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Title: The Israel Lobby?
Author: Noam Chomsky
Date: March 28, 2006
Language: en
Topics: Israel, a response
Source: Retrieved on 1st October 2021 from https://chomsky.info/20060328/
Notes: Published in ZNet.

Noam Chomsky

The Israel Lobby?

I’ve received many requests to comment on the article by John

Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt (henceforth M-W), published in the London

Review of Books, which has been circulating extensively on the internet

and has elicited a storm of controversy. A few thoughts on the matter

follow.

It was, as noted, published in the London Review of Books, which is far

more open to discussion on these issues than US journals — a matter of

relevance (to which I’ll return) to the alleged influence of what M-W

call “the Lobby.” An article in the Jewish journal Forward quotes M as

saying that the article was commissioned by a US journal, but rejected,

and that “the pro-Israel lobby is so powerful that he and co-author

Stephen Walt would never have been able to place their report in a

American-based scientific publication.” But despite the fact that it

appeared in England, the M-W article aroused the anticipated hysterical

reaction from the usual supporters of state violence here, from the Wall

St Journal to Alan Dershowitz, sometimes in ways that would instantly

expose the authors to ridicule if they were not lining up (as usual)

with power.

M-W deserve credit for taking a position that is sure to elicit tantrums

and fanatical lies and denunciations, but it’s worth noting that there

is nothing unusual about that. Take any topic that has risen to the

level of Holy Writ among “the herd of independent minds” (to borrow

Harold Rosenberg’s famous description of intellectuals): for example,

anything having to do with the Balkan wars, which played a huge role in

the extraordinary campaigns of self-adulation that disfigured

intellectual discourse towards the end of the millennium, going well

beyond even historical precedents, which are ugly enough. Naturally, it

is of extraordinary importance to the herd to protect that self-image,

much of it based on deceit and fabrication. Therefore, any attempt even

to bring up plain (undisputed, surely relevant) facts is either ignored

(M-W can’t be ignored), or sets off most impressive tantrums, slanders,

fabrications and deceit, and the other standard reactions. Very easy to

demonstrate, and by no means limited to these cases. Those without

experience in critical analysis of conventional doctrine can be very

seriously misled by the particular case of the Middle East(ME).

But recognizing that M-W took a courageous stand, which merits praise,

we still have to ask how convincing their thesis is. Not very, in my

opinion. I’ve reviewed elsewhere what the record (historical and

documentary) seems to me to show about the main sources of US ME policy,

in books and articles for the past 40 years, and can’t try to repeat

here. M-W make as good a case as one can, I suppose, for the power of

the Lobby, but I don’t think it provides any reason to modify what has

always seemed to me a more plausible interpretation. Notice incidentally

that what is at stake is a rather subtle matter: weighing the impact of

several factors which (all agree) interact in determining state policy:

in particular, (A) strategic-economic interests of concentrations of

domestic power in the tight state-corporate linkage, and (B) the Lobby.

The M-W thesis is that (B) overwhelmingly predominates. To evaluate the

thesis, we have to distinguish between two quite different matters,

which they tend to conflate: (1) the alleged failures of US ME policy;

(2) the role of The Lobby in bringing about these consequences. Insofar

as the stands of the Lobby conform to (A), the two factors are very

difficult to disentagle. And there is plenty of conformity.

Let’s look at (1), and ask the obvious question: for whom has policy

been a failure for the past 60 years? The energy corporations? Hardly.

They have made “profits beyond the dreams of avarice” (quoting John

Blair, who directed the most important government inquiries into the

industry, in the ’70s), and still do, and the ME is their leading cash

cow. Has it been a failure for US grand strategy based on control of

what the State Department described 60 years ago as the “stupendous

source of strategic power” of ME oil and the immense wealth from this

unparalleled “material prize”? Hardly. The US has substantially

maintained control — and the significant reverses, such as the overthrow

of the Shah, were not the result of the initiatives of the Lobby. And as

noted, the energy corporations prospered. Furthermore, those

extraordinary successes had to overcome plenty of barriers: primarily,

as elsewhere in the world, what internal documents call “radical

nationalism,” meaning independent nationalism. As elsewhere in the

world, it’s been convenient to phrase these concerns in terms of

“defense against the USSR,” but the pretext usually collapses quickly on

inquiry, in the ME as elsewhere. And in fact the claim was conceded to

be false, officially, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when

Bush’s National Security Strategy (1990) called for maintaining the

forces aimed at the ME, where the serious “threats to our interests…

could not be laid at the Kremlin’s door” — now lost as a pretext for

pursuing about the same policies as before. And the same was true pretty

much throughout the world.

That at once raises another question about the M-W thesis. What were

“the Lobbies” that led to pursuing very similar policies throughout the

world? Consider the year 1958, a very critical year in world affairs. In

1958, the Eisenhower administration identified the three leading

challenges to the US as the ME, North Africa, and Indonesia — all oil

producers, all Islamic. North Africa was taken care of by Algerian

(formal) independence. Indonesia and the ME were taken care of by

Suharto’s murderous slaughter (1965) and Israel’s destruction of Arab

secular nationalism (Nasser, 1967). In the ME, that established the

close US-Israeli alliance and confirmed the judgment of US intelligence

in 1958 that a “logical corollary” of opposition to “radical

nationalism” (meaning, secular independent nationalism) is “support for

Israel” as the one reliable US base in the region (along with Turkey,

which entered into close relations with Israel in the same year).

Suharto’s coup aroused virtual euphoria, and he remained “our kind of

guy” (as the Clinton administration called him) until he could no longer

keep control in 1998, through a hideous record that compares well with

Saddam Hussein — who was also “our kind of guy” until he disobeyed

orders in 1990. What was the Indonesia Lobby? The Saddam Lobby? And the

question generalizes around the world. Unless these questions are faced,

the issue (1) cannot be seriously addressed.

When we do investigate (1), we find that US policies in the ME are quite

similar to those pursued elsewhere in the world, and have been a

remarkable success, in the face of many difficulties: 60 years is a long

time for planning success. It’s true that Bush II has weakened the US

position, not only in the ME, but that’s an entirely separate matter.

That leads to (2). As noted, the US-Israeli alliance was firmed up

precisely when Israel performed a huge service to the US-Saudis-Energy

corporations by smashing secular Arab nationalism, which threatened to

divert resources to domestic needs. That’s also when the Lobby takes off

(apart from the Christian evangelical component, by far the most

numerous and arguably the most influential part, but that’s mostly the

90s). And it’s also when the intellectual-political class began their

love affair with Israel, previously of little interest to them. They are

a very influential part of the Lobby because of their role in media,

scholarship, etc. From that point on it’s hard to distinguish “national

interest” (in the usual perverse sense of the phrase) from the effects

of the Lobby. I’ve run through the record of Israeli services to the US,

to the present, elsewhere, and won’t review it again here.

M-W focus on AIPAC and the evangelicals, but they recognize that the

Lobby includes most of the political-intellectual class — at which point

the thesis loses much of its content. They also have a highly selective

use of evidence (and much of the evidence is assertion). Take, as one

example, arms sales to China, which they bring up as undercutting US

interests. But they fail to mention that when the US objected, Israel

was compelled to back down: under Clinton in 2000, and again in 2005, in

this case with the Washington neocon regime going out of its way to

humiliate Israel. Without a peep from The Lobby, in either case, though

it was a serious blow to Israel. There’s a lot more like that. Take the

worst crime in Israel’s history, its invasion of Lebanon in 1982 with

the goal of destroying the secular nationalist PLO and ending its

embarrassing calls for political settlement, and imposing a client

Maronite regime. The Reagan administration strongly supported the

invasion through its worst atrocities, but a few months later (August),

when the atrocities were becoming so severe that even NYT Beirut

correspondent Thomas Friedman was complaining about them, and they were

beginning to harm the US “national interest,” Reagan ordered Israel to

call off the invasion, then entered to complete the removal of the PLO

from Lebanon, an outcome very welcome to both Israel and the US (and

consistent with general US opposition to independent nationalism). The

outcome was not entirely what the US-Israel wanted, but the relevant

observation here is that the Reaganites supported the aggression and

atrocities when that stand was conducive to the “national interest,” and

terminated them when it no longer was (then entering to finish the main

job). That’s pretty normal.

Another problem that M-W do not address is the role of the energy

corporations. They are hardly marginal in US political life —

transparently in the Bush administration, but in fact always. How can

they be so impotent in the face of the Lobby? As ME scholar Stephen

Zunes has rightly pointed out, “there are far more powerful interests

that have a stake in what happens in the Persian Gulf region than does

AIPAC [or the Lobby generally], such as the oil companies, the arms

industry and other special interests whose lobbying influence and

campaign contributions far surpass that of the much-vaunted Zionist

lobby and its allied donors to congressional races.”

Do the energy corporations fail to understand their interests, or are

they part of the Lobby too? By now, what’s the distinction between (1)

and (2), apart from the margins?

Also to be explained, again, is why US ME policy is so similar to its

policies elsewhere — to which, incidentally, Israel has made important

contributions, e.g., in helping the executive branch to evade

congressional barriers to carrying out massive terror in Central

America, to evade embargoes against South Africa and Rhodesia, and much

else. All of which again makes it even more difficult to separate (2)

from (1) — the latter, pretty much uniform, in essentials, throughout

the world.

I won’t run through the other arguments, but I don’t feel that they have

much force, on examination.

The thesis M-W propose does however have plenty of appeal. The reason, I

think, is that it leaves the US government untouched on its high

pinnacle of nobility, “Wilsonian idealism,” etc., merely in the grip of

an all-powerful force that it cannot escape. It’s rather like

attributing the crimes of the past 60 years to “exaggerated Cold War

illusions,” etc. Convenient, but not too convincing. In either case.