There is only one way to look at the UAE-Israel deal: The United Arab Emirates is seeking more support from the United States, and it believes it must go through Israel to get it. Mohammed bin Zayed figures if he pleases Israel and its lobby, he will gain favor from the reigning superpower. For instance, he will receive advanced weaponry that only friends of Israel can get. And so much for the Palestinians!
This understanding of the Israel lobby’s power goes well beyond the conventional view of the lobby as influencing US policy with respect to Israel and Palestine. But the assessment is not mine alone. It is a widely-held belief in world capitals. Even Vladimir Putin and Narendra Modi have acted in similar fashion: looking on the Israel lobby as a gatekeeper to Washington. And in power politics, perception is reality.
Israeli analysts regularly address this influence. Though no one in the American press does. It is just too undemocratic a truth. Our press has a hard enough time with the more limited theory of the lobby’s influence to even consider this wideranging role.
Let’s run down a list of countries and their conduct toward the US/Israel that confirms this theory.
—Egypt. The most direct predecessor to the UAE is Egypt. Anwar Sadat did not act out of altruism in reaching out to Israel in 1977. He wanted American support, and it was his “perception” that Jews were the gatekeepers, writes a powerful American Jew.
“Sadat had broken with the Soviets and was casting his lot with the Americans. He realized that if he wanted to replace Soviet weapons with meaningful American military and economic support, he could get it only by making a bold move with Israel, because of his perception of the political influence of American Jews and, more broadly, the support of the American public for Israel,” Stuart Eizenstat, the political veteran and Israel lobbyist in his own right, wrote in his book about the Jimmy Carter years.
It goes without saying that Egypt has gotten a lot, materially, from the U.S. out of its deal with Israel, even if the public is unhappy with it. And the consistent message to Egypt from the U.S. is, So long as you maintain your deal with Israel, you can do anything you want to your own people.
—India. For 45 years after the creation of Israel, India supported the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people. Then in 1992, it changed that policy to gain the favor of the United States, on the eve of the Indian PM visiting the U.S.
An Israeli thinktank reports that India reversed its stance on Israel because of the perceived “influence of the Jewish lobby” to release aid from the U.S., the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank too, which “India desperately needed at that time.” Vinay Kaura, an Indian scholar published by the Begin Sadat Center for Strategic Studies in Israel, writes:
It was also strongly felt in some circles in the Indian government that the establishment of diplomatic relations between India and Israel would improve India’s image in the US…
That perception of the lobby’s power continues to this day, as in Modi’s decision to visit Israel in 2017, Kaura writes:
It was recognition of the influence of the Jewish lobby in the US that promoted this positive development in Indo-Israeli relations. When Modi made his historic visit to Israel on July 4-6, 2017, the former US ambassador to Israel, Dan Shapiro, tweeted that the “stunningly successful visit of Indian PM Modi this week was a huge strategic win for Israel.”
—Russia. In 2018, Axios reported that the Russians had used the Israelis as an intermediary to Washington in a failed effort to cut a grand deal for removal of Iranian forces from Syria in exchange for sanctions relief with Iran. Barak Ravid, an Israeli reporter, said that Netanyahu was the gatekeeper on the offer, and blocked the deal because of sanctions relief.
‘They [the Russians] asked us to open the gates for them in Washington,’ one Israeli official told me,” Ravid wrote.
—Saudi Arabia. The Saudis have not officially normalized relations with Israel, but they are said to be working behind closed doors with Israel, in opposition to Iran. The Saudis have gained a lot from that cooperation: they have used the Israel lobby to protect themselves from criticism in the U.S. over the murder of Jamal Khashoggi and the genocide in Yemen.
In 2018, for instance, the Republican House blocked legislation critical of Saudi Arabia, and Eli Clifton reported that Saudi Arabia had a key political asset in lobbyist Norm Coleman, the fervent Israel supporter who as national chair of the Republican Jewish Coalition is very close to Sheldon Adelson, who of course is a major donor to Republicans, and whose only issue is Israel. Clifton said that Saudi Arabia was paying $125,000 a month for Coleman’s influence.
Norm Coleman sits at the hub of some of the House GOP’s biggest sources of campaign spending. And Coleman isn’t shy about saying what his Saudi employers are expecting from him.
Saudi Arabia also got support from United Against Nuclear Iran, a very pro-Israel group funded in part by Thomas Kaplan. Clifton reports that Thomas Kaplan attended an event with the Crown Prince three months after the murder of Khashoggi, when every decent person was avoiding Mohammed bin Salman like the plague. A leading supporter of Israel, Kaplan has connections to Sheldon Adelson and the Council on Foreign Relations, as well as to liberal institutions like the 92d St Y in New York and the Belfer Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School.
The fact that the Saudis relied on the Israel lobby was echoed last September on the Israeli channel i24News. Edy Cohen, an Israeli expert on Arab politics at the Begin and Sadat Center, said that bin Salman was cultivating Israel because the “Jewish lobby is very strong” in the United States. “AIPAC is very strong.” And in order to maintain American support, Saudi Arabia turned to the lobby and Israel, Cohen said.
Within days of the Khashoggi murder, Netanyahu interceded for the Saudis to try to get the U.S. to overlook the killing. And the U.S. has overlooked the murder.
—Honduras. In January 2019, Barad Ravid reported that Honduras had reached out to Israel so as to get a meeting with the U.S. Secretary of State. Netanyahu got him that meeting, for his own ends. Ravid wrote on Axios:
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is helping to open doors in Washington for Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández as part of his effort to push the Latin American nation to move its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem…
[Juan] Hernández asked Netanyahu to get him a meeting with Pompeo because he couldn’t reach him for a long time. They added that Netanyahu asked Pompeo to join his meeting with Hernández, which dealt mainly with the issue of moving the Honduran embassy to Jerusalem.
The short trilateral meeting lasted 15 minutes.
—Qatar. Qatar flew Alan Dershowitz and Morton Klein out to visit the country in 2017 as part of an effort to erase its “pro-terrorist” label over previous support for Palestinian resistance. Dershowitz promptly wrote an article for the Hill saying that Qatar should not be blockaded and isolated. And Qatar later came through for the Israel lobby itself– it killed Al Jazeera’s undercover four-part documentary of the Israel lobby’s activities in the U.S. Though the doc has come out in bootlegged form.
I could go on and on. Here are three more quick examples:
–In 2019, a Tunisian presidential candidate spent $1 million to hire a Canadian firm headed by a former Israeli intelligence officer to try and get a meeting with Donald Trump. The deal’s exposure hurt the candidate politically but it does follow a pattern of Tunisian politicians quietly normalizing relations with Israel and getting access in D.C.
–Juan Guaido the would-be leader of Venezuela has declared that he would restore relations with Israel that Marxist governments had cut off ten years ago out of concern for Palestinians. Guaido has of course had the support of the Trump administration against the Maduro government.
–The Democratic Republic of Congo hired an Israeli firm to do lobbying in Washington in an effort to skirt sanctions for human rights violations. “The Democratic Republic of Congo hired an Israeli security firm to lobby the U.S. government after criticism of President Joseph Kabila’s failure to hold elections and hand over power,” Bloomberg reported in 2017.
Call it conspiracy or the usual workings of a superpower and a client state; but this pattern of friendship-with-Israel-in-exchange-for-access is now widely emulated. Edy Cohen of the Begin Sadat Center explained last year in a piece for the Jewish News Service that the Gulf states were acting on that basis, for self interest:
The Gulf Arab states are interested in being part of the Western world—not necessarily out of a love of Zion, but because they understand that the path to warmer ties with the West and the United States runs through Israel…
[G]enuine peace is not the object of the Gulf states aspirations, but rather the outcome of interests, as well as the need to maintain security and stability and maintain U.S. aid.
Cohen believes in the power of the Israel lobby more even than I do. He once said that the Israel lobby drove down the Turkish lira to punish Erdogan for an anti-Israel stance.
What’s most fascinating about this theory of access is that there are unquestionably a number of examples to support it, but the American press would never touch it. And still the pattern is clear: many powerful leaders regard the lobby as a gatekeeper. And you can’t understand American foreign policy in the Middle East without assessing the role of the Israel lobby in Washington.
Barack Obama himself acknowledged the lobby’s gatekeeper role when he reached out to Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chair of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations– and a rightwing supporter of Israeli settlements– in order to hire Hillary Clinton as secretary of state. The New York Times reported six years after the fact:
Once elected, Obama seemed to understand that he needed someone to lend him credibility with the Israeli government and its American defenders, a tough friend of Israel who could muscle the country away from settlements and toward a peace agreement. An aide to Obama called Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish American Organizations, and asked him to call Hillary Clinton to see if she would be “agreeable” to being named secretary of state.
So in his most important appointment, Obama needed to show “credibility” with the Israeli government and its lobby! That is real clout. And the pathetic powers of the presidency are revealed in the fact that though Obama reached out to the lobby to say he could “muscle [Israel] away from settlements,” per the Times, he did nothing to slow the settlements. Just as Obama could do nothing to punish Chuck Schumer for opposing him on the Iran deal. The lobby’s powers transcend party politics.
This is why even liberal Zionists urge that Israel support in the U.S. remain bipartisan. They want to preserve that influence by having no public differences in the lobby. Israel support must be as American as mom and apple pie– and Tammany Hall.
It seems America does not need to twist those arms for Israel to be accepted into the fold. These countries do not care a damn about human rights, the Palestinians, or the fact that unarmed kids are being killed for protesting their suffering, as long as America is not mad at them, and will do them the favors that are badly needed, they are willing to prostrate themselves in front of Israel, and dance the Hora with them if necessary. It seems the UAE does not care that MOSSAD agents used stolen passports to boldly enter their country to assassinate a Palestinian official in a hotel in Dubai, violating international and UAE laws. Everything is now hunky-dory, lovey-dovey, or whatever you want to call it. Now they can conspire against Iran overtly.
It is disappointing that Qatar kowtowed to US/Israel demands and canned a documentary bringing attention to Israel’s endless crimes, but Qatar like other Arab nations wants to please the US so much, and appease Israel’s champion, despite Kushner and Bin Salman’s vicious plan to have them boycotted. It is a pity that these weak countries are willing to overlook the long list of Israel’s crimes against their own, and did not work in unity to make demands about ending the occupation, stopping the land grabs, and killing civilians by bombs and snipers, before readily agreeing to make nice with Israel. A missed opportunity.
Which Arab nation is going to capitulate to the “enemy” next?
It was in the late 80’s. I was discussing the power of Israeli over US policy. A guy who had spoken to the Saudi Amb. to the US, said he had been told by the Japanese Amb. to the US, that if Japan needed something from the US, they went through the Israelis.
This article discussed how the US media carries Israel’s water. That’s done by editing out relevant news, not providing context to stories and selecting information that skews perceptions. An old story.
There was a time the executive directors at ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN were all Jewish. Lots of experience and lessons learned.
Why the monumental emphasis on media? Simple. The perceptions held by the public, public opinion, is the primary foundation upon which the political establishment is captured. The basis of Israeli power is the realization of this simple reality hence the talent and effort dedicated to maintain it and by keeping Palestinians angry. Influencing Palestinians is not as difficult as managing Americans.
Hopefully the day will come Palestinians encourage their leadership take this reality into account. They would benefit from an investment in public relations in order to better get their messages to the American public. There is a whole world of supporters who could advance justice for Palestine once the game is seriously engaged and the skill and investment of the opposition is respected.
Those who have sat down with Senators or Reps. to bring them around on the Question of Palestine have learned its the public’s perceptions that keeps the bit in their mouth. How many times have we heard, “Israel has the right to defend itself.”
“The United Arab Emirates is seeking more support from the United States…” – all true, and the reason is that MBZ sees the end of the fossil fuel era and he wants to get in bed with the high tech world, which means the U.S. and its colonies:
“Here’s why the United Arab Emirates launched a mission to Mars”
https://www.livescience.com/united-arab-emirates-mars-why.html
“UAE starts first nuclear reactor at controversial Barakah plant”
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/08/uae-starts-operations-arab-world-nuclear-power-plant-200801101118964.html
“What does he [MBZ] really want?”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/09/magazine/united-arab-emirates-mohammed-bin-zayed.html
“We used to say in the Pentagon, the objective was to get M.B.Z. addicted to aerospace magazines so he’d buy everything we produced,” Riedel said.”
In short, what we now have is a “house of cards” constructed by a self-serving, dishonest, incompetent Zionist controlled U.S. president working hand in hand with “Israel” and corrupt, dictatorial Arab regimes whose citizens and those throughout the Arab/Muslim world support the Palestinians.
https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-a-decent-person-would-opposes-the-israel-uae-deal-1.9077730
“A Decent Person Would Oppose the Israel-UAE Deal”
Odeh Bisharat. Haaretz. Aug. 17, 2020.
EXCERPTS:
“The disgraceful agreement with the United Arab Emirates is ‘a Palestinian bypass agreement,’ as described by Middle East scholar Yossi Amitai. It’s an agreement that grants legitimacy to the continued oppression of the Palestinians: Continue with the occupation, and the UAE will grant you normalization. Meanwhile the muses have not fallen silent, they are actually rejoicing.
“Decent journalists are delivering tons of compliments: ‘This peace is entirely his,’ says Nahum Barnea in the daily Yedioth Ahronoth. ‘He deserves a sincere and double blessing,’ says Channel 12 pundit Amnon Abramovich. Rran Zinger, the commentator on Kan Channel 11, tweets that the ruler of the emirates has promoted ‘the establishment of a Palestinian state.’
“Is it too much to ask these esteemed people, and others, to check the merchandise first? After all, Netanyahu’s shiny new acquisition is a regime that, in addition to all the usual injustices in the Arab world, ‘disappears’ citizens and foreign residents, and disgracefully exploits migrant workers, especially women. In addition, the second side of the agreement, Donald Trump, symbolizes the craziness in relations among countries and people. And there is no need to say much about the third side, Benjamin Netanyahu, to whose name five glamorous words have been added: bribery, fraud, breach of trust.”