On 2010-08-10, at 9:35 PM, Michael Smith wrote:
> The thought experiment is, what would American foreign policy
> look like if there were no Israel lobby? For one thing, there
> very likely wouldn't be an Israel.
Arguably so. There may very well have been no partition of Palestine and subsequent UN recognition of the new Israeli state if the Truman administration had opposed it. Your assertion presumes that the administration was opposed to the creation of Israel but capitulated under pressure from the organized Zionist lobby and ended up acting against US interests - the same logic that animates Lobby conspiracists today.
My own view, which is far more widely shared, is is that the Truman administration well understood how what its responsibiities were, and debated and designed US policy with a view to advancing the interests of US capitalism. Its policies in Palestine and elsewhere were shaped at the time by the postwar collapse of the British and French empires and the rise of third world nationalist movements supported by the Soviet Union which threatened unfettered Western control of colonial and semi-colonial markets and resources, most notably the oil reserves of the Mideast. The Zionist social democratic leadership in Palestine was able to offer itself to the West as the custodian of its values and interests in the region, and has since then proved an invaluable ally crushing and containing left-nationalist and Islamist regimes and movements hostile to Western imperialism. The Truman administration then and subsequent Republican and Democratic administrations since have not needed a Zionist lobby to interpret their Mideast interests for them, much less have they cowered before one assumed to be so powerful that it has bent these administrations to its will. Such disagreements as have emerged between and within the two parties have not turned on its strategic support of Israel, but on how that support can be reconciled with America's wider regional and global interests, disputes which are essentially tactical in nature. The Israel lobby is real and has intervened in these disputes, but not decisively as M-W and their followers on this list sincerely but mistakenly claim.
Or do have evidence, Michael, of which we're unaware, that there would be no Israel but for the Israel lobby in 1948? Who comprised it? What was the nature of the (presumed) conflict between it and the Truman administration regarding the formation of Israel? How did it compel the Truman administration to support partition and statehood?
> Would there have been an Iraq
> war? Hard to say, but it seems pretty clear that the Israel lobby
> formed a significant and influential part of the war constituency.
One factor certainly was the joint US-Israel motive to rid the region of the rejectionist Saddam regime in order to pave the way for an Israeli-imposed "peace settlement" on a Palestinian population considered certain to to be demoralized at the loss of its most important state patron. But wider factors equally prompted the invasion. The most widely cited was to gain control of Iraq's rich and largely untapped oil reserves hitherto closed to US oil firms, as well as a strategic military astride the oil-rich Middle East and Central Asian regions. Another was to demonstrate the overwhelming ("shock and awe") capabilities of Rumsfeld's New Model Army to intimidate the Iranians, Libyans, North Koreans, Cubans, etc. and force them into compliance with US objectives or face similar punishment.
The Jewish American neocons supported these policies, but so did their non-Jewish counterparts, and why is it so easily assumed that the former supported these policies because their primary allegiance was to Israel rather than the United States, whose culture they shared and where they had risen to prominence? If they didn't distinguish between the two, it was not because they had a hidden Israeli agenda but because US and Israeli interests, despite any tactical disagreements, are convergent.
> An analogous question is, what would US policy toward Cuba be if
> there were no gusanos in Florida?
There would be a blockade of Cuba and a history of subversion and armed intervention against it in order to contain the spread of its revolutionary anticapitalist model to Latin America. The gusanos, like the Israel lobby, fiercely encourage US policy, but they did not originate and do not control it. It flows out of the structure and imperatives of US capitalism.
> All hypothetical, of course, but to the extent that they make
> us look back at the record, and weigh the various causes as best
> we can, such questions may be enlightening.
Or profoundly misleading...