda since 
contributions given in support of unions representing 
public sector workers, the building trades, and 
transportation workers each were significantly higher 
than the total contributions given in support for the 
Israeli government. Furthermore, with rare exceptions, 
PACs allied with the Israel Lobby do not contribute 
more than 10 percent of the total amount raised by a 
given campaign.

The vast majority of the (admittedly few) House members 
who refuse to follow AIPAC´s line are easily reelected. 
For example, every Democratic member of Congress who 
refused to support the July 2006 House resolution 
supporting Israel´s attacks on Lebanon, a resolution 
subjected to vigorous lobbying by AIPAC, was reelected 
by a larger margin than they were two years earlier.

It is important to recognize the broad array of 
interests that find it advantageous to exaggerate the 
Lobby´s power. There are members of Congress and their 
aides who want to deflect criticism from progressive 
constituents opposed to their support for the 
Occupation and other Israeli policies; there are 
foreign service officers who want to do the same in 
talks with foreign leaders by making the U.S. 
government appear to be a hostage to special interests 
beyond the administration´s control; there are the 
constituent components of the Lobby itself, which finds 
it useful for fundraising purposes and as a means of 
intimidating members of Congress; there are Jews who 
find the idea of having such power and influence a 
liberating reflection of overcoming centuries of 
oppression; and, of course, there are bigots who find 
the exaggeration of Jewish power and influence a 
highly-effective means of spreading their anti-Semitic 
ideology.

As a result, while it is important to acknowledge where 
the Israel Lobby does indeed have clout, it is also 
important to be wary of the multiplicity of reasons why 
so many people would, consciously or unconsciously, 
tend to overstate its influence.

In an article published four weeks prior to the start 
of the U.S. invasion of Iraq ("Iraq, Israel and the 
Jews," [Tikkun, March/April 2003], I predicted that 
sooner or later, the American public would realize that 
a U.S. invasion of Iraq had been a disaster, and "in 
order to divert attention from those who were 
responsible" there might be some in the foreign policy 
establishment who would revert to the time-honored 
tradition of blaming the Jews.

Indeed, perhaps the most misleading argument put 
forward by Walt and Mearsheimer is their claim that the 
2003 invasion of Iraq "was motivated in good part by a 
desire to make Israel more secure." This is ludicrous 
on several grounds. First of all, Israel is far less 
secure as a result of the rise of Islamist extremism, 
terrorist groups, and Iranian influence in 
post-invasion Iraq than it was during the final years 
of Saddam Hussein´s rule, when Iraq was no longer a 
strategic threat to Israel or actively involved in 
anti-Israeli terrorism. Indeed, it had been more than a 
decade since Iraq had posed any significant threat to 
Israel and both Israel´s chief of intelligence and the 
Israeli Defense Forces chief of staff made public 
statements in October 2002 emphasizing how Israel´s 
military strength had grown over the previous decade as 
Iraq´s had grown weaker.

During the final years of Saddam Hussein's rule, Iraq 
was no more of a threat to Israel than it was to the 
United States. All Iraqi missiles capable of reaching 
Israel had been accounted for and destroyed by UNSCOM, 
the International Atomic Energy Agency had determined 
that Iraq no longer had a nuclear program, and 
virtually all the country´s chemical weapons had 
similarly been accounted for and destroyed. The 
Israelis, who actively monitored United Nations 
disarmament efforts in Iraq and had the best military 
intelligence capabilities in the region, presumably 
knew all this. Indeed, Israel´s chief of military 
intelligence during the lead-up to the war, Major 
General Aharon Farkash, also recognized that Iraq did 
not have any missiles capable of striking Israel and 
reiterated observations by other top Israeli security 
officials that Iraq was incapable of producing nuclear 
weapons at any time in the foreseeable future.

Though observers were less confident regarding the 
absence of biological weapons, the Israelis recognized 
that there was no realistic threat from that source 
either. Respected Israeli military analyst Meir 
Stieglitz, writing in the Israeli newspaper Yediot 
Ahronot, stated categorically that, "There is no such 
thing as a long-range Iraqi missile with an effective 
biological warhead. No one has found an Iraqi 
biological warhead. The chances of Iraq having 
succeeded in developing operative warheads without 
tests are zero." Similarly, it was recognized that Iraq 
could not realistically attack Israel with biological 
weapons by other means, either. For example, it would 
have been hard to imagine that an Iraqi aircraft 
carrying biological weapons, presumably some kind of 
subsonic drone, could have somehow made the 600 mile 
trip to Israel without being detected and shot down. 
Israel-as well as Iraq´s immediate neighbors-had 
sophisticated anti-aircraft capability.

Furthermore, if the United States was really concerned 
with Israel´s safety from Iraqi attack, why did the 
U.S. government provide Iraq with key elements of its 
WMD capability during the 1980s, "including the seed 
stock for its anthrax and many of the components for 
its chemical weapons program" back when Iraq clearly 
did have the capability of striking Israel? How could 
the "pro-Israel Lobby"-which was no more influential in 
2003 than it was fifteen years earlier-have the power 
to push the United States to invade Iraq when Saddam 
was no longer a threat to Israel, when the Lobby was 
unable to stop U.S. technology transfers to Iraq when 
it really could have potentially harmed Israel?

More fundamentally, it appears that Israeli officials 
warned the Bush administration that invading Iraq could 
destabilize the region, in large part due to concern 
that it would strengthen Iran, which the Israelis 
considered the primary threat. For example, in a visit 
to Washington D.C. in February 2002, both Israeli Prime 
Minister Ariel Sharon and his Defense Minister Fouad 
Ben-Eliezer emphasized their concern that "Iran is more 
dangerous than Iraq." Sharon specifically warned Bush 
against occupying Iraq or invading Iraq without an exit 
strategy since the likely result would be an 
insurgency, which the Israeli prime minister feared, 
could radicalize the region and spill over Iraq´s 
borders. Israeli ambassador Danny Ayalon was even 
instructed by Sharon to tell visiting Israelis not to 
encourage a U.S. invasion of Iraq for fear that its 
likely failure would be blamed on Israel.

Interestingly, Mearsheimer and Walt acknowledge that 
the Israelis were initially skeptical about the 
administration´s obsession with `regime change´ in 
Iraq. Indeed, a careful reading of their book reveals 
that Israel was not the principal backer of the 
long-planned invasion and Israeli officials came on 
board only after the decision had been made, apparently 
with the promise that Iran would become the next 
target. In other words, the Israeli government and the 
Israel Lobby were willing to use their clout to help 
their friends in the White House garner public and 
congressional support for a decision that had already 
been made independently, but they were not responsible 
for the decision to go to war itself.

As a result, Mearsheimer and Walt´s charge that "the 
war was due in large part to the Lobby´s influence" 
does not square with the facts. Furthermore, despite 
the belated backing for the invasion by the Israeli 
government, Iraq was not the major priority for AIPAC 
and allied lobbying groups in the months leading up to 
the congressional vote authorizing the invasion in 
October 2002. Indeed, some of Israel´s biggest 
supporters on Capitol Hill were among the most 
outspoken voices against the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Nor does the authors´ emphasis, often repeated 
elsewhere, that it was the affinity for Israel by the 
influential neo-conservatives that played a major role 
in the decision to invade that oil-rich nation. Those 
behind the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) 
and other neo-conservatives opposed Iraq because they 
feared it would challenge U.S. hegemony in the region, 
which was always their priority. The strong support by 
PNAC members and other neo-cons for Israel only goes as 
far as they see American and Israeli interests 
converging. They have not been major supporters of 
Israel, for example, when the right wing has not been 
in power. And even under the rightist Prime Minister 
Ariel Sharon, most Israeli government officials-with a 
few notable exceptions-saw Israel´s political and 
strategic interests at odds with the American 
neo-conservative´s designs on Iraq.

These same neo-conservatives, while in the Reagan 
administration during the 1980s, were advocates of a 
U.S. invasion of Nicaragua and Cuba as well as a 
nuclear first strike-as part of a so-called "limited 
nuclear war"-against the Soviet Union. In short, they 
are hawks across the board, not just in regard to the 
Middle East. "Support for Israel" has always been seen 
as part of a broader strategic design to advance 
perceived U.S. interests in the region.

While a disproportionate number of Jews could be found 
among the top policy makers in Washington who pushed 
for a U.S. invasion of Iraq, it is also true that a 
disproportionate number of Jews could be found among 
liberal Democrats in Congress and leftist intellectuals 
in universities who opposed the invasion of Iraq. 
Furthermore, it is absurd to imply that those who were 
most responsible for the decision to invade 
Iraq-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Vice 
President Dick Cheney, and President George W. 
Bush-would place the perceived interests of Israel 
ahead of that of the United States. And they were 
perfectly capable of making such a stupid and tragic 
miscalculation on their own.

Blaming supporters of Israel for the Iraq debacle also 
ignores the many more important factors which led the 
Bush administration to invade Iraq, not the least of 
which is oil.

In my article in Tikkun last year, I detailed the role 
of the military-industrial complex and other interests 
that are even more influential than the Israel Lobby. 
For example, though Mearsheimer and Walt observe that 
U.S. foreign aid to Israel comes out to "about $500 a 
year for every Israeli," they ignore the fact that 
virtually all of the military assistance goes directly 
to American arms merchants and the economic aid is 
barely more than what Israel pays annually for interest 
on loans from U.S. banks for previous weapons 
purchases. In other words, ordinary Israelis never see 
that money. Furthermore, for every dollar of U.S. 
military aid, Israeli taxpayers are forced to pay $2 to 
$3 to cover personnel, training, and spare parts.

Mearsheimer and Walt downplay this largesse for 
American arms manufacturers by noting that Israel is 
allowed to spend up to one-quarter of its aid money 
domestically. However,eventhat75percentisfarmore than 
any other country receives. Furthermore, the aid to 
Israel makes it possible for the United States to sell 
arms to Arab countries concerned about countering 
Israeli arms procurement. Even "domestic" Israeli arms 
production involves the purchase of American parts and 
includes lucrative partnerships with American firms. 
When the authors talk about how the United States 
provides Israel, at taxpayer expense, with "such top-
drawer weaponry as Blackhawk helicopters and F-16 
jets," they seem to forget the lobbying efforts by 
Sikorsky or Lockheed Martin, the powerful corporations 
which manufacture those aircraft, or the more than $1 
million in congressional appropriations and armed 
services committees.

It is also important to note that the governments of 
Egypt and Colombia do not have strong allied domestic 
lobbies, yet they are the second and third largest 
recipients of U.S. military aid. Clearly, as I have 
pointed out in previous articles in this magazine, 
while Mearsheimer and Walt are correct in noting how 
U.S. support for Israeli government policies actually 
hurts U.S. interests in the long-run, the U.S. 
government still believes there are plenty of good 
strategic and economic reasons for supporting a 
militarized Israel. As Uri Avnery puts it, just as 
"Israel uses the U.S. to dominate Palestine," it is 
also true that "the U.S. uses Israel to dominate the 
Middle East."

Yet the pressure on U.S. policymakers to blindly 
support Israeli policies is motivated by more than 
narrow strategic and economic interests. There are 
ideological factors as well, which (while the Israel 
Lobby has certainly played a role in cultivating them) 
were already firmly entrenched in the American psyche.

One is the sentimental attachment many 
Americans-particularly liberals of the post-World War 
II generations-have for Israel. There is a great 
appreciation for Israel´s internal democracy, 
progressive social institutions (such as the 
kibbutzim), the relatively high level of social 
equality, and Israel´s important role as a sanctuary 
for an oppressed minority group that spent centuries in 
the Diaspora. Through a mixture of guilt regarding 
Western anti-Semitism, personal friendships with Jewish 
Americans who identify strongly with Israel, and fear 
of inadvertently encouraging anti-Semitism by 
criticizing Israel, there is enormous reluctance to 
acknowledge the seriousness of Israeli violations of 
human rights and international law. Many American 
liberals of this generation have an idealist view of 
Israel that is both as sincere and inaccurate as the 
idealized view of Stalin´s Russia embraced by an 
earlier generation of American leftists. To many 
Americans who are middle aged and older, Israel is seen 
as it was portrayed in the idealized and romanticized 
1960 movie Exodus, starring a young Pau lNewman.

Contributing to this view is the widespread racism in 
American society against Arabs and Muslims, often 
encouraged in the media. This is compounded by the 
identification many Americans have with Zionism in the 
Middle East as a reflection of their own historical 
experience in North America as immigrants and pioneers. 
In both cases, European migrants (many of whom were 
escaping religious persecution) built a new nation 
based upon noble, idealistic values, while 
simultaneously suppressing and expelling the indigenous 
population seen as violent and"primitive."

Mearsheimer and Walt, as well as Rabbi Lerner in the 
last issue of this magazine, correctly note the bias in 
the mainstream media, particularly among leading 
columnists and other pundits, in defense of Israeli 
government policies and U.S. support for such policies. 
It is unclear, however, whether this media bias is 
qualitatively worse than media bias in its coverage of 
other conflict regions or international policy issues 
in which the U.S. government is heavily invested. 
During the 1980s, for example, it was extremely rare to 
read or hear anything positive in the mainstream media 
about the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. Articles 
documenting that leftist regime´s real and alleged 
human rights abuses were more prominent than accounts 
of the far greater human rights abuses by rightist 
regimes in Guatemala and El Salvador.Today,negative 
press coverage regarding Cuba and Venezuela outweighs 
any negative stories regarding pro-U.S. governments 
with poor human rights records like Colombia and 
Mexico.Similarly, rarely is there serious critical 
analysis of the neo-liberal model of globalization or 
the Pentagon´s bloated budget, nor are there many 
positive news stories or opinion pieces regarding 
groups challenging corporate greed and militarization.

This is not to say that those who challenge U.S. policy 
regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict haven´t been 
subjected to enormous pressure from organized right 
wing forces. I have often been on the receiving end of 
such attacks. As a result of my opposition to U.S. 
support for the Israeli government´s policies of 
occupation, colonization, and repression, I have been 
deliberately misquoted, subjected to slander and libel, 
and been falsely accused of being "anti-Semitic" and 
"supporting terrorism;" my children have been harassed 
and my university´s administration has been bombarded 
with calls for my dismissal. I have also had media 
appearances and speaking engagements cancelled, even by 
groups generally supportive of the right to dissent. 
(For example, in 2003, just two weeks prior to its 
annual meeting at which I had been scheduled to speak 
on U.S. foreign policy and international law, the State 
Bar Association of Arizona rescinded its invitation 
after the president and board received a flurry of 
emails claiming that I was "anti-Israel." A few years 
earlier, the Ore-gon Peace Institute cancelled an 
invitation for me to speak at a forum in Portland 
following similar pressure from the campaign of the 
first district´s Democratic nominee for Congress. And a 
recent peace studies conference at Hofstra University 
insisted at the last minute on adding a right wing 
supporter of the Israeli government to their plenary 
program in order to counter my scheduled "anti-Israel" 
presentation, wherein I raised concerns about 
Washington´s failure to take into account international 
law in brokering the Is-raeli-Palestinian peace 
process.)

It is important to remember, however, that those who 
challenge U.S. policy anywhere are going to be 
subjected to intimidation. Recent attacks against U.S. 
professors specializing in the Middle East and 
criticism of the Middle East Studies Association are 
very disturbing, but they are only marginally worse 
than the similar attacks against professors 
specializing in Latin America and the Latin American 
Studies Association during the 1980s. Right wing 
criticism during the 1960s targeting Southeast Asian 
scholars was also widespread. In other words, 
intellectuals with empirical knowledge of any world 
region who dare challenge the lies and distortions of a 
given administration relevant to their area of research 
are going to be subjected to intimidation.

This is not to belittle the exceptional nature of the 
challenges faced by critics of U.S. support for the 
Israeli government. Given that Israel is the world´s 
only Jewish state and that some criticism of Israel 
really is rooted in anti-Semitism, organized attacks 
against those opposing Israeli policies tend to carry 
more resonance since they involve alleged 
manifestations of prejudice against a minority group. 
If a Jewish state were not the focus, many liberals 
would dismiss such attacks as passé McCarthyism and 
would not take them seriously. As a result, assaults on 
critics of Israeli policies have been more successful 
in limiting open debate, but this gagging censorship 
effect stems more from ignorance and liberal guilt than 
from any all-powerful Israel lobby.

It has long been in Washington´s interest to maintain a 
militarily powerful and belligerent Israel dependent on 
the United States. Real peace could undermine such a 
relationship. The United States has therefore pursued a 
policy that attempts to bring greater stability to the 
region, while falling short of real peace. Washing-ton 
wants a Middle East where Israel can serve a proxy role 
in projecting U.S. military and economic interests. 
This symbiosis requires suppressing challenges to 
American-Israeli hegemony within the region.

This also requires suppressing challenges to this 
policy within the United States and there is no 
question that the Is-rael Lobby plays an important role 
in this regard. However, this is primarily an issue of 
the Israel Lobby working at the behest of U.S. foreign 
policymakers, not U.S. foreign policymakers working at 
the behest of the Israel Lobby.

Unfortunately, Washington´s agenda provokes a reaction 
that all but precludes any kind of stable order that 
would enhance the long-term national security interests 
of the United States or Israel, much less peace or 
justice. U.S. policy has resulted in dividing Israelis 
from Arabs, although both are Semitic peoples who 
worship the same God, love the same land, and share a 
history of subjugation and oppression. The so-called 
peace process is not about peace but about imposing a 
Pax Americana. To blame the current morass in the 
Middle East on the Israel Lobby only exacerbates 
animosities and plays into the hands of the 
divide-and-rule tactics of those in Congress and the 
administration whose primary objective is ultimately 
not to help Israel but to advance the American Empire.

Stephen Zunes (www.stephenzunes.org) is professor of 
politics and international studies at the University of 
San Francisco and a member of the Tikkun advisory 
board. He serves as the Middle East editor for Foreign 
Policy in Focus (www.fpif.org) and is the author of 
Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of 
Terrorism (Common Courage Press,2003). 





Ran Greenstein
Johannesburg, South Africa