NOVANEWS
Perhaps the most bizarre thing about attempts to really analyze the Lobby and find the limits of its influence is that they are met way too frequently by accusations that the analyst who attempts to do so is “obfuscating” the role of the Lobby. If Jewish, the accusation gets an endearing twist: he is indulging in “Jewish tribalist apologetics.”
Odder still is that these accusations have no rational rhyme or reason. Instead, those making the most wide-ranging claims proclaim their monopoly on Historical and Analytical Truth, pretend counter-arguments are gratuitous, and in the process talk very little about class, capitalism, and Empire. When we get to the Middle East, apparently materialism doesn’t matter for the Empire—we need to look to nationalism, ideology, Zionism, special interests, and the other stocks-in-trade of those who don’t want to talk about the political economy of American imperialism.
What makes this a sort of perverse Orientalism is that rational analysis is permitted when we make the analytical transition to Latin America (I think). Take Venezuela. The Israeli state hates Venezuela and Hugo Chavez. The American government hates Venezuela and Hugo Chavez. The Lobby hates Hugo too. All would rather see a pro-Israeli policy comprador in place of Hugo—someone who would funnel oil money away from his people towards multinational petroleum corporations. The domestic elite would get in on the binge, taking a cut of the proceeds for selling out their own people. But almost no one would argue that the Lobby or Jewish capital—as opposed to capital some of which happens to be owned by Jews—or Israel is driving American policy towards Venezuela.
Without question, there is a convergence of interests. That convergence tends to be tacitly understood as one driven by the bigger force: the general ideology and material needs of American Empire. The Lobby serves a useful role, too: whenever Chavez criticizes Israeli atrocity, the Lobby accuses him of anti-Semitism, thereby adding to the ongoing demonization. There are reasons why other sectors of American capital tolerate the Lobby, too. Still, the core thrust of policy is neither the Lobby nor Israel nor Israeli or Jewish-linked capital pushing and yanking American policy this way and that. The core thrust of policy is the general needs of American and global capital, congealing in the practice of the American government.
My question: Why, when this logic is extended to American foreign policy in the Middle East, do we suddenly have to be subject to talk about “obfuscating” the role of the Lobby? Or “apologizing” for Israeli interference in the virginal Buchananite innocence of American isolationist republicanism? Because Israel is in the Middle East, and because of geographical proximity to Iran and Iraq, influence is commensurately greater? It’s all very strange. On the one hand, interests American and Israeli are commensurately more intense in the Middle East. The geo-political game’s axis rotates around the Suez and control over the economic development and trajectories of the huge and potentially powerful states of Southwest, South, and East Asia.
On the other hand, we must ask the empirical question: does Israel serve America? Does America serve Israel? Or do “their” elites, who frequently hold investments in the same companies, generally service each other amidst occasional spats and, less frequently, strong divergences of opinion, especially on the core issue for the Lobby/organized American Jewry/Israel: the occupation? I think it’s the latter. The role of the Lobby is clearly immense in preventing Obama from imposing a two-state “solution” on Israel-Palestine.
Tribalist ideology alongside the material interests of the core American weapons manufacturing firms and an Israeli society largely constructed around a permanent garrison economy have crystallized into a Lobby that pushes policies clearly dangerous to the broader interests of American empire. I think overt formalized apartheid is perceived as dangerous to large segments of American capital—hence the formation of J Street as a counter-lobby.
That’s clear. Less clear—because no one bothers with serious argument—are the claims about Israel “determining” American policy vis-à-vis Iraq or Iran. If the Israel Lobby was a “deterministic influence” or the “core determinant of policy” in the hyper-serious jargon of those who indulge this delusion, we’d be carpet-bombing Isfahan and Tehran. Go look at the JINSA and AIPAC websites. Reality is more complicated than “the Lobby wags the dog in the Middle East,” although those befuddled by multi-variate analysis will call me a dogmatic materialist, a shill for Israel, a Judeophile Zionist, or whatever verbal abuses they concoct in lieu of the arguments they can neither make nor win.
Take another example. Phil Weiss’s invaluable Mondoweiss blog has a piece up discussing Barry Goldwater’s confession about how the “Israel lobby is way too powerful, it could send us to war, and money’s at the root of it.” Phil, who clearly sees the Lobby very differently than I do, comments, “Note especially the fear that a special interest could deliver us into war for Israel.” This rhetoric assigns a place for “special interests” in diverting the natural course of American government, basically paralleling the Walt-Mearsheimer thesis of the Lobby diverting American foreign policy from a more benignly humane course. But there are no “Special Interests” in Washington.
Policy is the outcome of discussions and debates amongst constellations of powerful interests –usually agreeing, sometimes disagreeing. None are “special.” Special interests are neither aberrant nor external to the system. They are the system. Seriously, stop reading J.J. Goldberg and go read Richard Drinnon (better, read both)! We have been facing West and burning and killing brown-folk for centuries. We live in a racist capitalist empire. The people who helm that empire make good money from occupation and from sowing chaos, and until that is re-integrated into the analysis, there will be no analysis, just recycled dogma.
Against real analysis, consider Goldwater’s bizarre invocations of American pre-lapsarian purity:
The damage that this self-interest brings on is that self-interest groups are now, more than ever, running this country. You take the Israel groups, and there are many of them . . . if just a rumor goes out that the president is going to sell some military equipment to an Arab nation, overnight there will be 60 to 70 senators siding up with the Israeli group. Why? Because they have money, and they threaten. But they’re not the only ones.
You name it, there’s an organization in Washington working for it, all self-interest….The last example was when we wanted to fulfill our promise to sell Saudi Arabia some F-15s. We sent them a few, but then the Israeli group got up in arms and, by God, it stopped. I think the first tabulation we got, 65 senators were opposed to it before any debate or any discussion. And that’s held true with every weapons system that we’ve wanted to sell any of the Arab countries.
The damage that this self-interest brings on is that self-interest groups are now, more than ever, running this country. You take the Israel groups, and there are many of them . . . if just a rumor goes out that the president is going to sell some military equipment to an Arab nation, overnight there will be 60 to 70 senators siding up with the Israeli group. Why? Because they have money, and they threaten. But they’re not the only ones.
You name it, there’s an organization in Washington working for it, all self-interest….The last example was when we wanted to fulfill our promise to sell Saudi Arabia some F-15s. We sent them a few, but then the Israeli group got up in arms and, by God, it stopped. I think the first tabulation we got, 65 senators were opposed to it before any debate or any discussion. And that’s held true with every weapons system that we’ve wanted to sell any of the Arab countries.
Is opportunistic embrace of a confused Goldwater really helpful in understanding why history happens the day it does? No, I don’t think so. Organizations don’t make Washington work for their self-interest. Washington is founded on organizations working for their self-interest.
That doesn’t mean just profits. The Israel Lobby helped quash arms deals in the 80s that would have been a feast for the military-industrial complex. (Goldwater was probably obliquely referring to the Al-Yamameh deal). But how relevant is that to current maneuverings between the Lobby and other sectors of the military industrial complex? Arms deals involving sales to the Arab states now go through unimpeded, usually lubricated by streams of weapons or arms sent off to Israel or Israeli or Israeli-American arms companies, most of it ending up back in the domestic military industrial firms anyway, a nice two-for-one theft from the American taxpayer, deftly accomplished while blame gets foisted on the Lobby.
Very useful and powerful, something of which elites are doubtless aware, unless they are so damnably stupid that they can’t look at their own balance sheets and lobbying strategies and make intelligent decisions based upon them. Furthermore, if we take the ability to politicize arms sales as a measuring stick, the Lobby has lost autonomous power since the 80s (not that I am sure that measuring tool is the appropriate one).
Are there responses, nuances, counter-arguments, qualifications, hedges, or rebuttals that I’ve missed? Is there a problem with this research program other than that it upsets received wisdom? Let me know. Or just call me a Zionist. Whatever’s easier.
Technorati Tags: Gaza, Israel, military industrial complex, Palestine, US military aid, Zionism
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