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The Israel lobby
Prospect Magazine, Britain, Issue 73, April 2002 www.prospect-magazine.co.uk
America's unconditional support for Israel runs counter to the interests of the US and its allies. We need an open, unprejudiced debate about it....
...The debate that is missing in the US is not one between Americans who want Israel to survive and those-a marginal minority-who want Israel to be destroyed. The US should support Israel's right to exist within internationally-recognised borders and to defend itself against threats. What is needed is a debate between those who want to link US support for Israel to Israeli behaviour, in the light of America's own strategic goals and moral ideals, and those who want there to be no linkage. For the American Israel lobby, Tony Smith observes in his authoritative study, Foreign Attachments: The Power of Ethnic Groups in the Making of American Foreign Policy (Harvard), "to be a 'friend of Israel' or 'pro-Israel' apparently means something quite simple: that Israel alone should decide the terms of its relations with its Arab neighbours and that the US should endorse these terms, whatever they may be."
The Israel lobby is one special-interest pressure group among many. It is a loose network of individuals and organisations, of which the most important are the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)-described by the Detroit Jewish News as "a veritable training camp for Capitol Hill staffers"-and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organisations. The Israel lobby is not identical with the diverse Jewish-American community. Many Jewish-Americans are troubled by Israeli policies and some actively campaign against them, while some non-Jewish Americans-most of them members of the Protestant right-play a significant role in the lobby. Even pro-Israel groups differ on the question of Israeli policies. According to Matthew Dorf in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency: "The Zionist Organisation of America lobbies Congress to slow the peace process. Their allies are mostly Republicans. At the same time, the Israel Policy Forum and Americans for Peace Now work to move the process along. Democrats are most sympathetic to their calls."
The Israel lobby is united not by a consensus about Israeli policies but by a consensus about US policies towards Israel. Most of the disparate elements of the pro-Israel coalition support two things. The first is massive US funding for Israel. As Stephen M Walt writes in International Security (Winter 2001/02), "In 1967 Israel's defence spending was less than half the combined defence expenditures of Egypt, Iraq, Jordan and Syria; today Israel's defence expenditure is 30 per cent larger than the combined defence spending of these four Arab states." Israel receives more of America's foreign aid budget than any other country-$3 billion a year, two thirds in military grants (total aid since 1979 is over $70 billion)....
...It is difficult to prove direct cause-and-effect connections between the power of a lobby and America's foreign policy positions. But, in the middle east, it is hard to explain America's failure to pressure Israel into a final land-for-peace settlement-particularly since the Oslo deal in 1993-without factoring in the Israel lobby. The influence of the lobby may be easier to detect in the way US positions have shifted on more specific totems of the conflict. For example, Israeli settlements in the occupied territories were regarded as illegal during the Carter administration. Under Reagan, they shifted to being an "obstacle" to peace and are now just a complicating factor. Similarly, East Jerusalem was considered by the US to be part of the occupied territories but recently its status has become rather more ambiguous......
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the pro-israel lobby may be compared to the anti-castro lobby, in the sense that they are both blowbacks from us policy during the cold war: both have outlived their peak of usefulness to us imperialism, both may be sometimes regarded as 'obstacles' and 'embarrassments' by some washington insiders today, but they have lives of their own....
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