The Israel LobbyJohn Mearsheimer and Stephen WaltFor the past several decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967,
the centrepiece of US Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with
Israel. The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort
to spread democracy throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic
opinion and jeopardised not only US security but that of much of the rest of the
world. This situation has no equal in American political history. Why has the US
been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in
order to advance the interests of another state? One might assume that the bond
between the two countries was based on shared strategic interests or compelling
moral imperatives, but neither explanation can account for the remarkable level
of material and diplomatic support that the US provides.
Instead, the thrust of US policy in the region derives almost entirely from
domestic politics, and especially the activities of the Israel Lobby. Other
special-interest groups have managed to skew foreign policy, but no lobby has
managed to divert it as far from what the national interest would suggest, while
simultaneously convincing Americans that US interests and those of the other
country in this case, Israel are essentially identical.
Since the October War in 1973, Washington has provided Israel with a level
of support dwarfing that given to any other state. It has been the largest
annual recipient of direct economic and military assistance since 1976, and is
the largest recipient in total since World War Two, to the tune of well over
$140 billion (in 2004 dollars). Israel receives about $3 billion in direct
assistance each year, roughly one-fifth of the foreign aid budget, and worth
about $500 a year for every Israeli. This largesse is especially striking since
Israel is now a wealthy industrial state with a per capita income roughly equal
to that of South Korea or Spain.
Other recipients get their money in quarterly installments, but Israel
receives its entire appropriation at the beginning of each fiscal year and can
thus earn interest on it. Most recipients of aid given for military purposes are
required to spend all of it in the US, but Israel is allowed to use roughly 25
per cent of its allocation to subsidise its own defence industry. It is the only
recipient that does not have to account for how the aid is spent, which makes it
virtually impossible to prevent the money from being used for purposes the US
opposes, such as building settlements on the West Bank. Moreover, the US has
provided Israel with nearly $3 billion to develop weapons systems, and given it
access to such top-drawer weaponry as Blackhawk helicopters and F-16 jets.
Finally, the US gives Israel access to intelligence it denies to its Nato allies
and has turned a blind eye to Israels acquisition of nuclear weapons.
Washington also provides Israel with consistent diplomatic support. Since
1982, the US has vetoed 32 Security Council resolutions critical of Israel, more
than the total number of vetoes cast by all the other Security Council members.
It blocks the efforts of Arab states to put Israels nuclear arsenal on the
IAEAs agenda. The US comes to the rescue in wartime and takes Israels side
when negotiating peace. The Nixon administration protected it from the threat of
Soviet intervention and resupplied it during the October War. Washington was
deeply involved in the negotiations that ended that war, as well as in the
lengthy step-by-step process that followed, just as it played a key role in
the negotiations that preceded and followed the 1993 Oslo Accords. In each case
there was occasional friction between US and Israeli officials, but the US
consistently supported the Israeli position. One American participant at Camp
David in 2000 later said: Far too often, we functioned . . . as
Israels lawyer. Finally, the Bush administrations ambition to transform the
Middle East is at least partly aimed at improving Israels strategic
situation.
This extraordinary generosity might be understandable if Israel were a
vital strategic asset or if there were a compelling moral case for US backing.
But neither explanation is convincing. One might argue that Israel was an asset
during the Cold War. By serving as Americas proxy after 1967, it helped contain
Soviet expansion in the region and inflicted humiliating defeats on Soviet
clients like Egypt and Syria. It occasionally helped protect other US allies
(like King Hussein of Jordan) and its military prowess forced Moscow to spend
more on backing its own client states. It also provided useful intelligence
about Soviet capabilities.
Backing Israel was not cheap, however, and it complicated Americas
relations with the Arab world. For example, the decision to give $2.2 billion in
emergency military aid during the October War triggered an Opec oil embargo that
inflicted considerable damage on Western economies. For all that, Israels armed
forces were not in a position to protect US interests in the region. The US
could not, for example, rely on Israel when the Iranian Revolution in 1979
raised concerns about the security of oil supplies, and had to create its own
Rapid Deployment Force instead.
The first Gulf War revealed the extent to which Israel was becoming a
strategic burden. The US could not use Israeli bases without rupturing the
anti-Iraq coalition, and had to divert resources (e.g. Patriot missile
batteries) to prevent Tel Aviv doing anything that might harm the alliance
against Saddam Hussein. History repeated itself in 2003: although Israel was
eager for the US to attack Iraq, Bush could not ask it to help without
triggering Arab opposition. So Israel stayed on the sidelines once again.
Beginning in the 1990s, and even more after 9/11, US support has been
justified by the claim that both states are threatened by terrorist groups
originating in the Arab and Muslim world, and by rogue states that back these
groups and seek weapons of mass destruction. This is taken to mean not only that
Washington should give Israel a free hand in dealing with the Palestinians and
not press it to make concessions until all Palestinian terrorists are imprisoned
or dead, but that the US should go after countries like Iran and Syria. Israel
is thus seen as a crucial ally in the war on terror, because its enemies are
Americas enemies. In fact, Israel is a liability in the war on terror and the
broader effort to deal with rogue states.
Terrorism is not a single adversary, but a tactic employed by a wide
array of political groups. The terrorist organisations that threaten Israel do
not threaten the United States, except when it intervenes against them (as in
Lebanon in 1982). Moreover, Palestinian terrorism is not random violence
directed against Israel or the West; it is largely a response to Israels
prolonged campaign to colonise the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
More important, saying that Israel and the US are united by a shared
terrorist threat has the causal relationship backwards: the US has a terrorism
problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel, not the other
way around. Support for Israel is not the only source of anti-American
terrorism, but it is an important one, and it makes winning the war on terror
more difficult. There is no question that many al-Qaida leaders, including Osama
bin Laden, are motivated by Israels presence in Jerusalem and the plight of the
Palestinians. Unconditional support for Israel makes it easier for extremists to
rally popular support and to attract recruits.
As for so-called rogue states in the Middle East, they are not a dire
threat to vital US interests, except inasmuch as they are a threat to Israel.
Even if these states acquire nuclear weapons which is obviously undesirable
neither America nor Israel could be blackmailed, because the blackmailer could
not carry out the threat without suffering overwhelming retaliation. The danger
of a nuclear handover to terrorists is equally remote, because a rogue state
could not be sure the transfer would go undetected or that it would not be
blamed and punished afterwards. The relationship with Israel actually makes it
harder for the US to deal with these states. Israels nuclear arsenal is one
reason some of its neighbours want nuclear weapons, and threatening them with
regime change merely increases that desire.
A final reason to question Israels strategic value is that it does not
behave like a loyal ally. Israeli officials frequently ignore US requests and
renege on promises (including pledges to stop building settlements and to
refrain from targeted assassinations of Palestinian leaders). Israel has
provided sensitive military technology to potential rivals like China, in what
the State Department inspector-general called a systematic and growing pattern
of unauthorised transfers. According to the General Accounting Office, Israel
also conducts the most aggressive espionage operations against the US of any
ally. In addition to the case of Jonathan Pollard, who gave Israel large
quantities of classified material in the early 1980s (which it reportedly passed
on to the Soviet Union in return for more exit visas for Soviet Jews), a new
controversy erupted in 2004 when it was revealed that a key Pentagon official
called Larry Franklin had passed classified information to an Israeli diplomat.
Israel is hardly the only country that spies on the US, but its willingness to
spy on its principal patron casts further doubt on its strategic value.
Israels strategic value isnt the only issue. Its backers also argue that
it deserves unqualified support because it is weak and surrounded by enemies; it
is a democracy; the Jewish people have suffered from past crimes and therefore
deserve special treatment; and Israels conduct has been morally superior to
that of its adversaries. On close inspection, none of these arguments is
persuasive. There is a strong moral case for supporting Israels existence, but
that is not in jeopardy. Viewed objectively, its past and present conduct offers
no moral basis for privileging it over the Palestinians.
Israel is often portrayed as David confronted by Goliath, but the converse
is closer to the truth. Contrary to popular belief, the Zionists had larger,
better equipped and better led forces during the 1947-49 War of Independence,
and the Israel Defence Forces won quick and easy victories against Egypt in 1956
and against Egypt, Jordan and Syria in 1967 all of this before large-scale US
aid began flowing. Today, Israel is the strongest military power in the Middle
East. Its conventional forces are far superior to those of its neighbours and it
is the only state in the region with nuclear weapons. Egypt and Jordan have
signed peace treaties with it, and Saudi Arabia has offered to do so. Syria has
lost its Soviet patron, Iraq has been devastated by three disastrous wars and
Iran is hundreds of miles away. The Palestinians barely have an effective police
force, let alone an army that could pose a threat to Israel. According to a 2005
assessment by Tel Aviv Universitys Jaffee Centre for Strategic Studies, the
strategic balance decidedly favours Israel, which has continued to widen the
qualitative gap between its own military capability and deterrence powers and
those of its neighbours. If backing the underdog were a compelling motive, the
United States would be supporting Israels opponents.
That Israel is a fellow democracy surrounded by hostile dictatorships
cannot account for the current level of aid: there are many democracies around
the world, but none receives the same lavish support. The US has overthrown
democratic governments in the past and supported dictators when this was thought
to advance its interests it has good relations with a number of dictatorships
today.
Some aspects of Israeli democracy are at odds with core American values.
Unlike the US, where people are supposed to enjoy equal rights irrespective of
race, religion or ethnicity, Israel was explicitly founded as a Jewish state and
citizenship is based on the principle of blood kinship. Given this, it is not
surprising that its 1.3 million Arabs are treated as second-class citizens, or
that a recent Israeli government commission found that Israel behaves in a
neglectful and discriminatory manner towards them. Its democratic status is
also undermined by its refusal to grant the Palestinians a viable state of their
own or full political rights.
A third justification is the history of Jewish suffering in the Christian
West, especially during the Holocaust. Because Jews were persecuted for
centuries and could feel safe only in a Jewish homeland, many people now believe
that Israel deserves special treatment from the United States. The countrys
creation was undoubtedly an appropriate response to the long record of crimes
against Jews, but it also brought about fresh crimes against a largely innocent
third party: the Palestinians.
This was well understood by Israels early leaders. David Ben-Gurion told
Nahum Goldmann, the president of the World Jewish Congress:
Since then, Israeli leaders have repeatedly sought to deny the
Palestinians national ambitions. When she was prime minister, Golda Meir
famously remarked that there is no such thing as a Palestinian. Pressure from
extremist violence and Palestinian population growth has forced subsequent
Israeli leaders to disengage from the Gaza Strip and consider other territorial
compromises, but not even Yitzhak Rabin was willing to offer the Palestinians a
viable state. Ehud Baraks purportedly generous offer at Camp David would have
given them only a disarmed set of Bantustans under de facto Israeli control. The
tragic history of the Jewish people does not obligate the US to help Israel
today no matter what it does.
Israels backers also portray it as a country that has sought peace at
every turn and shown great restraint even when provoked. The Arabs, by contrast,
are said to have acted with great wickedness. Yet on the ground, Israels record
is not distinguishable from that of its opponents. Ben-Gurion acknowledged that
the early Zionists were far from benevolent towards the Palestinian Arabs, who
resisted their encroachments which is hardly surprising, given that the
Zionists were trying to create their own state on Arab land. In the same way,
the creation of Israel in 1947-48 involved acts of ethnic cleansing, including
executions, massacres and rapes by Jews, and Israels subsequent conduct has
often been brutal, belying any claim to moral superiority. Between 1949 and
1956, for example, Israeli security forces killed between 2700 and 5000 Arab
infiltrators, the overwhelming majority of them unarmed. The IDF murdered
hundreds of Egyptian prisoners of war in both the 1956 and 1967 wars, while in
1967, it expelled between 100,000 and 260,000 Palestinians from the newly
conquered West Bank, and drove 80,000 Syrians from the Golan Heights.
During the first intifada, the IDF distributed truncheons to its troops and
encouraged them to break the bones of Palestinian protesters. The Swedish branch
of Save the Children estimated that 23,600 to 29,900 children required medical
treatment for their beating injuries in the first two years of the intifada.
Nearly a third of them were aged ten or under. The response to the second
intifada has been even more violent, leading Haaretz to declare that
the IDF . . . is turning into a killing machine whose efficiency is
awe-inspiring, yet shocking. The IDF fired one million bullets in the first
days of the uprising. Since then, for every Israeli lost, Israel has killed 3.4
Palestinians, the majority of whom have been innocent bystanders; the ratio of
Palestinian to Israeli children killed is even higher (5.7:1). It is also worth
bearing in mind that the Zionists relied on terrorist bombs to drive the British
from Palestine, and that Yitzhak Shamir, once a terrorist and later prime
minister, declared that neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can
disqualify terrorism as a means of combat.
The Palestinian resort to terrorism is wrong but it isnt surprising. The
Palestinians believe they have no other way to force Israeli concessions. As
Ehud Barak once admitted, had he been born a Palestinian, he would have joined
a terrorist organisation.
So if neither strategic nor moral arguments can account for Americas
support for Israel, how are we to explain
it? Islahonline -------------------------------------------------------------------------- All views expressed herein belong to the individuals concerned and do not in any way reflect the official views of Hidayahnet unless sanctioned or approved otherwise. If your mailbox clogged with mails from Hidayahnet, you may wish to get a daily digest of emails by logging-on to http://www.yahoogroups.com to change your mail delivery settings or email the moderators at [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the title "change to daily digest". -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Recommended sites: Angkatan Belia Islam Malaysia : http://www.abim.org.my Jamaah Islah Malaysia : http://www.jim.org.my Radio Islam Kuliyyah : http://www.kuliyyah.com Palestinkini Info : http://www.palestinkini.info Partai Keadilan Sejahtera : http://pk-sejahtera.org The Muslim Brotherhood : http://ikhwanweb.com YAHOO! GROUPS LINKS
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