Radical left publication Tikkun, a heavy critic of Israel and America, prints a review by Stephen Zunes that finds “The Israel Lobby” to be complete garbage.
Zunes’ argument is that America’s policies are so reprehensible in total that blaming the Israel Lobby alone absolves the US for its supposed awful foreign policy. So this is an argument that US policy is uniformly awful and not only in the Middle East, which proves that the “Lobby” has nothing to do with it:
The overbearing power and McCarthyite tactics wielded by the American Jewish establishment against critics of Israeli government policies—particularly against prominent Jewish progressives like Michael Lerner—has made critical discourse about U.S. support for the Israeli government extremely difficult. As a result, it is all too easy to buy into the arguments put forward by John Mearsheimer and Steve Walt in their newly-released book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007) that the ‘Israel Lobby’ is primarily responsible for the tragic course taken in U.S. Middle East policy. The Tikkun Community has recently sponsored a series of public events with the authors, and Rabbi Lerner wrote a lengthy piece in the September/October issue of this magazine largely defending their perspective.
As a political scientist and international relations scholar specializing in the United States’ role in the Middle East, I must disagree. I am in no way denying that the Israel Lobby can be quite influential, particularly on Capitol Hill and in its role in limiting the broader public debate. However, it would be naÃve to assume that U.S. policy in the Middle East would be significantly different without AIPAC and like–minded pro–Zionist organizations…
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Any serious review of U.S. foreign policy in virtually any corner of the globe demonstrates how the United States props up dictatorships, imposes blatant double-standards regarding human rights and international law, supports foreign military occupations (witness East Timor and Western Sahara), undermines the authority of the United Nations, pushes for military solutions to political problems, transfers massive quantities of armaments, imposes draconian austerity programs on debt–ridden countries through international financial institutions, and periodically imposes sanctions, bombs, stages coups, and invades countries that don’t accept U.S. hegemony. If U.S. policy toward the Middle East was fundamentally different than it is toward the rest of the world, Mearsheimer and Walt would have every right to look for some other sinister force leading the United States astray from its otherwise benign foreign policy agenda. Unfortunately, however, U.S. policy toward the Middle East is remarkably similarly to U.S. foreign policy elsewhere in the world.
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In 2006, ‘pro–Israel’ PACs and individuals are estimated to have contributed more than $9 million to party coffers and congressional campaigns. While that is a significant amount, it ranks significantly below that of PACs and individuals supporting the interests of lawyers ($58 million), retirees ($36 million), real estate interests ($33 million), health professionals ($32 million), securities and investment interests ($29 million), the insurance industry ($21 million), commercial banks ($16 million), the pharmaceutical industry ($14 million), the defense industry ($13 million), electrical utilities ($12 million), the oil and gas industry ($11 million), and the computer industry ($10 million), among others. If campaign contributions had such a direct impact on policy as Walt and Mearsheimer claim, Congress should therefore have a strong and consistent pro-labor agenda since contributions given in support of unions representing public sector workers, the building trades, and transportation workers each were significantly higher than the total contributions given in support for the Israeli government. Furthermore, with rare exceptions, PACs allied with the Israel Lobby do not contribute more than 10 percent of the total amount raised by a given campaign.
The vast majority of the (admittedly few) House members who refuse to follow AIPAC’s line are easily reelected. For example, every Democratic member of Congress who refused to support the July 2006 House resolution supporting Israel’s attacks on Lebanon, a resolution subjected to vigorous lobbying by AIPAC, was reelected by a larger margin than they were two years earlier.
…Perhaps the most misleading argument put forward by Walt and Mearsheimer is their claim that the 2003 invasion of Iraq “was motivated in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure.†This is ludicrous on several grounds. First of all, Israel is far less secure as a result of the rise of Islamist extremism, terrorist groups, and Iranian influence in post–invasion Iraq than it was during the final years of Saddam Hussein’s rule, when Iraq was no longer a strategic threat to Israel or actively involved in anti–Israeli terrorism. Indeed, it had been more than a decade since Iraq had posed any significant threat to Israel and both Israel’s chief of intelligence and the Israeli Defense Forces chief of staff made public statements in October 2002 emphasizing how Israel’s military strength had grown over the previous decade as Iraq’s had grown weaker.
…While a disproportionate number of Jews could be found among the top policy makers in Washington who pushed for a U.S. invasion of Iraq, it is also true that a disproportionate number of Jews could be found among liberal Democrats in Congress and leftist intellectuals in universities who opposed the invasion of Iraq. Furthermore, it is absurd to imply that those who were most responsible for the decision to invade Iraq—Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney, and President George W. Bush—would place the perceived interests of Israel ahead of that of the United States. And they were perfectly capable of making such a stupid and tragic miscalculation on their own.
By adhering to his radical Left agenda, Zunes manages to see America’s supposed crimes as far superceding Israel’s.
Zunes gets much of his argument from Joseph Massad, the infamous Columbia associate professor who is effectively anti-semitic.
It is instructive to look at the argument a little closer, seeing that it is from an intellectual Arab perspective that is being parroted by gullible or malicious left-wing useful idiots like Zunes.
Massad wrote his critique of the “Israel Lobby” paper last year for Al-Ahram:
The underlying argument has been simple and has been told time and again by Washington’s regime allies in the Arab world, pro-US liberal and Arab intellectuals, conservative and liberal US intellectuals and former politicians, and even leftist Arab and American activists who support Palestinian rights, namely, that absent the pro- Israel lobby, America would at worst no longer contribute to the oppression of Arabs and Palestinians and at best it would be the Arabs’ and the Palestinians’ best ally and friend. What makes this argument persuasive and effective to Arabs? Indeed, why are its claims constantly brandished by Washington’s Arab friends to Arab and American audiences as a persuasive argument? I contend that the attraction of this argument is that it exonerates the United States’ government from all the responsibility and guilt that it deserves for its policies in the Arab world and gives false hope to many Arabs and Palestinians who wish America would be on their side instead of on the side of their enemies.
From the funhouse mirror perspective he is essentially right – the US policies towards the Arab world would hardly be different without the Israel lobby. His problem is not primarily with Israel but with America.
The record of the United States is one of being the implacable enemy of all Third World national liberation groups, including European ones, from Greece to Latin America to Africa and Asia, except in the celebrated cases of the Afghan fundamentalists’ war against the USSR and supporting apartheid South Africa’s main terrorist allies in Angola and Mozambique (UNITA and RENAMO) against their respective anti-colonial national governments. Why then would the US support national liberation in the Arab world absent the pro-Israel lobby is something these studies never explain.
Massad is where leftist intellectualism and Muslim fundamentalism meet. The “national liberation” movements that he refers to must mean the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots, as they are the only real threat to the corrupt leadership of most Arab countries. There is no doubt that Egypt, Syria and the rest of the Arab countries are autocratic dictatorships with little regard to human rights, but there is equally no doubt that the alternatives would be worse from anyone who is not a Muslim terrorist or sympathizer.
The US supported the independence of Jordan, Syria, Egypt and all the others who emerged from the Ottoman Empire and colonial rule. Massad doesn’t seem interested in maintaining Arab independence – he is interested in replacing these independent states with fundamentalist ones, all in the name of “liberation.” He skillfully uses leftist talking points to help build an Arab world that is fully aligned with terror (and, in all probability, which would combine into a single Muslim fundamentalist Arabia.)
This following paragraph is particularly enlightening in more ways than one:
Finally we come to the financial argument, namely that the US gives an inordinate amount of money to Israel — too exorbitant a cost that is out of proportion to what the US gets in return. In fact, the United States spends much more on its military bases in the Arab world, not to mention on those in Europe or Asia, than it does on Israel. Israel has indeed been very effective in rendering services to its US master for a good price, whether in channelling illegal arms to central American dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s, helping pariah regimes like Taiwan and apartheid South Africa in the same period, supporting pro-US, including Fascist, groups inside the Arab world to undermine nationalist Arab regimes, from Lebanon to Iraq to Sudan, coming to the aid of conservative pro- US Arab regimes when threatened as it did in Jordan in 1970, and attacking Arab nationalist regimes outright as it did in 1967 with Egypt and Syria and in 1981 with Iraq when it destroyed that country’s nuclear reactor. While the US had been able to overthrow Sukarno and Nkrumah in bloody coups, Nasser remained entrenched until Israel effectively neutralised him in the 1967 War. It is thanks to this major service that the United States increased its support to Israel exponentially. Moreover, Israel neutralised the PLO in 1982, no small service to many Arab regimes and their US patron who could not fully control the organisation until then. None of the American military bases on which many more billions are spent can claim such a stellar record. Critics argue that when the US had to intervene in the Gulf, it could not rely on Israel to do the job because of the sensitivity of including it in such a coalition which would embarrass Arab allies, hence the need for direct US intervention and the uselessness of Israel as a strategic ally. While this may be true, the US also could not rely on any of its military bases to launch the invasions on their own and had to ship in its army. American bases in the Gulf did provide important and needed support but so did Israel.
Massad now accidentally gives a powerful argument for Israel as an effective ally of the US. He even ignores Israel’s ability to do anything unilaterally, making the assumption that both the Six Day War and the Osirak raid were really American initiatives carried out willingly by their Israeli puppets.
Ultimately, his hatred of America is far greater than his hatred of Israel (which is legendary.) Although it appears that he was born in the US he clearly considers the United States to be the real source of evil on the planet, with Israel just an appendage.
This is not particular to Massad – the entire Arab world looks to the United States as the “big Satan” even as they are happy to keep taking money and weapons from us. Israel is a lightning rod for their hate, and the fact that dhimmi Jews control what they consider Arab land is certainly a contributing factor for their misoziony, but if Israel didn’t exist their hatred for America would not be abated at all.
It is interesting that leftists have adopted this anti-American, pro-terrorist line of thinking at the same time that the Arab intellectuals have started framing their arguments in leftist terms. It is also ironic that if the “liberation movements” that Massad champions would win control of their countries, Massad and his fellow Christian Arabs would be at the mercy of the jihadists.
(adapted from two posts at Elder of Ziyon)
Seth Freedman has, in his endearingly provocative manner, slapped together another