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The Lobby
By Paul Craig Roberts
11/14/07 "ICH" -- -- Experts in the West and ordinary people
in Arab lands have understood for many years that the United
States does not have an independent policy toward the Middle
East. President Jimmy Carter, a man of good will, tried to use
American influence to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,
the source of dangerous instability in the Middle East.
However, Israel was able to block Carter’s attempt, while
blaming Yasser Arafat. Carter’s plan would have given rise to a
Palestinian state. Israel did not want any such state, because
obvious military aggression is necessary in order to steal the
territory of an official state with defined borders. It is much
easier to steal land from a non-state.
By
preventing the rise of a Palestinian state, Israel has been able
to continue with its theft of the West Bank. Palestinians who
have not been driven out have been forced into ghettos, cut off
from schools, hospitals, water, and their olive groves and
farmlands. In a recent book, President Carter called the
existing situation “apartheid.” Carter was demonized by the
Israel Lobby for his use of this word, but some experts consider
Carter’s choice of words to be an euphemism for the continuation
of what I. Pappe and N. G. Finkelstein call “the ethnic
cleansing of Palestine.”
That the vast majority of Americans know nothing of this is
testimony to the power of the Israel Lobby.
A
number of writers have exposed Israel’s misbehavior and the
power of the Lobby, but until now, the Lobby has been able to
marginalize its critics by smearing them as “anti-semites,” “nazis,”
and “Jew-haters.” In a new book, John J. Mearsheimer and
Stephen M. Walt have broken the Israel Lobby’s power to suppress
truth by demonizing and intimidating all who would criticize
Israel.
Mearsheimer and Walt are distinguished scholars holding
distinguished appointments at the University of Chicago and
Harvard University, two of America’s most distinguished
universities. Their book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign
Policy, published by the distinguished American publisher,
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is a masterpiece of scholarship and
documentation. Footnotes comprise 23 percent of the book’s
pages.
Mearsheimer and Walt easily succeed in making their case that
neither strategic nor moral grounds can explain U.S. support for
Israel. Only the power of the Israel Lobby can explain the
juxtaposition of a dwindling moral and strategic case with
ever-increasing U.S. backing for Israel, even to the
disadvantage of U.S. national and strategic interests. Indeed,
both executive and legislative branches are so completely
compromised by the Lobby that the different elements of U.S.
Middle East policy
“have been designed in whole or part to benefit Israel vis-a-vis
its various rivals.”
Chapter by chapter, Mearsheimer and Walt demonstrate the
deleterious effects the Lobby has had on U.S. relations with
Palestinians, Iraq, Syria, Iran, and Lebanon. The two scholars
conclude:
“The lobby’s influence helped lead
the United States into a disastrous war in Iraq and has
hamstrung efforts to deal with Syria and Iran. It also
encouraged the United States to back Israel’s ill-conceived
assault on Lebanon, a campaign that strengthened Hezbollah,
drove Syria and Iran closer together, and further tarnished
America’s global image. The lobby bears considerable, though not
complete, responsibility for each of these developments, and
none of them was good for the United States. The bottom line is
hard to escape, although America’s problems in the Middle East
would not disappear if the lobby were less influential, U.S.
leaders would find it easier to explore alternative approaches
and be more likely to adopt policies more in line with American
interests.”
There is nothing anti-semitic about this book. Mearsheimer and
Walt do not challenge Israel’s right to exist or the legitimacy
of the Israeli state. They believe the U.S. must defend Israel
from threats to its survival. They even regard AIPAC, the
American Israel Public Affairs Committee, as a legitimate
American lobby and not as an unregistered agent of a foreign
state.
The
motives of the two scholars, apart from respect for truth and
the obligation to speak it, are to further Israel’s and
America’s legitimate interests. Mearsheimer and Walt agree with
numerous Israeli historians and commentators that Israel’s
policy toward Palestine and the Arabs, together with the Lobby’s
suppression of critics, have been “directly harmful to Israel.”
The inflexibility that Israel has imposed on U.S. foreign policy
has America mired in wars--now a half decade or more old--in
Iraq and Afghanistan. Even as Muslim rage threatens to engulf
America’s puppet in Pakistan, vice president Dick Cheney, Israel
and its neoconservative allies strive to initiate war with Iran.
This is a high price to pay for Israeli territorial expansion
even if the U.S.-Israeli policy of war and coercion succeed. If
military aggression fails to bring the Middle East under the
hegemony of the U.S. and Israel, the dangers to energy flows and
Israel’s existence could result in the use of nuclear weapons.
It is literally insane for the United States to expose the world
to such risks for the sake of Israel’s misguided policy toward
Palestine.
Other scholars, especially those whose sense of justice is
offended by the cruel oppression Palestinians suffer at the
hands of Israel, are more critical than Mearsheimer and Walt.
The latter do Israel and the Lobby a service by defining the
issue as one of U.S. and Israeli legitimate national interests
rather than casting it as a case of crimes, inhumanity, and
injustice.
Instead of legitimate national interests, James Petras, Bartle
Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Binghamton University in New
York, sees “a level of crimes parallel to those of the Nazis in
World War II” (The Power of Israel in the United States,
2006). Petras writes that “the architects of the Iraqi war
planned a series of aggressive wars of conquest based on the
principle of domination by violence, torture, collective
punishment, total war on civilian populations, their homes,
hospitals, cultural heritage, churches and mosques, means of
livelihood and educational institutions. These are the highest
crimes against humanity.”
“The worst crimes,” Petras writes, “are committed by those who
claim to be a divinely chosen people, a people with ‘righteous’
claims of supreme victimhood.”
It
remains to be seen how much more blood and treasure Zionist
fanaticism will extract from Americans. But one thing is
certain: the Israel Lobby is far too powerful for America’s
good and Israel’s.
Forty years ago the Lobby was sufficiently powerful to force
President Lyndon Johnson to cover up the intentional Israeli
attack on the USS Liberty that resulted in 34 Americans dead and
174 wounded. Admiral Thomas Moorer, Chief of Naval Operations
and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff declared: “No American
President can stand up to Israel.”
Forty years later the Israel Lobby is able to reach into
Catholic universities and to overturn tenure decisions. The
courageous scholar Norman Finkelstein was denied tenure at
DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois, because he is an
effective critic of Israeli policies.
In
America today academics and intellectuals who fail to toe the
Lobby’s line are unlikely to receive support from conservative
or liberal foundations. Even Mearsheimer and Walt’s article,
“The Israel Lobby,” commissioned by the Atlantic Monthly
and from which their book evolved, had to be published overseas
in The London Review of Books when the Atlantic
Monthly’s editors’ courage failed them.
American patriots who glorify in their country’s status as the
“sole superpower” have much to learn about the subservience of
their country’s foreign policy to a tiny state of five million
people. There is no better place to begin than with Mearsheimer
and Walt’s The Israel Lobby.
Paul Craig Roberts wrote the Kemp-Roth bill and was Assistant
Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was
Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and
Contributing Editor of National Review. He is author or coauthor
of eight books, including The Supply-Side Revolution (Harvard
University Press). He has held numerous academic appointments,
including the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy,
Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown
University and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution,
Stanford University. He has contributed to numerous scholarly
journals and testified before Congress on 30 occasions. He has
been awarded the U.S. Treasury's Meritorious Service Award and
the French Legion of Honor. He was a reviewer for the Journal of
Political Economy under editor Robert Mundell. He is the
co-author of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. He is also coauthor
with Karen Araujo of Chile: Dos Visiones – La Era Allende-Pinochet
(Santiago: Universidad Andres Bello, 2000).
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