At Pulse, Robin Yassin-Kassab interviews David Hirst, author of Beware of Small States, and asks two really important questions re the lobby. Read the whole piece to see Hirst’s analysis of the next war, starting with Lebanon, and how big it could get. Egad. Though I share some of Hirst’s glass-jaw analysis of the lobby, below.
RYK: Why has the West, in media and cultural production as well as in its geostrategy, tended to be partial to the Zionist narrative of the Middle East?
DH: For all the well-known reasons that have been rehearsed a thousand times. Biblico-Christian sentiment, Western guilt complex, admiration for the rugged, idealistic early Zionist settlers and their achievement in “making the desert bloom” and all that, highly effective Jewish/Zionist propaganda and influence within the corridors of Western power.
On the geostrategic level, I don’t agree with the idea that Israel has been a valuable asset or ally in the service of an “imperial” or “neo-imperial” America. Quite the contrary, nothing has been historically more damaging than Israel itself to America’s interests, legitimate or otherwise, and its image in the region.
It is basically a measure of the quite extraordinary, disproportionate influence of the “friends of Israel” — AIPAC and company — that they get American politicians to buy the thesis that Israel deserves the support that the US lavishes on it not only because it shares Western “values” (which it increasingly doesn’t), or it is “the only democracy in the Middle East” (which it increasingly isn’t), but because it is to the strategic and political benefit of the US itself. This is not to say that Israel cannot in certain circumstances render services to the US — a classic example would be Israel’s readiness to rescue King Hussein in Black September 1970 — but that begs the question: who created the circumstances in which such a service was necessary in the first place? And the essential, underlying, perennial answer is that Israel itself, and its behavior towards the Arab region in which it implanted itself, is the principal cause of these kinds of crises and emergencies; and that they constitute threats to US interests because, in its deference to all things Israeli, it allows its interests get inextricably mixed up with those of its proteges. Even before Israel came into being the Zionists and their friends felt the need to promote a “strategic” argument for the creation of a Jewish state — that it would protect the British imperial life-line to the East — that was as spurious as its American descendant is today….
RYK: Do you think the greater visibility of the Israel lobby in the West, partly because of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, partly as a result of changes in the American Jewish community, will have a positive effect on Western policy?
DH: The extraordinary outrage, hysteria almost, that greeted the publication of their book — sober, scholarly, unassailably objective presentation of its topic though it was — and the manifest reluctance of the mainstream media and of course the US political establishment to be seen to endorse its conclusions, is just another demonstration of how very powerful — and spoiled — that lobby is, but also, I think, how eventually vulnerable it is too. I just don’t think AIPAC and the like can go on like this for ever, with their bigotry on Israel’s behalf, their specious arguments and their disdain for America’s true interests in the region, as opposed to those which they define for it; they are pushing their luck and the harder they do so the stronger will be the eventual backlash against themselves and the foreign state they promote.
