The only good thing that has come out of the Iran war is that it is OK to say that Israel dragged us into a (stupid, hateful) war, and that Israel and its lobby work against the American people’s interest.
Kamala Harris says so. Trump “got pulled into it [the war with Iran] by Bibi Netanyahu, let’s be clear about that”,” she said this spring.
So does Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Michigan. Israel is “taking us to a war we don’t need to fight.”
The facts are out there. The New York Times exposed Netanyuahu’s presence in the White House situation room in the weeks before Israel launched the illegal war. And Joe Kent resigned as Trump’s counterterrorism director saying that Israeli officials packaged intelligence for Trump officials.
So Israel helped convince Trump to go to war, with disastrous consequences for the world and civilian life.
Two questions arise from this awful revelation. How long has this been going on? And why does Israel and its lobby have such power? The answers are, A long time, and, Money in politics.
How far back does Israeli influence in American politics go?
As to the history, we are at last entering an era where the mainstream is investigating Israel’s sway over foreign policy. The public and even Democratic Party leaders are (finally) so angry over Israel’s slaughter and persecution of Palestinians that they are willing to hear the facts of Israel’s nullification of American policy.
New York Magazine and the New Yorker have investigated the Biden administration’s supplication to Israel in 2023-2024 as it perpetrated a genocide in Gaza—blatant violations of law that surely played a role in Kamala Harris’s ignominious defeat (and that have damaged the reputations of Biden, Tony Blinken and Samantha Power).
Israel tried to drag us into war with Iran back in the Obama administration, Hillary Clinton now confesses.
“When I was secretary [of state] it was a constant theme by Netanyahu and his then government, the then Defense Minister Ehud Barak, the former prime minister. It was relentless. It was a constant push,” Clinton told David Remnick at the 92d Street Y. “He would basically say, “You need to support us in attacking Iran.”
(Yes, reread Jeffrey Goldberg’s 2010 piece in the Atlantic promoting an American attack on Iran because he believed as “a near-certainty” that Israel was about to act alone. Bullshit.)
And what about the Iraq war?
Twenty years ago Walt and Mearsheimer wrote that the Israel lobby pushed the Iraq war against U.S. interests, and they were denounced and censored. Jeffrey Goldberg smeared the scholars at the Center for Jewish History, saying, “Jews start all wars.” But a new book, “Israel’s Lobby: America in the Grip of a Foreign Power,” by Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick echoes that assertion, and it’s being promoted by the Nation.
The best thing Rahm Emanuel has done in his apparent presidential run is say there has been zero accountability for the Iraq war. “You had an Iraq war that was built on a lie. Thousands of people lost their lives and are maimed for life. We spent a trillion dollars, and everybody accountable for that lie never faced one day of either career or professional justice,” he said on CNN.
The failure of anyone to pay a price for advocating that calamity is a big reason behind the institutional breakdown in our society. The center does not hold– because the center authored a massive blunder that killed hundreds of thousands. And the Best and the Brightest have carried on being the Best and the Brightest.
Netanyahu and AIPAC both pushed the Iraq war, and many influential Americans pushed it for Israel. Tom Friedman said he wanted to “smash” something in the Arab world because of suicide bombings in TelAviv.
Jerrold Nadler said the neocons had the delusion of rearranging the Middle East for peace in Israel. Joe Klein said the same. Tom Friedman also said if you’d have put 25 neocons on a desert island the war would never have happened.
Let’s go back further. Our support for Israel was a factor in Al Qaeda’s decision to attack the United States on September 11. Osama bin Laden and some suicide bombers said that the Israeli occupation of Palestine angered them. But you were not allowed to say so publicly. Pro-Israel voices did all they could to censor that view, including in the official 9/11 report, which all but dismissed the idea.
The Israel lobby destroyed the two-state solution. Again and again it twisted our leaders’ arms to make sure that Israel could continue the war crime of moving civilians into occupied territory (the settlements) without any consequences. George W. Bush overlooked the colonization of Jerusalem at the urging of the late Sheldon Adelson. Obama began his administration stating that settlements must end, but soon reneged on that promise under the pressure of Netanyahu and the lobby.
Obama got the clear political message that presidents who took on Israel – Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush – didn’t get a second term. (Even Tom Friedman agrees with me on that point.)
Let’s keep going back. It is arguable that our policy on Israel may have resulted in the murder of Robert F. Kennedy in 1968 (a new book by the eminent scholar Michael Fischbach says so) and there are journalists on the internet who say that John Kennedy was killed because he tried to stop Israel from getting nuclear power (I don’t find this argument convincing, but LBJ’s flipflop on nukes is a significant undertold story).
Most importantly, State Department officials warned in 1947-48 that establishing a Jewish state in the Middle East would create regional unrest for generations. They were right. And though it is true that Arab states said they would recognize Israel 50 years later, if a Palestinian state was established, what took the U.S. 11 minutes in Israel’s case – recognizing a state – has forever eluded Palestinians, even as their families are bombed mercilessly and they are forced off their lands.
Has support for Israel finally become toxic?
On to Question two. Why has the U.S. gone against its own people’s interest to support Israel endlessly?
No doubt there are many reasons. The shadow of the Holocaust gave an enormous historical moment to the U.N.’s decision to resolve the “Jewish Question” in Europe by setting up a Jewish state. Liberal American political culture continues to carry that historical burden. There is also the realpolitik idea that Israel was an important ally in geopolitical struggles. But that claim has evaporated. Israel is today distracting the U.S. from its goal of pivoting to Asia/Chinese strategy, as Eli Clifton said on a Nation podcast.
The chief reason for nullification of the U.S.’s own policy is factional influence, the Israel lobby, using the lever of money. Truman got into office thanks to the generous donation of pro-Israel donors, according to historians, and the lobby pushed him to overcome his opposition to a religious state. Obama credited his political rise in Chicago to a “cabal” of generous liberal Zionists. And Netanyahu forced Obama’s collapse on settlements in 2011-12 by deploying the “leadership of the American Jewish community”, who in turn used the lever of big donors, Obama’s top foreign policy aide said.
Trump destroyed the Iran deal and moved the embassy to Jerusalem in all-but-frank deference to his biggest donor, Adelson.
Biden and Harris ignored a genocide for the same reason. The weight of the Jewish community’s contributions to Democratic campaigns is “gigantic” and “shocking,” as a J Street panel stated in 2016—and that redounds to the strength of the Israel lobby. One of the first places a congressional candidate goes to raise money is the Jewish community, Stephanie Schriock of Emily’s List reported at that event. “But before you went to the Jewish community, you had a conversation with the lead AIPAC person in your state and they made it clear that you needed a paper on Israel.”
The key fact about Israel lobby contributions is that they’re not party-loyal. They are up for grabs. There are always “threats that the money could go elsewhere,” as Clifton stated on the Nation broadcast. The lobby abandoned George H.W. Bush for Clinton in the ‘92 presidential election because Clinton ran to Bush’s right on settlements. Haley Stevens just spent a staggering $60 million in the Democratic primary she lost to Abdul el-Sayed in Michigan, and at least half that money was from pro-Israel donors—and there is now fear among Democrats that Michigan Jews will abandon the party for the Republican candidate in the general election because of Israel.
That’s why Biden and Harris said nothing about a genocide in 2023 and 2024. They feared that the lobby money would go to the other side.
Those days are ending. A genocide and an illegal war foisted on the U.S. have exposed Israel’s political reach, and made Israel a pariah nation. AIPAC is such a dirty word in politics that even El-Sayed’s Republican opponent is said to have sought distance from the lobby. Over 100 Democratic congresspeople seek an end to U.S. aid to the apartheid state, and heroes like Zohran Mamdani have demonstrated that you can win powerful office while insisting on BDS (boycott divestment and sanctions targeting war crimes).
Most critically, the Jewish community is fracturing. (Yes I know, I’ve predicted this forever). A privileged, educated liberal cohort in American life is at last ashamed of Israel’s conduct and examining our community’s organizational role in forcing U.S. political obeisance to war crimes.
Yes, it’s about time. And generations of Palestinians have paid the price.
