THE BANALITY OF ANTI-ISRAELI LOBBY DOCTRINE

NOVANEWS

This is a guest post from David Green. My own take in general terms aligns with Green’s. Israel has constructed itself as an imperial asset in the Middle East. We still lack a satisfactory synthesis explaining the Israel Lobby’s role in shaping American foreign policy, and I don’t think the Walt-Mearsheimer argument is very satisfactory, and am consistently stunned at the welcome they receive from leftists. Various domestic capitalist interests assert themselves in different ways. Some do so through lobbying, some through Congress, some through the executive, some through the Pentagon.

Ideology plays a role, too, as do nationalism and tribalism –they are forces used to mobilize people, frequently, against more tangible economic interests. What the Lobby–defined narrowly, say, AIPAC–is , is an organization that advises the affluent, and especially affluent Jews, as to how they should disburse their money, telling them which congressional candidates they should support. The notion that the Lobby does nothing for American capitalism-imperialism (same thing) more broadly isn’t serious.

Gabriel Ash has pointed out that the Lobby and fears of anti-Semitism stalled the Durban process, and canned Cynthia McKinney when she got out of line by doing her job–representing her constituents, or starting to. Likewise the canard of anti-Semitism, pushed by the Lobby, has been used to attack Venezuela, an enemy of the Empire. I’m sure there are other examples. In the absence of a rigorous materialist analysis, there’s no analysis at all.

The Israel Lobby has for decades played an integral role in promoting American support for Israeli depredations, and in shaping the ideological and sanitizing component of American geopolitical strategy in relation to oil. Nevertheless, those so-called realists who claim that the Lobby drives American foreign policy in Israel’s interests and which undermine U.S. interests—and who have been especially dogmatic and vitriolic in the wake of Mearsheimer/Walt (2006)—have in effect enlisted an aspect of the Palestinian rights movement in the service of imperial U.S. elite interests. In doing so, they have propagated a remarkably banal account of the U.S., Israel, Palestine, and our wars in the region.

The doctrinaire anti-Lobby phenomenon on the left has found its platform most noticeably at the popular websites Counterpunch and Mondoweiss. Jeffrey Blankfort, accurately described by Left Business Observer’s Doug Henwood as a “toxic character,” holds forth regularly on both sites, including in the Comments section on Mondoweiss, where he disciplines anti-anti-Lobby heretics such as me in dismissive fashion, having accused me of “drinking Chomsky’s Kool-Aid.”

Blankfort has, incredibly, taken on the mission and obsession of convincing the pro-Palestinian community that Noam Chomsky has for all these years worked tirelessly and insidiously to undermine the Palestinian cause: first by criticizing American and Israeli policies (for the cover of credibility); second by challenging the notion of the all-powerful Lobby, and thus undermining efforts to ferret out the Zionist conspirators among those who have made it so difficult for the U.S. to control Middle East oil. Blankfort asserts that this has indeed been a conscious strategy on Chomsky’s part, and he clearly has the approval of his internet proprietors in his efforts to convince others of this astonishing turn of events in the history of Zionist and anti-American strategy.

Only the fanatical anti-Lobby can, in its clueless way, make actual Lobbyists appear to be more factual and convincing in their arguments than their doctrinaire opponents. Recently, at the Nixon Center, the contemptible Robert Satloff of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy debated Chas Freeman, recently celebrated as an anti-Lobby realist whose appointment by the current administration was subverted by the Lobby (as most certainly it was). Nevertheless, within the realist and elitist assumptions that structured the definition of “strategic interests” in this debate, Satloff got much the better of Freeman. While of course he understands American “interests” in crass terms, he also correctly understands Israel’s role as a strategic asset, especially in terms of innovation and testing of military technology.

In relation to the First Gulf War, celebrated by anti-Lobbyists as sterling proof of Israel’s uselessness, Satloff offered this accurate assessment: “America began stocking war reserves in Israel fifteen years ago. Those stockpiles are hardly ‘minimal’—the total value is approaching $1 billion. They’re U.S. property and the Pentagon can draw upon them at any time. America has shown it is able to move military supplies from Israel to the Gulf; for example, it sent Israeli mine-plows and bulldozers to Iraq during the first Gulf War in 1991. 

In contrast, Freeman lamely and bitterly complained that out of hundreds of billions of dollars of military spending, we give Israel $3 billion, and that Israel is already rich anyway. Clearly, for U.S. planners, the truth is that Israel has always been a strategic bargain and continues to be so. This is somehow lost on those realists who while supporting imperial strategy have now been enlisted by leftist and quasi-leftist websites into the Palestinian cause.

Meanwhile, Blankfort’s latest effort at bringing anti-Lobby pseudo-intellectualism to a wider audience has been his utterly bizarre promotion of a recent, ponderous 610-page tome by military historian Geoffrey Wawro titled Quicksand: America’s Pursuit of Power in the Middle East, featured on both above-mentioned websites and in the Counterpunch subscribers-only newsletter. Blankfort claims that this is a book “that the Israel Lobby doesn’t want Americans to read.” In truth, the Lobby won’t hear of it except for Blankfort’s WWF-style and self-promoting efforts to bring it to their attention by picking a fight that otherwise would not exist, and for all his efforts almost certainly never will.

Wawro, a perfectly conventional realist, Cold Warrior, and amateur strategic planner, has written a long and generally informative history of American involvement in the region. It is written in a melodramatic, bombastic, Stephen Ambrose-like journalistic style, and is thus superficially entertaining.

But there is no reason for it to be positively reviewed or indeed reviewed at all by serious diplomatic historians, as (in spite of Blankfort’s claims to the contrary, in which the quantity of footnotes apparently correlates with originality) it brings no significant new research to light, and offers no convincing argument—indeed, no argument whatsoever—to support Wawro’s conclusion regarding the dominant power of the Lobby over an extended period of time in undermining U.S. strategic interests.

Wawro’s realist and exceptionalist banality is clear in both the book’s title and in the Introduction: “Quicksand sets out to discover and elucidate the countries, interests, raw materials, and ideas that have lured us to the Middle East and snared us there (emphases mine).” On this basis, one must conclude that over the past two centuries, Americans have been “lured and snared” nearly everywhere, innocents that we are, wanting only “markets” for the resources that somehow exist beyond our borders of a given era.

Similarly, Wawro’s naiveté is displayed in this banal conclusion: “From the Balfour Declaration to the Bush Doctrine, the United States has struggled to find its stride in the Middle East, as our latest stumbles in Iraq and Afghanistan merely confirm (emphases mine).” It is just remarkable that someone who uses such precious terminology is endorsed by those with claims as leftists.

In spite of all the footnotes, Wawro’s assertions often hang in conjectural mid-air: “Although Kennedy balked at a formal security guarantee for Israel—fearing that it might prompt an equivalent guarantee from the Arab states and lead to World War III—Israel did receive critical hardware…” Or, “In an act of breathtaking chutzpah, the first Hawks were installed around Israel’s nuclear weapons facility at Dimona, which the Kennedy administration staunchly opposed.” The latter assertion is attributed to the most recent book of “historian” Michael Oren.

And of course while the power of the Lobby in such instances is implied, it’s rarely clearly proved—no less proved to be determinant. This is history as hearsay, transparently intended to imply the power of the Israel Lobby to control American decisions without the bother of a thorough and respectful argument, and the scholarly integrity that would be required to go with it.

In other instances, Wawro’s grasp of major historical contexts is simply absent. For example, he says nothing about the power struggle between Secretary of State William Rogers and Henry Kissinger during Nixon’s first term, central to—among other things—the real possibility of a nuclear war. But of course, this topic would have no payoff in terms of exaggerating the power of the Lobby, unless we simply assume that Kissinger=Jewish=Lobby. Beyond that, many chapters of the book bear not even superficial interest in relation to the Lobby question, consisting of recounting our involvements in Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

Ultimately, Wawro’s naïve realism does not allow for a fundamental, actually-existing reality: both during the Cold War and since, the U.S. requires official enemies in order to pursue its strategic goals through “persuasion,” intimidation, and violence.

It was on this basis that relations with Egypt’s Nasser were aggravated during the Cold War, and that Iran is currently demonized. Israel’s role continues to be usefully secondary in this regard, and clearly helpful in pursuit of our leaders’ resource-related interests. Wawro asserts that oil and Israel are the “chief drivers” of his narrative. But over 610 pages he fails to entertain the notion that among U.S. planners, these “drivers” might have been (and continue to be) vitally and “positively” interrelated. Instead, our “stumbles” are regularly attributed to the Israel Lobby with claims that assume causation rather than demonstrating anything remotely of the sort.

Incidentally, Wawro has nothing to say about the Palestinian plight, and is clearly a garden variety racist regarding the Arabs: “Where strongman rule faltered, mass movements—Arab nationalism, Sunni fundamentalism, Shiite revolution—suggested themselves, in the Arab and Persian street, as the only virtuous way forward. The book looks at the seductive appeal those mass movements have had for the Middle East and the deadly threat they seemed to portend for American interests, which have always preferred bilateral relations with reliable strongmen in states like Saudi Arabia, imperial Iran or the Egypt of the free officers. Our preference for states over transnational movements is understandable, but we have so often attached ourselves to the wrong states or the wrong leaders (emphasis mine).”

There you have it, in a nutshell—the pro-Palestinian left as we now know it at Counterpunch and Mondoweiss.

In conclusion, these issues are not merely historical and academic, but are central to the strategy and tactics of the Palestinian rights movement, especially among Americans, in terms of our understanding of and relation to our government’s actions. Again, it is appalling that Blankfort (and Wawro) have any presence at all on allegedly respectable pro-Palestinian websites, no less a favored status. Beyond his anti-Lobby fanaticism, Blankfort brings absolutely nothing of any intellectual or political interest whatsoever, other than a kind of (no, a real) Stalinism.

I will conclude by stating to the reader, who is not reading this at either the Counterpunch or Mondoweiss website, that a shorter version was indeed submitted to both. At that point the reader is justified in concluding that in relation to this issue, and even on the pro-Palestinian left, free speech and honest debate have their doctrine-imposed limits, convoluted as they are in terms of the case at hand. So much for the role of the American left in the Palestinian cause.

David Green (davegreen84@yahoo.com) lives in Champaign, IL. He has been involved in serious anti-Israel Lobby activities there for the past 12 years: in relation to the local media, local Jewish institutions (as both a member and non-member), and the University of Illinois and its supporters of Israel.

Technorati Tags: CounterPunch, David Green, Israel, Israel Lobby, Jewish Lobby, Mondoweiss, Palestine, Zionism, Zionist Lobby

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