By Michael Karadjis
The unconditional and mostly uncritical support that the United States has provided Israel over many decades has been more pronounced than US attitudes even to some of its most favoured Third World puppet regimes. While the US may from time to time give half-hearted official support to criticisms by human rights bodies of other pro-American governments, in virtually every case it will use its veto in the United Nations to block even the mildest criticism of even the most blatant violations of human rights or international law by Israel.
This comes alongside Israel, though a First World economy, being the largest recipient of US aid in the world, averaging some $US 3 billion a year. Since 1949, the US has provided Israel some $84 billion; but when the interest costs born by US taxpayers on behalf of Israel, another $49 billion, I added, the total amounts to more than $134 billion.[1]
This has long led to controversy over the nature of this relationship. A sizeable body of opinion claims that, in contrast to the US relationship with various puppet tyrants in the Third World, its relationship with Israel is the reverse: a powerful Israel, acting through a US-based ‘Jewish’ or ‘Israeli’ lobby dictates US policy in the Middle East, bludgeoning Congress into making decisions which are in conflict with real American interests.
Far from being an asset to US interests, support for Israel is a liability, they argue, as it alienates the US from both the peoples and even the right-wing Arab and Muslim governments of the oil-rich region, and inflames anti-American sentiment. The only reason the US continues on this course is due to the power of this well-funded domestic lobby. The US empire, responsible for Hiroshima and Vietnam, is not so powerful: it allows itself to be dominated by a small state of six million people and the voices of well-organised domestic lobbyists representing a mere 2.7 percent of the US population.
The main schools of ‘Israeli Lobby’ theory
The most blatant version of this explanation is that US policy is dictated by a ‘Jewish Lobby’, consisting of the large diaspora of Jews throughout the world, who are described as relatively wealthy, as owning a large part of the western media, and heavily involved in areas such as finance. They are said to act as a fifth column for Israel by using their wealth and media control to push the US and other governments to carry out pro-Israel policies despite their own interests.
This view is associated with many far-right critiques, which think that the US would play a much better role in the world if it were not run by “Jews” who manipulate the great country into acting against its own interests. However, less blatant forms of this analysis are sometimes found among some left activists and analysts. Here we will not concentrate on this kind of ‘Jewish’ lobby theory with its racist connotations.
Far more commonly we hear of an ‘Israeli Lobby’ dominating US foreign policy. This is a lobby with special interests connected to the state of Israel. This avoids the more racist connotations of the ‘Jewish Lobby’, because it does not necessarily have to involve the majority of Jews in the US, and it can involve non-Jewish Americans who have special interests in Israel, which may include economic interests, election interests (ie those in electorates where a large Jewish population is well-organised by right-wing Zionist leaders), or ideological interests, for example the powerful Christian-Zionist Lobby.
At the outset, there is no argument that such a lobby exists. There are many lobbies in the US, and the pro-Israel lobby is a particularly powerful one. The pro-Israel lobby is often successful at silencing sections of the media which may attempt to slightly criticise Israel, and in denigrating the reputations of academics and intimidating universities to get people sacked, to name some of its better-known activities.
Even many analysts who argue against the view that the Israeli lobby is the driver of US foreign policy have themselves been victims of its very active lobbying. For example, as Joseph Massad points out:
Is the pro- Israel lobby extremely powerful in the United States? As someone who has been facing the full brunt of their power for the last three years through their formidable influence on my own university and their attempts to get me fired, I answer with a resounding yes. Are they primarily responsible for US policies towards the Palestinians and the Arab world? Absolutely not.[2]
However, the argument is not about the relative power of this lobby, but whether it is so powerful that it, and Israel itself, is the driver of US foreign policy in the Middle East, that is, whether it is “the tail waving the dog” rather than “the dog waving the tail.” This argument still sees a powerful, primarily Jewish, group of Americans acting on behalf of a foreign government to push policies on the US government which are at odds with the latter’s interests.
The issue was recently brought to the fore by the publication of an extensive critique of the influence of the Israeli lobby on US foreign policy by John Mearsheimer, a Professor of Political Science at Chicago, and Stephen Walt, Professor of International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.[3] This was new because these were very much figures of the US foreign policy establishment, whose views represent the thinking of one wing of the right-wing ‘realist’ school in the US.[4] They write for example:
The overall thrust of U.S. policy in the [Middle East] region is due almost entirely to U.S. domestic politics, and especially to the activities of the “Israel Lobby.” … No lobby has managed to divert U.S. foreign policy as far from what he American national interest would otherwise suggest.
Along with the right-wing argument, there is also a left version of the Israeli lobby theory. Unlike the right, they do not believe natural US foreign policy, without the lobby’s influence, would be any less imperialist. For example, referring to the former US administration of George Bush in 1988-92 (from here on called ‘Bush I’), Jeffrey Blankfort notes that “while an overall evaluation of Bush’s career would have him standing in the dock as a war criminal, his confrontation with the lobby was one of the bright spots for opponents of the US-Israel alliance.”[5]
This is in reference to the Bush I’s opposition to an expansion of settlements by Israel’s right-wing Likud government of Yitzak Shamir, at a time when the US was trying to negotiate one of the many fake “peace” agreements between Israel and the Palestinians, which would have resulted in a different form of subjugation of the Palestinians, but which required some concessions by Israel.
These left-wing ‘Israeli lobby theorists’ see George Bush I was a war criminal when he implemented policies such as the 1991 destruction of Iraq. But it is simply not in US interests to support Israel – a natural US policy in the Middle East would still be imperialist, but would not require the oppression of the Palestinians. Bush understood that, and was trying to get a better deal for the Palestinians, not out of concern for their oppression, but because US interests demand good relations with the reactionary Arab oil monarchies, like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Relations with these repressive dictatorships, which control much of the world’s oil, are undermined by US support for Israel, where there is no oil.
Blankfort’s article describes the extraordinarily well-organised work of the lobby, particularly the aggressive and often successful canvassing and intimidation of members of Congress. A large section deals with the lobby’s mobilization to get Congress support to vote against Bush I’s attempt to merely delay for 120 days some $10 billion in US-guaranteed loans to Israel. Reading this, we are left with the impression that its threats to unseat members of Congress really is what drives US policy in the Middle East. Yet this raises another problem: it gives the purely legislative branch of the state too much power. If a warped and pressurized “democratic” process really is responsible for an overall foreign policy orientation for many decades that is in conflict with US imperialist interests, we might expect to find an active undermining of this policy in practice by other sections of the US state, as in other cases where imperialist interests clash with the “democratic” process. For example when Congress voted against arming the Nicaraguan contras in the 1980s, people from the top levels of the US state and government organised the Iran-Contra affair. Yet we see none of this in relation to Israel.
The most ambitious attempt to deal with these contradictions of “lobby theory,” and use a more Marxist approach while still within the framework of talking about a lobby, has been made by Gabriel Ash. He emphasises that the people in the Israeli lobby are not some foreign Jewish, or even foreign Israeli, body, but are a part of the US and “transnational” ruling class. It is only natural that there are divisions among the ruling class, and that some sections may have closer interests with Israel, while other sections may favour more opening to reactionary Arab states via a less extreme pro-Israel position. And this Israeli lobby within the US ruling class are not necessarily only its Jewish members.[6]
Ash criticises Noam Chomsky’s simplistic rejection of “lobby theory” in which Chomsky counterposes “strategic-economic interests of concentrations of domestic power in the tight state-corporate linkage” to “the Israeli lobby” as factors in US Middle East policy. Naturally Chomsky claims the first factor – ie the interests of the ruling class – is primary.[7] However, Ash points out that this is a false distinction, which accepts the right-wing theoretical framework of Mearsheimer and Walt while rejecting their conclusions:
The way out of this mess is to translate M&W’s concept into our own analytical framework. That would mean collapsing the false distinction between the Lobby and “strategic-economic interests of concentrations of domestic power in the tight state-corporate linkage” … we should look at Washington as a complex web of interlocking and overlapping alliances of (transnational) capital and (domestic) state institutions. The Israel Lobby will then reappear as one such alliance among many. While U.S. capital emerges domestically, and while White Americans predominate in its circles, capital is global and many of the interests represented in Washington lost their “nationality” long ago. There is as little that is “American” in the interests of Citibank and Wal-Mart as in the interests represented by the Israel Lobby.[8]
However, once we get as far as this version, it renders the term ‘lobby’ meaningless: if we are talking about a section of the US ruling class, then a study of what its interests are, and why those interests are very pro-Israel, is still necessary. A section of the US ruling class which is not only Jewish is a section of the US ruling class, not a mere lobby.
Yet elsewhere Ash appears to describe the lobby as much like other lobbies in the way it acts and in the nature of its pressure in formulating state policy, rather than a section of the ruling class. He compares the Israel lobby to lobbies such as the gun lobby and the religious right, but neither gun laws nor creationism command the same kind of virtually absolute support among the US ruling class as does support for Israel. Is this simply because the Israel lobby is more powerful or better funded, or is there something more fundamental about US support for Israel? Elsewhere he writes as if the Israel lobby were similar to a more well-heeled version of movements such as the environment movement or the anti-war movement. For example, he writes:
… the truth of this conclusion (that “the White House and Congress would have made different choices but for the existence of the Lobby”) should be obvious — and to the left above all. You cannot believe that money buys influence and simultaneously maintain that the millions of dollars spent in Washington every year by the Israel Lobby are insignificant. Nor can one be an activist while believing that activism makes no difference. If the well-heeled Israel Lobby effort to promote war doesn’t make much of a difference, what chance do thousands of cash strapped antiwar activists have?[9]
Furthermore:
… if you take the Israel Lobby out of Washington, you will not find beneath it the untarnished “national interest” M&W expect. You will find other lobbies all the way down. The Lobby only “diverts U.S. foreign policy” from where other lobbies would have left it.[10]
So despite it being part of the ruling class, it appears it still has to use the traditional lobbying tactics of other social movements to get its way; moreover, if it wasn’t there, the US ruling class may well have a different Middle East policy, depending on the strength of other “lobbies.” Yet the Israeli lobby, unlike others, nearly always gets its way. This is a strange way for a section of the ruling class to act – for it to need to continually lobby, it must be a minority among the ruling class; yet these lobbying activities ensure its policies always dominate over those of the alleged ruling class majority.
The problem is that while Ash is correct that there are divisions over Middle East policy among the ruling class, these divisions are not so fundamental. One key reason the lobby has been so successful is that its Zionism is in accord with the overall views of all wings of the US ruling class. What the main right-wing Israeli lobby – the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) – does is push the boundaries as far as it can in a more extreme direction. No doubt its activities, like those of other lobbies, do influence policy, but that does not prove that it is responsible for the support by the US ruling class for Zionism as a whole. Joseph Massad, a key critic of lobby theories, puts it most correctly:
What then would have been different in US policy in the Middle East absent Israel and its powerful lobby? The answer in short is: the details and intensity but not the direction, content, or impact of such policies.[11]
The ‘lobby theorists’ critique of the traditional left analysis
Nevertheless, we need to answer some of the points raised by lobbyist theorists, which cast doubt on the traditional left-wing view of those arguing against the Israeli lobby explanation of the US-Israel connection. This traditional view has gone something like the following.
Israel is a colonial-settler state whose existence in a hostile region, where it has displaced indigenous Arabs, makes it a permanently dependent ally of imperialism. It is precisely its permanent conflict with its neighbours that makes it most useful to imperialism: as Henry Kissinger put it, “Israel’s obstinacy … serves the purposes of both our countries best.” The whole first world population of Israel have some stake in maintaining their position of privilege in the region, and this requires being a willing tool of imperialism. The Israeli bourgeoisie is therefore both completely dependent on imperialism, while at the same time being a tiny section of the imperialist bourgeoisie itself.
This is a far more stable prop for imperialism in this vital oil-rich region than the reactionary Arab/Muslim capitalist states, where only a thin crust of the bourgeois elite can be reliable allies of imperialism – and they can be removed by revolution. The overthrow of the Shah of Iran showed this – all the years of imperialist investment in this regime as a regional policeman fell apart in 1979. This could not happen to Israel, where the whole population is tied to imperialism. Israel thus plays the role of, in the words of former US Secretary of State Alexander Haig, “the largest and only unsinkable U.S. aircraft carrier in the world.” In this role, Israel has helped knock down regimes hostile to imperialist interests, such as its defeat of Nasser in 1967, which dealt a crippling blow to the Arab nationalist wave.
However, the lobby theorists claim that support for Israel is detrimental to US imperialist interests. Its very existence, and particularly US support to its most uncompromising policies, is precisely what creates hostility to the US and to imperialism in the region. The Palestinians themselves do not have oil, so there is no special US interest in Israel’s oppression of Palestine. But US control of this vital oil-rich region beyond Palestine is threatened by anti-imperialist movements which have as their starting points precisely hostility to Israel. Otherwise, many of these fundamentally bourgeois-led movements and states would be more likely US allies. Due to Israel, even many right-wing capitalist regimes in the region often have to take their distance from Washington. While supporting oppression and opposing national liberation movements is the same policy that US imperialism pursues elsewhere in the Third World, it is not true to say, as Chomsky does, that “US policies in the Middle East are quite similar to those pursued elsewhere in the world,” because elsewhere these reactionary policies do not include a colonial settler state that produces such local hostility to the US.
Few would deny that the early Zionist movement was promoted by imperialism, but this was in the age of colonialism, when Britain and France directly controlled parts of the region. A colonial-settler Zionist state would be a natural ally in such a set-up: as Sir Ronald Storrs, British governor of Jerusalem, thought, Israel would be “a little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism.”[12] However, it has a completely different effect today when imperialism maintains control via indirect neo-colonial arrangements with the local compradore ruling classes.
Some would concede also that there was some utility of Israel for the US during the Cold War, as it could act as a US surrogate against pro-Soviet regimes in the region, but this is fundamentally different after the Cold War. According to Blankfort, “if during the Cold War the US regarded Israel as a reliable ally against Soviet-backed regimes in some Arab states, this argument vanished as quickly as did the USSR.” Now with no Communist threat, the only real threat is political Islam, and it is precisely US support for Israel that facilitates the growth of this movement.
Despite the talk of Israel being a most reliable US cop in the region, there are few cases in which Israel has been used in that role, other than 1956 (by UK and French imperialism, but opposed by US imperialism), and in 1967 (supported by US imperialism). In fact, when the US directly intervenes, such as Bush I’s war against Iraq in 1991, an effort was made to ensure Israel did not attack Iraq, even when Iraq launched Scuds at Israel, because an Israeli attack on the side of the US would have destroyed the Arab coalition the US had built to attack Iraq. Thus while it may be the “most reliable” ally of imperialism, this is irrelevant if it cannot be used in this role.
Surely then if the US were to broker a genuine peace agreement which forced an Israeli withdrawal from the territories occupied in 1967 and allowed a viable Palestinian state, this would boost the standing of US imperialism in the region among millions of Arabs and Muslims, strengthen the relationship between the US and the reactionary Arab states which control most of the oilfields, and defuse anti-imperialist sentiments.
The only reason the US continues to act against its own imperialist interests is the pressure of the Israeli lobby. Bush I knew that, and when he tried to get an Israeli-Palestinian peace process going with the Madrid conference, Israel reacted by demanding $10 billion in US-guaranteed loans, Bush asked Israel to delay it for 120 days and made it conditional on Israel freezing its settlement binge, and Israel refused. This led to a furious offensive by the Israeli lobby to get the numbers in Congress to vote against Bush, and this may have cost him the election a few months later.[13]
Anti-imperialism in the Middle East is not only a reaction to Israel
At the outset, part of this thesis is based on a fallacy: the idea that anti-imperialism in the Middle East is fundamentally a reaction to Israel’s dispossession of the Palestinians and US support for this. According to Jean Bricmont:
In the Middle East, the main charge against the United States is that it is pro-Israel, because it lets itself be “manipulated by the Jews”. Therefore, if Washington switched sides, there would be no more basis for hostility to U.S. presence, including its control over oil[14] (my emphasis).
Anti-imperialist movements, whether leading to bourgeois nationalist, religious radical or socialist governments, are not unique to the Middle East. They exist throughout the neo-colonial world, because of the nature of imperialism. The mass uprising against British imperialism in Iraq in the early 1920s had nothing to do with the future Zionist state; likewise the revolutionary developments in Iran from 1944 to 1953, including Mossadeq’s nationalization of imperialist oil interests, which led to the CIA’s bloody 1953 coup. The rise of Nasserism – the most radical version of the bourgeois nationalist wave – was first directed against imperialism, not Zionism: the nationalization of the Suez Canal was a huge anti-imperialist act, and UK and French imperialism utilised Israel for their joint attack on Nasser.
The revolution against British imperialism in Yemen was followed by a civil war in the 1960s which pitted a Nasser-backed anti-imperialist left against a Saudi-backed royalist right. The unique thing about the way US imperialism aims to rule the oil-rich region is not only via Israel, but also via the Saudi Arabian monarchy and the other princes, sheiks and emirs on the Gulf, rather than even the normal right-wing bourgeois regimes it uses elsewhere. When Israel knocked out Nasser in 1967, it was not only doing itself a favour (by seizing territory), but also knocking out a nationalist regime which was upsetting imperialism’s other key prop: the semi-feudal oil monarchies. In fact, the strategic nature of the US-Israel alliance derives precisely from this knock-out of Nasserism: US aid to Israel increased 450 percent after 1967,[15] and some 99 percent of US aid to Israel has been given after 1967.[16]
Of course, lobby theorists could argue that Israel may have done the US a service because the Nasser regime was pro-Soviet, but the collapse of the USSR and end of the Cold War made Israel no longer useful in this way. Yet while the USSR could provide an alternative pole for bourgeois nationalist regimes, it was never simply the Soviet alliance that was the problem to imperialism, but any challenge to undiluted imperialist control represented by various anti-imperialist movements. Such anti-imperialist movements continue to exist throughout the Third World, including the Middle East, in the post-Soviet era. US support to Israel may intensify anti-US sentiment in the region, but is by no means primarily responsible for it. It would exist without Israel.
Israel as regional cop?
However, even if it only intensifies anti-US feeling, what is it about Israel that makes this intensification worth it? Is it the role it can play as regional cop for imperialism?
It may be true that the US has been less willing to directly use Israel to attack as in the manner of 1956 and 1967, and the holding back of Israel from attacking Iraq in 1991 is a good example. However, Stephen Zunes provides much information on how the US continues to use Israel even in such operations, in secondary but very important ways:
Rather than being a liability … the 1991 Gulf War once again proved Israel to be a strategic asset: Israeli developments in air-to-ground warfare were integrated into allied bombing raids against Iraqi missile sites and other targets; Israeli-designed conformal fuel tanks for F-15 fighter-bombers greatly enhanced their range; Israeli-provided mine plows were utilized during the final assaults on Iraqi positions; Israeli mobile bridges were used by U.S. Marines; Israeli targeting systems and low-altitude warning devices were employed by U.S. helicopters; and Israel developed key components for the widely-used Tomahawk missiles.
This has continued during the current Iraq invasion:
Israel has also been supportive of U.S. military operations in Iraq by helping to train U.S. Special Forces in aggressive counterinsurgency techniques and sending urban warfare specialists to Fort Bragg to instruct assassination squads targeting suspected Iraqi guerrilla leaders. The U.S. civil administration in Iraq, established following the 2003 invasion, was modeled after Israel’s civil administration in the occupied Arab territories following the 1967 Israeli invasion … Israelis have helped arm and train pro-American Kurdish militias and have assisted U.S. officials in interrogation centers for suspected insurgents under detention near Baghdad. Israeli advisers have shared helpful tips on erecting and operating roadblocks and checkpoints, have provided training in mine-clearing and wall-breaching methods, and have suggested techniques for tracking suspected insurgents using drone aircraft. Israel has also provided aerial surveillance equipment, decoy drones, and armored construction equipment.
Israel has also been useful in providing services to imperialism elsewhere in the Third World, using its extensive experience in repression to aid the US in places from Central America to Sri Lanka. It has served as an indirect link for the US to regimes, such as apartheid South Africa, which have been so internationally isolated that even the US Congress is forced to cut off open cooperation due to alleged “human rights’ concerns; similarly it played a key role in the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s, both facilitating links to the Iranian leaders and in channeling arms to the contras.
All these examples make it clear that Israel performs a great deal of work that would be valuable to US imperialism without any Israeli lobby existing. Nevertheless, the argument remains whether all these secondary uses of Israel to imperialism really can make up for the intensification of anti-US hostility in the region. While Israel can be seen as a ‘cop of last resort’, the lobby theorists have a point that the “aircraft carrier” analogy is stretching it, or at least outmoded, given what the US considers would be the counterproductive effect of any direct US use of Israel against its neighbours.
US support for the most extreme Israeli policies of Likud governments make hostility to the US even worse, and thus the risk of using Israel in the region even greater. It would seem therefore to be in US interests to at least push a compromise “peace” agreement rather than the more extreme Likud versions of Zionism. This would reduce hostility and thus make it easier to use Israel when needed. Therefore, lobby theorists argue, policies like those of the current Bush II/Neo-con US regime with its rabid support for Likud must surely be against US interests and thus dictated by the Israel lobby.
Growing convergence of US and Israeli ruling classes
However, these secondary military services Israel provides the US are not the only reasons for imperialist support for Israel. There is debate over whether Israel should be termed a mini-imperialist country in its own right – due to its nature as a colonial settler state – or if the fact that it is even more dependent on imperialism than average Third World countries for its survival makes this term meaningless. However, what is not in dispute is that its ruling class largely originates in imperialist countries in recent decades, along with most of the Israeli population, and that the economic and technological level of the country is First World.[17]
Given the origins of the Israeli ruling class and its decades of connection with the US ruling class, their destinies are now so linked as to be difficult to separate them. This is why pro-Israel forces in the US are well beyond what can usefully be called a “lobby.”
It is no surprise that these links are strongest in the military industry, a very large section of the US ruling class. Lobby theorists often point to the $3 billion dollars provided by the US annually to Israel as evidence of the power of the lobby, rather than of Israel’s strategic worth to the US. But there is an even more direct connection: most of this money can only be spent on US-made weapons. Such well-known names in the US ruling class as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, United Technologies, Boeing, Textron and General Dynamics profit handsomely from this money provided by US taxpayers, with Israel’s armed forces full of their products.[18]
Due to Israel’s militarized existence, the military/high tech industries have come to play a dominant role there only seen elsewhere in the US itself, and so its large-scale, symbiotic relationship with the US military-industrial complex, in research and development as well as weapons’ sales, is hardly surprising. Israel is the fifth-largest supplier of high-tech military hardware to the United States.[19] Israel produces 10 percent of the world’s arms and is involved in many joint ventures with US defense and high-tech companies.
One good example is that the Israeli defense/electronics company Elbit Systems has been chosen by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), along with Boeing, as a member of the winning consortium for the Secure Border Initiative (SBI) on the US-Mexican border, “to supply technology to identify threats, to deter and prevent crossings, and to apprehend intruders.” Elbit was selected “because of its ability to bring together global resources with decades of technological experience and capabilities securing borders in extreme cold, mountainous regions, as well as hot, desert terrains,”[20] ie, its experience in protecting the ill-gotten “borders” of Israel. Elbit is the largest private defense company in Israel, and also has facilities in in the United States, in Talladega, Alabama, Merrimack, New Hampshire, and Fort Worth, Texas.
One of the key links between the US and Israeli arms industries is the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), and its cousin, the Center for Security Policy (CSP). These were among the leading organisations which, along with the Project for the New American Century and the American Enterprise Institute, formed the core of the neoconservative project. And certainly they include the same number of Jewish defense intellectuals with Likud connections as the other “think tanks” do, but their boards of directors are also stacked with various generals and admirals, heads of defense industries, for example from Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Israeli Aircraft Industries, and Northrop Grumman (which builds ships for the Israeli Navy, sells F-16 avionics and E-2C Hawkeye planes to the Israeli Air Force, and the Longbow radar system to the Israeli army), plus weapons brokers and military consultancies like Cypress International and SY Technology, whose main clients include the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency, which oversees joint projects with Israel.[21]
With links like these, major sections of the US ruling class would hardly need to be convinced by an electoral lobby to be supporting Israel, and an aggressive one at that.
Israeli mini-imperialist state: Key ideological prop of US imperialism
Beyond these direct connections between the ruling classes, what needs to be understood is the special nature of the Israeli state which makes it central to imperialist strategy and makes it highly unlikely that imperialism would simply drop it, short of truly enormous challenges that might make it counterproductive.
The First World (and arguably mini-imperialist) nature of Israel may not result in imperialist backing forever – there came a time when the West understood that imperialist domination in South Africa was better served by scrapping apartheid, once the international mass movement had raised the price of continuing support. However, until such a point is reached – and there is no evidence that it has – it is the ideological uses of a western prop in the region that is often underestimated by lobby theorists.
Imperialism does not rule by “free” economic expansion on its own. Those who argue that without Israel, US capital could spread more unencumbered in the region, are making a similar mistake to those who argue that chauvinist campaigns against immigrants in western countries are against the interests of big capital which profits from the “free” movement of highly exploitable labour. It is the whip of the anti-immigrant movement, alongside the racism which tells immigrants where their right place is in the hierarchy, that ensure their labour remains highly exploitable.
Therefore, in supporting Israel, imperialism is supporting a country which it projects as a replica of advanced western ‘Judeo-Christian’ civilization in the region, bluntly telling millions of Arabs who they must look up to if they want the cash, the technology, the arms, and supposedly the standard of living.
Those not looking at this ideological aspect and instead concentrating on the hostility it creates miss a number of further points related to this. Firstly, the presence of Israel actually helps reactionary Arab regimes justify their own repressive rule, and in practice has facilitated rather than compromised their connections to the US; secondly, the presence of a colonial-settler state, along with the Saudi monarchy, entrenches a conservative politics in the region: even anti-imperialist movements are thereby stuck at the ‘national’ stage and rarely go over the anti-capitalist stage; a democratic solution to the Palestine problem would threaten the repressive regimes that imperialism relies on in the oilfields; and pushing an aggressive Israel coincides with an increasingly aggressive US imperialism threatened by competitors, serves the US interest of promoting its lead in providing “security cover” in the region for other imperialists, and enforces an ideological message about who the boss is – an approach which is often relied upon by imperialism despite the potential increase in hostility among local populations.
Does US support for Israel damage or bolster relations with reactionary Arab states?
Despite the claims that US support for Israel creates hostility in the region, the very existence of a theocratic and racist regime in the heart of the Arab world actually helps the reactionary monarchies of the Gulf justify their repressive regimes and massive security apparatuses armed to the teeth by the same US that arms Israel. Ironically enough, the Saudi rulers justify their need for massive quantities of arms by pointing to the aggressive anti-Arab actions of heavily armed Israel.
Thus apart from keeping these regimes in power, this relationship is also a bonanza for the US armaments industry, arming both sides. The big rise in weaponry used in the region with the current US regime’s support for Likud’s terroristic policies along with the invasion of Iraq have pushed US arms sales abroad to $21 billion in 2005-6, double the previous year.[22]
These enormous arms sales call into question the idea that US support for Israel has affected its relationship with the reactionary Arab states. Saudi Arabia is one of the biggest recipients of US arms in the world. Saudi Arabia recently announced plans to buy $5.8 billion worth of American weapons to modernize its National Guard, along with $3 billion “in orders for Black Hawk helicopters, Abrams and Bradley armored land vehicles, new radio systems and other weapons.” Meanwhile, Bahrain, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates “have filed plans to buy Black Hawk helicopters for a total of $1 billion. Oman plans to buy a $48 million anti-tank missile system. The Emirates plans to buy rocket artillery equipment and military trucks for $752 million and Bahrain will purchase Javelin missiles for $42 million.”[23]
If anything, the collapse of the USSR has meant that local capitalist states, even when in partial conflict with imperialism or forced to speak out about Palestine, have to rely even more on the US for weaponry and “security” cover, where the latent threat from Israel intensifies this need. Zunes has a story which highlights how incorrect is the idea that US support for Israel jeopardizes its relations with Arab oil monarchies:
In 1993, seventy-eight senators wrote President Bill Clinton insisting that the United States send even more military aid to Israel. The lawmakers justified their request by citing massive weapons procurement by Arabs states, neglecting to note that 80% of this military hardware was of U.S. origin. If they were really concerned about Israeli security, they would have voted to block these arms transfers. Yet this was clearly not their purpose. Even AIPAC did not actively oppose the sale of 72 highly sophisticated F-15E jet fighters to Saudi Arabia in 1992, since the Bush administration offered yet another boost in U.S. weapons transfers to Israel in return for Israeli acquiescence.
An increasingly aggressive US-Israeli alliance since the 1990s did not prevent Gaddafi’s Libya transforming itself from the most radical bourgeois-nationalist regime in the region to a US ally during this period, despite Libya maintaining an anti-Zionist stand. Likewise, back in the 1980s, the Reagan regime’s aggressive support for Israel did not prevent the radical bourgeois-nationalist and anti-Zionist regime of Saddam Hussein of Iraq from collaborating with imperialism in its invasion of Iran. Even when Israel bombed an Iraqi nuclear reactor, with barely a peep from the US, Hussein stepped up his new alliance with imperialism. Israel meantime sent arms to the similarly radical bourgeois nationalist regime in Iran, and facilitated US contact with the mullahs, enabling the US to play one off against another.
When the Iraqi regime entered its long period of conflict with imperialism in 1990, resulting in two US wars against it, this did not result mainly from mass pressure on the regime to react against US support for Israel; on the contrary, it resulted from the conflict between Iraq, a real country, and Kuwait, one of the oil sheikdoms of the Gulf. The borders of this piece of private property in sand and oil, when drawn up by British imperialism, had almost cut Iraq off from the sea. Thus it could be argued that US support for these anachronistic monarchies also creates anti-US hostility in the region.
Moreover, Israel’s dispossession of the Palestinians also allows these repressive “anti-imperialist” regimes to use anti-Zionist demagoguery in the same way as the openly reactionary regimes do, to justify a repressive state. Hussein’s regime for example could hang Communists from lamp-posts, providing an indirect service to imperialism, while slandering his victims as “Zionist spies.”
Israeli settler-state: Maintaining anti-imperialism within ‘national’ bounds
The existence of a colonial-settler state, keeping alive a burning immediate national question, tends to restrict the struggle to the national stage in the region. The existence of the Saudi and Gulf monarchies has a similar effect. Thus, while lobby theorists argue that US support for Israel intensifies anti-imperialism in the region, we could equally argue that it politically limits the anti-imperialism that would be there anyway, and maintains conservative political hegemony throughout the region.
While Latin America and the Middle East are regions of a similar level of economic development, in the former the anti-imperialist struggle has tended to cross over from the national stage to socialist revolution at many times; we have Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia, and we had Nicaragua, El Salvador and a continent of national liberation struggles led by left-revolutionary forces. By contrast, in the Middle East, anti-imperialism has meant Khomeiniite Iran, Baathist Iraq and Syria, Gaddafi’s Libya, etc – regimes which are a headache for imperialism, but which are unmistakenly bourgeois – and now we have Bin Ladenism. This is not to criticize the masses of the region for their focus on the national question – the focus reflects the reality of both the gross national oppression of the Palestinians, and the medievalism of the Saudi monarchy.
None of this means that US support for Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians does not intensify hostility. If continued Israeli intransigence did create a situation where it was fuelling such anti-imperialist feeling that the US felt its interests were under serious threat, then it is likely the US would force Israel to some kind of compromise.
Yet the ‘lobby theorists’ may well point out that there appears now an intensification of anti-US hostility of the ‘Islamist’ type, arguably driven in particular by hostility to Zionism and Israeli occupation of Jerusalem, but this has not led to any US pressure on Israel to compromise – on the contrary, the current US regime has strengthened its alliance with the most reactionary forces in Israel.
However, while some of the ‘Islamist’ type of opposition appears ferociously and uncompromisingly anti-imperialist, it is important to understand why the US does not yet see this kind of anti-imperialism as any more fundamental a threat than the national struggle that has long existed in the region, with or without Israel; ‘political Islam’ is just as bourgeois as other forms of bourgeois nationalism.
Moreover, in the past, many ‘Islamist’ forces were promoted by imperialism as a counterweight to Communist, left-wing and Nasserite movements. Such imperialist support is in itself evidence that western governments understand that their “anti-imperialism” is not as fundamental as their rhetoric would suggest, and that in different circumstances many of these movements would be prone to manipulation by imperialism. Indeed, the most fundamentalist regime on Earth is none other than the Saudi monarchy – the key US ally outside of Israel.
Furthermore, while hostility to Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians is one driver of this Islamic radicalism, it is far from being the only cause of its spectacular rise in recent years. Al Qaida evolved out of a wing of the Islamic reactionaries which had been sent by Saudi Arabia, with US support, to fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. US support for Israel and the plight of the Palestinians were not apparently bothering Bin Laden much in 1980s. He turned against the US when the latter used the Gulf War against Iraq in 1991 to occupy Saudi Arabia with thousands of troops. The occupation of his native land, the land of Islamic holy sites Mecca and Medina, was as potent as the long-term occupation of Jerusalem.
This coincided with the growing alienation of the Saudi bourgeoisie, of which Bin Laden is a prominent member, from the Saudi monarchy, which monopolises power. Thus the anti-US hostility of the ‘fundamentalist’ Bin Laden is as much due to US support for the ‘fundamentalist’ Saudi monarchy, which he seeks to overthrow for his own class purposes, as to US support for Israel.
This Islamist radicalization was also further fuelled by the US-led decade-long strangulation of Iraq. The biggest boost to Islamist radicalization has come from the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. If US support for Israel is alleged to be against US interests because its fuels anti-US hostility, then presumably the US is also acting against US interests by occupying Saudi Arabia and then Iraq – yet who could argue that direct imperialist occupation of the oilfields, when feasible, is not in US interests?
One other point on the more reactionary forms of ‘Islamism’ is that its deeply religious language, its use of large-scale terrorist actions (such as 9/11), and the “clash of civilizations” kind of ideology it espouses all play directly into the hands of imperialist militarism. Those arguing that US support for Israel is inflaming ‘militant Islam’ miss the point that the more the ‘Islamic’ coloration of local anti-imperialism as a reaction to Zionism, the more this provides imperialism with its much needed new all-encompassing “enemy,” after the collapse of the USSR robbed it of the “threat” of international communism. There is no better example than the US and Israeli occupations of Mecca/Medina and Jerusalem inflaming ‘al Qaida’, leading to the attack in the WTC, giving the US the propaganda pretext to take over the Iraqi oilfields.
However, it is important not to conflate all the various kinds of movements often jumbled together as ‘political Islam’ as being the same, or all medieval in their politics. Some movements originating in political Islam, such as the Lebanese Shiite group Hizbullah and the Palestinian Hamas, have evolved substantially from more sectarian and ‘fundamentalist’ roots into genuine national liberation movements, casting off in the process much of the baggage that would have prevented their struggles moving forward in unity with other forces [note that this article was written around the time of the last Israel-Hezbollah conflict in 2006, not long after the completion of Lebanon’s national liberation from Israeli occupation in 2000, a movement largely led by Hezbollah, being based among the Shia of southern Lebanon where Israel was occupying; and hence long before Hezbollah transformed itself into a death squad for the Assad regime’s war against its people beginning in 2011 – MK]. However, the very fact that Hamas is, and Hezbollah till recently was, involved in life and death national struggles against Israeli occupation still restricts further evolution among their mass base towards linking national and social revolution: one step forward, when greeted by another Israeli rocket attack, maintains the struggle at the level of pure survival.
Democratic Palestine: Against imperialist interests
This is also true of the secular nationalist Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). At its height in the 1980s, the PLO’s long term struggle, together with support from the world socialist movement, had led the PLO to becoming the most politically progressive force in the Arab world. Any victories for the PLO were likely to undermine regional Arab capitalist regimes, so the US had all the more reason to support Israel’s repression of it. The radicalized Palestinian masses stood on the side of progressive forces in Jordan and Lebanon, and Israel performed a good service to imperialism in helping the forces of reaction in both countries (Jordan in 1970 and Lebanon during the civil war) against the PLO-backed progressive forces.
However, lobby theorists can point out a key weakness in this argument: that the PLO would not exist in the first place if Israel were not there, and the only reason there is a radicalized Palestinian mass which could join progressive forces in other countries is due to their dispossession. As Camille Mansour puts it:
These struggles for influence, occurring in a region so close to Israel, are often linked (an in the case of the Jordanian crisis, were definitely linked) to the Arab-Israeli conflict itself: for the Americans, Israel was in the paradoxical position of being an asset by alleviating threats to its own and American interests – threats, however, that it may have itself originally provoked through its situation of conflict with the Arabs.[24]
But this argument takes us back as far as 1948 – when few would argue that an ‘Israeli lobby’ ran Washington – not to 1967, 1982 or 2006. Since both Israel and the Palestinian dispossession do exist, and Israel has been useful to imperialism for a prolonged period of time, even if it were of less use now, the question would arise of what to replace it with. And then clear-sighted imperialist planners would understand that if Israel were replaced by a democratic-secular state, this may well spell doom for the reactionary Saudi and Gulf monarchies, and other repressive Arab states. Despite the rhetoric of the neo-conservatives about a ‘democratic revolution” across the Middle East, in reality the last thing the US wants are popular democratic regimes overthrowing the oil monarchies on which imperialism has long relied.
Therefore, if the Palestinians cannot be crushed outright, then co-opting the national movement within unjust Zionist bounds – such as the various US-backed ‘peace plans’ – ensures the struggle of the Palestinians remains necessarily focused on not only national issues, but on pure survival.
Conflict within US and Israeli ruling classes over different versions of Zionism
This is why every time a US government has advocated a compromise by Israel on the occupied territories to assuage its reactionary Arab clients it is always completely within the bounds of Zionism and of an undemocratic solution. No wing of the US government has ever advocated a fully independent viable Palestinian state in all of West Bank and Gaza with a capital in East Jerusalem (not to mention the return of Palestinian refugees). Usually what is advocated is a partial withdrawal, handing over parts of the occupied territories to some kind of Oslo-style “autonomy”, or a “state” of cantons, with greatly restricted rights, never including East Jerusalem. When the Israel lobby fights a US government on this, it is a dispute among rival concepts of an undemocratic Zionist solution. Thus even those US governments which are said to “stand up to the lobby” also see the usefulness of Israel to imperialism, if not the extreme Likud program.
For example, the Ford administration clashed with Israel in 1975 over its support for Resolution 242, which called for Israeli withdrawal from the territories occupied in 1967 in exchange for peace with Arab neighbours.[25] Yet this resolution said nothing about a Palestinian state in those territories. For decades, the pro-imperialist Jordanian monarchy expected to get the West Bank if Israel withdrew, and US policy supported this. While Jordan, along with Egypt and Syria, which both had territory seized by Israel in 1967, voted for Resolution 242, the al Fatah leadership of the PLO long rejected it.[26]
Blankfort describes the extraordinary mobilization by AIPAC of 76 Senators who signed a letter objecting to Ford’s delay of delivery of certain weapons to Israel and suspension of negotiations for pending financial and military aid, and quotes a report which claimed that this “virtually forced the executive branch to abandon the option of imposing a Mideast settlement which Israel considered to be potentially detrimental to its security.” Yet the idea that Ford was about to “impose” Resolution 242 is entirely fanciful: as Blankfort explains elsewhere, Ford and Kissinger raised the idea of “reassessing” Middle East policy, and supporting 242, as a reaction to their inability to get Israel to agree to a second Sinai disengagement, which they saw a necessary for getting Egypt on board for the Camp David accord. Yet Camp David became reality within a couple of years, a massive coup for US imperialism in bringing about the defection of Egypt, the principal Arab power, to the US camp, and also getting Egypt to recognise Israel. Neither before nor after has the US ever shown any real interest in “imposing” 242, despite it being well within the confines of a Zionist solution.[27]
In the epic confrontation between George Bush I and Yitzhak Shamir’s Likud regime in Israel in 1991, Bush was not calling for a Palestinian state, and not necessarily even a complete Israeli withdrawal. The issue was the launching of the ‘peace process’ with the Madrid Conference. At this conference, the Palestinians were not even allowed to have their own delegation, let alone a PLO delegation – a number of officially non-PLO Palestinians had to form a joint team with Jordan.
The exact contours of what would emerge from this process were left deliberately vague. Here was how Bush I described the process:
Negotiations will be conducted in phases, beginning with talks on interim self-government arrangements … Beginning the 3rd year, negotiations will commence on permanent status. No one can say with any precision what the end result will be. In our view, something must be developed, something acceptable to Israel, the Palestinians, and Jordan, that gives the Palestinian people meaningful control over their own lives and fate and provides for the acceptance and security of Israel.[28]
The Madrid process was thus the first step towards the Oslo accord of 1993, under Bush’s successor Clinton, which was accepted by the new Israeli Labour government of Yitzhak Rabin, which defeated Shamir’s Likud regime. Oslo also left all the important issues for the future while ceding control of some Palestinian population centers to an autonomous but powerless Palestinian authority, allegedly giving Palestinians “control over their own lives and fate.”
Ironically, the lobby theorists see Bush I’s election defeat and Clinton’s ascendancy as a victory of the lobby, and castigate the Zionist nature of Oslo. Blankfort claims that Clinton “turned his Middle East diplomacy over to pro-Israel Jewish lobbyists with ties to Israel’s Labor party.” This ignores not only the essential continuity between Madrid and Oslo, but also the fact that the US and Israeli right-wing, including the US-based Israel lobby, began an immediate campaign against Clinton, Rabin and Oslo, declaring it an unacceptable concession to PLO “terrorists.”
In any case, seeing all this as a US-Israeli split is at most only half-true: these examples put the US governments of the ‘Republican Realist’ Bush I and the Democrat Clinton in full agreement with the Israeli Labour Party, ie, the main traditional party of Zionism. Clinton may have turned heavily to those “with ties to Israel’s Labor party,” but these Zionists had supported Madrid. It was with Likud’s more fanatically right-wing program that they had a conflict.
Yet in other cases, it is the other way around. For example, in 1987, then Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Shimon Peres reached the London Agreement with Jordan’s King Hussein for resolving the status of the Palestinian territories. The agreement called for an international conference hosted by the UN, to find a solution based on resolution 242, and for the Palestinians to be represented by the Jordanian delegation, with no PLO participation. There was no suggestion of a Palestinian state; on the contrary, Jordan would gain sovereignty over the West Bank. This was fundamentally similar to the Reagan Plan (1982) and was the basis for the later Madrid plan.
Peres was the Labour Party deputy in the Likud-Labour National Unity government (1984-1990). The Likud prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, opposed this agreement from the right. “Peres beseeched then Secretary of State (to President Reagan) George Schultz to take the initiative in pursuing the plan. Schultz declined.”[29] Reacting to the sabotage by the Reagan regime of an Israeli Labour initiative, Yassir Arafat declared this disproves ideas about a Jewish lobby running Washington, rather, “the US tells Israel what to do.”
Current alliance of US and Israeli right-wing: Pushing US world dominance
The current energetic alliance between the US neoconservatives, AIPAC, the Christian fundamentalist right, the Bush II regime and the Likud regimes of Netanyahu and Sharon began taking effect while the Republicans and Likudniks were still out of power in the mid-1990s, in reaction against Oslo. Moves such as the 1995 Jerusalem Embassy Act[30] were aimed at undermining Clinton and Rabin at the moment when sensitive “peace process” negotiations were taking place and both governments were up for re-election.
When Netanyahu brought Likud back to power in Israel in 1996, he was immediately greeted by leading US neo-conservatives Richard Perle and Douglas Feith with the ‘Clean Break’ plan. This advocated scrapping Oslo, undermining Arafat, crushing the Palestinians, and for Israel to spearhead a US-led undermining of Syria and Iran and overthrow of the Iraqi regime, giving Iraq to the Hashemite monarchy of Jordan – along with the scrapping of all remnants of ‘Labour Zionism’ in the economic field.[31]
Much is often made of the fact that some of these neoconservatives – in particular Perle, Feith and Wolfowitz – were Jewish Americans (though many others are not), as if to suggest that they were American agents of Israel who wanted to overthrow these governments because they are anti-Israel.[32] However, these US neoconservatives were disappointed in Netanyahu because even an Israeli leader as reactionary as he thought this program was too extreme – it was still the dog attempting to wag the tail.[33]
In fact divisions exist in both the US and Israeli ruling classes over whether it is a good idea to overthrow governments like those of Iran, Iraq and Syria. On the one hand, these governments are capitalist, repressive and anti-working class, and many in the US and Israeli ruling classes fear that forced overthrows could lead to even more hostile forces taking power. However, other sections of the ruling classes believe they must be dealt with to establish unlimited US and/or Israeli power in the region, not only because these regimes are anti-Israel, but also because they have their origins in national revolutions, however distant in the past, and have a history of trying cut out more space for their own national bourgeoisie, particularly over their oil wealth, and are thus unreliable, however much they may be willing to do deals if imperialism would recognise their regional interests.
The “Clean Break’ people weren’t too shy about how much the military needs of US imperialism were at the centre of their attempt to goad Netnyahu even further to the right. The document helpfully notes:
Mr. Netanyahu can highlight his desire to cooperate more closely with the United States on anti-missile defense in order to remove the threat of blackmail which even a weak and distant army can pose to either state. Not only would such cooperation on missile defense counter a tangible physical threat to Israel’s survival, but it would broaden Israel’s base of support among many in the United States Congress who may know little about Israel, but care very much about missile defense.
Moreover, the basis of this aggressive approach had already been laid out by Wolfowitz when he was US Undersecretary of Defense for Policy under Defense Secretary Dick Cheney in the regime of Bush I, in the ‘Defence Planning Guidance’ white paper of 1992. It is clear from this paper that Wolfowitz’s prime concerns were about US world domination, not Israel; for him and his allies, an extremist Israeli regime is the best ally in such an ongoing struggle.
Among other things, the document says the US must deter “potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.” While such “potential competitors” could include a re-strengthened capitalist Russia or China or a bloc of nationalist-minded oil-producing states, the document made clear the US rulers also had their European imperialist “allies” in mind: “A substantial American presence in Europe and continued cohesion within the western alliance remain vital…we must seek to prevent the emergence of European-only security arrangements which would undermine NATO.”[34]
This underlines another aspect of post-Cold War world: the sharpening of the struggle between major imperialist blocs, particularly the US and the European Union, as well as other large capitalist countries such as Russia. The alliance between the most aggressive wing of the US ruling class and the most extremist forces in Israel should also be seen within this context. The various Middle Eastern capitalist classes have some bargaining power between these various blocs. Meanwhile, since the 1990s, the main EU imperialist powers, particularly France and Germany, have made a number of feeble attempts to shake off the domination of US military-security cover represented by US control of NATO, while their competition with US imperialism increases in various parts of the world.
Iraq switched its oil trading from the dollar to the euro in 2000, and Iran announced the setting up of an oil bourse in 2006 which would also deal in euro. Some analysts have seen these moves as key to understanding the US invasion of Iraq (opposed by Paris and Berlin) and its threats to invade Iran, given the central importance the “petro-dollar” has long played in ensuring US world dominance.[35] This further underlines how US hostility to these regimes can be connected to this inter-imperialist rivalry, how national bourgeois regimes can cause trouble for the US regardless of Israel, and how the end of the USSR does not give the US unquestioned control – thus meaning Israel remains a useful asset.
By pushing the most aggressive and confrontational wing of the Israeli ruling class to maintain high tension in the region – within the ideological coat of the “war on terror” – the US neo-conservatives and their allies seek to maintain the necessity of the US “security” cover in the region, to “protect” the investments of other imperialists as well, which would be undermined by a genuine peace agreement. At the same time, this also is of direct material interest to the gigantic US armaments industry – a much more major part of the US ruling class than in any of its imperialist competitors.
Showing who is boss
While such an approach may be considered counterproductive if pushed too far, an approach based on intimidation and “showing who is boss” is not that uncommon an imperialist policy. The US may choose to not use Israel regularly, but its presence maintains the threat should anyone step too far out of line. The fact that the US still economically dominates the region, especially in the all-important fields of oil, dollars and weapons, suggests this strategy of intimidation has to date been working.
There are many historical precedents for what might appear ‘irrationally’ aggressive approaches. All the same points could be made about the continuing British colonial presence in northern Ireland, for example: does it not alienate the southern Irish, and deepen ant-British sentiment in the much larger area of the Irish republic, in exchange for direct control over a small region with few important resources to exploit? Yet this again underlines the fact that imperialism does not only rule via the free flow of capital, but also ideologically: the British presence is a reminder of who is boss.[36]
If the US backs Israel only due to an Israeli lobby, then does Britain maintain its Malvinas (“Falklands”) colony in the south Atlantic – territory claimed by Argentina – due to the lobby of a couple of thousand English sheep herders? It could be claimed that this turns popular sentiment against Britain – yet Britain is a major imperialist power in Argentina. Thatcher’s war against Argentina in 1982 had far more to do with using the ideological hammer of demonstrating imperialist superiority than with the idea that Argentina may deny British investors a major place in any oil wealth discovered under the sea – an idea as unlikely as Saudi Arabia kicking out the US oil majors. And in both cases, US support for Israel and British support for Malvinas was aimed at warning any future Argentine or Arab regimes which may have different ideas of the consequences.
Moreover, while Argentina at the time was ruled by a right-wing military dictatorship that was helping US imperialism against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua, the US stood solidly on the side of its imperialist British partner against its satrap – unity in showing who is boss was more important than any anti-US sentiment this may have created in Latin America.
Is intransigent Zionism in the interests of the Israeli ruling class?
Moreover, if by the “Israeli lobby” we mean the right-wing organisation AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee), which pushes extreme Likudnik positions and is allied with the most warmongering faction of the US ruling class, then it is difficult to describe it either as ‘the Jewish lobby’ or even ‘the Israel lobby’. It is far from being the Jewish lobby because the majority of US Jews have more progressive politics on a range of issues, including Israel, than AIPAC. Even calling it ‘the Israel lobby’ is misleading, as the majority of US Jews that do support Israel tend towards the ‘peace-process’/two-states politics, and tend to support the Israeli Labour Party and of the US Democrats, rather than the extremist positions of Likud and the current US regime.
For example, one survey showed that while a large majority of American Jews (85 percent) generally support Israel, including 64 percent who “strongly support” it, 63 percent support the establishment of a Palestinian state, and 18 percent want to the US government to “pressure Israel to negotiate for peace.”[37] Mearsheimer and Walt themselves claim even less support for Israel, writing that “in a 2004 survey roughly 36 per cent of American Jews said they were either ‘not very’ or ‘not at all’ emotionally attached to Israel.” As Daniel Levy says: “Polls repeatedly show that American Jews, unsurprisingly, are liberal on Israel-Palestine, just as they are across a range of issues. Paradoxically then, it could be argued that there is too little Jewish influence in Washington.”[38] Given that Jews only constitute 2.3 percent of the US population, it is difficult to see how such a contradictory outlook among such a small group could really translate into such an aggressively permanent pro-Israel US policy.
Moreover, in US 2006 exit polls, 87 percent of Jews supported the Democrats and only 12 percent the Republicans, as has long been the case. This compares with a Democrat-Republican split of 44 to 54 among Protestants and 55 to 44 among Catholics. To be sure, the Democrats have historically been just as pro-Zionist as the Republicans, and many just as aggressively so; however, in the years since Oslo the Republicans – particularly the current regime – have clearly emerged as the more aggressively hard-line pro-Israel party, with no apparent change to voting patterns. One of the groups most solidly supporting the Republicans were “white evangelical born-agains,” at 70 percent.[39] This non-Jewish “lobby” has in recent years been fanatical in its support for the most extreme Likud positions, far more so than the average among American Jews.
Just how useless the question of Jewish votes is to US policy towards Israel can also be discerned from the recent brawl within the Democratic Party in Connecticut, between liberal Democrat Ned Lamont and Lieberman, the darling of AIPAC. Protestants gave LaMont 38% of their vote, Catholics 32%, and Jews 34% – not markedly different. LaMont won majorities only from those professing “other” (68%) or “no religion” (67%), a large proportion of whom are likely to be Jewish. Another internal Democratic poll showed Lamont leading by 50 percent to 41 percent among Jews, and explained that “Lieberman’s backers attribute the shift to opposition to the Iraq war. Jewish opposition to the war has always outpaced general opposition.”[40] As Mearsheimer and Walt admit,
“although neo-conservatives and other Lobby leaders were eager to invade Iraq, the broader American Jewish community was not … a compilation of nationwide opinion polls by the Pew Research Center shows that Jews are less supportive of the Iraq war than the population at large, 52 per cent to 62 per cent.”
Thus even if it were true that AIPAC decides policy for the US rulers, it is not necessarily the case that this would be the policy advocated by American Jews, American supporters of Israel, or by many Israelis themselves.
Which leads to the question of whether the most right-wing positions on Israel-Palestine are necessarily in the interests of the Israeli bourgeoisie any more than in the interests of the US bourgeoisie. If it is assumed that a softer version of Zionism would better facilitate the penetration of US capital in the Middle East, then surely the same would be true of Israeli capital. The more right-wing, ideologically-driven sections of both the US and Israeli ruling classes could be said to be blocking the freer expansion of both ruling classes in the region.
That is not to suggest that there are no special interests of the Israeli ruling class which may sometimes clash with those of the US ruling class; obviously there are. For example, the lavishing of money on settlers in the West Bank could be said to be in the interests of some Israeli capitalists, but not necessarily be in the interests of wider US expansion in the region. However, while some Israeli capitalists might benefit, these settlements could also be said to not be in the wider interests of the expansion of Israeli capital in the region. In fact, that is actually more true for Israeli capital than for US capital: Israeli capital is far more restricted in its own natural region of dominance than US capital. So the right-wing US-based ‘lobby’ – and successive US governments, and aggressive US ‘neo-conservatives’, both Jewish and non-Jewish – by continually blocking a genuine peace process and even sabotaging Oslo-style ‘peace’, is doing a much greater disservice to Israeli than to US capital in the region.
Moreover, even if Israeli capital benefits by the use of cheap Palestinian labour in a way that does not necessarily interest US capital, this is not at all threatened by attempts by one wing of the US ruling class, supported by Israeli Labour, for an undemocratic compromise. On the contrary, such a compromise, a rationalization and legalisation of the occupation via the creation of “independent” Bantustans, would facilitate the exploitation of cheap Palestinian labour. In fact the more hard-line approach tends to advocate the expulsion of the Palestinians, or permanently walling them off from the Israeli economy. Thus it is difficult to see this more hard-line approach as being in the interests of Israel any more than US capital if a purely economistic approach is taken to the issue of imperialist control, without taking into account the ideological aspects of imperialist world and regional dominance.
Who decides when there is a difference?
Finally it is important to note, in reference to the idea that Israel or its lobby decides US policy, that whenever there has been a clash between the a US ruler or section of the US ruling class and a particular policy of the Israeli lobby which appears at odds with US interests, the lobby has tended to lose, casting some doubt on its effectiveness. For example, when US president Carter had decided that Israel had to withdraw from some (by no means all) of southern Lebanon when it invaded in 1978, he got his way by threatening a suspension of some aid.
As lobby theorists show, the lobby has its greatest impact on Congress when members are up for reelection. However, the president has often used his powers to overrule Congress in such cases. For all the noise about the lobby versus George Bush I noted above, the fact is that Bush faced down AIPAC and won. Bush did hold up the loan guarantees to Israel. The lobby had thought it had the numbers in Congress, but when Bush, feeling the US national interest in an Oslo-style deal was very important, pressed his view forcefully, including with a televised message to the American people, then as Blankfort explains, “both Israel and AIPAC had agreed, given the poll numbers that it would be unwise to challenge the president in Congress, but to wait for the 120 days.”
What he means by “the poll numbers” was as Blankfort explains:
Polls taken afterward indicated that Americans supported Bush by a 3-1 margin and half of those responding opposed providing any economic aid to Israel. Two weeks later, a NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey showed that while voters favored aid to the Soviet Union by a margin of 58% to 32%, and aid to Poland by a margin of 55% to 29%, voters opposed economic support to Israel by 46% to 44%. Moreover, 34% saw Israel as the greatest impediment to peace in the region while only 33% saw the Arab nations in that role.
Yet lobby theorists constantly tell us that the lobby’s strength is in threatening members of Congress with electoral defeat. But if one strong presidential speech can produce such results in public opinion, then the lobby clearly is a paper tiger, despite Blankfort ridiculing the notion. The reason the lobby can usually successfully threaten members of Congress is that in the vast majority of cases, a slight scrap between two tactical versions of a Zionist solution is not something any wing of the ruling class feels is fundamental enough to need to challenge the lobby. If the true US imperialist “national interest” really were threatened by AIPAC’s or Israel’s policies, it is really odd that US leaders do not more often make “televised speeches” since that appears to be all that Bush needed.
What the lobby theorists also miss here is that in standing up to the lobby and to Likud, it may well be argued that Bush I helped bring about the election defeat of Shamir’s Likud regime and its replacement by Labour, which was in agreement with Bush’s initiatives. Following this victory, Bush then “agreed to the loan guarantees with the proviso that the amount of money that Israel was spending in the Occupied Territories be deducted from the total.” Blankfort does not realize he has written a piece which demonstrates that the theory he thinks he is promoting is wrong.
Lobby theorists like Blankfort can then only claim that such actions lost Ford, Carter and Bush I the subsequent elections. However, he provides no evidence for such assertions. Ford headed a caretaker post-Watergate, post-Vietnam Republican government that would have required a miracle to win an election; the ‘Reagan revolution’ which defeated Carter came atop a groundswell of right-wing revanchism, and it is unlikely Lebanon played that big a role. Bush’s replacement by Clinton followed three terms of Republican rule and it really was time for a change.
All Blankfort can tell us in the last case is that there was allegedly an “increase in the media of articles critical of Bush’s handling of the presidency and, particularly, the economy,” as if that were by definition the doing of Jews, and that “the vast majority of the Jewish community of America … could not bring themselves to vote for George Bush.” Problem being that, as shown above, the vast majority of the Jewish community in the US have historically always voted Democrat.
US-Israeli differences do not only occur over the Middle East. At times, Israel is less loyal to US aims in other parts of the world. In 2000, the US pressured Israel to scrap a multimillion dollar deal to sell PHALCON reconnaissance aircraft to China, and in 2004, the very pro-Israel Bush II regime forced Israel to scrap a deal to upgrade China’s Harpy drone surveillance aircraft, leading to the ouster of Amos Yaron, director general of the Defense Ministry. In 2005, Israel was even prepared to ignore US hostility to the Chavez government in Venezuela, despite Chavez’s strong support to the Palestinians. The US forced Israel to call off a lucrative deal to install its own systems in US-made F-16 fighters for the Venezuelan air force upgrade its warplanes.[41]
The Iraq war: US or ‘lobby’ interests?
Since the neoconservative cabal in the Bush II regime was largely responsible for the invasion of Iraq, and since some of them are Jewish and many connected to Likud, the idea that this was also an exercise of the lobby’s power, against the better US interest, is also common. Blankfort thinks that Bush “allowed a gaggle of right-wing pro-Israel Jewish neocons to write his Middle East script which gave us the war on Iraq.”
However, the fact that some 15 percent of the world’s known oil reserves are in Iraq, and were under a regime that the US considers unreliable – for among other reasons, its attempt to knock of Kuwait’s oil as well – gives credence to the more traditional idea that US imperialism launched a war to control Mideast oil reserves.
Of course it true that the Iraqi regime was anti-Israel and had given aid to the Palestinians. It was well-known that Israel considered Iraq a major enemy and was in favour of removing Hussein. And there is no doubt that this was also one of the reasons the US went to war. But there is no contradiction: for the US, removing an unreliable, easily demonized ruler, who was an enemy of both its Israeli ally and of its Gulf oil-state allies, from control over a large part of Mideast oil, was clearly in US interests (the actual methods of doing so are another thing).
More sensible lobby theorists such as Gabriel Ash at least see the lobby as only one of the forces behind the invasion. Ash lists the lobby (by which he means a “small elite of military, business and political figures” with interests in the US and Israel), the US defense industry and Big Oil as the three sections of the ruling class most directly involved in the war. And he shows that all three have profited handsomely from the war, with Big Oil the big winner, its stocks gaining 127 percent in the last three years, the 100 largest companies on the Israeli stock exchange a close runner up, and the defense industry also seeing a good 50 percent increase in total returns on investments.[42]
Meanwhile, Iraq’s entire economic structure has been re-written, and not surprisingly massive privatisation, extraordinary tariff cuts, a tax ceiling for the rich and similar measures abound, making even clearer the fundamentally imperialist aims of the invasion. However, one area that did cause some conflict among the occupiers was oil.
A neo-liberal economic program of this sort would include privatisation of Iraqi oil. However, if this occurred, and private companies began furiously selling off Iraq’s oil, it would lead to a collapse in world oil prices – which both the big US oil companies and Saudi Arabia would fight tooth and nail to prevent. It is hardly an accident that the world oil price, and thus the profits of US oil majors, have gone through the roof since the invasion.
But some of the more removed neo-con intellectuals wanted to push a quirkier scheme of the Israeli and Israel lobby right – the collapse of the Saudi monarchy, something clearly against US interests. If Iraqi oil privatisation led to a flood of oil on the world market, they figured, it would bring down the Saudis. But, as Greg Palast shows in the most extraordinary article on this issue, this plan was squashed by Bush-Cheney and Big Oil, who replaced it with their arrangement for “locking up Iraq’s oil with agreements between a new state oil company under “profit-sharing agreements” with “IOCs” (International Oil Companies). The combine could “enhance the [Iraq’s] government’s relationship with OPEC,” it read, by holding the line on quotas and thereby upholding high prices,” in the process rescuing the Saudis.[43]
While Likud-connected neo-cons may have provided ideological ammunition for the war, when it came to a question of real interests – Iraq’s oil, the world oil price and the Saudi monarchy – Big Oil won hands down.
This surge in oil prices not only boosted US oil companies’ profits, but also those of US defense companies: the huge rise in Saudi and Gulf state military purchases described above flowed from this rise in oil prices, explained William Hartung, director of the arms trade project at the World Policy Institute of the New School in New York.[44]
Lebanon: Did Israel “disappoint”?
Israel’s brutal destruction of Lebanon this year also received uncritical US blessing. Yet far from this being an exercise in ‘lobby power’, a number of factors suggest this was a US war using a willing Israeli proxy. According to Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah:
Israel did not get a green light from the United States. Instead, Israel was given a decision by the United States to go and finish this issue in Lebanon … The world community gave a decision to Israel to destroy the resistance in Lebanon. Some Arabs then came to provide a cover and encourage Israel to continue the battle, and to tell Israel that this is the golden and historic opportunity to destroy the resistance in Lebanon … They want to destroy any spirit of resistance in Lebanon, whether inside Hezbollah or any other party … This is what Israel is doing, and this is what the United States, which wants to re-arrange the entire region anew, needs.
Israel obviously had its own reasons for wanting to crush Hezbollah, but the timing – when it was already engaged in a massive crackdown in Gaza, and when the US was ratcheting up the propaganda battle against Iran in preparation for an attack – strongly indicated a US agenda. The US wanted an Israeli attack on Hezbollah, an ally of Iran, as a testing ground, and a morale boost, for its own planned attack on Iran. In addition, US leaders feared that when they attacked Iran with Israeli backing, Hezbollah may respond with rocket attacks on Israel. Therefore they wanted an Israeli attack to wipe out Hezbollah’s arsenal – or at least to get Hezbollah to waste it on Israel – before a US attack.
According to the right-wing, pro-war Israeli Debka-file, “America is willing to fight in Lebanon to the last Israeli soldier, just as Iran is ready to fight to the last Hizballah combatant. Israel must beware of being hustled into taking imprudent steps by the proxy contest between the Washington and Tehran.”[45] With the serious defeat which Hezbollah handed to Israel, many Israeli officials began blaming Bush for encouraging Israeli leader Olmert to undertake this ill-conceived adventure.[46]
The US plan also involved an Israeli attack on Syria, which Israeli leaders considered to be “nuts”:
As part of Bush’s determination to create a “new Middle East” – one that is more amenable to U.S. policies and desires – Bush even urged Israel to attack Syria, but the Olmert government refused to go that far. One source said some Israeli officials thought Bush’s attack-Syria idea was “nuts” since much of the world would have seen the bombing campaign as overt aggression.
In an article on July 30, the Jerusalem Post referred to Bush’s interest in a wider war involving Syria … With U.S. forces bogged down in Iraq, Bush and his neoconservative advisers saw the inclusion of Israeli forces as crucial for advancing a strategy that would punish Syria for supporting Iraqi insurgents, advance the confrontation with Iran and isolate Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.[47]
It was logical for Israel to reject such “nuts.” Israel is in the region; it knows that regardless of its views on the Assad regime, if it is overthrown it will most likely be replaced by an Islamist regime. For all its rhetoric, the Syrian regime has never militarily challenged Israeli occupation of the Golan Heights, and has kept a tight lid on Palestinian fighters in Lebanon. But lobby theorists might well argue that the only reason for the US to be opposed to such a regime is in deference to Israel, which occupies Syrian territory; and if the US pressured Israel to return the Golan, Assad would have no further reason to pose as anti-imperialist. However, this does not take into account the current US view, that anyone who has said ‘no’ in the past – by opposing US surrogates in Lebanon, by allegedly turning a blind eye to Iraqi resistance forces passing through its territory, by allying with Iran and Hezbollah, even for pragmatic reasons – must be wiped away for complete US domination of a restructure new Middle East.
Even more significant were voices from the US regime which expressed disappointment with Israel – not for its wanton brutality, but for not being brutal enough, for its failure to crush Hezbollah and to continue to prove its worth to the US. Leading neo-con fanatic Charles Krauthammer writing in the Washington Post put it this way in the midst of the war:
Israel’s leaders do not seem to understand how ruinous a military failure in Lebanon would be to its relationship with America, Israel’s most vital lifeline.
For decades there has been a debate in the United States over Israel’s strategic value. At critical moments in the past, Israel has indeed shown its value. In 1970 Israeli military moves against Syria saved King Hussein and the moderate pro-American Hashemite monarchy of Jordan. In 1982 American-made Israeli fighters engaged the Syrian air force, shooting down 86 MiGs in one week without a single loss, revealing a shocking Soviet technological backwardness.
But that was decades ago. The question, as always, is: What have you done for me lately? Hezbollah’s unprovoked attack on July 12 provided Israel the extraordinary opportunity to demonstrate its utility by making a major contribution to America’s war on terrorism.
America’s green light for Israel to defend itself is seen as a favor to Israel. But that is a tendentious, misleadingly partial analysis. The green light – indeed, the encouragement – is also an act of clear self-interest. America wants, America needs, a decisive Hezbollah defeat. Unlike many of the other terrorist groups in the Middle East, Hezbollah is a serious enemy of the United States. In 1983 it massacred 241 American servicemen. Except for al-Qaeda, it has killed more Americans than any other terror organization.
Hence Israel’s rare opportunity to demonstrate what it can do for its great American patron. The defeat of Hezbollah would be a huge loss for Iran, both psychologically and strategically. Iran would lose its foothold in Lebanon. It would lose its major means to destabilize and inject itself into the heart of the Middle East.
The United States has gone far out on a limb to allow Israel to win and for all this to happen. It has counted on Israel’s ability to do the job. It has been disappointed.[48]
Two other US right-wingers, writing in the Israeli daily Haaretz, claimed that Israel had been “cautious” in Lebanon, allegedly “fearing that an overly aggressive military campaign will alienate world opinion.” However, they stress, “Israeli leaders ought to worry more about a different scenario, one in which American policymakers, analyzing the Israel Defense Forces’ failure to defeat Hezbollah after 30 days effort, lose their faith in Israel’s ability to “get the job done” on issues of shared strategic interest. Should the IDF lose its aura of invincibility in American eyes, Israel’s perceived value as an ally could decline sharply.” They warn that “the hard truth is that Israel must appear to be, and be, a winner in order to remain a valuable strategic partner for the United States.
Any conclusion of the current conflict on terms that leave Hezbollah unbowed would further undercut the West’s credibility, and would squander much of the deterrent effect of Israel’s past military successes from 1948 to the present.”[49]
Conclusion
These opinions lay out clearly the real basis of the US-Israel relationship. This is neither to argue for complete Israeli subservience, nor for Israeli innocence. Nor is this intended to downplay the destructive work that right-wing Zionist activists do carry out in western countries, particularly the US. Their campaigns of pressure and intimidation dishonestly harness issues such as the Holocaust and “anti-Semitism” in such a way as to apply maximum “moral” pressure: anyone daring to mildly criticize the most brazen Israeli violations of human rights are routinely cast as incurable Jew-haters. And precisely this kind of argument, that any criticism of Zionism is anti-Semitism, that a state on account of it being a “Jewish” one should have carte blanche to carry out any level of repression, encourages theories about Jews running the world, on which the more extreme, essentially anti-Semitic, forms of lobby theory are based.
However, even the more rational lobby theorists – while they should be defended against scurrilous and McCarthyite accusations of “anti-Semitism” – fall down in the end. It is simply irrational to believe that the most powerful imperialist state in history, which has used the most horrific displays of violence to maintain and extend its power – is likely to act against its own interests for many decades simply because of the pressures of a domestic lobby. Even if looking at the lobby’s activities as one factor, it is still necessary to explore what real imperialist interests are in relation to Israel. It is the imperialist interest in the maintenance of Israel that facilitates the extraordinary level of effectiveness of the lobby influencing policy further in this same direction.
While the last section above quoted US leaders stating that Israel may outlive its usefulness to the US if it cannot continue to demonstrate its military superiority in the region, it is unlikely that Israel will be cast aside by the US any time soon. However, if a socialist Israeli leadership were to seek a genuine peace with the Palestinians based on justice and equality, it may be precisely at that point that it would cease being of use to the US. As Norman Finklestein wrote, in what seems to be an appropriate conclusion:
Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann once asked a British official why the British continued to support Zionism despite Arab opposition: Didn’t it make more sense for them to keep Palestine but drop support for Zionism? “Although such an attitude may afford a temporary relief and may quiet Arabs for a short time,” the official replied, “it will certainly not settle the question as the Arabs don’t want the British in Palestine, and after having their way with the Jews, they would attack the British position, as the Moslems are doing in Mesopotamia, Egypt and India.” Another British official judged retrospectively that, however much Arab resentment it provoked, British support for Zionism was prudent policy, for it established in the midst of an “uncertain Arab world . . . a well-to-do educated, modern community, ultimately bound to be dependent on the British Empire.” Were it even possible the British had little interest in promoting real Jewish-Arab cooperation because it would inevitably lessen this dependence. Similarly the U.S. doesn’t want an Israel truly at peace with the Arabs, for such an Israel could loosen its bonds of dependence on the U.S., making it a less reliable proxy. This is one reason why the claim that Jewish elites are “pro”-Israel makes little sense. They are “pro” an Israel that is useful to the U.S. and therefore useful to them. What use would a Paul Wolfowitz have of an Israel living peacefully with its Arab neighbors and less willing to do the U.S.’s bidding?[50]
In this light, it is also interesting to note what Wolfowitz’s friends proposed to Netanyahu in the ‘Clean Break’ in 1996, apart from pushing for more Israeli aggression across the region and Israeli support for “missile defense.” In proposing to rip up “Labour Zionism” which had created a “shackled economy,” they demanded this be done “in a bold stroke rather than in increments, liberalizing its economy, cutting taxes, re-legislating a free-processing zone, and selling-off public lands and enterprises,” stressing that these moves “will electrify and find support from a broad bipartisan spectrum of key pro-Israeli Congressional leaders.” However, what this course has meant for Israeli workers is a 20 percent poverty rate and the very rapid development of a rich-poor divide as wide as only the US within the developed world – alongside permanent war and insecurity. A break with Zionism by Israeli workers, joining hands with the oppressed Palestinians, would be the decisive change necessary for them to confront their own exploiters. US imperialist leaders certainly do not want that – lobby or no lobby.
Links, No. 30,September-December 2006. Sydney: Links Publishing Association.
[1] ‘United States Aid to Israel: Funding the Occupation’, The Palestine Monitor, http://www.palestinemonitor.org/factsheet/US_Aid_to_Israel.htm
[2] Joseph Massad, ‘Blaming the Israeli lobby’, Znet, March 29, 2006, http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=107&ItemID=10010
[3] John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, ‘The Israeli Lobby’, London Review of Books, Volume 28, No. 6, March 23, 2005, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/mear01_.html.
[4] For example, as Stephen Zunes points out, “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 a nuclear weapons freeze and a 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,” Stephen Zunes, ‘The Israel Lobby: How Powerful is it Really?’, Foreign Policy in Focus, May 16, 2006, http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/3270
[5] Jeffrey Blankfort, ‘Damage Control: Noam Chomsky and the Israel-Palestine Conflict’, Dissident Voice, May 25, 2005, http://www.dissidentvoice.org/May05/Blankfort0525.htm
[6] Articles by Gabriel Ash include ‘The Israel Lobby and Chomsky’s Reply’, Dissident Voice, April 20, 2006, http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Apr06/Ash20.htm , News of Neoconservative Demise are Somewhat Premature, Dissident Voice, April 4 2006, http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Apr06/Ash04.htm, and ‘Why Oppose the Israel Lobby? Comments on Mearsheimer and Walt’, Dissident Voice, April 18, 2006,
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Apr06/Ash18.htm
[7] Noam Chomsky’s view is in ‘The Israel Lobby?’, Znet, March 28, 2006, http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=11&ItemID=9999
[8] Gabriel Ash, ‘The Israel Lobby and Chomsky’s Reply’, Dissident Voice, April 20, 2006, http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Apr06/Ash20.htm
[9] Gabriel Ash, ‘Why Oppose the Israel Lobby? Comments on Mearsheimer and Walt’, Dissident Voice, April 18, 2006, http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Apr06/Ash18.htm
[10] ibid.
[11] Massad, op cit.
[12] Quoted from M. Shahid Alam, ‘Two White Sisters in Asia: Israel and Australia’, Dissident Voice, November 10, 2006, http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Nov06/Alam10.htm
[13] This story is central to the thesis of Blankfort, op cit.
[14] Jean Bricmont, ‘How to deal with the lobby: The de-Zionisation of the American mind’, Counterpunch, August 12-13, 2006, http://www.counterpunch.org/bricmont08122006.html
[15] Zunes, op cit.
[16] ‘Should we blame the `Israel lobby’?’, Socialist Worker, http://www.socialistworker.org/2002-2/414/414_07_IsraelLobby.shtml.
[17] Israel’s GDP per capita in 2005 was $US25,000 (the same as Spain, and a little less than Italy), compared with Egypt ($3,900), Jordan ($4,700), Syria ($3,900), Lebanon ($6000), Iraq ($1,800), West Bank ($1,100) and Gaza ($600),CIA World Factbook, https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/index.html
[18] For a chart of these companies’ weapons supplies to Israel, see Josh Harkinson and Daniel Schulman, ‘Boom time in Beiruit’, Mother Jones, November-December 2006, http://www.mojones.com/news/outfront/2006/11/boom_time_in_beirut.html
[19] Zunes, op cit.
[20] Laura Goldman, ‘Israeli technology to keep US borders safe’, World War IV Report, October 15, 2006, http://ww4report.com/node/2743
[21] Jason A. Vest, ‘The Men From JINSA and CSP’, The Nation, September 2, 2002
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20020902/vest
[22] Leslie Wayne, ‘Foreign Sales by US Arms Makers Doubled in a Year’, New York Times,
November 11, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/11/business/11military.html
[23] ibid.
[24] Blankfort quoting Camille Mansour, Beyond Alliance: Israel and US Foreign Policy, Columbia University, New York, 1994, p. 103-104.
[25] Blankfort discusses this clash as an example of where the Israeli lobby allegedly rolled a US president who wanted a settlement. It is clear however that the settlement Ford wanted was also completely Zionist.
[26] Later, the PLO leadership would take to saying they accepted Resolution 242 – ie Israeli withdrawal – along with “all other UN resolutions on Palestine,” which thus included General Assembly Resolution 3236 (1974) on the right of Palestinians to self-determination and to set up their own state in these territories, and Resolution 194 (1948) on the right of return of Palestinian refugees to their homes in Israel from where they were driven in 1948.
[27] Here Blankfort sets up a straw dummy when criticizing Chomsky for calling the US “rejectionist” because “it has not called for the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. This enables him to ignore the US goal: getting Israel to withdraw to its pre-1967 borders as a way of improving regional US relations and the stability of it sources of oil.” Therefore, Blankfort concludes that the US really must be acting against its interests to satisfy the lobby, since it has never forced Israel to simply carry out 242 (withdrawal), regardless of it not supporting a Palestinian state. Yet we have to believe Blankfort that the US really wants to carry out 242, but has never pushed it because it bows to the lobby, rather than because it has no real interest in pushing even 242.
[28] George Bush, speech at the Middle East Peace Conference in Madrid, Spain, October 30, 1991, The American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/US-Israel/Bush_Peace.html. Another good description of how tepid was the Bush I initiative that lobby theorists have lionized is ‘What was the Madrid peace conference in 1991?’, http://www.endtheoccupation.org/article.php?id=204
[29] Daniel Levy, ‘Is It Good for the Jews?’, The American Prospect, May 7, 2006, http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=11647
[30] This act required the U.S. Embassy in Israel to move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, pushed by a number of AIPAC and Republican leaders, and moved by Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole at the 1995 AIPAC Annual Conference
[31] The Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies’ ‘Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000’, A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, 1996, http://www.iasps.org/strat1.htm
[32] Jewish neoconservatives include Perle, Feith, Wolfowitz, Irving and William Kristoll, I. Lewis Libby, Robert Kagan, David Wurmser and Charles Krauthammer. Non-Jewish neocons include US vice-resident Dick Cheney, Defence secretary Rumsfeld, John Bolton, Stephen Cambone, Zalmay Khalilzad, R. James Woolsey, and Frank Gaffney, not to mention Rupert Murdoch.
[33] It was widely reported that Netanyahu rejected the strategy as too extreme, see for example, John F. Mahoney, ‘Timeline for war’, The Link, Vol. 37, Issue 4, September-October 2004, http://www.ameu.org/page.asp?iid=258&aid=434&pg=1
[34] The Pentagon, Defence Planning Guidance for the Fiscal years 1994-99, March 7, 1992, in New York Times, March 8, 1992.
[35] Cóilín Nunan, ‘Petrodollar or petroeuro? A new source of global conflict’, http://www.feasta.org/documents/review2/nunan.htm
[36] Throughout most of the 20th century, Britain remained the dominant imperialist power in the Irish economy, though this has since changed with Irish membership of the EU. The rise of the Irish struggle from the late 1960s onwards also contributed towards that change, and this demonstrates the importance of the Palestinian struggle in upping the price the US has to pay for its support for Israel. In a similar case, in the first half of the 1990s, a newly emergent imperialist Greek state embargoed the newly independent (former Yugoslav) Republic of Macedonia, making absurd demands on Macedonia to change its name as its name was allegedly an ancient Greek copyright. Many critics argued about how such obscurantism could help Greek capital invest there. Wouldn’t it aid Greece’s competitors? Yet since ending the embargo in 1995, Greek capital has been the dominant foreign capital in Macedonia.
[37] Kenneth Bandler, ‘American Jewish Support for Israel Increases Dramatically’, Science Blog, August 6, 2002, http://www.scienceblog.com/community/older/archives/K/5/pub5096.html
[38] Daniel Levy, op cit.
[39] US House of Representatives National Exit Poll, CNN, 2006, http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2006/pages/results/states/US/H/00/epolls.0.html
[40] David J. Silverman, ‘Lieberman’s Support for Iraq War Creates Dilemma for Jewish Backers’, Combined Jewish Philanthropies, July 5, 2006, http://www.cjp.org/content_display.html?ArticleID=187442 . The different claims of Jewish support for Lamont probably reflect the difficulties in determining who is a Jew.
[41] ‘US presses Israel to halt Venezuelan plane upgrade’, Haaretz, October 20, 2005, http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/spages/636557.html
[42] Gabriel Ash, News of Neoconservative Demise are Somewhat Premature, Dissident Voice, April 4 2006, http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Apr06/Ash04.htm. In choosing the Israeli stock exchange as a measure of the gains of the US ‘Israel lobby’, Ash explains that “the financial relations the Lobby is enmeshed in are more complicated and are not transparently tracked by commonly available financial data. Nevertheless, the U.S. Israel Lobby usually defines its policy goals in deference to the wishes of the ruling class of Israel. We can therefore ask how the latter group has fared.”
[43] Greg Palast, ‘Was the Invasion of Iraq A Jewish Conspiracy?’, Tikkun Magazine, July/August 2006, http://www.gregpalast.com/was-the-invasion-of-iraq-a-jewish-conspiracy. If nothing else is read on the subject, Palast’s article should be.
[44] Leslie Wayne, ‘Foreign Sales by US Arms Makers Doubled in a Year’, New York Times,
November 11, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/11/business/11military.html
[45] ‘Washington Expected an IDF Grand Slam to Dispose of Hizballah’, DEBKAfile Special Report, July 23, 2006,
http://www.debka.com/article.php?aid=1188
[46] Robert Parry, ‘Israeli Leaders Fault Bush on War’, August 13, 2006, http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/081206.html
[47] ibid; Also, Tom Regan, ‘US neocons hoped Israel would attack Syria’, Christian Science Monitor, http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0809/dailyUpdate.html
[48] Charles Krauthammer, ‘Israel’s Lost Moment’, Washington Post, Friday, August 4, 2006, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/03/AR2006080301258.html
[49] David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey, ‘Israel must win’, Haaretz, 13 August, 2006, http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/749293.html. Articles with similar messages included Ralph Peters, ‘Hezbollah 3, Israel 0’, New York Post, http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/hezbollah_3__israel_0_opedcolumnists_ralph_peters.htm, who argues that Israel’s shambolic performance was because “Israel tried to fight humanely” but “You can’t win if you won’t fight,” ie, Israel needed to do much more killing, but “The IDF’s been living on fumes since 1967. Hezbollah cleared the air.” And Gary Pickholz, ‘Uncle Sam to Olmert Drop Dead’, Haaretz, http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ArticleContent.jhtml?itemNo=753074, which warned that Israeli failure could mean that “Israel is the new Taiwan –a poor military ally, incapable of fulfilling its regional role irrespective of a bottomless credit, no longer worth the significant investment.”
[50] Norman G. Finkelstein, ‘The Lobby: It’s Not Either-Or’, Monthly Review Zine, http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/finkelstein010506.html
Their Anti-imperialism and Ours 
