WASHINGTON - The pro-Israel lobby in the
United States has manipulated Washington's
policies in the Middle East to the point where it
is the US that does most of the fighting, dying
and rebuilding while Israel reaps most of the
security benefits, argues a new study by two US
scholars.
"This situation has no equal in
American political history," says the 83-page
study, "The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy".
"Why has the United States been willing to
set aside its own security and that of many of its
allies in order to advance the interests of
another state?" ask authors John Mearsheimer of the
University of Chicago and
Stephen Walt of the John F Kennedy School of
Government at Harvard University.
The
answer, according to the paper, which is already
stirring debate in academic circles and fury among
pro-Israel groups, is the influence of the
pro-Israel lobby.
These groups include the
American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC),
the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish
Organizations, the Jewish Institute for National
Security Affairs, the Washington Institute for
Near Eastern Policy and, more recently, Christian
Zionist organizations.
A shorter version
of the study was published in the London Review of
Books on March 10. The authors say their research
is so strong that they doubt that any US
mainstream publication would dare publish it.
Based on sources that include Israeli
scholars and journalists, international
human-rights organizations, and testimony from the
lobby itself and politicians that support it, the
study examines how the pro-Israel lobby built up
its influence in Washington and says its
intimidation of the press, think-tanks and
academia has led to a deceptive picture of Israel.
Since World War II, the United States has
channeled US$140 billion in support to Israel,
notes the study, which also challenges the notion
that Israel is a "crucial ally in the war on
terror, because its enemies are America's
enemies".
"Saying that Israel and the
United States are united by a shared terrorist
threat has the causal relationship backwards:
rather, the United States has a terrorism problem
in good part because it is so closely allied with
Israel, not the other way around," the authors
argue.
"In short, treating Israel as
America's most important ally in the campaign
against terrorism and assorted Middle East
dictatorships both exaggerates Israel's ability to
help on these issues and ignores the ways that
Israel's policies make US efforts more difficult,"
they say.
According to the study,
pro-Israel lobby groups have exploited the
sensitivities of major media outlets and of US
politicians to campaign contributions to maintain
their sympathy for Israel regardless of what it
does in the region.
During AIPAC's annual
conference this month, which attracted top US
officials and congressional leaders, the new
Republican majority leader in the US House of
Representatives, John Boehner, vowed never to
allow anti-Israel legislation to come to the
floor.
"As the new House majority leader,
I can assure you that under my leadership,
legislation that is in any way perceived as
anti-Israel will not be considered in the House of
Representatives," said Boehner.
The study
also points to Washington's staunch support of
Israel at the United Nations. Since 1982, it says,
the United States has vetoed 32 Security Council
resolutions critical of Israel - a number greater
than the combined total of vetoes cast by all the
other Security Council members. And it has blocked
Arab states' efforts to put Israel's nuclear
arsenal on the agenda of the International Atomic
Energy Agency.
At home, the lobby has
worked hard to suppress its critics, something the
authors say has not been good for democracy,
especially one that now claims to be promoting
freedom in the Arab world.
"Silencing
skeptics by organizing blacklists and boycotts -
or by suggesting that critics are anti-Semites -
violates the principle of open debate upon which
democracy depends," they say.
The study
was immediately attacked by a number of pro-Israel
organizations. The Committee for Accuracy in
Middle East Reporting in America, for example,
said in a statement that it had many errors, and
that "a student who submitted such a paper would
flunk" (get a failing grade).
The New York
Sun, known for its pro-Israel stance, published
supportive reactions to the study from a prominent
white supremacist and from the Muslim Brotherhood
in Egypt as evidence that the authors catered to
extreme tastes. And Eliot Engel, a Democratic
congressman from New York who is Jewish, said the
scholars' paper "really deserves the contempt of
the American people", and described it as "the
same old anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist drivel".
Mearsheimer said: "We fully recognized
that the lobby would retaliate against us. We
expected the story we told in the piece would
apply to us after it was published. We are not
surprised that we've come under attack by the
lobby."
The paper notes that the
pro-Israel lobby has also been bolstered by the
support of prominent, and some would say
extremist, Christian evangelicals such as Gary
Bauer, Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed and Pat
Robertson, as well as Congressmen Dick Armey and
Tom DeLay, former majority leaders in the House of
Representatives, all of whom believe Israel's
rebirth is the fulfillment of biblical prophecy
and support its expansionist agenda.
Neo-conservative "gentiles" such as
Ambassador to the UN John Bolton; Robert Bartley,
former Wall Street Journal editor; William
Bennett, former secretary of education; Jeanne
Kirkpatrick, the former UN ambassador; and
influential columnist George Will are also
committed supporters of the Israel lobby.
While the pro-Israel lobby has managed a
number of successes for Israel, the cost for the
United States is mounting, the study says.
"This situation is deeply worrisome,
because the lobby's influence causes trouble on
several fronts," says the study. These include
possible increases in the military danger that all
states face - including Washington's European
allies.
By preventing US leaders from
pressuring Israel to make peace, the lobby has
also made it impossible to end the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which gives
extremists a potent recruiting tool and enlarges
the pool of potential militants, the authors say.
And new attempts by the lobby to "change regimes"
in Iran and Syria could lead the US to attack
those countries, with potentially disastrous
effects.
"We do not need another Iraq. At
a minimum, the lobby's hostility toward these
countries makes it especially difficult for
Washington to enlist them against al-Qaeda and the
Iraqi insurgency, where their help is badly
needed," it says.
The authors counted a
number of other negative effects on both the
United States and Israel. These include how the US
is now supporting Israel's expansionist policies
in the West Bank, making Washington appear
complicit in human-rights abuses.
US
backing has emboldened extremists to reject a
number of opportunities for peace deals with such
Arab countries as Syria and with the Palestinians
and the implementation of the Oslo Accords, the
study says.
Mearsheimer said he and
co-author Walt were prompted to write the piece
after many years of studying US foreign policy in
the Middle East.
"It was clear to us that
many people understood the problem that we
describe in the piece but were afraid to talk
about it ... because the lobby would retaliate,"
he said.
