From a book review in the Wall Street Journal today of America’s Great Game: America’s Secret Arabists and the Shaping of the Middle East, by Hugh Wilford. Part of the story involves the British spy Kim Philby. The reviewer is Michael Doran, from the pro-Israel Saban Center:
The Middle East in the 1950s offered surprising opportunities for such men. Kim was, for instance, the motive force behind the 1951 founding of the American Friends of the Middle East. Seemingly a private outfit dedicated to citizen diplomacy, it was actually a CIA front that sought to weaken support for the Jewish state in the U.S. You read that right: The CIA created an early counterbalance to the pro-Israel lobby, promoting an anti-Zionist reading of the region until 1967, when the radical magazine Ramparts exposed agency funding to domestic organizations.
Wikipedia says this assertion about the American Friends of the Middle East has been published before. Ramparts had this report that touches on the CIA allegation.
I’m curious to read Wilford’s book, though; the “Arabists” — whom both William Quandt and Robert Kaplan characterized as a Protestant elite — certainly lost out in their ability to shape the Middle East to a philosemitic Establishment that no one seems to be anatomizing.
In 1951 Israel was still closely allied to the Soviet Union. This must have been a factor in the attitude of the US elite. If the CIA continued to fund anti-Zionist groups after Israel realigned with the West that would really surprise me.
The CIA doesn’t fund organizations to “counterbalance” anything. It funds organizations in order to control and manipulate them (and then destroy them when their usefulness runs out). I have utter contempt this type of propaganda (which I don’t think you were intending to support): the CIA manipulation of anti-Zionist organizations is used to suggest the CIA was anti-Israel. One might as well argue that COINTELPRO proves that the FBI opposed the Vietnam war.
“Counterbalance” is an interesting way to put it.
If the quasi-governmental Jewish Agency laundered the equivalent of $35 million to the AZC and to AIPAC’s founder news via the Near East Report to buy politicians and PR:
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/gsmith.php?articleid=13327
It would be interesting to know how much the CIA paid, and whether it was as skillfully deployed (apparently it was not).
I’m not sure it’s prudent to reduce anything that Philby was involved in to a single paragraph. And if this is old news, maybe it’s just a way to associate contemporary opposition to Zionism with disloyalty and duplicity.
The Arabist myth resurfaces. Kennedy, as early as 1960, thanked Jewish donors in hotel lobbies – this was recorded even by Goldberg, who beliveves a “red river of anti-Semitism” runs under America – which naturally lends itself to fleeing to Israel to volunteer in ruling over Palestinian prisoners.
The last time you truly had an independent Middle Eastern foreign policy was with Eisenhower. But we shouldn’t glamorize those days. The coup of Iran, among other things, happened during those days. And the policy may have been independent, but it was not necessarily moral. Neither, of course, is the current policy.