Culture » June 21, 2009 » Web Only

The Israel Lobbies: Left, Right and Center

A new book helpfully details Jewish-American lobbying organizations spanning the political spectrum.

By Ralph Seliger

Dan Fleshler.

Fleshler provides a modicum of hope that the United States can play a more constructive role in ending the conflict between Israel and the Arab and Islamic worlds.

As both a public-relations professional and an activist, Dan Fleshler fights the good fight on behalf of Americans for Peace Now and other organizations in the pro-Israel peace camp.

In his new book, Transforming America’s Israel Lobby: The Limits of Its Power and the Potential for Change (Potomac Books, April), Fleshler addresses two audiences: progressives who are not familiar with (or are skeptical of) the pro-Israel/pro-peace community and liberal supporters of Israel who fear that criticizing repressive Israeli policies would unduly harm that country.

Above all, he argues against a “zero-sum” perspective—that what hurts one side necessarily helps the other, or vice-versa. He explicitly argues for “even-handedness” on Mideast issues, a term that is a bugaboo for most of the pro-Israel community in the United States.

Fleshler writes in the large shadow of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, which generated intense controversy upon its release two years ago. Fleshler’s book is partially a critique of The Israel Lobby, but its main intention is to suggest ways U.S. policy on the Israeli-Arab conflict can be moved in a more progressive, peace-oriented direction, and provide a more accurate analysis of how “the conventional Israel lobby” operates. (Fleshler labels as “conventional” the mainstream Jewish organizations that concern themselves with Israel, as opposed to the more progressive pro-Israel groups he supports.)

Transforming America’s Israel Lobby may also be viewed as a follow-up to J. J. Goldberg’s 1996 book Jewish Power: Inside the American-Jewish Establishment. Goldberg, then editor-in-chief of The Forward newspaper, was criticized for boldly proclaiming that American Jews actually have power. Some readers felt the book could prompt an anti-Semitic backlash.

But Goldberg reminded his readers that the American Jewish community was haunted by the Holocaust, when it was powerless to move even the ostensibly friendly administration of Franklin Roosevelt to intervene on behalf of Hitler’s Jewish victims. Anti-Jewish prejudice reached a high point in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s, but it was not until the 1960s that discrimination against Jews ended in housing, hotels and resorts, admissions to top universities and professional schools, and the hiring practices of prestigious law firms and Wall Street.

Goldberg’s book registered a triumphal note that American Jews had finally arrived at a place where they could safely exercise power as Americans and Jews without being severely slapped down. Yet this slap-down, according to many, has come a decade later with the work of professors Mearsheimer and Walt and the widely held view in the United States and abroad that foreign policy under George W. Bush was dictated by Jewish or Israeli interests.

While they may not have written an anti-Semitic book, Mearsheimer and Walt were remarkably insensitive in not understanding that as members of a historically oppressed and vulnerable minority group, many Jews would see hatred in the single-minded intensity of their arguments.

Fleshler, who opposed the Iraq war from its outset, might have expended more energy in debunking Mearsheimer and Walt’s central thesis that the so-called Israel Lobby was “a necessary but insufficient cause” for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The professors’ main conceptual failing was in equating the neoconservatives with the Israel Lobby—noxiously reducing the neocons to their Jewishness (not all are Jews) and their Jewishness to a right-wing species of Zionism (also a reductionist leap). They then elevated a few sub-cabinet level appointees to “deciders” in an administration that had no Jews of cabinet rank at the time.

Fleshler likes to quote Daniel Levy, an Israeli peacenik who helped draft the unofficial Geneva Accord of 2003 and now works on Middle East peace issues for think tanks in Washington, D.C. Levy—a player in the establishment of the new progressive pro-Israel lobbying organization, J Street, who despises the mainstream Israel lobby—was scathing in criticizing much of the organized Jewish community for “outsourcing” foreign policy analysis to the neocons.

But Levy also criticized Mearsheimer and Walt for confusing cause and effect; he regarded support for the Iraq war by some Jewish organizations as a sales job for a decision that was already made by the Bush administration for its own reasons.

Fleshler rather easily refutes the notion that the “Israel Lobby” is as powerful as the professors describe it, calling it a “400-pound gorilla” (rather than the proverbial 800 pounds) that exercises influence by “smoke and mirrors” because the appearance of power creates its own reality.

He documents with facts and figures that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and its allies are on the low end of the top 20 lobbying interests in Washington, in actual dollars spent. (A problem with Mearsheimer and Walt was that they took seriously AIPAC’s self-promoting claims of effectiveness.)

Transforming America’s Israel Lobby contains an admirable level of detail about the complex landscape and history of national U.S. Jewish organizations. The book’s “Guide for the Perplexed” section classifies more than 70 Jewish groups that weigh in on national issues. Far from monolithic, their history involves surprising twists and turns.

For example: Tom Dine, a liberal Democrat who built up AIPAC as its director in the 1980s, now works for the dovish Israel Policy Forum, which was formed as a counterweight to AIPAC with the encouragement of Yitzhak Rabin. Speaking of AIPAC last year, Dine declared: “These people have to go. …These people have stayed too long.”

Fleshler provides a modicum of hope that the United States can play a more constructive role in ending the conflict between Israel and the Arab and Islamic worlds. Still, his focus on U.S. politics may foster the illusion that solutions to the conflict lie only in Washington.

A less optimistic outlook, however, may be justified by the operation of another Israel lobby entirely, that of the Israeli settler movement, from whose ranks emerged the murderer of Rabin. The movement violently opposes any attempt by Israel to disengage from the occupied territories, whether unilaterally or by negotiations. Not to be outdone, the Islamic world has produced a slew of forces of its own that resist peace; Hamas and Hezbollah could be regarded as “lobbies,” but are more properly called “movements.”

Still, by detailing the existence of progressive organizations that strive for Israel’s security, Middle East peace and Palestinian rights, Transforming America’s Israel Lobby advances our understanding of the nature of America’s Israel lobbies, a diverse group of organizations that are too often referred to in the singular.

• Help In These Times publish more articles like this. Donate today!
• Subscribe today and save 46% off the newsstand price!

• subscribe to print magazine

• stay in touch with our email newsletter

  Subscribe to our regular weekly e-mail newsletter. It's packed with updates on recent and upcoming stories, events, campaigns and things every progressive should be informed about.

   

• email this article to a friend

  Your Name Your Email Recipient Email

  Personal message Thought you might be interested in this article from In These Times.

   

  Please help us prevent spam by verifying the word you see in the image above

  Send to multiple recipients. Just separate each email address with a comma.

• Reader Comments

  While it is certainly true that the Jewish elements of the Israel lobby are not monolithic, when it comes to conditioning US aid to dissuade Israel from taking actions contrary to US interests (like settlement activities in the Occupied Territories), it must be reiterated that the majority of these groups line up to support Israel unconditionally. 

  As pointed out by Mearsheimer and Walt, “these divisions notwithstanding, the majority of organized groups in the American Jewish community – especially the largest and wealthiest among them – continue to favor steadfast support for Israel no matter what policies the Jewish state pursues…Even the dovish Americans for Peace Now supports ‘robust U.S. economic and military assistance to Israel,’ opposes calls to ‘cut or condition’ U.S. aid, and seeks only to prevent U.S. aid from being used to support settlement activities in the Occupied Territories [emphasis added].”  The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, p. 120. 

  Remarkably, Israel is the only country that does not have to account for how it spends its aid money.  While Israel is legally barred from using US aid in the Occupied Territories, there is no actual reduction in actual aid to Israel when it does so, only in loan guarantees (Israel just has to pay a higher interest rate on a small portion of borrowed funds).  See The Israel Lobby, pp. 29-29.  We have seen how ineffective this policy has been over the past 40 years in deterring or “preventing” settlement construction.  This is why is there is a growing consensus amongst most progressives that conditioning US aid to Israel, along with campaigns such as BDS, are the only realistic ways to encourage Israel to stop its illegal settlement activity.

  Considering that these settlers could not have built all these illegal settlements, nor acted as they have without the substantial U.S. aid that these groups have strenuously and unconditionally supported all these years, it is more than a little disingenuous to imply that these extremist settlers are “another Israel lobby entirely.”  With the exception of the Jewish Voice for Peace (which has called for the US to suspend military aid to Israel until it ends the occupation of the Occupied Territories), all of these groups effectively provide the settler movement aid and cover to openly engage in, without fear of meaningful consequences, illegal if not terrorist activities against both the Palestinians as well as Rabin.

  Posted by Imran on Jun 24, 2009 at 6:56 PM

  Fleshler’s book corrects this mistaken notion that Mearsheimer and Walt advanced about dovish pro-Israel organizations. Americans for Peace Now actually supported US financial sanctions against settlements expansion during the George H. W. Bush administration. APN raises money for Peace Now’s “Settlements Watch” program, that monitors settlement activities with the view of ending them. 

  Most of the other dovish Jewish groups did not yet exist when Bush senior was president, but their opposition to settlements is a core principle for all of them.

  Posted by rseliger on Jun 24, 2009 at 7:52 PM

  The APN’s 110th Congress Briefing Book states that its position is to “reject any calls to cut or condition regular annual U.S. assistance to Israel.”  Its past and current support for the existing policy regarding loan guarantees is simply a reflection of US and international law regarding the spending of money on illegal settlements in the Occupied Territories.  It should be noted that even this loan guarantee suspension in 1991 under Bush Senior lasted just a few months.

  Like APN, the dovish Israel Policy Forum also does not advocate making American aid more conditional but rather focuses its efforts on persuading the US to work more actively and effectively for a two-state solution.  With the exception of the Jewish Voice for Peace, I know of no other group advocating the conditioning of actual aid to Israel (as opposed to simply loan guarantees) with a settlement freeze.

  While it is certainly admirable and commendable that these dovish groups monitor settlement activities, and advocate opposition to settlements as a core principle, I respectfully submit that it is going to take more than supporting temporary loan guarantee suspensions to get Israel to modify its behavior regarding illegal settlements.  This strategy has been a dismal failure for the past 40 years.  Its going to take stronger measures like advocating the conditioning of US aid to a settlement freeze, as well as campaigns like BDS, to make a meaningful difference in Israeli behavior.

  Posted by Imran on Jun 24, 2009 at 9:35 PM

  I appreciate Imran’s polite tone. All strategies for peace over the past 40 years have failed.

  BDS is not likely to work either; it has only marginal political support and it is one-sided. For example, BDS does nothing to address Hamas and other violent Arab groups that have contributed to making the quest for peace so difficult.

  Posted by rseliger on Jun 25, 2009 at 5:24 PM

  I encourage groups like APN and the Israel Policy Forum to continue to oppose settlement activity.  But, as history has shown, its going to take more coordinated action.  I agree with Naomi Klein, who said on this website, “I think those are wonderfully complementary strategies.  This problem is going to take everything we’ve got.  And that’s why I’m so resistant to taking such powerful tactics as BDS off the table at such a crucial moment.  The US government was hardly a world leader when it came to sanctions against South Africa.  But when universities and municipalities joined the sanctions movement, it eventually forced the federal government to get with the program.

  I support the BDS strategy for Israel because it will work again, and it will work because it cuts to the heart of something that is so important to so many Israelis.  And that is the idea of normalcy, the idea that Israel is really an honorary adjunct to North America and Europe—even though it happens to be located in the Middle East.

  At the moment, it is possible to lead a very comfortable, very secure, very cosmopolitan life in most parts of Israel—despite the fact that Israel is at war with neighbors.  I don’t think Israel has a right to simultaneously rain bombs and missiles on Gaza, to attack Lebanon in 2006, to massively expand the settlements, and also have this state of normalcy within its borders.  For justice to come, the status quo will have to first become uncomfortable.

  When concerts are canceled in Tel Aviv, when tourists don’t come to Israel, then, I believe, many Israelis will start putting pressure on their political leaders to finally negotiate a lasting peace.  So I don’t buy the argument that they’ll just feel isolated and become more right wing.  The threat of isolation can be a very powerful tool for progressive change in a country like Israel.”

  For the full article discussing the pros and cons of BDS on this website, see: To Boycott Israel or Not, March 30, 2009, by Joel Bleifuss.  Here is the link for convenience.

  http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/4311/to_boycott_israelor_not/

  Posted by Imran on Jun 25, 2009 at 5:55 PM

• extended discussion >>>Continued...

  Discussions with more than 5 comments are continued on our special discussion page to encourage continuity and ease of use. There are currently 7 posts.

Also by Ralph Seliger

• Jews on J Street
  A new liberal Washington lobby comes of age at its first annual conference. Posted on November 11, 2009
• Should Neve Gordon Be Punished?
  An Israeli professor's support for the Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions (BDS) movement sparks controversy.Posted on October 12, 2009
• Einstein and Israel
  The great scientist was both a Zionist and bi-nationalist—a fact too complex for the author of a new book to accept. Posted on September 9, 2009
• Israel’s Center Does Not Hold
  Netanyahu's coalition begins to govern, as the world awaits a two-state solution.Posted on May 18, 2009
• ‘Kidnapped’ in Gaza
  A BBC correspondent's book--now available in the United States--details his Gaza kidnapping and collects balanced reportage from the Middle East and Central Asia.Posted on April 2, 2009