“A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.”-- Saul Bellow
Beneath Plymouth Rock, in the deep substratum of the American psyche, lies a mythic Jew. The Puritans lay the ground for it when they fled across the Atlantic to found a “New Zion.” They conceived their mission messianic, anointing themselves God’s “American Israel.” The “Judeo-Christian heritage” our politicians love to invoke then is no mere ceremonial. America owes its identity to Old Testament tropes and legend. As Edmund Wilson once wrote, “The Puritanism of New England was a kind of new Judaism, a Judaism transposed into Anglo-Saxon terms.”
A Jew-fixation runs accordingly through the American mind. But like everything American it assumes a peculiar New World cast: as often manifest as Philo-Semitism as its ominous mirror image. Typically, it is war that awakens the dark incarnation. Henry Ford, for example, would blame America’s entry into the First World War on a phantom German-Jewish banking syndicate. As the Second raged, isolationist and America First spokesman, Charles Lindbergh would charge the “British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt administration” with pushing the nation into the conflict. A half century later Patrick Buchanan would rehabilitate the America First movement and echo Lindbergh’s slander: “there are only two groups beating the drums for [the first Gulf] war,” he sneered, “the Israeli Defense Ministry and their amen corner in the U.S.” And finally, prior to the Gulf War’s sequel, Virginia Congressman James Moran would reprise the refrain: “If it were not for the strong support of the Jewish community for this war in Iraq, we would not be doing this.”
Now, the notion that the Jews control American statecraft might seem as nothing more than the lurid delusion of cranks, demagogues, and politicians too marginal to take seriously. Only recently, members of the Academy has indulged it too. Drs. Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, two political scientists from no less eminent universities than Harvard and Chicago, respectively, not only rehearse their tawdry little folie á deux in public; they actually claim to prove it. (While their colleagues-- NYU’s Tony Judt, in The New York Times, and Michigan’s Juan Cole, in Salon, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, in Foreign Policy--have come forward to defend them.)
II.
The London Review of Books published Walt and Mearsheimer’s agitprop in their March 23, 2006, issue in an article titled “The Israel Lobby.” Naturally, the more sophisticated the paranoid, the more elaborate the rationalization his delusions embrace. So in the “Israel Lobby” the professors have conjured a chimera a bit more subtle, a tad more circumstantial, than the classic Jewish conspiracy but no less fictive or sinister.
The distortion begins with the very first sentence. “Following the Six-Day War,” it reads, “Israel became the centerpiece of America’s Middle East policy.” Oil-- the imperative that has preoccupied US decision-making in the region since at least FDR—plays no role in their fiction. Drs. Mearsheimer and Walt, evidently, never bothered to familiarize themselves with the Carter Doctrine, which just happens to explain why the U.S. maintains bases throughout the Arab Gulf and has gone to war there twice in little more than a decade.
“An attempt… to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force… The region… is of great strategic importance: It contains more than two-thirds of the world's exportable oil.”
Since ‘67, their revisionist history continues, America has set aside its strategic interests in the region in order to serve Israel’s. And why does Washington do the Jewish state’s bidding? Well, naturally, because of the infamous “Israel Lobby”. But before they get to their villain, they first mischaracterize the U.S-Israeli alliance’s two principal parts—its strategic and its ideological underpinnings. The geopolitical basis they dismiss by understating Israel’s strategic value during the Cold War. Sure, it contained Soviet expansion and humiliated the Soviet’s Syrian and Egyptian clients, they concede. Sure, it mobilized its armies in 1970, during Black September, to protect America’s ally, Jordan’s King Hussein. But what about the OPEC oil embargo in ’73? Wasn’t U.S. support for Israel at fault? (Pace the then popular bumper sticker: burn Jews, not oil!) And what was Israel’s virtue during the Iranian revolution, they ask? Israel, in the end, couldn’t prevent it. A perfect illustration of the kind of absurd straw men the professors contrive throughout.
Anyway, now, post-09/11, the eminent scholars assert, Israel poses an unmitigated strategic liability. The U.S., in fact, allegedly has a terrorism problem “in good part” because of Israel; support for which contributes an “important” source of anti-American terrorism (on more, later). As for Israel’s role as a surrogate for U.S. interests; that is, its value in distracting Syria from otherwise meddling in Iraq or in containing Iran? Well, Syria and Iran don’t threaten the U.S., Walt and Mearsheimer claim, only Israel. No, the U.S.’s recent obsession with Iran’s nuclear program, in their mind, is a function of the Israel Lobby. “In their mind” being the operative phrase. They conveniently ignore the European Community’s (and the UN’s) supporting role and interest in averting a nuclear Iran in addition to Iran’s sponsorship of Islamic terrorist groups. Groups the U.S. has its own interest in extirpating, according to CIA analyst Robert Baer in See No Evil, because of the international terrorist war they’ve waged on American forces, including their bombings of our Beirut embassy and marine barracks.
And what about America’s moral calling to spread its way of life and to defend small, embattled democracies? Well, Israel, in their view, is neither an underdog nor a genuine democracy. The self-styled Middle East experts have determined that 6.5 million Israelis can fend for themselves indefinitely against 320 million Arabs and 60 million Iranians. Moreover, as a Jewish state, “where citizenship is based on the principle of blood kinship,” they write, Israel violates America’s equal rights creed. Never mind that any Israeli resident—religion, race, color or creed, notwithstanding-- can apply for citizenship after living there five years or that democracies like Ireland and Germany accord citizenship priority to their Diasporas, as does Israel’s right of return: but, hey, what’s a little “blood” libel between friends?
What’s more, “viewed objectively, [Israel’s] past and present conduct offers no basis for privileging it over the Palestinians,” they continue, because “on the ground, [its] record is not distinguishable from its [Arab] opponents”. Perhaps, the professors can’t apprehend the moral distinction between IDF raids that endeavor to assassinate terrorists, which collaterally and inadvertently kill Palestinian civilians, and PLO/Al-Aqsa brigade guerilla operations and suicide bombings whose very purpose and raison d’être is to slaughter and to terrorize Israeli citizens. (See Dr. Benny Morris’ article, “And Now for Some Facts, The New Republic, May 8, 2006, on how Mearsheimer and Walt falsify his scholarly work on the partition period to exaggerate Israelis transgressions and accuse it of “crimes” it didn’t commit.)
But even if, we acknowledge, for arguments’ sake, Israel’s original sin, its displacement of the Palestinians, and its subsequent draconian suppression of their two intifadas, do these transgressions even approach the same order of magnitude as the crimes and depredations of Assad, Saddam, Mubarak, and the House of Saud, etc, let alone suggest commensurability? “Israel does not behave significantly better than most other states,” Walt and Mearsheimer write: are Harvard and Chicago’s own kidding? Even by the standard other democracies set, Israel compares favorably. Did the British use rubber bullets in India? Did an English equivalent of Israel’s B’Tselem monitor their occupation of Northern Ireland and publish the Royal Army’s human rights violations? Or what about those humanitarian cynosures, the French, in Algeria: remember Setif? Or the Belgians’ in the Congo? And what occupation escutcheon would be complete without the blot of America’s Indian Removal Act or Wounded Knee?
Anyway, whatever “special treatment” Israel once earned because of the Holocaust, Messrs. Walt and Mearsheimer are not having it anymore. Israel has forfeited the mantle of victim by committing “fresh crimes against a largely innocent third party: the Palestinians.” Innocent? Non-violent resistance is innocent; a cult of martyrdom is not. Victimization doesn’t exempt one from moral responsibility. And innocents don’t encourage suicide bombers to blow themselves up in discotheques and then canonize them afterward, however brutal their treatment or excruciating their suffering.
“Fresh crimes against a largely innocent third party: the Palestinians… whose national ambitions and sovereignty Israel, to this day, allegedly, has refused to recognize.” Repeating the PLO’s fraudulent alibi for Camp David’s failure: Prime Minister Barak’s proposal, they submit, only would have created a “disarmed set of Bantustans under de facto Israeli control.” The authors’ response to the map Dennis Ross published in his memoir, The Missing Peace, which exposed this lie by documenting the contiguous Palestinian state constituting 91% of the West Bank that Barak offered at Camp David, and the 98% proposed at Taba? The proposal was only oral; they cavil, never presented on an illustrated map. And then again, why believe anything Dennis Ross has to say about Camp David? According to them, the American delegation was in thrall to Israel and Ross himself is a card-carrying member of “The Israel Lobby”.
III.
Which brings us to the real cause of the US-Israeli bond, in Walt and Mearsheimer’s fiction-- domestic politics; that is, the “unmatched power” of the “Israel Lobby.” A domestic lobbying group they portray as a treacherous Behemoth with tentacles penetrating nearly every branch, agency, and power center of America’s foreign policy apparatus—tentacles sufficiently long and sinewy to maneuver the entire U.S. government to sacrifice its own interests in order to serve another nation’s.
Not all “Jewish Americans,” they feel constrained to tell us, are part of the Lobby. There are some Jews-- Walt and Mearsheimer’s best friends, no doubt-- who don’t concern themselves very much with Israel. There are others who even beg to “differ” about specific Israeli policies. Yet about one thing the Jews all agree: “despite their differences, moderates and hardliners both favor giving steadfast support for Israel.” Naturally, this elision minimizes the dissension between dovish groups like Peace Now and The Israel Policy Forum, on the one hand, and hawkish AIPAC and The Zionist Organization of America, on the other, and disregards entirely the latitude this discord gives antagonistic policymakers to pit the two camps against each other to stymie opposition.
But like any paranoid, they discern their figment and its influence everywhere. The “Israel Lobby,” in their description, positively owns Congress. No representative can debate the Lobby, let alone defy it. The evidence: former Democratic Senator, Ernest Hollings, noted upon leaving office, “you can’t have an Israeli policy other than what AIPAC gives you around here.” Supposedly, the ubiquitous Jewish voter gives the Lobby leverage over the Executive branch as well. True, they constitute less than “3%” of the population (actually, it’s more like 2%). But the Jews, you see, turnout in large numbers on Election Day; they donate lots and lots of money; and they live in pivotal states (cunning aren’t they?) And if you criticize Israel, forget about getting a job in the President’s administration. The Lobby allegedly will veto your appointment, filling the administration’s ranks instead with Israel sympathizers and fellow-travelers. Mearsheimer and Walt, apparently, aren’t familiar with George Marshall, Allen Dulles, William Rogers, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Caspar Weinberger or James Baker.
But wait: the Lobby’s omnipotence extends further still. It manipulates the media; dominates the think-tanks; monitors, blacklists and intimidates scholars; and worst of all, smears anyone who criticizes Israel as Anti-Semitic. Well, I ask you, what does one call animus toward the Jewish state so irrational that it could prompt two academics to indulge historical errors, to misquote another scholars’ work, and (as we shall see) to resort to obvious fallacy to infer conclusions about America’s motives in Iraq which mock the evidence? An animus so rabid that it would equate democratic Israel with Arab tyranny, and compare IDF human right violations with Syrian and Iraqi genocide, and finally would breed a fantasy of a confederate domestic lobby so omnipotent it can actually compel the U.S. President, Congress, military, State Dept., Pentagon, and intelligence services to betray the nation’s interests for Israel’s sake? Arabism, perhaps? (Pace Sheik Nayef Rajoub, Hamas’ leading vote-getter in the recent Palestinian election, “And now it is the Jewish lobby in the U.S. that is setting policy in the world and causing it to wage war the world over.”)
IV.
The professor’s little yarn continues with their “Lobby” inciting the war in Iraq.
“Pressure from Israel and the Lobby was not the only factor behind the decision to attack Iraq in March 2003, but it was critical… [T]he war was motivated in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure… Within the U.S., the main driving force behind the war was small band of neoconservatives, many with ties to Likud. But leaders of the Lobby’s major organizations also lent their voices to the campaign… There is little doubt that Israel and the Lobby were key factors in the decision to go to war. It’s a decision the US would have been far less likely to take without their efforts…And although many claim that the Iraq war was about oil, there is hardly any evidence to support that proposition, and much evidence of the Lobby’s influence.” ”
Not 09/11; not President Bush’s oedipal conflicts; not imagined collaboration between Iraq and al-Qaeda; not Saddam’s illusory weapons of mass destruction or his ejection of UN weapons inspectors; not the failures of the sanctions regime or the Saudi bases their enforcement required or the fatwa from Bin-Laden this “infidel” presence provoked; not the missionary impulse to spread democracy; nor the strategic goal of a new headquarters from which to observe the virulent anti-American poisons purveyed throughout Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Arab world—No, “the key factors” behind the invasion of Iraq, the professors conclude, were Israel and the Lobby.
The “evidence” implicating Israel,
(1) Prime Minister Sharon reportedly called US-Israeli strategic coordination “unprecedented”; (2) a retired Israeli general also said, “Israeli intelligence was a full partner to the picture presented by American and British intelligence regarding Iraq’s non-conventional capabilities”; (3) former Prime Ministers Barak and Netanyahu, in public editorials, also advocated deposing Saddam Hussein; (4) “apart from Kuwait…Israel was the only country in the world where both politicians and the public favored war” [no citation provided]; (5) Philp Zelikow, former Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board member and current advisor to Condeleezza Rice, told an audience at the University of Virginia in September 2002, “The unstated threat was the threat against Israel”; (6) in August of 2002, Dick Cheney told the Veterans of Foreign Affairs, “Israel is urging US officials not to delay a military strike against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.”
The “evidence” implicating the “Lobby”,
(
1) An editorial in The Forward reported that, “As President Bush attempted to sell the… war in Iraq, America’s most important Jewish organizations rallied as one to his defense;” (2) prominent neoconservatives inside the administration-- many pro-Israel and with close ties to pro- Israeli groups-- zealously advocated toppling Saddam (Wolfowitz, Feith, Perle, Abrams, and Bolton, among others); (3) on September 15, 2001, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz proposed attacking Iraq before Afghanistan but President Bush rejected it; (4) but by early 2002, Vice-President Cheney had changed the President’s mind because three neoconservatives on Cheney’s staff had convinced him; (5) prominent neoconservative pundits outside the administration led a relentless public relations campaign in favor of the war-- Robert Kagan, Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, among them.
For all the tediously redundant citations and superfluous quotes, Walt and Mearsheimer’s logic amounts to the following syllogism: (1) Largely Jewish neoconservatives vociferously championed the Iraqi War; (2) These same neo-cons belong to the Lobby and support Israel (which also endorsed the Iraq War); (3) Ergo, America went to war in Iraq because of the Lobby and Israel. Yet the flaws this logic betrays are so flagrant an undergraduate would shrink from them. The minor fallacy: the Lobby is so vast and prolific that in subsuming practically every public proponent of war, it renders the category meaningless. Supporters of the Iraq War belong to the Lobby; ergo, the Lobby supported the Iraq War. As for the major fallacy—well, correlation doesn’t equal causation. Messrs. Harvard and Chicago flunk Social Science 101. That neoconservatives and Israel advocated the Iraqi war before its declaration doesn’t prove that their support triggered it. The evidence the authors cite could as easily stand for the converse. That is, Israel and the neo-cons touted the war to please and/or to back a President who, Richard Clarke and former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill have disclosed, had fixated on Iraq as early as September 12, 2001, and who, following his success in Afghanistan, decided to found his legacy on completing what his father already had started.
Or more probably, following 09/11, a consensus of elite and public opinion, obsessed with the specter of al-Qaeda cooperating with, and obtaining nuclear and/or chemical weapons from rogue states like Iraq, coalesced around the necessity of removing Saddam to preempt this possibility. The neo-cons, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, the Pentagon, the NSC, Congress, the American public, the British, the Israelis, and the “coalition of the willing”—each for their own independent, related, or identical motives— were suddenly of a piece. Israel and the Lobby no more “caused” the Iraqi war than did Halliburton, the oil companies and/or defense contractors which profited from it; the 62% of Americans who supported it, the Congress which voted for it, or the 09/11 attacks which enabled it. You would think two academics would know better than to draw conclusions about cause from anecdote. Then again, as Orwell once observed, propaganda “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
V.
Alas, Mearsheimer and Walt’s 12,700 word screed reeks of so much mendacity no essay of this length could dispel it all. Nonetheless two of its most invidious canards bear refuting: (1) that U.S. support for Israel stems from the connivance of an all-mighty domestic lobby and its corollary, that, for this reason, protecting Israel has dominated U.S. Middle East policy since ’67; and (2), that the U.S.’s terrorism problem is somehow owed to this paternalism. The irony is that the work of Wiliam Quandt and Rashid Khalidi, two Middle East scholars the authors themselves cite for objectivity-- for their supposed immunity from the “Lobby’s” insidious influence-- gives the lie to the former.
In American Diplomacy and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, Quandt-- a former NSC official, Mearsheimer and Walt characterize as a “senior Middle East expert…with a well-deserved reputation for even-handedness”-- writes,
“Managing the relationship with the Soviet Union in the Middle East, access to inexpensive oil, and support for Israel were American interests readily accepted by successive administrations… Support for Israel [however] was always tempered by a desire to maintain some interests in surrounding Arab countries, because of either oil or competition with the USSR.”
In other words, Israel’s security never has been the “centerpiece” of U.S. Middle East policy, not before ’67, not after. Since World War II, three equivalent objectives have governed American statecraft in the region: (i) securing access to oil (thus the Carter doctrine); (ii) safeguarding Israel’s survival; and (iii) ensuring America remained the Great Power with preponderant influence in the region, which, through the Cold War, meant checking the Soviets and their Arab clients and now translates into limiting Russian and European influence. The first and third priorities, in fact, account for U.S. alliances with Arab regimes antagonistic to, if not belligerent toward, Israel. Close ties with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and the UAE has secured access to oil; while conservative Jordan, post-Nasser Egypt and Saudi Arabia have balanced radical Syria and Iraq and projected U.S. influence beyond the Levant. Egypt, for this reason, received over $2 billion in foreign aid last year. While Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and Bahrain host U.S. military bases.
Not that preserving a rapport with both Israel and her Arab foes hasn’t demanded nimble U.S. statesmanship on occasion, it has. When the Arab-Israeli conflict seethes, for example, American interests collide and the immediate priority of one or the other can mean sacrificing the third. Sometimes, Washington’s need to appease and protect its pro- Arab allies has trumped Israel’s interests and overridden the objections of pro-Israel groups at home; other times Israel’s needs have prevailed. But when oil concerns or Great Power rivalry has spurred the U.S. to bridle or to rebuke or to strong-arm Israel, no amount of Israeli protest or AIPAC pressure could dissuade or thwart a President from doing otherwise. So,
• Eisenhower wielded the threat of sanctions to compel Israel to withdraw from the Sinai following the Suez crisis;
• Nixon and Kissenger delayed a weapons airlift to Israel during the ’73 War and later prevented Sharon from vanquishing the Egyptian’s encircled Third Army;
• President Carter extracted from Begin, a paladin for “Greater Israel,” a West Bank autonomy arrangement in the Camp David Accords;
• Following the Iranian revolution, Carter authorized, and Reagan approved, the sale of F-15s and AWACS defense systems to Saudi Arabia;
• Reagan condemned Israel for bombing Iraq’s nuclear reactor in Osiraq; and during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, he forbade Sharon from entering West Beirut and vanquishing Arafat and his commandos;
• Bush I excluded Israel from the international Gulf War coalition and later conditioned a shipment of Patriot missiles on Israel forgoing retaliation to Iraqi SCUD attacks;
• Bush I, later, won his infamous showdown with AIPAC on Israeli loan guarantees, persuading Congress to deduct each dollar spent for West Bank settlements;
• Clinton coaxed Netanyahu, an adamant opponent of Oslo, to assent to the Wye River Accords, further withdrawing the IDF from West Bank cities;
• Bush II formally endorsed the creation of a Palestinian state;
• Finally no American President has ever conferred legal recognition on Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights, its West Bank settlements, or its designation of Jerusalem as its capital.
In each instance, the President exercised his constitutional authority as the final arbiter of U.S. foreign policy, to which the Pentagon, CIA, State Department, Congress (and the interest groups lobbying it), and every other agent of America’s fragmented foreign policy apparatus had to defer. AIPAC, oil concerns, defense contractors, the Saudi ambassador, the Arab-American Alliance, or any other rival interest group can stage blusterous press conferences, register formal complaints, elicit non-binding Congressional resolutions, induce bureaucratic foot-dragging and stall policy implementation. They even can embarrass a President or tarnish his political standing, but, in the end, lobbies cannot impose a policy they favor or derail a course they dislike. In foreign affairs, the President’s perceptions of U.S. interests, and his will to pursue them, reign supreme.
VI.
It is true however that the breadth and depth of U.S. solicitude for Israel exceeds its support for its Arab allies. A religious, historical, and existential kinship bind the Calvinist and Jewish democracies above and beyond their strategic partnership. It imparts to their relationship a separate ideological dimension which makes it unique-- a “special relationship”, in the scholar’s parlance. Pro-Israel lobbying groups, in mobilizing and marshalling widespread affection for Israel among the American public, cement this ideological bond.
“We agree there is strong support for Israel in America,” Walt and Mearsheimer counter, “But we believe this popularity substantially due to the lobby’s success at portraying Israel in a favorable light and effectively limiting discussion of Israel’s less savory actions.” They, evidently, would have us believe AIPAC manufactures this good will and burnishes Israel’s reputation, like some low-rent public relations firm handling an incorrigible celebrity.
But U.S. partiality toward Israel reflects nothing so transitory or synthetic. Their bond is ontological. The Puritans, remember, founded these United States as a missionary project to redeem mankind. As such, we are an ideological nation. That is, a core of principles forms our identity and sets us apart. Foremost among them is that our Republic ordains a universal example, a promise of salvation for all who would follow. Regimes matter; or to us, they matter anyway. The U.S., for this reason, does not play the cynical game of realpolitick Metternich-style as the Europeans do. France could go from Israel’s foremost military patron to its Arab nemeses’ chief arms supplier in the space of a few years once withdrawal from Algeria militated otherwise. The U.S. does not-- the U.S. cannot-- treat democracies so capriciously. Rather, as democracy’s apostle and guardian, we see its proliferation not just as a good in itself but also as a vital national interest—an imperative for preserving the American experiment and way of life. U.S. foreign policy consequently betrays a greater, more enduring affection for democracies like Israel that embody its values than Arab dictatorships and monarchies that do not. This isn’t to say that U.S. foreign policy is more virtuous than that of Europe’s democracies or that over the past two centuries exigencies haven’t occasioned U.S. alliances with tyrants or even condoned our destabilization of a hostile democracy. It is to suggest, rather, that when the U.S. forges strategic partnerships with fellow democracies, that democratic fellowship deepens their relationship and binds them together with a fastness autocracies cannot equal or even approximate. Or, to quote, Quandt again,
“The bond between the United States and Israel is unquestionably strengthened because of the presumed congruence of values between the two nations. Americans can identify with Israel’s national style—the commitment to western-style democracy, the ideals of individualism and freedom—in a way that has no parallel on the Arab side. Neither the ideal of a well-ordered Muslim community nor that of a modernizing autocracy evokes much sympathy among Americans. Consequently, a predisposition no doubt exists in American political culture that works to the advantage of the Israelis”
What Walt and Mearsheimer refuse to see, in other words, is that American electorate’s affinity for Israel doesn’t emanate from what Israel does, but from what Israel is, a kinship born of culture and identity, not behavior. Israel, like the U.S., is a settler democracy. Israel, like the U.S., did not grow organically around communities rooted in the medieval soil. Immigrants established them, purposefully, post-Enlightenment. Israel, as such, evokes a vision of America’s younger self-- a small, beleaguered democracy settled by hardy pioneers who fled Europe to found a new and better nation amid an alien population in inhospitable environs. A kinship of origin that elevates the U.S-Israeli special relationship to a primal attachment the U.S. enjoys with no other nation save Great Britain. Even their founding myths and motifs resemble each other, a likeness of patrilineal cousins: the Jeffersonian yeoman farmer and Zionism’s rugged kibbutznik; America, “The City on a Hill”, and Israel, “The Light Unto Nations”; God’s “Chosen People” and Christ’s “Elect”; a New and Old Jerusalem, each erected on Promised Lands. Professor Rashid Khalidi, a Middle East history professor of Palestinian descent, echoes this view in his recent book, Resurrecting Empire:
“[T]he same religious and romantic factors that led many European Protestants to extend their fervent support to Zionism affected American Protestants, with the same potent political results…There were other reasons beyond the potent influence of the Bible for Americans to be attracted by the lure of Zionism. Because of their own pioneer heritage, Americans were more apt than Europeans to identify with lurid images of brave, outnumbered settlers of European stock taming an arid land in the face of opposition from ignorant, fanatical nomads… Like European political leaders, they [American political leaders] were swayed mainly by their own beliefs, which tended to reflect the biblically induced pro-Zionist sentiment prevalent among their Protestant constituents.”(italics mine) .
This ideological bond and symbolic connection between the U.S and Israel, on the one hand, intensifies their strategic cooperation when their interests converge, as in the second Gulf War; on the other, it preserves their relationship even when their leaders disagree and their respective interests clash, as in the first. More often than not though, the geopolitical and ideological dimensions reinforce each other.
That is, democracies may or may not be more peaceful, as Kant believed, or disposed to U.S. interests. Regime change may or may not bring the prosperity, security, or the strategic boon neoconservatives have promised. However, once in the U.S.’s geopolitical orbit, democracies, certainly, make for more reliable allies. Changes in the Israeli government, for instance, do not risk abrogated commitments or herald wholesale shifts in allegiance. The same cannot be said of our other friends in the region. For America’s ties to Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia remain only as durable as their authoritarian rulers’ grip on power. Indeed, Iran’s history (and Libya’s, a US ally before Qaddaffi’s coup) offers an enduring object lesson in the sudden strategic reversals and dramatic realignments autocracies threaten.
VII.But
America’s Arab alliances risk worse than defection. And that Walt and Mearsheimer imagine the U.S.-Israeli alliance “an important source” of “anti-American terrorism” implies a perverse irony: they write, “There is no question that many al-Qaida leaders, including Osama Bin Laden are motivated by Israel’s presence in Jerusalem and the plight of the Palestinians.” Ironic because what 09/11 actually dramatizes is the al-Qaedan scourge America’s alliance with Israel’s foes has begotten. The stark discovery that our Arab allies breed a malignant anti-Americanism transmissible to U.S. shores. That in violently suppressing opposition, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and even Jordan have radicalized their politics and galvanized a generation of Islamic militants with nihilist rage. Only their despotisms prove too entrenched to topple, too wily and ruthless in effacing opposition and in channeling it elsewhere-- at Israel, at the U.S., at Western Europe, anywhere but at its source.
Fouad Ajami writes in his new book The Foreigner’s Gift,
“Post-09/11…the American imperial position in its two pillars of influence—Saudi Arabia and Egypt—was reeling… $2 billion a year of aid to the regime of Muburak [] bought for America the hatred of Egypt’s middle classes and the virulent enmity of its Islamists. It was in Mubarak’s political prisons that countless Islamists had endured brutality and torture and vowed revenge on the Egyptian ruler and the foreign power that backed him… If Al Qaeda’s money came from the Arabian Peninsula, the Egyptians had provided the backbone of operational leadership…. America’s authoritarian… friends rode with America but brought down on it the wrath of the aggrieved and disgruntled in their domains… September 11th cast the bargain with Arab authoritarianism in an entirely different light.”
Even Bin-Laden himself lists U.S. support for Israel third among his litany of grievances. The Saudi Arabian’s infamous fatwa, “Declaration of the World Islamic Front for Jihad against the Jews and the Crusaders” inveighs first and foremost at the presence of infidel U.S. troops on Saudi soil and the protection they buy his sworn enemy, the House of Saud. A military presence having nothing whatsoever to do with Israel but rather with the First Gulf War and Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait; and where troops have remained ever since because under-populated Saudi Arabia cannot defend itself or secure the oil fields so indispensable to U.S. strategic needs. Thus the added irony: far from a sub rosa plot to make the world safe for Israel, as Walt and Mearsheimer suppose, the Second Gulf War actually was propelled by the ulterior motive of making the Middle East safe for the House of Saud. A peaceful regime in Iraq, the U.S. calculated, would enable the U.S. to dismantle its base in Saudi Arabia and to curtail sanctions against Iraq, thereby defusing al-Qaeda’s two most explosive charges: that U.S. troops were desecrating sacred Muslim soil and enforcing a humiliating and genocidal sanction regime against the Iraqi people.
But let us, for a moment, confront Walt and Mearsheimer’s premise head-on. After all, it’s practically an article of faith in Europe (thus their London forum), to say nothing of the Arab world, that by acquiescing to Israel’s Occupation and self-destructive settlement policy, the U.S. invites its terrorism problem and creates one for Europe. But consider the alternative and this shibboleth reveals itself for the myth it is. Imagine, that is, a world in which a U.S President, defying domestic opposition, forced Israel to withdraw fully from the Territories. That tomorrow we awaken to discover that the PLO has established a Palestinian state more or less along the lines Mahmoud Abbas’s referendum proposes—a sovereign country equal to 100% of the West Bank’s land mass before ‘67; its capital in East Jerusalem; the Jewish settlements evacuated; Hamas and Islamic Jihad disarmed and/or co-opted; and Israel’s absorption of a token number of Palestinian refugees and compensation for the rest. Imagine this utopian scenario and reevaluate. Would the normalization of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict strengthen Arab moderates in their ongoing war with the Jihadists? Yes. Would it fortify the U.S.’s strategic presence thereby in the Levant and improve its standing in the Gulf, especially in Iraq? Of course. But-- and herein lies the qualification that swallows the premise: would it quell the seismic unrest, the febrile resentment, the volatile Jihadist backlash sudden oil wealth-- and the modernization accompanying it-- has precipitated or dispose of the corrupt, oppressive, sclerotic Arab regimes oil money has buttressed and enabled? No. Would it diminish Western civilization’s threat to the Islamic world’s traditional elites? No. Would al-Qaeda and the other Jihadists, in short, still beset the U.S and target its shores? And the answer, regrettably, is an unqualified yes.
Because however much the Palestinians’ plight may infuriate Islamic militants, and rationalize anti-American terror, Israel still functions more as lightening rod than spark, more effect than cause, more object than subject of displaced rage and cathartic delusion. For what really inflames al-Qaeda-- and every other Islamic militancy for that matter, whether Hamas, Hezbollah, or Islamic Jihad-- is not the Occupation but the Jewish state’s very existence. The presence of which in the Middle East they perceive to be the satanic agent of America’s crusade to corrupt their sacred pan-Islamic ulama. In this, the Jihadists and the U.S. projections of Israel actually mirror each other; they’re existential. Israel signifies for the U.S. the very democratic pluralism it embodies and champions. To the Jihadist, on the other hand, Israel incarnates the modern civilization they deplore. Israel represents the revolutionary Western dynamo that has diluted their culture, devalued their status, and eroded their identity-- uprooting, alienating, and disenfranchising them. Francis Fukuyama, in America at the Crossroads, explains,
“Islamism and its radical jihadist offshoots are the products of what Olivier Roy calls ‘deterritorialized’ Islam, in which individual Muslims find themselves cut off from authentic local traditions, often as uprooted minorities in non-Muslim lands. This explains why so many jihadist have not come from the Middle East but have rather been bred in Western Europe…. Jihadism is a byproduct of modernization and globalization… an attempt to create a new universalistic doctrine that can be a source of identity within the context of a modern, globalized, multicultural world.”
And which, if true, means the U.S. will have to battle the Jihadists for the foreseeable future, an endemic menace spurning Israel could do nothing to pacify.
VIII.
And it’s the traumas of modernity, what’s more, which returns us to where we started—the origin of Walt and Mearsheimer’s tract in the netherworld of the America mind. After all, how, in the “Israel Lobby,” do two academics—two academics who profess to deplore anti-Semitism—fall prey to a crude analytical tool reminiscent of the Judeophobic ravings of Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and Patrick Buchanan?
Well the story begins with America’s own trial with modernization at the turn of the 20th century and the emergence, in turn, of our own homegrown political atavism, the Populist movement. Populism, like Jihadism, Richard Hofstadter observed in The Age of Reform, arose from the havoc—the confusion, the alienation, the dissolution of old certainties and faiths-- modernization wreaked on a pre-modern society. Populism, like Jihadism, expressed a nostalgic longing for a return to a purer, more pastoral, traditional order. And Populism, like Jihadism, seized on a vivid symbolic target, a scapegoat upon which the dispossessed could vent his rage and frustration-- modernity incarnate, the international Jew. And so, the Jewish specter, previously confined to private space, enters American politics, an incubus forever after.
For as David Plotke writes in his introduction to The Radical Right, “
once a movement introduces durable themes into a national political culture or tradition, those themes become widely available to later forces who may not be identical in aims or composition to those who came before them.”
Or, I would add, who may not even be aware of their theme’s origin. Thus the Jewish chimera could pass through the collective subconscious from the Populists to Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, Patrick Buchanan, and on up to the Ivory Tower without the professors, perhaps, even conscious they had succumbed to its mythology. Because if the bogeyman has mutated ever so slightly from Jewish bankers to Jewish lobbyists, the basic fixture remains the same. God’s American Israel no longer can determine its own destiny because a Jew, whose loyalties forever lie in a Jerusalem elsewhere, has subverted America’s will and internationalized its identity.
Alas, finance capital eludes sovereign control. Middle Eastern violence and instability redound overseas. And on 09/11, the innocent nation, stricken for the first time by the plagues of Job, discovers that the “champion and vindicator of only her own freedom,” now has “monsters to destroy” all its own. Because Chosen-ness and Election confer no privilege beyond their lead role as the phantoms the paranoid and malevolent, the sophistic and grandiose, project in their shadowy worldview.
