Last night historian Rashid Khalidi spoke about his important new book, Brokers of Deceit: How the US Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East, at the International Peace Institute in New York and repeatedly downplayed the role of the Israel lobby in American policy-making across the Middle East. A video of his appearance is here.
While Khalidi acknowledged that the U.S. has for 20 years acted as Israel’s lawyer in the Israel/Palestine conflict, thereby foreclosing the two-state solution, he argued that that conflict represents the very narrow arena in which the lobby can throw its weight around. On Palestine, American presidents are responsive to a domestic lobby “because there’s no counterweight.” On general strategic matters, the lobby has little influence.
Khalidi’s book contains a similar argument:
“As Noam Chomsky has argued convincingly in an interview in the Journal of Palestine Studies… Mearsheimer and Walt’s ‘realist’ international-relations perspective does not recognize that US support for Israel is entirely compatible with many basic American corporate and strategic interests, rather than being mainly the result of the action of this lobby.”
While readers know that I hold the Walt-Mearsheimer view, it seemed most helpful to try and convey Khalidi’s view of the matter, as stated last night.
For his book, Khalidi undertook a historical investigation of negotiations over the last 30 years and found that American presidents have often set out to put pressure on Israel vis-a-vis the occupation but they invariably give up before long and adopt Israeli “desiderata,” as Obama has, with the result that the U.S. has continually pressured the weaker side, the Palestinians, to accept Israel’s terms. But Palestinians have been incapable of renouncing their rights; and so there has been no peace, no justice, no resolution. There was a window in which the two-state solution could actually have been effected, in the early 1990s, in the trusting and imaginative spirit that followed the Oslo accords, but once Oslo’s actual measures were put in place — checkpoints, the wall, and the end of freedom of movement, with resultant violent resistance — both sides hunkered down and the U.S. merely stood up for the Israeli regime and portrayed the Israelis as the victims.
This U.S. imbalance was not strictly a result of domestic pressure. “To suggest that the Israel lobby has arcane influence over American policy is a terrible mistake,” Khalidi said. Yes it has “enormous weight” on the Palestine issue, but whenever the U.S. has “an overwhelming strategic objective” in the region, American presidents dismiss the lobby and pressure Israel.
Khalidi gave two examples. The 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel was in the interests of the U.S. because the U.S. wanted to take Egypt away from Soviet influence during the Cold War. So Nixon, Ford, and Carter insisted that Israel talk; these presidents had “no hesitation in forcing Israel to do things that American policy makers wanted.”
The same goes for the sale of a “major weapon system to Saudi Arabia” during the Reagan administration. In that instance, far more powerful lobbies than the Israel lobby prevailed– the oil lobby and the aerospace lobby aligned with US policy makers, and the sale went through “without the slightest difficulty.”
Even during the ’73 oil embargo, when it seemed that U.S. material interests were being damaged by the US attachment to Israel, Henry Kissinger said, per Khalidi’s research, that while the rhetoric of Saudi diplomats was intransigent, privately they were willing to play ball with the United States.
The lobby can exercise power in its bailiwick, Khalidi said, because the arc of force in the region is the U.S. alignment with the Arab oil monarchies, and they don’t really object to Israel. And therefore there is no contradiction between American strategic interests and American policy toward Israel.
(Khalidi went on that the U.S. has successfully decoupled oil policy from Israel/Palestine. For if Israeli intransigence actually affected Arab oil supply, European, South Asian and East Asian governments would be “howling” at the U.S. to change its policy, because they are the principal beneficiaries of Arab oil. The U.S. gets its oil chiefly from West Africa, Latin America, and North America. But those other nations don’t push us because we have made sure that oil markets are unaffected by the conflict.)
“It is really not the Israel lobby that drives American policy,” he said. Yes there are occasions when the lobby “prevails,” but these are rare occasions– when the cost of US alignment with the Israel lobby is so small that the U.S. can get away with it. And here Khalidi meant U.S. support for the unending occupation. In that case there is “exaggerated attention to domestic political concerns”– be it voters, donors, or pro-Israel media.
This calculus is now at risk. Arab public opinion is overwhelmingly concerned with Palestine and against U.S. policy. But Arab states are generally not democracies, so there has been no problem for the U.S. in ignoring public opinion. “That policy would become untenable if [Arab states] are democratized,” Khalidi said. “If Arab governments begin to reflect popular opinion then American policy will be in jeopardy.”
In the Q-and-A, Jeff Laurenti of the Century Foundation somewhat questioned Khalidi’s view of the lobby. He said that Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush were both closer to Khalidi’s “mythical ideal of an honest broker” in the conflict–and both were one-term presidents. We all know that there were other reasons for Carter and Bush’s political defeats, Laurenti said, but “there’s a mythology in Washington that it ain’t unrelated.”
(Myself I believe that mythology; certainly it is interesting that Laurenti acknowledges that this belief is widespread, including, I would say, on the part of George H.W. Bush and his son and his son’s successor; the Washington Post underlines this belief with respect to Bush, as does Michael Desch in Security Studies.)
Seeming to acknowledge the power of the lobby, Laurenti spoke of changes inside the American Jewish community; he mentioned J Street.
Khalidi responded to this point. He said that the U.S. was changing swiftly, far more swiftly than he could have imagined even ten years ago– chiefly on campuses. “There was no debate 20 years ago. There was no other voice, to be frank,” he said. At that time it was hard even to say the words Palestine or Palestinian on college campuses. Today he is part of the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia.
Yes, there are far more centers devoted to Israeli studies. But young people have access to far better information than the myths purveyed by “stodgy media” in the last generation. Khalidi spoke of a burgeoning awareness including among young Jews fostered by Peter Beinart’s book, Students for Justice in Palestine chapters, Jewish Voice for Peace, and “shock journalism.”
But, he said: “I see absolutely no effect whatsoever on American politics at this point.”
I heard Khalidi talk at Columbia. One of his very interesting points was that European countries fight the USA all the time on trade (WTO ?) matters, without fear, but they do not fight the USA on Israel, perhaps because they are still caught up in Holocaust issues. However, he pointed out that Europe is close to the M/E and fears of terrorism and also the reality of emigration from M/E to EU makes the palestine issue much more immediate for them than it is for us. And even so, the EU does almost nothing to end Israeli lawlessness. I guess that H/R is always and everywhere merely a lip-service thing.
(Not that I am a promoter of terrorism, far from it, but the Palestinian decision long ago to restrict “armed struggle” against Israel to The Land ought to mean that Europe has little realistic reason to fear I/P-based terror. Just saying.)
I don’t understand how Arab democracy does or even could change political realities for the USA w.r.t. I/P.
On the question of Arab democracy, well, perhaps it’s coming, but so what? Egypt is fairly democratic just now, but even though the government is Islamic, it still seems to keep the border with Gaza closed and otherwise to keep within the USA’s policy. Also the arab states have little trade with Israel and therefore cannot threaten (as EU could) to cut back trade. And the Arab states are not war-like and are no match militarily for Israel in anyc ase.
So I don’t understand how Arab democracy does or even could change political realities for the USA w.r.t. I/P.
I’ve read Khalidi’s new book. I highly recommend it.
This is so pathetic of Khalidi, and equally pathetic of Chomsky. He is just using the idea of “US interests” to write Jewish power out of the picture. Contra Chomsky, “US interests” are not axioms from which we can deduce things. He actually says that nothing has changed about US ME policy since 1945–it’s all about control of oil. So there is no difference between cultivating Nasser as possible Cold War asset in the early 1950s, to invading Iraq in 2003.
“US interests” are not axiomatically defined, but constructed daily in Washington by the various interests that comprise society. Since the 1940s, when it overcame the opposition of the diplomatic and military establishments to US sponsorship of a Jewish state, Zionism has been one of those interests, and has radicalized US pursuit of the “corporate and strategic interests” Chomsky (and Khalidi) claim are dominant.
Thus the anti-Iran policy encountered substantial business opposition in the 1990s, but was overwhelmed by the Zionocracy. The Iraq war was the product of the neocons and the gentile radicals and was a strategic and corporate disaster.
Zionism has been the chief driver of US militarism since the end of the Cold War. The Zionocracy contributed to the Gulf War vote in 1990, the closest since the War of 1812. 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq 2003, from which the dissolution of Syria has followed, the virulent Islamophobia—Zionism has turned western Asia into the eastern front of the US empire, site of its worst deeds and ideologies, like the eastern front of Nazi Germany, with the war on “Judeobolshevism” and the Judeocide.
I do not understand the effort that has been put into downplaying the influence of the Israel lobby in the American political system by respected academics and writers like Khalidi, Chomsky, Max Ajl, and others. It seems like there is this group of people on the Left who take the tack that, yes, there is an Israel lobby in the US but it’s irrelevant to the discussion because every time there’s an American hegemonic interest in the Middle East this in fact trumps any domestic political pressure. If this absolutist view being proposed were true, however, then why do AIPAC and all the other think-tanks exist at all? Is it all some kind of racket to get wealthy donors concerned with Israel’s continued existence as a Jewish state to pony up lest catastrophe happen? I find that difficult to believe. And, why do groups like StandWithUs spend so much time and effort bringing speakers to the US and engaging in grass-roots efforts at influencing public opinion in this country? Do all of these organizations do this simply to act as a smoke-screen for decisions made in secret in Washington and Jerusalem? I have a hard time grasping why AIPAC and the rest would go to such lengths purely for the exercise of raising money, although obviously there must be a profit motive in the equation somewhere. In my estimation, downplaying the lobby’s influence is as unhelpful as overplaying it. It seems to me there must be a give and take between those in Washington who make the case for Israel and those who decide the policy, and I’m troubled that there is such a reticence on the part of some of the most respected scholars on this issue to discuss this aspect of the US/Israel relationship.
There is no more Cold War. Yet are support of Israel is stronger now than during that Era.
The major weapons sale to Saudi Arabia was a big boon to Ike’s military-industrial complex. Israel already had those weapons we sold to SA, and we committed to giving Israel superior weapons, as we’ve done for a long time now. This again benefits Ike’s military-industrial complex, the one he warned us about; too, A quarter of US military aid to Israel is reserved to compete with the US as a major arms supplier, and to develop Israel’s own military-industrial complex generally. And don’t forget we give Israel interest on top of all that.
The US citizenry is still paying for the old Arab oil embargo.
That the Arab oil regimes don’t mind Israel so there’s no strategic difference with USA on its pro-Israel stance is short-sighted; it’s not looking at the long term affect on the US position in the world, the one dependent on other countries’ peoples looking on USA as a humane guide respecting power. Is our sole veto at the UN so often regarding anything Israel a solid basis for projection of US soft power and influence?
I don’t see Khalidi’s POV as clarifying what is most important now, that is, of what strategic use to the USA is Israel, given the huge blank check the USA gives Israel in every way?
“This calculus is now at risk. Arab public opinion is overwhelmingly concerned with Palestine and against U.S. policy. But Arab states are generally not democracies, so there has been no problem for the U.S. in ignoring public opinion. “That policy would become untenable if [Arab states] are democratized,” Khalidi said. “If Arab governments begin to reflect popular opinion then American policy will be in jeopardy.”
That policy would also become untenable if American citizens were sufficiently informed about what their government gives Israel, as compared to what we Americans get in return.