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In the last 25 years, many Palestinians
and other Arabs, in the United States and in the Arab world,
have been so awed by the power of the US pro-Israel lobby that
any study, book, or journalistic article that exposes the inner
workings, the substantial influence, and the financial and political
power of this lobby have been greeted with ecstatic sighs of
relief that Americans finally can see the "truth" and
the "error" of their ways.
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.
Let me start with the premise of the argument, namely its effect
of shifting the blame for US policies from the United States
onto Israel and its US lobby. According to this logic, it is
not the United States that should be held directly responsible
for all its imperial policies in the Arab world and the Middle
East at large since World War II, rather it is Israel and its
lobby who have pushed it to launch policies that are detrimental
to its own national interest and are only beneficial to Israel.
Establishing and supporting Arab and other Middle East dictatorships,
arming and training their militaries, setting up their secret
police apparatuses and training them in effective torture methods
and counter-insurgency to be used against their own citizens
should be blamed, according to the logic of these studies, on
Israel and its US lobby.
Blocking all international and UN support for Palestinian rights,
arming and financing Israel in its war against a civilian population,
protecting Israel from the wrath of the international community
should also be blamed not on the United States, the studies insist,
but on Israel and its lobby. Additionally, and in line with this
logic, controlling Arab economies and finances, dominating key
investments in the Middle East, and imposing structural adjustment
policies by the IMF and the World Bank which impoverish the Arab
peoples should also be blamed on Israel, and not the United States.
Finally, starving and then invading Iraq, threatening to invade
Syria, raiding and then sanctioning Libya and Iran, besieging
the Palestinians and their leaders must also be blamed on the
Israeli lobby and not the US government. Indeed, over the years,
many pro-US Arab dictators let it leak officially and unofficially
that their US diplomat friends have told them time and again
how muc! h they and "America" support the Arab world
and the Palestinians were it not for the influence of the pro-
Israel lobby (sometimes identified by the American diplomats
in more explicit "ethnic" terms).
While many of the studies of the pro-Israel lobby are sound and
full of awe-inspiring well- documented details about the formidable
power commanded by groups like the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee (AIPAC) and its allies, the problem with most of them
is what remains unarticulated. For example, when and in what
context has the United States government ever supported national
liberation in the Third World? 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 ne! ver explain.
The United States has had a consistent policy since World War
II of fighting all regimes across the Third World who insist
on controlling their national resources, whether it be land,
oil, or other valuable minerals. This extends from Iran in 1953
to Guatemala in 1954 to the rest of Latin America all the way
to present-day Venezuela. Africa has fared much worse in the
last four decades, as have many countries in Asia. Why would
the United States support nationalist regimes in the Arab world
who would nationalise natural resources and stop their pillage
by American capital absent the pro-Israel lobby also remains
a mystery unexplained by these studies. Finally, the United States
government has opposed and overthrown or tried to overthrow any
regime that seeks real and tangible independence in the Third
World and is especially galled by those regimes that pursue such
policies through democratic elections.
The overthrow of regimes from Arbenz to Goulart to Mossadegh
and Allende and the ongoing attempts to overthrow Chavez are
prominent examples, as is the overthrow of nationalist regimes
like Sukarno's and Nkrumah's. The terror unleashed on populations
who challenged the US-installed friendly regimes from El Salvador
and Nicaragua to Zaire to Chile and Indonesia resulted in the
killing of hundreds of thousands, if not millions by repressive
police and militaries trained for these important tasks by the
US. This is aside from direct US invasions of South East Asian
and Central American countries that killed untold millions for
decades.
Why would the US and its repressive agencies stop invading Arab
countries, or stop supporting the repressive police forces of
dictatorial Arab regimes and why would the US stop setting up
shadow governments inside its embassies in Arab capitals to run
these countries' affairs (in some cases the US shadow government
runs the Arab country in question down to the smallest detail
with the Arab government in question reduced to executing orders)
if the pro-Israel lobby did not exist is never broached by these
studies let alone explained.
The arguments put forth by these studies would have been more
convincing if the Israel lobby was forcing the United States
government to pursue policies in the Middle East that are inconsistent
with its global policies elsewhere. This, however, is far from
what happens. While US policies in the Middle East may often
be an exaggerated form of its repressive and anti- democratic
policies elsewhere in the world, they are not inconsistent with
them. One could easily make the case that the strength of the
pro-Israel lobby is what accounts for this exaggeration, but
even this contention is not entirely persuasive. One could argue
(and I have argued elsewhere) that it is in fact the very centrality
of Israel to US strategy in the Middle East that accounts, in
part, for the strength of the pro-Israel lobby and not the other
way around.
Indeed, many of the recent studies highlight the role of pro-Likud
members of the Bush administration (or even of the Clinton administration)
as evidence of the lobby's awesome power, when, i t could be
easily argued that it is these American politicians who had pushed
Likud and Labour into more intransigence in the 1990s and are
pushing them towards more conquest now that they are at the helm
of the US government. This is not to say, however, that the leaders
of the pro-Israel lobby do not regularly brag about their crucial
influence on US policy in Congress and in the White House. That
they have done regularly since the late 1970s.
But the lobby is powerful in the United States because its major
claims are about advancing US interests and its support for Israel
is contextualised in its support for the overall US strategy
in the Middle East. The pro- Israel lobby plays the same role
that the China lobby played in the 1950s and the Cuba lobby still
plays to this day. The fact that it is more powerful than any
other foreign lobby on Capitol Hill testifies to the importance
of Israel in US strategy and not to some fantastical power that
the lobby commands independent of and extraneous to the US "national
interest." The pro-Israel lobby could not sell its message
and would not have any influence if Israel was a communist or
anti-imperialist country or if Israel opposed US policy elsewhere
in the world.
Some would argue that even though Israel attempts to overlap
its interests with those of the US, that its lobby is misleading
American policy- makers and shifting their position from one
of objective assessment of what is truly in America's best interest
and that of Israel's. The argument runs as follows: US support
for Israel causes groups who oppose Israel to hate the US and
target it for attacks. It also costs the US friendly media coverage
in the Arab world, affects its investment potential in Arab countries,
and loses its important allies in the region, or at least weakens
these allies. But none of this is true. The United States has
been able to be Israel's biggest backer and financier, its staunchest
defender and weapon-supplier while maintaining strategic alliances
with most if not all Arab dictatorships, including the Palestinian
Authority under both Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas.
Moreover, US companies and American investments have the largest
presence across the Arab world, most prominently but not exclusively
in the oil sector. Also, even without the pathetic and ineffective
efforts at US propaganda in the guise of the television station
Al-Hurra, or Radio Sawa and the now-defunct Hi magazine,
not to mention US-paid journalists and newspapers in Iraq and
elsewhere, a whole army of Arabic newspapers and state-television
stations, not to mention myriad satellite television stations
celebrate the US and its culture, broadcast American programmes,
and attempt to sell the US point of view as effectively as possible
encumbered only by the limitations that actual US policies in
the region place on common sense. Even the offending Al-Jazeera
has bent over backwards to accommodate the US point of view but
is constantly undercut by actual US policies in the region. Al-Jazeera,
under tremendous pressure and threats of bombing from the United
State! s, has for example stopped referring to the US occupation
forces in Iraq as "occupation forces" and now refers
to them as "coalition forces". Moreover, since when
has the US sought to win a popularity contest among the peoples
of the world? Arabs no more hate or love the United States than
do Latin Americans, Africans, Asians, or even and especially
Europeans.
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 co! untry'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.
AIPAC is indeed powerful insofar
as it pushes for policies that accord with US interests and that
are resonant with the reigning US imperial ideology. The power
of the pro-Israel lobby, whether in Congress or on campuses among
university administrators, or policy-makers is not based solely
on their organisational skills or ideological uniformity. In
no small measure, anti- Semitic attitudes in Congress (and among
university administrators) play a role in believing the lobby's
(and its enemies') exaggerated claims about its actual power,
resulting in their towing the line. But even if this were true,
one could argue, it would not matter whether the lobby has real
or imagined power. For as long as Congress and policy-makers
(and university administrators) believe it does, it will remain
effective and powerful. I of course concede this point.
What then would have been different
in US policy in the Middle East absent Israel and its powerful
lobby? The answer in short is: the details and intensity but
not the direction, content, or impact of such policies. Is the
pro- Israel lobby extremely powerful in the United States? As
someone who has been facing the full brunt of their power for
the last three years through their formidable influence on my
own university and their attempts to get me fired, I answer with
a resounding yes. Are they primarily responsible for US policies
towards the Palestinians and the Arab world? Absolutely not.
The United States is opposed in the Arab world as elsewhere because
it has pursued and continues to pursue policies that are inimical
to the interests of most people in these countries and are only
beneficial to its own interests and to the minority regimes in
the region that serve those interests, including Israel. Absent
these policies, and not the pro-Israel lobby which supports them,
the United States should expect a change in its standing among
Arabs. Short of that, the United States will have to continue
its policies in the region that have wreaked, and continue to
wreak, havoc on the majority of Arabs and not expect that the
Arab people will like it in return.
Joseph Massad is associate professor of modern Arab politics
and intellectual history at Columbia University. His recent book
The
Persistence of the Palestinian Question was published by
Routledge.
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