Joseph Massad
Middle East Eye / July 16, 2024
The claim that the Israel lobby controls US policy in the Middle East amounts to absolving the US of responsibility for its imperialist policies in the Arab world
Over the last few weeks, the Israel lobby has been increasingly featured in the news in the context of the ongoing election seasons in the UK, France, and the US.
News articles proliferate about the huge funds the UK’s Israel lobby contributed to candidates in the recent elections, the Israeli ministerial interference in the recent French elections, or the defeat of US Congressional Representative Jamaal Bowman due to the support of his opponent by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the most influential pro-Israel lobby group in the US.
This is in addition to media coverage of the role the lobby has played since 7 October in silencing critics of Israel and its genocide in Gaza.
As I have argued previously, there is often an excitement that afflicts many pro-Palestine supporters in the US and the Arab world when the Israel lobby’s machinations are exposed in the western press.
It is based on their perception that once aware of the inordinate power of this lobby, the broader US and western public will correct the aberrations of US foreign policy towards the Palestinians and the Middle East, which they believe are caused by the lobby’s interference.
The common assumption among these Americans and pro-western Arabs who support the Palestinians is that absent the Israel lobby, the US government and other western powers would become more friendly or, at the very least, far less hostile towards Arabs and Palestinians.
The seduction of this argument hinges on its exoneration of the US government from all the responsibility and guilt that it deserves for its policies in the Arab world.
It seeks to shift the blame for US policies from the US onto Israel and its US lobby and gives false hope to many Arabs and Palestinians who wish America would be on their side instead of on the side of their enemies.
Critical studies
For at least half a century, the lobby’s formidable power in deciding elections in western countries and its influence on universities, the press, and cultural and educational institutions have been the subject of many books and articles.
Perhaps the first such treatment, albeit one that expressed mild criticisms of pro-Israel forces in the US, was an article that George Ball, the under secretary of state in the Johnson and Kennedy administrations, published in Foreign Affairs in 1977.
Ball and his son later published a complete study of the matter in book form.
Other books published in the next decade include Paul Findley’s 1985 They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel’s Lobby. Findley was a former US Republican congressman whose re-election campaign was defeated by the Israel lobby in 1982 after he had served 11 terms in the House of Representatives.
A former AIPAC president described Findley as “a dangerous enemy of Israel”, which led to his political demise.
Another book, The Lobby: Jewish Political Power and American Foreign Policy, by former Time Magazine writer Edward Tivnan, was published in 1987 and elaborated on the same theme.
However, it was not until the prominent mainstream political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt published a paper in 2006 on the Israel lobby and US foreign policy, which they later expanded and published as a book in 2008, that its role in shaping policy became a major topic of discussion in the US mainstream, even if only to defame its authors and defend the lobby against their cogent arguments.
In addition to objective assessments of the role of the Israel lobby, there exists a motley collection of antisemitic and white-supremacist conspiracy theories about the alleged influence of “the Jews” in western countries and their alleged control of the US government.
Pro-lobby commentators, however, use this as a cudgel to beat down those with valid criticisms of the Israel lobby that have nothing to do with antisemitism – a treatment meted out to Mearsheimer and Walt, among others.
Sane and reasonable discussions on the Israel lobby range between those who argue that absent the formidable influence of the lobby, US policy towards the Middle East would be less hostile to the Palestinians, and those who believe that the lobby’s influence does not extend beyond cheering and pushing existing US policy further in the same direction to which it is beholden.
My view has always been more akin to the latter.
An ‘implacable enemy’
The claim that the Israel lobby controls US policy in the Middle East amounts to absolving the US from responsibility for all its imperialist policies in the Arab world and the Middle East at large since World War Two.
Rather, it is Israel and its lobby that have pushed the US to enact policies that are detrimental to its own national interests and only benefit Israel, the argument contends.
That the US blocks all international and UN support for Palestinian rights while it arms and finances Israel in its war against a civilian population and shields it from the wrath of the global community should also be blamed not on the US and its western allies but on Israel and its lobby, it further insists.
What this line of thinking elides is the reality that the US government has never supported national liberation in the Third World.
The US record is one of being the implacable enemy of all national liberation groups, including European ones, from Greece to Latin America to Africa and Asia.
Its backing of groups like the Afghan mujahideen in their war against the Afghan revolutionary government and the Soviet Union; Unita and Renamo, the main terrorist allies of apartheid South Africa in Angola and Mozambique, against their respective anti-colonial revolutionary national governments; and the Contras against the revolutionary Sandinista government in Nicaragua, were all cases in which the US was supporting counter-revolutionary groups intent on destroying national liberation revolutionary governments.
Why the US would then support Palestinian national liberation absent the Israel lobby is something this argument fails to address.
When I first made these arguments two decades ago, a pro-Palestinian white Christian American academic objected to them in a conversation, insisting that the US supported Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser against the 1956 tri-partite invasion of Egypt by France, Britain, and Israel.
But US support in this orphan case, as I retorted to him, was premised on clipping the wings of France and Britain. These erstwhile empires thought they could still act imperially after the Second World War when it was the US that rescued them from Nazi aggression.
The US further opposed Israel’s decision in that instance to coordinate its aggression on Egypt with these former empires rather than with its own government.
Israel soon realized that it could instead pursue the same aggression on its neighbours in coordination with the US. Expectedly, the US did not object at all to any subsequent Israeli invasions (1967, 1978, 1981, 1982, 1985, etc) of neighbouring Arab countries.
US imperial interests
A related argument that the Israel lobby’s influence on the US government is what led to the US invasion of Iraq is equally unpersuasive.
This is not to say that the lobby did not actively support the US-led war effort (it certainly did). Still, it was ultimately pushing for a war that was already desired and planned by other American political and economic imperial interests with far superior influence.
The invasion of Iraq follows a consistent policy of the US since the Second World War of overthrowing all regimes across the Third World that insist on controlling their national resources, whether it be land, oil, or other valuable minerals.
This extends from Iran in 1953 to Guatemala in 1954, to the rest of Latin America, and all the way to present-day Venezuela and Iran.
Africa has fared much worse in the last six decades, as have countries in Asia.
The overthrow of regimes including Guatemala’s Jacobo Arbenz, Brazil’s Joao Goulart, Iran’s Mohammed Mossadegh, Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, and Chile’s Salvador Allende, and the attempts to overthrow Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro, are prominent examples, as are the overthrow of nationalist regimes like Ahmad Sukarno’s in Indonesia and Kwame Nkrumah’s in Ghana.
The terror unleashed on populations who challenged the US-imposed regimes from El Salvador and Nicaragua to the Congo, and later Zaire, Chile, and Indonesia resulted in the killing of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, by repressive police and militaries trained for these important tasks by the US.
This is aside from direct US invasions of Southeast Asian and Central American countries that killed untold millions for decades.
As the Israel lobby played no role in all these other invasions or interventions, why then would the US not have invaded Iraq (or Afghanistan) or stopped threatening Iran on its own? These are policy questions that critics of the Israel lobby’s perceived stranglehold on the US government can never explain.
Such a line of argument would have been more convincing if the Israel lobby was forcing the US government to pursue policies in the Middle East that are inconsistent with its global policies elsewhere.
This is far from what happens, however.
Overlapping agendas
While US policies in the Middle East may often be an exaggerated form of its repressive and anti-democratic policies elsewhere in the world, they are not incongruent with them.
One could easily make the case that the strength of the Israel lobby is what actually accounts for this exaggeration, but even this contention is not entirely persuasive.
I have often argued that it is the very centrality of Israel to US strategy in the Middle East that accounts, in part, for the strength of the Israel lobby and not the other way around.
Indeed, some cite the role of pro-Israel, and especially pro-Likud, members of the Bush administration (or even of the Clinton administration), let alone those of Obama, Trump, or Biden, along with pro-Israel American billionaires, as evidence of the lobby’s awesome power.
However, it could be argued that it is these US politicians and billionaires who, since the 1990s, have pushed Likud and other Israeli political parties to embrace a more aggressive agenda. Such incitement persists today amid Israel’s genocidal war on the Palestinians of Gaza.
This is not to suggest that Israel lobby leaders do not regularly boast of their crucial influence on US policy in Congress and the White House.
They most recently celebrated their success in defeating Bowman and have regularly bragged about their role since the late 1970s.
But the lobby is powerful in the US because its major claims are about advancing US interests, and its support for Israel is contextualized in its support for US militarism and its overall strategy in the Middle East.
The Israel lobby plays the same role today that the China lobby played in the 1950s in support of Taiwan against the People’s Republic of China, and the Cuba lobby still plays against Cuba’s revolutionary government and in support of counter-revolutionary Cuban exiles.
That the Israel lobby is more influential than any other foreign-policy lobby in the US is not because it commands some fantastical power to steer the US away from its “national interest”. If anything, it only proves how important Israel is to US grand strategy.
The Israel lobby could not sell its message and would not have any influence if Israel were a communist or anti-imperialist country, or if Israel opposed US policy elsewhere in the world. Indeed, this would be a laughable proposition.
Arab approval
Some would argue that even though Israel attempts to overlap its interests with those of the US, its lobby deliberately misleads US policymakers and shifts their position from one of objective assessment of what is truly in America’s best interests and that of Israel’s.
The argument has it that US support for Israel leads political and militant groups in the Middle East who oppose Israel to become hostile to the US itself and to target it for attacks.
Such support also costs the US the loss of friendly media coverage in the Arab world, impacts its investment potential in Arab countries, and weakens its Arab regional allies.
But none of this is necessarily true.
The US has been able to be Israel’s biggest backer and financier and its staunchest defender and weapons supplier while maintaining strategic alliances with most, if not all, Arab dictatorships, including the Palestinian Authority, under both Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas.
Indeed, the more intransigent the US is in supporting Israel’s current genocide of the Palestinians, the more it is embraced by its Arab puppet rulers.
Moreover, US companies and investments have the largest presence across the Arab world, most prominently, but not exclusively, in the oil sector.
A whole army of Arabic newspapers, private and state-run television stations, and myriad satellite television stations owned by Arab Gulf princes, not to mention massive websites and internet news outlets funded by western NGOs, are deployed to promote the US point of view.
They celebrate American culture, broadcast its television programs, and attempt to sell US positions as effectively as possible, encumbered only by the limitations that actual US policies in the region would place on common sense.
Even the offending Al-Jazeera network has bent over backwards to accommodate the US point of view but, again, is often undercut by actual US policies in the region.
Under tremendous pressure and threats of bombing from the US during its invasion of Iraq, Al-Jazeera stopped referring to the US military in Iraq as “occupation forces”, shifting to “coalition forces”.
Mutual benefit
In their financial arguments about the tremendous influence of the Israel lobby, many point to the fantastical amount of money that the US “gives” to Israel – too exorbitant a cost that is out of proportion to what the US obtains in return.
In fact, the US spends much more on its military bases in the Arab world, including Qatar, Bahrain, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates – let alone those in Europe, Africa, or Asia – than it does on Israel.
Between 7 October 2023 and January 2024, the US spent $1.6bn on its military build-up in the Middle East to defend its imperial interests. Between 2001 and 2019, the US spent $6.4 trillion on its wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Pakistan alone.
Israel has indeed been very effective in rendering services to its US master for a good price, whether in channeling illegal arms to Central American dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s or helping pariah regimes like Taiwan and apartheid South Africa in the same period.
It has additionally supported pro-US, including fascist, groups inside the Arab world to undermine nationalist Arab regimes, from Lebanon to Iraq to Sudan.
It has come to the aid of conservative pro-US Arab regimes when threatened, as it did in Jordan in 1970. And it outright attacked Arab nationalist regimes in 1967 with Egypt and Syria and in 1981 with Iraq when it destroyed the country’s nuclear reactor.
Whereas the US had been able to overthrow Sukarno and Nkrumah in bloody coups in the mid-1960s, Nasser remained entrenched until Israel effectively neutralized him in the 1967 war.
It is thanks to this major service that the US increased its support to Israel exponentially.
Moreover, Israel’s neutralization of the PLO in 1982 was no small service to many Arab regimes and their US patron, which could not fully control the organization until then.
None of the American military bases on which many more billions are spent can claim such a stellar record.
Some might push back, arguing that if this were true, then why did the US have to intervene directly in Kuwait and Iraq?
In those instances, direct US intervention was needed as it could not rely on Israel to do the job due to the sensitivity of including it in such a coalition, which would embarrass Arab allies. While this may have shown Israel’s uselessness as a strategic ally, the US also could not rely on any of its military bases to launch the invasions on their own and had to ship in its army to finish the job.
US bases in the Gulf did provide essential support, but so did Israel.
It is true that Operation al-Aqsa Flood has completely overturned Israel’s strategic military importance to the US.
Israel’s military defeat against the Palestinian resistance continues to necessitate American and British military help. Its calls for western support began as early as 8 October to prop up its military might, with additional requests for backup in April.
The US, the UK, and US bases in Jordan did most of the work in defending Israel against Iranian missile retaliation following Israel’s bombing of the Iranian consulate in Damascus.
Still, for the US, Israel’s manifest weaknesses have not altered the role it plays in the region. This includes the destruction of all resistance to US interests and anything that would undermine its strategy, including Israel’s place within it.
Exaggerated claims
As the Israel lobby’s most formidable force, AIPAC is indeed powerful insofar as it pushes for policies that accord with US interests and are resonant with the reigning US imperial ideology.
The last nine months have made amply clear that the power of the Israel lobby, whether in Washington or on university campuses, is not based solely on its organizational skills or ideological uniformity.
In no small measure, antisemitic attitudes among congressional leaders, policymakers, and university administrators underpin their beliefs in the lobby’s exaggerated claims – and those of its enemies’ – about its actual power, resulting in their toeing the line.
In such a context, it does not matter if the lobby has real or imagined power.
As long as government leaders and, more notably, university administrators believe it does based on their antisemitic bias or objective assessments, it will remain effective and powerful.
Some might then ask: without such influence of a powerful Israel lobby, what would have been different about US policy in the Middle East?
The answer, in short, is the details and intensity but not the direction, content, or impact of such US policies.
So, is the Israel lobby extremely powerful in the US?
As someone who has been facing the full brunt of its power for the past two decades, through its outsized influence on my own university and intense pressure campaigns to get me fired, I answer with a resounding yes.
Is the lobby primarily responsible for US policies towards the Palestinians and the Arab world? Absolutely not.
The Arab world, and especially Palestinians, oppose the US because of its history of pursuing policies that are inimical to the interests of most people in those countries.
Its sole objective has been to safeguard its own interests and the minority regimes in the region that serve those interests, including Israel.
It is only in the absence of harmful US policies, not the lobby that supports them, that the ongoing Israeli genocide against Palestinians can stop.
The US government and its western allies are the ones who bear full responsibility for abetting, supplying, and defending Israel’s right to commit genocide against the Palestinians.
The efforts of the Israel lobby to have the US support Israel even more than it does is a complicitous act in the ongoing genocide, but it certainly is not the principal cause of this monstrous crime.
Joseph Massad is Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University in New York; he is the author of many books and academic and journalistic articles; his books include Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan, Desiring Arabs, The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians, and most recently Islam in Liberalism
