Patrick Seale, the veteran British Middle East correspondent, recently declared that "Israel is at the heart of world disorder." He meant to argue that the harnessing of US power to the interests of Israel, particularly in the US invasion of Iraq and its failure to broker an equitable Middle East settlement, had inflamed a clash of civilizations. While Seale,s remarks could be dismissed as the views of an "Arabist, " the debate over the role of the Israeli lobby in US policy has been opened inside the US itself with the publication of an article by two of the most respected and influential American scholars of international politics, John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard. They provide systematic documentary evidence for the same contentions made by Seale.
They argue: "The U.S. national interest should be the primary object of American foreign policy. For the past several decades, however, .....unwavering U.S. support for Israel has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardized U.S. security.....This situation has no equal in American political history. Why has the United States been willing to set aside its own security in order to advance the interests of another state?"
US policy, they conclude, cannot be accounted for by moral imperatives. "Israel's conduct is not morally distinguishable from the actions of its opponents": its creation involved ethnic cleansing of Palestinians while it continues to colonize lands on which Palestinians have long lived. Nor can it be accounted for by shared strategic interests."Israel [has become] a strategic burden." Rather, it is "due almost entirely to U.S. domestic politics, and especially to the activities of the 'Israeli Lobby," including its use of election campaign money, the targeting of any politicians seen to be unsympathetic to Israeli policy, the stifling of debate in the press and getting partisans appointed to high office.
The results have been deleterious for the U.S. Morally, the US protects Israel from UN resolutions against its treatment of the Palestinians while massive US aid to Israel is "the de facto enabler of Israeli expansion in the occupied territories, making the US complicit in the crimes perpetrated against the Palestinians." They show how the lobby forced Bush to back down from early efforts to restrain Israeli repression in the West Bank. "By preventing U.S. leaders from pressuring Israel to make peace, the Lobby has....made it impossible to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This situation gives extremists a powerful recruiting tool....[and] contributes to Islamic radicalism around the world." "Palestinian terrorism is not random violence directed against Israel or "the West"; it is largely a response to Israel's prolonged campaign to colonize the West Bank and Gaza Strip. "The United States has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel."
Uncritical support for Israel has other costs. "Israel's nuclear arsenal is one reason why some of its neighbors want nuclear weapons, and threatening these states with regime change merely increases that desire." Also the lobby systematically pushed for the war against Iraq, and continues to push for similar action against Syria and Iran. "We do not need another Iraq", Mearsheimer and Walt argue. All this is good for Israel but not the US: "Israel's enemies get weakened or overthrown, Israel gets a free hand with the Palestinians, and the United States does most of the fighting, dying, rebuilding, and paying. The US finds itself in conflict with an increasingly radicalized Arab and Islamic world, Israel still ends up protected by the world,s only superpower."
An edited version of their paper was published in the London Review of Books Vol. 28, No. 6 (March 23, 2006), and is available online at www.lrb.co.uk.
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