Study Decrying "Israel Lobby" Marred by Numerous Errors Alex Safian, March 20, 2006
http://www.camera.org/index.aspx_context==7&x_issue=5&x_article=99 A new study by Harvard professor Stephen Walt and University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer charges that the "Israel lobby" has distorted the foreign policy of the United States to the point of serious damage to U.S. interests. Perhaps anticipating that their claims might be controversial, the authors attempt to reassure any who might doubt them: Some readers will find this analysis disturbing, but the facts recounted here are not in serious dispute among scholars. In fact, even a cursory examination of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy reveals that it is riddled with errors of fact, logic and omission, has inaccurate citations, displays extremely poor judgement regarding sources, and, contrary to basic scholarly standards, ignores previous serious work on the subject. The bottom line: virtually every word and argument is, or ought to be, in "serious dispute." In other words, a student who submitted such a paper would flunk. According to the report, which is posted on Harvard's Kennedy School of Government website: The U.S. national interest should be the primary object of American foreign policy. For the past several decades, however, and especially since the Six Day War in 1967, the centerpiece of U.S. Middle East policy has been its relationship with Israel. The combination of unwavering U.S. support for Israel and the related effort to spread democracy throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardized U.S. security. This situation has no equal in American political history. Why has the United States been willing to set aside its own security in order to advance the interests of another state? One might assume that the bond between the two countries is based on shared strategic interests or compelling moral imperatives. As we show below, however, neither of those explanations can account for the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the United States provides to Israel. Instead, the overall thrust of U.S. policy in the region is due almost entirely to U.S. domestic politics, and especially to the activities of the "Israel Lobby." Other special interest groups have managed to skew U.S. foreign policy in directions they favored, but no lobby has managed to divert U.S. foreign policy as far from what the American national interest would otherwise suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that U.S. and Israeli interests are essentially identical. Why does America support Israel? Is it true that U.S. policy in the Middle East, and specifically our support for Israel, is due almost entirely to the activities of the "Israel Lobby?" The authors are hardly the first to so argue, though one wouldn't know it from reading their report, which, as noted, ignores all prior serious work on the subject, including the seminal book refuting such claims, the late Professor A.F.K. Organski's The $36 Billion Bargain: Strategy and Politics in U.S. Assistance to Israel. Though the authors do cite Organski's book once, on the strategic importance of Israel during the cold war, they entirely ignore his main point, which is that the primary reason for U.S. support of Israel can't possibly be the Jewish vote, or Jewish political contributions, or the activities of any pro-Israel lobby, for the simple reason that, as polls indicate, Jews were just as pro-Israel before 1970, when U.S. support for Israel was minimal, as they were after 1970, when U.S. support for Israel grew rapidly. As Organski put it in his preface: In 1983 I ran across a Congressional Research Service series on assistance to Israel from 1948 to 1983, and I was surprised by what I saw. The numbers told an important story. Assistance to Israel before 1970 had been very low. After 1972 levels shot up. The data fairly screamed that American Jews could not have been responsible for U.S. policy, for it is elementary that one cannot explain a variable with a constant, and American Jews had been in favor of assistance all along... Now, the president in 1970 was Richard Nixon, a Republican who knew very well that overwhelmingly Democratic and left-leaning American Jews had already voted against him in large numbers and would do so again in 1972. So what happened in 1970 that convinced Nixon, the arch practitioner of realpolitik, to press for increased support for Israel? Here we can turn to another seminal work on U.S./Israel relations, Israel: The Embattled Ally, by the late Harvard professor, Nadav Safran. According to Safran the turning point in U.S./Israel relations was the so-called Black September crisis, in which the Palestine Liberation Organization, assisted by invading Syrian tanks, and in connivance with the Soviet Union, attempted to overthrow and assassinate Jordan's King Hussein, an ally of the United States (see pages 451-456). Had these two Soviet clients succeeded in taking Jordan, they would have created an arc of radical Soviet client states pointing right at the Persian Gulf, thereby threatening western oil supplies. As Safran put it: In the White House conception, Jordan under King Hussein ... constituted an important buffer separating the pro-Soviet radical regime of Egypt from those of Syria and Iraq, and all three of them from oil-rich, friendly Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf principalities. The fall of the Jordanian regime would bring about a solid pro-Soviet bloc from the Euphrates to the Nile ... Safran continued: ... [when] the Syrians captured Irbid, an important junction of roads linking Jordan, Syria, Iraq and Israel ... King Hussein sent additional urgent appeals for American and British help. Consultations with the British ... revealed that they not only refused to intervene militarily ... but [also] strongly counseled against American intervention. Similar opposition was expressed by other European allies. The President ordered Kissinger to work out contingency plans for a joint American-Israeli intervention ... Confident of American and Israeli support, King Hussein was able to commit all his forces to battle; fearful of that support, specifically of a flanking attack by massed Israeli tank columns, the Syrians withdrew, and Jordan was saved. According to Safran this affair had a profound effect on U.S/Israel relations: The Jordanian episode had a far-reaching effect on the American attitude toward Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict... the President ... was deeply impressed by the determination shown by the Israelis at a time when America's formal allies had quit on him. ... the Jordanian episode drove home to the President and some of his advisers ... the value for the United States of a strong Israel. (emphasis added) Needless to say, Safran's work was also ignored by the authors. Has support for Israel damaged U.S. interests, or caused terrorists to target us? Of course, the authors don't just argue that U.S. support for Israel was due to the pro-Israel lobby rather than U.S. interests, they also argue that this support has in fact damaged U.S. interests. They claim for example, that because of its support for Israel the U.S. is targeted by terrorists: ... the United States has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel, not the other way around. U.S. 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, for example, that many al Qaeda leaders, including bin Laden, are motivated by Israel's presence in Jerusalem and the plight of the Palestinians. According to the U.S. 9/11 Commission, bin Laden explicitly sought to punish the United States for its policies in the Middle East, including its support for Israel, and he even tried to time the attacks to highlight this issue. While the 9/11 Commission report did mention Israel as a factor in the attacks, there is much evidence to argue against the assertion, and they certainly did not point to Israel as the major factor in provoking the attacks. Indeed, according to documents cited by experts on Al Qaeda, such as Rohan Gunaratna, the group attacked the United States on 9/11 (and before) not primarily because of our support for Israel, but because of our support for Saudi Arabia and other "moderate" Arab countries. As Gunaratna explains in his book Inside Al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror, after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and threatened Saudi Arabia, bin Laden was horrified that the Saudis were considering a U.S. offer to send troops to protect the Kingdom. Bin Laden urged against what he saw as sacrilege, and offered to protect the Kingdom with his Afghan mujahidin, but the Saudis turned him down and invited in the Americans. For inviting in the infidels, the Saudi rulers would never be forgiven by bin Laden. Gunaratna quoted from bin Laden's key fatwa on the subject: Ignoring the divine shariah law; depriving people of their legitimate rights; allowing the Americans to occupy the land of the two Holy Places [Mecca and Medina] ... the regime has torn off its legitimacy... Clearly after belief (iman) there is no more important duty than pushing the Americans out of the holy land [Arabia]... There is no precondition for this duty and the enemy must be fought with one's best abilities. Al Qaeda's aim is to restore the caliphate (the unitary Arab Islamic state that existed in the days of Muhammed and his followers), but they understand that as long as the United States props up Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait and Egypt and Jordan, with weapons and soldiers and financial support, and the promise of military intervention if necessary, these regimes are unlikely to fall. A key example of such regime resilience was seen in Egypt after the assassination of Sadat in 1981 by radical Islamists, who thought that with the leader gone the regime would fall. Instead the regime survived and launched a brutal crackdown, decimating Egypt's Islamist movement. Among those imprisoned, but eventually released, was a young man named Ayman al- Zawahiri, who later rose to become Osama bin Laden's deputy and the operational leader of Al Qaeda. The lesson learned by Islamist leaders from the Sadat assassination was clear with a powerful U.S. active and engaged in the Middle East, the supported regimes would not fall. There would be no caliphate, therefore, until the U.S. is humiliated and driven from the Middle East, at which point the corrupt regimes will crumble into the waiting hands of Al Qaeda. Thus the earlier Al Qaeda attacks against the Unites States, in Saudi Arabia, in Kenya and Tanzania, in Yemen, and finally on the U.S. homeland on 9/11. These attacks had nothing to do with Israel and everything to do with U.S. support for Arab regimes. It should be noted also that Al Qaeda never even tried to attack an Israeli target, much less Israel itself, until after 9/11. Rest of the article can be read at: http://www.camera.org/index.aspx_context==7&x_issue=5&x_article=99 -- This is ZESTGlobal. Post articles on international affairs to [email protected] If you got this mail as a forward, subscribe to ZESTGlobal by sending a blank mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] OR, if you have a Yahoo! ID, by visiting http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTGlobal/join/ Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTGlobal/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
