NOVANEWS

When the President of the United States reiterated longstanding American policy in the Middle East – that the borders of Israel and a Palestinian state must be based on the 1967 borders, give or take a few land swaps here and there – was he really “not surprised,” as he claimed in his speech to AIPAC a few days later, by the ensuing uproar? That’s what he says, but the reality is harder to discern: after all, this was the premise behind George W. Bush’s – and, before him, Bill Clinton’s – public statements on the issue, and the President had every reason to believe this time would be no different.

Yet it was indeed different, because – as I pointed out here – Israel is different, all these years later. And so is the United States. President Obama was caught flat-footed because he and his advisors failed to consider the full import of these changes.

In Israel, a right-wing government has as its relatively “moderate” element Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose Likud-led government is backed in a coalition government by a number of extreme right-wingers who make the hawkish Likudniks look reasonable. Israel’s foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, is a thuggish radical whose racist anti-Arab diatribes have even Israel’s hard-line partisans in the US desperate to keep him in the background. Lieberman’s party, Yisrael Beiteinu, is a neo-fascist outfit which advocates the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank and the creation of  a “Greater Israel.” According to them, there are no Palestinians – only Jordanians who have infiltrated Israel.

In America, the power of the Israel lobby is much greater than at any time in the past, and certainly since the 1967 war. We are faced, here in this country, with the extraordinary spectacle of a US President confronting a foreign leader with a list of reasonable requests – negotiation in good faith, the abandonment of encroaching “settlements,” an end to the arbitrary humiliations endured by a people under occupation – and the leaders of the opposition are taking the side of the foreign leader. This from a party that revels in its alleged super-“patriotism”! Romney, Huckabee, and the whole Fox network team went into overdrive, following the President’s Mideast speech, flaying him for “betraying” Israel. Fox News even ran a story warning that “Jewish donors” would not back the President’s reelection campaign on account of his supposedly “new” stance.

Yet, as I am not the first to point out, there was nothing new in what the President said about the 1967 borders. That didn’t matter to Obama’s critics, however: so quick were they to pick up the latest party line from Tel Aviv that they didn’t even bother to acknowledge this, but were only concerned with echoing every jot and tittle of the Israeli position. Not since the heyday of the old Communist Party USA, when the Daily Worker was adept at not only defending but anticipating the line handed down by the Kremlin, have we seen such a phenomenon: the kowtowing before a foreign leader by American politicians.

The idea that our leaders are intent on pursuing America’s vital national interests abroad – that the formulation of our foreign policy has to do with determining what those interests are and how best to achieve them – is a myth. As is the case with domestic policy, foreign policy is a political question: that is, it’s all about the internal pressures and interests competing for primacy in the policymaking process. Nothing underscores the dynamics of this decision-making procedure quite so starkly and dramatically as the Israeli-Palestinian issue.

The US military has been particularly insistent that the question of Palestine be resolved before we can achieve our goals in the Middle East, and secure the defense of American interests more generally. That our unconditional support for Israel has cost us dearly, in terms of our prestige and “pull” in the Arab world, is undeniable. That we are fighting terrorists who use this issue to demonize the US, and provoke attacks on our interests and our citizens throughout the world, is likewise readily apparent.

Yet rather than give up this failed policy, which has led to nothing but trouble, our leaders in both political parties – including the President – have taken every opportunity to pledge themselves to an “ironclad” – as Obama put it – commitment to the survival of Israel as a Jewish state implanted in an Arab sea. And that, furthermore, this commitment is not contingent on Israeli behavior: our support is unconditional and permanent, no matter if Avigdor Lieberman comes to power and deports every Palestinian to the far side of the Jordan river.

In his “make up” speech to AIPAC, Obama once again reiterated this commitment and boasted about all the money we’re shoveling over there so Bibi can build “settlements” and keep the Palestinians in subjection. US “aid” built the wall that separates the Israeli green belt from the great prison-house of the occupied territories, and which makes permanent a land grab on a vast scale. Without that aid, both military and economic, Israel would sink like a stone beneath the demographic waves.

In short, we have the Israelis in a complete state of military and economic dependency – and yet they are calling the tune, and not Washington. What’s up with that?

What’s up is the Israelis have a singularly powerful lobby in the US, which wields such political clout that no politician can afford to cross them. We are living in a country where the chief executive must constantly look over his shoulder and worry that Congress will support the position of a foreign leader over the President of the United States. As Pat Buchanan so memorably – and correctly – put it, Congress is “Israeli-occupied territory.” And we aren’t just talking about Republican members pandering to their “born again” Christian fundamentalist constituency, but also Democrats in thrall to a wealthy and well-organized urban constituency which puts Israel first, last, and always.

In Israel, too – where, after forty years of constant warfare, voters are not interested in compromise – domestic politics dictates foreign policy. The Israeli electorate is so far to the right, these days, that a neo-fascist party and a Jewish version of Hitler have made huge gains of the sort that were once unthinkable. In its religious fervor, and millennialist hysteria, the Israeli zeitgeist has abandoned its Western and European antecedents, and become almost indistinguishable from its Arab neighbors: fundamentalism is as much a problem in Israel as it is in, say, Egypt, or Jordan. Israel, in short, has returned to its Asian-Oriental roots, and is very far from the idealistic experiment its European founders envisioned at the beginning.

The fundamentalist leaders of today’s Israel are no more interested in peace than the leadership of al-Qaeda, or Hamas. The President may cite the demographic time bomb going off at present in the occupied territories, which he says makes the current situation “unsustainable,” but Israel’s fundies have an answer to that: deportation, ethnic cleansing, and a “Greater Israel” that extends its territory to include “Samaria” (the West Bank) and lands supposedly granted to Israel in the Bible. A debate about this is precluded by the fundamentalist mindset: we’re talking about religion, here, and not anything amenable to rational discussion or negotiation. The ruling Likud party was founded on this fundamentalist premise, and a “Greater Israel” is what the party of Netanyahu represents: it is foolish to think he will abandon this goal because of American pressure.

Sprinkled with genuflections to the Israel lobby, such as his references to Iran’s nonexistent nuclear weapons program, and numerous pledges to continue and strengthen the costly symbiosis that has poisoned our relations with much of the rest of the world, Obama’s AIPAC speech was an exemplar of such craven appeasement that the sight of it must make genuine patriots cringe.

Why does the most powerful man on earth have to take Tel Aviv’s demands into account? Why is he not free to act and speak as he wills?

The reason, in short, is the pro-Israel movement in the United States, a well-organized and inordinately wealthy political machine that operates as the Israeli government’s agent in America. Here is a lobby – in effect, a fifth column in league with a foreign government – so powerful that it has become the decisive factor in determining US policy in a region of the world vital to US national interests. It has succeeded in subordinating those interests to Israeli objectives, and it has done so by creating a political apparatus in the US that politicians defy at their peril. Apologists for the Israel lobby constantly maintain that they have done nothing wrong, that their activities are carried out in full public view and in accordance with the principles of American democracy – and in this they are absolutely correct.

This is democracy in action – a well-organized and very well-funded minority, fanatically devoted to the interests of a country other than their own, has seized control of the policymaking apparatus of the US government. There is nothing inherently un-democratic about this. To the contrary: in a democracy, the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and by this standard the very well-greased gears of the Israeli state – slathered, as they are, with gobs of US taxpayer dollars – stand as a monument to that operating principle.

As for the views of the American people in their majority – well, in our democracy, these views don’t get a hearing. They don’t because most Americans couldn’t care less about Israel, and, furthermore: they don’t approve of “foreign aid” – especially at a time when we’re borrowing from the Chinese just to keep the government running. They are sick and tired of hearing about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which seems as insoluble as unraveling the Gordian Knot.

Yet, this healthy indifference to the quarrels of belligerent foreigners is irrelevant, politically, because it hardly matches the passion of Israel’s partisans, who pursue Tel Aviv’s cause with single-minded ferocity.

In both speeches, the President went out of his way to denounce efforts in the United Nations to “isolate” Israel, i.e. support the declaration of an independent  Palestinian state, and efforts in the occupied territories to unify the West Bank and Hamas-held Gaza. Support for Israel, he said, is encoded in our “values.” As Jennifer Laslo Mizrahi, president of The Israel Project, put it in response to the President’s performance before AIPAC: “Israel is as much a part of American values and traditions as are hot dogs, apple pie and freedom.”

This is utter nonsense, of course: support for Israel is no more a part of American tradition than is support for, say, the cause of Basque independence. Up until relatively recently, support for the Zionist project was evident among only a small minority of American Jews, never mind among the majority of Americans, and US Presidents, starting with Eisenhower and continuing on up to Bush Senior, were evenhanded in their treatment of both Israel and the Arabs, (and even, in the case of Bush I, a bit cool to Tel Aviv’s ceaseless demands).

Ronald Reagan, whose cold warrior credentials placed him firmly in Israel’s camp, disdained Tel Aviv’s advice and withdrew US forces from Lebanon, much to the anger and dismay of the neocons, who denounce him for it to this day. It was only with the advent of George W. Bush’s tenure in the White House that the “special relationship” became as “ironclad” as it is today. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Israeli propaganda machine made good use of the “Israel’s cause is our cause” argument, which gained new resonance beyond the Lobby’s traditional constituency.

Now that a war-weary nation is coming to its senses, however, and the shock of 9/11 has had time to wear off, the advantage enjoyed by the Israel Firsters has been dissipated over time. There is space, in the national discourse, for a view that puts American over Israeli interests, and seeks to undo the harm caused by years of kneejerk support for an oppressive and unjust occupation.

It is true that US intervention in the Middle East, and particularly in the Israel-Palestinian conflict, has only exacerbated the stand-off, and ill-served our national interests. Yet it is not enough to say that we simply shouldn’t intervene: we are, in reality, already intervening by subsidizing and arming the Israeli Sparta. The helicopter gunships that cut down Palestinian children whose only weapons are rocks and epithets have “made in USA” stamped all over them. Just as the tear-gas canisters hurled at Egyptian protesters by Mubarak’s goons had the same imprint of origin.

To say, simply, that the US should not intervene, that Washington should not be “dictating” to Tel Aviv, is to drop the entire context and reality of US policy. Unconditional American support for Israel in the form of a continuous stream of money and the most advanced weaponry has created the situation our President rightly calls “unsustainable,” and there is no walking away from our responsibility for the status quo.

I don’t blame those who take this “no intervention” line for trying to dispose of the Israeli-Palestinian question in this way. Telling the truth about the US-Israeli relationship, and pointing out its essentialy dysfunctional nature, has always been more trouble for a politician than it’s worth.

Those who raise these questions are smeared by the Israel lobby, and targeted for destruction: any politician or public official who questions the conventional Washington wisdom on these matters is pilloried in the press and excoriated by the Israeli Firsters. The sheer noise level of this smear campaign is very often enough to destroy a politician, a publication, or a reputation. Antiwar.com has been a major target of the Lobby ever since we started speaking out on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, i.e. from the get-go. We haven’t hesitated to criticize Israel, and my column in particular has taken the Israelis and their American supporters to task on numerous occasions. For that, I was purged from the Huffington Post as an invited blogger, and attacked by the neocons (and the ADL) as “anti-semitic.” Apparently the nearly all-Jewish leadership of the libertarian movement is not enough to placate these would-be Grand Inquisitors, who define “anti-Semitism” as opposition to the policies of whatever government is in power in Tel Aviv.

By this measure, most American Jews – who balk at the hardline policies of Netanyahu and his allies – are also “anti-Semites.” Go figure.

The great problem with any Empire, such as our own, is that it becomes the instrument of its own satellites. Our satraps hold us hostage, and exact tribute in the form of “foreign aid” – even as the folks back home go broke. While Social Security benefits are the target of congressional budget-cutters, aid to Israel is sacrosanct.

There’s something very wrong with this picture.

NOVANEWS

U.S. President Barack Obama said Sunday before the AIPAC pro-Israel lobby that two states for two people based on 1967 borders has been a long-standing U.S. policy for Mideast negotiations.

After a contentious couple of days, Obama said his endorsement of the Israel’s 1967 boundaries as the basis for a Palestinian state reflected the urgent need for a two-state solution between Israelis and Palestinians.

Moreover, Obama used the AIPAC address to clarify his statement in his Mideast speech on Thursday, emphasizing the U.S. believes in negotiations based on 1967 borders with mutually agreed swaps. He clarified that he did not mean the borders that existed on June 4, 1967.

Obama said his call for a future Palestine based on the 1967 borders with agreed land swaps was a public expression of what has long been acknowledged privately.

Obama said he brought this out in the open because delay will undermine Israel’s security and prospects for peace. He repeated his remarks from Thursday on Israeli-Palestinian borders and security verbatim.

The U.S. president also warned that Israel will face growing isolation without a credible Middle East peace process and said that we cannot afford to wait another decade, or another two decades, or another three decades, to achieve peace.

Obama reassured the crowd of Israel supporters that the U.S. commitment to Israel’s security is ‘ironclad’ and that the U.S. demands that Hamas recognize Israel’s right to exist.

The U.S. president also urged Hamas to release abducted Israel Defense Forces soldier Gilad Shalit.

Obama reemphasized the special relationship between the U.S. and Israel, and said his administration “will continue to maintain Israel’s qualitative edge.”

NOVANEWS

US president goes before Jewish lobby in DC, says US commitment to Israel’s security ‘ironclad,’ Washington won’t stand for Israel’s isolation in international arena. President further reassures: Israel, PA, to negotiate border different than 1967′s.

US President Barack Obama spoke before an AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) conference in Washington Sunday, amid rumored tensions with both Jreusalem and the Jewish community in the United States, following his Mideast policy speech last week.

Obama’s speech, where he endorsed the 1967 borders as the basis for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, has chafed the tense relations between Jerusalem and Washington further, as well as sparked rumors that the Jewish American community was, for the large part, rethinking its support for Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign.

Obama began by reassuring AIPAC that “the commitment of the United States to the security of Israel is ironclad”; adding that the US was committed to keeping Israel the secure home of the Jewish people.

“I’m not here to subject you to a long policy speech,” Obama began. “I gave one on Thursday in which I said that the United States sees the historic changes sweeping the Middle East and North Africa as a moment of great challenge, but also a moment of opportunity for greater peace and security for the entire region, including the State of Israel.”

Addressing the rumored tensions between himself and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Obama said that “While we may at times disagree, as friends sometimes will, the bonds between the United States and Israel are unbreakable, and the commitment of the United States to the security of Israel is ironclad.

“A strong and secure Israel is in the national security interest of United States not simply because we share strategic interests… (it is) simply because we face common dangers.”

America, he continued, has “a profound commitment to Israel’s survival as a strong, secure homeland of the Jewish people. We also know how difficult that search for security can be, especially for a small nation like Israel in a tough neighborhood.

“Because we understand the challenges Israel faces, I and my administration have made the security of Israel a priority,” he continued, saying that cooperation between the US military and the IDF was at “an unprecedented levels,” and that the US’ most advanced technologies are available to Israel, which is why the US has increased foreign military financing “to record levels.”

“Make no mistake, we will maintain Israel’s qualitative military edge,” Obama stressed to the sound of the crowd’s roaring applause.

As for the Iranian nuclear threat Obama declared: “Let me be absolutely clear – we remain committed to preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.”

“You also see our commitment to Israel’s security in our steadfast opposition to any attempt to de-legitimize the State of Israel. As I said at the United Nation’s last year, ‘Israel’s existence must not be a subject for debate,’ and ‘efforts to chip away at Israel’s legitimacy will only be met by the unshakeable opposition of the United States,’” he assured his audience.

It because of the US’ commitment to Israel’s long-term security that Washington has worked to advance peace between Israelis and Palestinians, the US president forged on.

“Now, I have said repeatedly that core issues can only be negotiated in direct talks between the parties, and… the recent agreement between Fatah and Hamas poses an enormous obstacle to peace. No country can be expected to negotiate with a terrorist organization sworn to its destruction.

“We will continue to demand that Hamas accept the basic responsibilities of peace: recognizing Israel’s right to exist, rejecting violence, and adhering to all existing agreements. And we once again call on Hamas to release Gilad Shalit, who has been kept from his family for five long years.”

Obama then turned his attention to his controversial Mideast speech: “I know that stating principles – on the issues of territory and security – generated some controversy over the past few days,” he cut right to the core.

“But as I said to Prime Minister Netanyahu, I believe that the current situation in the Middle East does not allow for procrastination. I also believe that real friends talk openly and honestly with one another. And so I want to share with you some of what I said to the prime Minister.

“I firmly believe, and repeated on Thursday, that peace cannot be imposed on the parties to the conflict… The United States will stand up against efforts to single Israel out at the UN or in any international forum. Because Israel’s legitimacy is not a matter for debate,” he said.

The US, he reaffirmed, “Will hold the Palestinians accountable for their actions and their rhetoric.”

“There was nothing particularly original in my proposal; this basic framework for negotiations has long been the basis for discussions among the parties, including previous US Administrations,” Obama said.

The US “believes that negotiations should result in two states, with permanent Palestinian borders with Israel, Jordan, and Egypt, and permanent Israeli borders with Palestine.

“The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states… As for security, every state has the right to self-defense, and Israel must be able to defend itself – by itself – against any threat,” he stressed.

“Let me reaffirm what ’1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps’ means: By definition, it means that the parties themselves – Israelis and Palestinians – will negotiate a border that is different than the one that existed on June 4, 1967.

“It is a well known formula to all who have worked on this issue for a generation. It allows the parties themselves to account for the changes that have taken place over the last 44 years, including the new demographic realities on the ground and the needs of both sides.

“The ultimate goal is two states for two peoples. Israel as a Jewish state and the homeland for the Jewish people, and the state of Palestine as the homeland for the Palestinian people; each state enjoying self-determination, mutual recognition, and peace,” he concluded.

The conference is known as AIPAC’s annual show of strength and true to form, some 10,000 people from all over the US attended the meeting. An increased presence of senators and congressmen from all across the political spectrum was also noted.

Prior to Obama’s arrival, pro-Israel demonstrators rallied outside the gathering’s venue, protesting what they believed would be the US president’s reiteration of his support of a Palestinian state within 1967 borders.

Meanwhile, some 300 protesters gathered outside the US Embassy in Tel Aviv, rallying against Obama’s speech. The protesters were carrying signs reading “Obama, Israel will not commit suicide.”

NOVANEWS

So he did what politicians trying to satisfy the pro-Israel lobby have been doing from time immemorial – he condemned Iran. Midway through a comparatively short speech, he promised the US would continue to escalate “pressure” on Iran, andaccused the nation of trying to make nuclear weapons.
“We remain committed to preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons,” Obama declared, to thunderous applause. He then went on to accuseIran of “hypocrisy” for criticizing the violent crackdown on pro-democracy protests in Bahrain. Obama declared earlier in the week that the US was committed to supporting the Bahrani regime and that the crackdowns showed they simply wanted a return to the “rule of law.”
Going to the Iran well is likely a cynical attempt to placate a potentially hostile lobby, and the thunderous applause suggest it did its job. The allegations against Iran, despite being identical to allegations made for years past, are not backed up by any hard evidence.

NOVANEWS

I don’t like to recycle, but I make an exception, because it’s the AIPAC conference this weekend and “thought” is suffusing the internet. Originally appeared here.

James Petras has been cloned. Petras I is still reliable, if a bit creaky in his old age. He digs for information in Chapare, Chiapas, and elsewhere in the Latin American countryside, interviewing militants from the Venezuelan National Peasant Front Ezequiel Zamora, rural organizers from the Brazilian Landless Worker’s Movements, syndicalists in Uruguay, and slum-dwellers in Argentine villas de miseria. He pores through primary resources in Portuguese and Spanish, clattering out endless reams of political journalism on the struggle of the dispossessed in Latin American, situating their struggles within the political economy of global imperialism. Petras I’s analysis may be a little theoretically fuzzy, but he gets his hands dirty and deals with facts.

Then there’s another Petras. Petras II is slightly off the rails. Still kind of coherent, he deploys Marxist sociological analysis in the pursuit of a highly idiosyncratic series of theses: that an interwoven complex of institutions called the Zionist Power Configuration has taken over the American government, that the ongoing aggression against Iraq emerged not out of Texaco, but out of Tel Aviv, and that the Iranian Green Movement was a bunch of Gucci revolutionaries from the posh neighborhoods of North Tehran. Both are busy, but especially the latter, who has been churning out pamphlets accusing Israel of allying with an American Fifth Column at the rate of one a year for the past half decade.

Petras II seems like he’s been stealing copy from Anthony Giddens and post-9/11 Rudolf Giuliani. He writes of the “post-colonial ethos of the American people” and is concerned that Israeli irredentism is jeopardizing the “work and security of American businessmen and officials” as they day-in and day-out construct the economic and political filigree of empire. He also offers counsel to the American fighting forces as to how to carry out our imperial wars, noting that things have gotten so bad that an American general – he means David Petraeus – commented that “Israel’s colonial dispossession of the Palestinian people has prolonged the war [in Iraq]…and undermined the capacity of the U.S. armed forces to successfully operate on multiple fronts to promote U.S. imperial interests.”

This latter Petras poses difficult problems for the Left. Is it better that the U.S. armed forces aren’t free to carpet bomb the Bolivarian Revolution because the Israeli Army’s carpet bombing of Gaza and transformation of the West Bank into a set of cantons traversed by endless Jewish-only roads and peppered with illegal settlements inhabited by glaze-eyed khasidim from Williamsburg insistent that the Torah gives them the right to uproot olive trees, beat the crap out of Palestinian shepherds in the South Hebron Hills, and generally thrash and steal from the aboriginal population, is slowing down the American occupation army in Iraq? Or should the Left instead oppose Israeli settler-colonialism and seek to shatter the spine of the American Israel lobby that supports it, so the U.S. Army, having ripped Iraqi society apart, can move back to its normal safari grounds in Latin America? Petras II would have us destroying the societies Petras I has been protecting for half a century. Not on purpose – but once we remove the imperial foot soldiers from the Middle East, we know that they tend to get busy elsewhere.

The rub is that Petras I and Petras II are one. Revolutionary intellectual cohabits the same body with reactionary ideologue. The gist of Petras’s argument – in this case, presented in a short pamphlet entitled War Crimes in Gaza and the Zionist Fifth Column in America, about 25 percent of it devoted to reprinting the Executive Summary of the Goldstone Report, a valuable service to those of his readers unfamiliar with the World Wide Web – is that Israel has “strategic domination” of the U.S. political system, and the “Zionist Power Configuration” controls the “mass media,” while “Americans have suffered major losses as a result of Israel’s relentless pursuit of military-driven power in the Middle East.” Furthermore, “Israel’s arrogance damages attempts by U.S. private investors to broker oil deals for multinational corporations.” The problem is an abusive “relation between states,” or as Petras quickly rejiggers the argument, a relationship between peoples in which one group, “Israeli Jews and their powerful one percent fifth column agents in the U.S.” imposes their bellicose, tribute-taking agenda on another group: “the American taxpayers, soldiers, workers and businesspeople.” His italics.

In the process, the Left comes in for heavy abuse. Petras attacks the “Marxist…Zionist fellow travelers” of the American Left for not printing any “critical essays on Zionist power” in such journals as the New Left Review (British), New Politics, Socialist Register, and so on, especially upset that his and John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s books don’t receive leftist attention.

The reaction to Walt and Mearsheimer is simply untrue. They were reviewed and responded to, if not always convincingly, and frequently far too dismissively. As for Petras, who can blame the Left? Most anyone not wearing a tinfoil hat would recoil from his conspiratorial gobbledygook. The Left in particular would tragically but correctly accuse Petras of whitewashing empire. Both reactions are too easy. Some of what Petras has been issuing in an unending stream over the past six years is correct. The Israel lobby – drop the “Zionist Power configuration” – is powerful. The mass-media does filter its news through a Zionist sieve. And it’s true that there has been a “Zionist/Israeli influence in promoting U.S. war policies.” The lobby’s power does hurt the many for the interests of the few. One can hardly find fault with Petras’s assertion that it must be countered. And Petras is enough of a leftist that parts of his political program are welcome. We should support “the class and popular struggle against finance, real estate and insurance billionaires.” But other things do not follow. Against his insistence, it is hard to identify “U.S. wars for Israel in the Middle East,” and Petras’s comment that the U.S. Left should organize under a banner with the legend, “ISRAEL DOESN’T TELL U.S. WORKERS WHO TO FIGHT” will not sit well with many leftists, having nothing to do with “Jewish ‘sensibilities’” as he writes and everything to do with the political and moral basis for left organization: that workers shouldn’t be fighting in capitalist wars.

Petras identifies institutional politics oriented towards ethnically conceived interests as the knot of the problem. But the lobby, pace Petras, Walt-Mearsheimer, and others, is not a fifth column-esque force making America deviate from its “national interest,” a bit of metaphysics imported from the conceptual universe of international relations theory. Those concerned about Palestinian liberation should know this more than anyone. The autocratic Palestinian Authority kowtows to Washington and Tel Aviv and promises Tzipi Livni the “biggest Yerushalayim” ever in return for the aid inflows that construct a collaborator class willing to administer the cantons from penthouses in Ramallah so long as the cash keeps piling up in the PA’s coffers. The children of the collaborator layer now have the freedom to puke in front of nightclubs just like in Western Europe, while their parents create employment for the underlying population in Palestinian industrial zones. Meanwhile Mohammed Dahlan’s Vichy torture squad tortures muqawama for fighting for their people. There are no “national interests,” merely class interests that permeate porous national borders. Money knows no flag.

Yet too much of what Petras says is correct for to be simply brushed off along with the nonsense. Noam Chomsky may not be a “liberal Zionist,” as Petras accuses, but when the latter wrote in The Fateful Triangle that “no pressure group [e.g. the lobby] will dominate access to public opinion or maintain consistent influence over policy-making elites unless its aims are close to those of elite elements with real power,” and in a later comment on the lobby wrote that what is at stake is weighing “(A) strategic-economic interests of concentrations of domestic power in the tight state-corporate linkage, and (B) the Lobby,” problems arose. It feels impertinent to type out the words, but Chomsky’s analysis was not entirely sound. The appropriate binary is not between “pressure groups” and “domestic power,” precisely because the lobby is not a “domestic pressure group,” but a component of class power. As Gabriel Ash comments, “the Israel Lobby should rather be a shorthand designation for a segment of the elites that fully participates in making U.S. imperialism happen” – an elite which traverses national lines.

The Israel lobby about which Petras is so pissed is precisely that: a class alliance between American and Israeli capitalists. It is more the outcome of Israel’s useful work as a regional Sparta and global arms merchant, dealing materiel to the terror states of Central America and the Southern Cone, to the Shah and Pretoria, than the cause of it. For that mercenary work of bloodletting amongst the brown people of Latin America and southern Africa, Israel got rewarded well: a couple billion dollars yearly since 1967. Given the links between the state and capital in Israel, that means Israeli elites got richly rewarded—chiefly, the ahusalim, or Ashkenazi founders of the state. While most of that money re-circulates back to the American military-industrial complex – the main role of Israeli political institutions in the political economy of American accumulation is to make the rich even richer – 25 percent is consistently allowed to stay in Israel, where it has built up a sizable domestic high-technology and military-industrial complex.

The physical plant stayed there, but the ownership did not. In a world of globalized capital movements, starting in the mid-1990s the “Israeli” MIC became decreasingly Israeli and increasingly American in ownership. Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler have calculated that the correlation coefficient between the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE) and the NASDAQ was .7 in the five-year span from 1996 to 2001 – meaning 70 percent of variations in the TASE were “explained” by variations in the NASDAQ. From 2002 to 2007, a nearly synchronous 92 percent of variations in the TASE were explained by movements in the NASDAQ.

The Israeli economy is a misnomer. There is an Israeli state with a constellation of institutions, not least among them an army, and an American state similarly poised, and between them flows of capital and flows of people with dual-passports, jet-setting from the Upper East Side to Eilat. The Israel lobby is certainly real. But it’s an expression of, and a complement to, material links. Ideology plays a role: the settlers’ American-abetted insistence on growing the Israeli state by nibbling away at the bits of land left for the Palestinian people, alongside the refusal to recognize the legitimacy of Palestinian nationalism that pervades the camouflaged hawks of the Israeli “peace camp.”

Petras and the lobby theorists hyperventilate about the settlement project endangering American interests, and they may be correct, even once one has reinterpreted “American interests” to mean the uneasy compromise between the decreasingly autonomous political apparatus operating as the executive committee of the ruling class and whichever fragments of capital propelled that elite into office. But they still ask the wrong questions, restricting their inquiries to the “fifth column.” That “fifth column” is just the American allies of the Israeli ruling class. They press on the U.S. government to facilitate settlement expansion because to cease or reverse settlement expansion runs the small but real risk of tearing Israeli society apart. No Israeli political leader would carry out such a task. And so Israel’s American allies, with billions of dollars in foreign investment in Israel, don’t push for it either, and they all shrug as messianic payes-sporting American and European Jews build up Judea over piles of Palestinian corpses. The lobby, deeply institutionalized in American politics, ensures that America does not exert pressure on Israel, while the PA skips happily along, gorging on aid inflows that will never develop the Palestinian economy. No one particularly cares.

Once one has sifted through the endless pages of bureaucratese and the self-deluded jargon of defense intellectuals, the lobby debate as it is conducted on the right is whether or not having Israel as an American ally is the best way to secure American capitalist interests in the Middle East. Petras, Mearsheimer, and Walt insist not. In juxtaposition with the “global hegemony strategy” called for by the Bush Administration and previous Republican administrations, they call for “off-shore balancing,” in which, as Walt writes, “the United States would intervene with its own forces only when regional powers are unable to uphold the balance of power on their own.” A part of this would be “giving Israel a choice: it can end its self-defeating occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and remain a cherished partner of the United States, or it can remain an occupying power on its own.” As he astutely notes, “This policy would undoubtedly be anathema to the different elements of the Israel lobby and would probably make some other Americans uneasy.” We get to the root of the issue: the lobby blocks the two-state settlement that would secure American regional interests.

Misunderstanding those interests, some claiming to be on the Left insist that any support of Israel irks the oil-rich Gulf sheikhdoms. Let Israel loose, they insist, and let’s be friends with the guys sitting on tremendous pools of petroleum. That analysis misunderstands the political economy of petroleum from the perspective of the oil majors and the state apparatuses they serially capture. Their sole interest is keeping prices elevated and controlling the flow of proceeds from those elevated prices. To do so, they need the sheikhdoms to be controlled by friendly regimes. Israel in that sense is a secondary issue, troublesome only to the extent that it incites popular pressure against the collaborator regimes, especially Aladdin’s cave – Saudi Arabia, capable of producing 10 million barrels of oil per day and sedulous about reinvesting the proceeds from its oil profits into American financial securities and American weapons systems. As Robert Vitalis comments, “For the region known as the Gun Belt, the Persian Gulf represents a critical market at a time of crisis in the arms industry,” keeping entire production lines going during lulls in Pentagon procurement.

To keep weapons purchases whirring along, excuses are helpful, even if the arms themselves sit in warehouses in the peninsula’s deserts. Israel provides the best excuse: the U.S. government’s legally-binding commitment to Israel’s Qualitative Military Edge ensures that it must have the latest weapons systems at all times. When Lockheed Martin wants customers for the F-35, apparently an over-sophisticated under-engineered ostrich of an airplane that can barely get off the ground, it looks to Israel. Israel obliges, with American taxpayers footing the bill. Israel thus equipped with the latest gewgaws out of Bethesda, U.S. death-merchants can sell the F-15 to Saudi Arabia, this time with dollars extracted from American taxpayers not through the IRS but at the gas pump. Meanwhile Israel’s itinerant bombing runs destabilize the Middle East, part of the consequence of creating what Chaim Weizmann called an “Asiatic Belgium.” Israel was envisioned as foreign irritant and plays precisely that role. The result is constant conflict. The Middle East has been aflame non-stop from 2001 to 2009. BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell made 876 billion in profits during that span. Coincidence, surely.

Misunderstanding this point, Petras, like so many of Walt and Mearsheimer’s epigones, also insists on casting the Iraq War as a tremendous failure for America, with American oil companies now not even bothering to place winning bids for development of Iraqi oil fields and with Iraqi oil production still trickling out at its pre-war levels, with the national interest crumpled somewhere between Fallujah and the Green Zone. Their mirror-images on the “Left” like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri vacuously rumble about the inadequacy of thinking that U.S. military actions are “primarily directed at a specific economic advantage…Such specific goals are secondary…Military force must guarantee the conditions for the functioning of the world market.” The dual metaphysics of capital and national interests explain everything – and nothing. Hardt and Negri are so scared of the accusation of vulgar economism that they miss the basic correlation between war and conflict in the Middle East – 1973, 1979, 1980, 1982, 1991, 2001, 2003 – and elevated profits for the oil companies and the arms merchants that sell their wares to the petro-states seeking something to do with the freshets of capital pouring into their bank accounts, while the rightist neo-populists and realists don’t ever look at capital accumulation and don’t see that the oil companies do just fine while Israel mucks around with dense inert metal explosives in the Middle East and Gaza burns.

They benefit because when the embers of instability are banked, burning steadily but hotly, gas and oil prices remain elevated. Petro-dollars gush into the coffers of the oil majors as well as the Gulf States, who then spend their cash on arms—overwhelmingly, American arms. Most of the rest provides the circulatory flows keeping the FIRE sector flush with cash. People make money off suffering and death in the Middle East, and they can easily hide behind the Israel lobby. Something strong enough to both hide and legitimate immense power, while contributing to American militarism in the Middle East, has a lot of power itself, and for that reason, the lobby is no pushover.

Precisely for that reason, the lobby must be confronted. It is a component of ruling class power, and to deny its influence will not fly. But behind and among it are blood-merchants, and none of them care about Palestinians – nor, one suspects, do Palestinians’ latest allies among the “realist” policy intelligentsia. American capital barely cares enough about Israeli militarism and occupation to dump its money into J Street, let alone to crash the hammer down on Zionist malfeasance in the Middle East. They do not and will not care about Palestinians until their interests are threatened more directly. The way to do that is simple. It’s by linking demands with others threatened by Israeli militarism, by American imperialism, and by capitalism more broadly, and making the costs of maintaining an Israeli client state in the Middle East higher than the costs of giving it up. Misguided fairy tales like Petras peddles simply won’t do in forging the political project that can lead to freedom in the Middle East. Perhaps at this hour it’s time for some realism. Which doesn’t mean defeatism. Just because the enemy is big does not mean we can’t bring it down.