Sunday, July 16, 2006
The Washington Post has a lengthy piece focusing on Walt/Mearsheimer, AIPAC and the "Israel Lobby": A Beautiful Friendship? In search of the truth about the Israel lobby's influence on Washington
While the folks at LGF are rather upset about it, aside from a somewhat fawning opening, I'm quite sure that this is not an article Walt & Mearsheimer would have written had they had the choice. On reading the whole thing, the picture that emerges is that a) the "Israel lobby" is powerful because its goals and the interests of the United States are congruent, and when they're not, the lobby is comensurately less powerful, b) it's pretty well like any other lobby in that regard, c) W&M are somewhat sloppy and not very convincing.
As to point A:
No need to go too deeply here. Americans understand that in the "clash of civilizations," Israel is our friend and the people who danced in the streets on 9/11 are our enemies. "Changing sides" would be a betrayal of our own values and principles. We know who our friends are.
From later in the piece:
Since 9/11, Americans have increasingly come to accept the idea that Israel and the United States share not just values but enemies. A Gallup Poll in February reported 68 percent of Americans have a favorable opinion of Israel with 23 percent unfavorable, and that Americans support Israelis over Palestinians by 59 percent to 15 percent.
Recent electoral victories by Islamic radicals in Iran and the Palestinian territories have only heightened the sense of us vs. them. With his sweeping condemnations and threats against the United States and Israel, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's radical new president, has quickly joined the pantheon of bad guys, alongside Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. "Ahmadinejad is worth every penny," says Morris Amitay. "He says amazing things, and the scary part is he really means it."...
Criticism of Israel isn't enough to guarantee political death, but Americans don't like people they see as crossing over the line into actual anti-Semitism, like Paul Findlay and Pete McClosky:
Findley says he had always voted for aid to Israel even while criticizing Israeli policy. But his real sin was meeting periodically with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, whom he once praised as "a great champion of human rights." Findley was targeted in the election of 1982: He had served 11 terms; he didn't get a 12th. Two years after that, Percy lost to Paul Simon in a bitter contest in which supporters of Israel poured an estimated $1.8 million into direct contributions and an independent anti-Percy ad campaign. The message to incumbents was clear: Oppose Israel at your peril.
"After that," says Findley, "I really feel the cloak of intimidation was pretty secure."...
Good. But the fact is, politicians, when they have a case, can stand up to "the lobby," in large part due to some hang-ups in the Jewish Community itself:
The prime minister of Israel was a hard-liner named Yitzhak Shamir, who in pre-independence days was the gun-wielding leader of the smallest and most extreme of militant Zionist factions. Faced with a wave of Jewish immigrants from the collapsing Soviet Union, Shamir's government was throwing up new housing as fast as possible. To ease the costs of massive borrowing, it was seeking $10 billion in loan guarantees from Washington. Bush and Baker wanted Shamir's pledge that he wouldn't use the loan guarantees toward expanding controversial Jewish settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. It was a promise Shamir didn't want to make. He instructed AIPAC to get the guarantees through Congress over the administration's objections.
The crunch came one day that September when AIPAC dispatched more than 1,000 members to Capitol Hill to lobby members of Congress. Bush retaliated at a news conference when he took direct aim at the Israel lobby, saying he was "up against some powerful political forces . . . I heard today there was something like 1,000 lobbyists on the Hill working on the other side of the question. We've got one lonely little guy down here doing it."
AIPAC's leaders had told Shamir they had enough votes to easily override the president in both the House and Senate, but Bush's remarks punctured their balloon like a blowtorch. Within days, leaders of both houses advised AIPAC to back down. Its support had melted away.
But what shocked Shamir even more was the rapid defection of his American Jewish allies. They didn't like being portrayed by the president as a shadowy but powerful force serving the interests of a foreign power. "It clobbered the Jewish community, left us in a state of shock," one American Jewish leader told me later...
...When Rabin came to Washington for the first time as prime minister, he summoned AIPAC's leaders to a closed-door meeting at the Madison Hotel in which he accused them of steering Israel into a needless confrontation with the White House. From now on, he told them, Israel would drive its own relations with Washington, and AIPAC would be consigned to a back seat.
The organization's leaders learned an important lesson. "After that they adopted the Colin Powell doctrine," says Ori Nir, a veteran journalist for the Jewish Forward. "They only fought the battles that they knew they could win."...
A very good way to maintain a winning record and make yourself look more powerful than you really are, indeed. This sensitivity of against proving out negative streotypes is a psychology that can't be underestimated among American Jews. It kept the Jewish Community from sending money to assist Jews in Japanese occupied territories in the lead-up to WW2, and it prevents some local communties from speaking out against teachers who bring poison into their local communities lest they look like bullies. It causes me to leave a minimum 20% tip when dining out.
As Michael Oren is quoted as saying later in the piece:
Walt, even in this superficially sympathetic piece, simply doesn't come off as making a good case:
Still, he doesn't seem to allow for the possibility that foreign policy in a pluralistic democracy is inevitably the product of a noisy clash of interests, or that the success of Israel's supporters may stem from the country's popularity here or from American revulsion over Palestinian suicide bombings. Or for that matter that American opposition to the prospect of Iran achieving a nuclear bomb has little to do with Israel and more to do with American fears of ayatollahs with nukes.
Iran may be worrisome, says Walt, but no more so than previous threats. "My belief is we would not be contemplating preventive war if we did not have a powerful domestic interest group pushing this issue. We have lived with a number of really odious regimes having nuclear weapons, because we understood that we could deter them effectively with the weapons at our disposal."...
But that's not how most Americans see it. We know who our enemies are. In order to accept the W&M case, you must accept that there's no rational basis for an American interest in disposing of avowed enemies like those in Iraq and Iran, or in trying to "justly" remove the nagging sore of the Palestinian issue. The fact that it is also in the interest of Israel to settle these issues doesn't mean we went to war against Iraq, for instance, because of Israel. It simply points to a confluence of interests.
The piece concludes quoting a series of voices from various perspectives all critical of the Walt & Mersheimer thesis. It simply doesn't sound good for them, nor should it.
The fact is, "the Lobby" is powerful because the Islamic World keeps producing convenient figures and groups like Ahmadinejad, Hizballah, and Hamas -- Israel's enemies, and ours. That's not the creation of a lobby, or a paranoid fear -- it's reality, and as long as we share that reality, America will stand with Israel, and all the cash, lobbying and propaganda in Arabia won't change that.
