I got about 60 pages into Aaron David Miller’s book, The Much Too Promised Land, a couple weeks back and registered displeasure. The next 40 pages aren’t an improvement. His book makes the claim that the close relationship between Israel and the U.S. is based on "common values and common enemies." Though the Israel lobby jumps in strongly, it doesn’t define the relationship.
What follows is a quotation from Miller’s interview of John Sununu about the lobby. Miller posted part of this interview as an audio on his book’s website. But he didn’t use the entire quotation when he put it in his book. The boldface strike-through is what he cut out in the hardback.
"It’s like a handful of pebbles in the shoe. It’s there all the time,
and this process of not permitting anything that’s trying to tug in theAnd it’s
other direction, to gain root and thrive, is almost automatic.
not just AIPAC, it happens all the time, everywhere. Every congressman,
every senator, before they win, is being soft lobbied on the issue.
Whether it’s their friend that owns 40 acres down the street whose
grandfather happened to have come from Kiev,goes in and talks to himIt happens
about helping him, developing a social relationship on an issue that
has nothing to do with the district, begins to communicate their
interest. And rightly so– pulling on their end of the rope.
almost invisibly. But across the board.There is nobody who has run for"
office in this country who has not been soft lobbied the day they
announce that they are going to run and not been hard lobbied after
they win.
Miller gutted three of the strongest statements in Sununu’s quotation: the Not letting another point of view thrive, the Soft lobbying on an issue that has nothing to do with the district, and the Emphatic statement about being soft-lobbied before you run and hard lobbied after you win. In fairness to Miller, he does quote another paragraph from Sununu that makes the point that people in Iowa’s third district have no interest in the Middle East, but I feel he neutered the strong ideas that Sununu, chief of staff under Bush I, was trying to express. Reporters make selections all the time; this was an unfair one.
The general problem with Miller’s book is that while he is a hardworking author who has generated a lot of interesting quotations and facts, he fails to see the forest for the trees. And what is the forest? Miller notes the following:
–In 1989 Sec’y of State James Baker, a fair man, tried to pressure the Israelis to stop the settlements now. "[The] hardline Israeli prime minister… announced a new settlement almost every time Baker arrived in Israel."
The Prime Minister of a tiny state could thumb his nose at the White House for only one reason. Because, no one in American politics offered George H.W. Bush, John Sununu, and Jim Baker any cover on an important policy initiative. No, as Miller makes clear, Baker was savaged by the Jewish community for a highly-reasonable policy that would have saved us all a lot of trouble, and 20 years of dithering. Per Miller: "The U.S. Congress has not had one long-serving member with an anti-Israeli or pro-Arab agenda since Paul Findley in the 1970s." Findley was of course knocked off by the lobby.
Common values, common enemies? Wrong. As Ambassador Kurtzer (who epitomizes Richard Witty’s standard of being a mediator) states in his book: "U.S. policy must never be defined anywhere but in Washington." Because, as Kurtzer shows, over and over our policy has been defined by Israel and its hardline supporters in the U.S.
I believe the power of the lobby has begun to recede this year for many reasons (Obama, Iraq, the neocons, and Walt and Mearsheimer, to start) . But let’s not lie to ourselves about its effects. It confused Jewish-American loyalty, and confused the national interest.
