A heavy-duty report on the impact of the Israeli lobby on US foreign policy leaves Washington exposed and the lobbyists reeling, writes Mohamed Hakki* There is an old saying about arrogance that goes, "beware of the irony of fate". At the moment when the Israeli lobby AIPAC (the American-Israeli Political Affairs Committee) was celebrating its triumph in Washington with 5,000 guests attending and every politician in the US making his or her pilgrimage, a new study explodes like a bomb in the midst of their celebrations, exposing their hubris, humbling them and bringing them back down to earth. The study is an 88-page report written by two university professors: Stephen Walt of the Kennedy School of Government and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago. It represents the first crack in the formidable dam holding and sheltering the most powerful lobby in the US -- and possibly the world. It tells the American people how the pro-Israeli lobby succeeded to convince American law-makers and officials about the lobby's influence in the media and how it brainwashed the public to support Israel, even if this runs counter to America's national interest. Israel's friends and supporters are scrambling without knowing what to do about it; attack it and thereby attract more attention to it, or ignore it? Professor Noam Chomsky put it best when he said, "any attempt even to bring up plain, undisputed relevant facts is either ignored (but these two prominent professors cannot be ignored) or sets off the most impressive tantrums, slanders, fabrications and deceit, and the other standard reactions." The report comes on the heels of a spying case against America by two high-ranking members of the lobby. It also coincides with the third anniversary of the Iraq war, which re-opened the question of the role of the "Israeli- first" advocates in the Bush administration. Of course, there were a number of courageous writers and analysts who attacked the lobby and America's subjection to Israeli national interests before, but never in this all inclusive and devastating fashion. In the words of the report, "the US national interest should be the primary object of American foreign policy. For the past several decades, however, and especially since the Six Day War in 1967, the centrepiece of US Middle East policy has been its relationship with Israel. The combination of unwavering US support for Israel and the related effort to spread democracy throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardised US security. This situation has no equal in American political history. Why has the United States been willing to set aside its own security in order to advance the interests of another country?" The report continues: "since the October War in 1973, Washington has provided Israel with a level of support dwarfing the amounts provided to any other state. Total direct US aid to Israel amounts to well over $140 billion in 2003." The United States comes to Israel's rescue in wartime and takes its side when negotiating peace. The Nixon administration re-supplied Israel during the 1973 October War and protected Israel from the threat of the Soviet intervention. It also coordinated its positions closely with Israel during the negotiations that preceded and followed the accords between Israel and the Palestinians. Indeed, David Aaron Miller, one of the main US negotiators at Camp David (2000) later said, "far too often we functioned... as Israel's lawyer" rather than as an honest broker. The authors trace a lot of ugly facts about Israel throughout its history and state categorically that our received account relies heavily on the work of Israeli scholars and journalists and Israeli and international human rights organisations. For instance, they say: "when political Zionism began in earnest in the late 19th century, there were only 15,000 Jews in Palestine." Or, "the Zionist leadership was not interested in establishing a bi-national state or accepting a permanent partition of Palestine. The Zionist leadership was sometimes willing to accept partition as a first step, but only as a tactical manoeuvre and not their real objective. When the opportunity came in 1947-48, Jewish forces drove up to 700,000 Palestinians into exile." Mearsheimer and Walt also refuse the Israeli canard that "the Arabs had fled because their leaders told them to." Careful scholarship has demolished this myth. In fact, most Arab leaders urged the Palestinian population to stay home, but fear of violent death at the hands of Zionist forces led most of them to flee. After the war, Israel barred the return of Palestinian exiles. Benny Morris says, "the idea of transfer is as old as modern Zionism." The authors also say, "the creation of Israel in 1947-48 involved explicit acts of ethnic cleansing, including executions, massacres and rapes by Jews." They add: "The IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] also murdered hundreds of Egyptian prisoners of war in both the 1956 and 1967 wars. In 1967 it expelled between 100,000 and 260,000 Palestinians from the newly conquered West Bank and drove 30,000 Syrians from the Golan Heights." One reason for the lobby's success with Congress is that some key members are Christian Zionists, like Dick Armey who said in September 2002 that, "my number one priority in foreign policy is to protect Israel." Mearsheimer and Walt retort: "one would think that the number one priority for any congressman would be to 'protect America' but that is not what Armey said." Further reason revealed in the report is the number of Jewish staffers and targeted campaigns to destroy House or Senate members that oppose the Zionist agenda, the most prominent of whom were Senators Fullbright and Charles Pevey, both former heads of the Foreign Relations Committee. The report only mentions Pevey. It says, "all the Jews in America from coast to coast gathered to oust Pevey. All American politicians got the message." The report goes on to say that "key organisations in the lobby make sure that critics of the Jewish state never get important foreign policy appointments, like George Ball whom Carter wanted as his first secretary of state". The report also outlines how the lobby's goals are served when pro-Israel officials occupy important positions in the executive branch, like Martin Indyk, deputy director of research at AIPAC and co-founder of the pro-IsraelWashington Institute for Near East Policy, Dennis Ross, who joined the Institute after leaving the administration in 2001, and Aaron Miller who has lived in Israel and often visits there. "Not surprisingly, Palestinian negotiators complained that they were negotiating with two Israeli teams -- one displaying an Israeli flag, and one an American flag." The worst administration, as far as citing pro-Israel biased policies, is the Bush administration. According to the study, the Bush administration's ranks include fervently pro-Israeli figures like Elliott Abrams, Douglas Feith, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and David Wurmser. These officials have consistently pushed for policies favoured by Israel and backed by Zionist organisations and lobbies. In all its chapters, the report contains a wealth of information on the insidious infiltration of US foreign policy thinking by Israeli pressure groups. Needless to say, none of the mainstream media has touched it or reprinted any parts of it thus far. As for the lobby group itself, it is silent; presumably hoping that ignoring the report will expedite its disappearance from the public eye. The information, however, is now out in the open. It may be extremely damaging to Israel in the long run. The chapter about Israeli lobbies and the Iraq war is a must read. It clearly shows that the neo-conservatives and lobby leaders were eager to invade Iraq, while the broader American Jewish community was not (a point that author Robert Fisk iterated in lectures in Australia recently). It was Scooter Libby (Vice-President Cheney's chief of staff), Paul Wolfowitz and Princeton historian Bernard Lewis who played the critical role in persuading the president and vice-president to favour war, according to the report. Will Washington feel the fallout? Already both the president and vice-president are embroiled in the Valerie Plame scandal, which is still growing. This as voices in the World Bank ask for regime change at the bank to get rid of "hate mongers and war mongers" at the top -- meaning Wolfowitz. * The writer is a political analyst resident in Washington.
