The late Robert Nisbet once wrote that while a half brick is not as useful as a whole one, it can be thrown twice as far. I was reminded of this remark when I read Michael Lind's essay (Prospect, April 2002) on the Israel lobby. Lind makes a half-brick sort of point, and tries to throw it very far indeed.
The point-that there is an influential pro-Israel lobby in the US, and that it distorts US policy and harms US national interests-is, of course, not new. It has been advanced for years in this country, not least by the late George Ball, who made a kind of second career of it. Ball was no middle east expert, but he had enough experience of how the executive branch of the US government works to know an ethnic lobby when he saw one. Some academic experts on the middle east have made similar claims, but few of them have worked in the executive branch; many of them, however, understand political sociology and know a good polemic when they hear one.
Lind, however, is not and has never claimed to be a middle east expert; and he has no executive branch experience either. (He has written with wisdom and skill on topics he has studied carefully, including a recent book about the Vietnam war that I reviewed favourably.) Perhaps this explains his numerous mistakes and misinterpretations. The half-truth he has delivered is, as I have said, not new, and what is new constitutes such a farrago of error that it would take more ink to put it right than he has used to get it wrong. This is why, when the editor of this magazine asked me to respond to Lind's arguments, saying that no one had yet taken him to task on matters of substance, I knew why that was so: it's a very big job, like having to clean up an entire university dormitory all by oneself after a vibrant Saturday evening. Not only that, but many people have very firm, if still wrong, opinions on this subject-unifactorial conspiracy theories, after all, are so economical-and I know that no mere facts or logic that I, or anyone else, might present will change their minds.
None the less, I take on some of this burden here, beginning with a sketch about how US middle east policy does in fact get made. That is because before one can say anything useful about how lobbies may affect the policy process, one must have a reasonably good grip on how that process works. Since Lind's essay was rather too brief on this point, particularly for an audience outside the US, it is worth our while to begin with this elemental matter.
One way to think about how US middle east policy is made is to imagine a three-dimensional dyadic matrix-a 2x2x2 cube-consisting of the following coordinates. Along one dimension, we may contrast "hard" geopolitical considerations with "soft" cultural ones (the difference between support for Israel because it is "a strategic asset" and because decent people have an obligation to "a beleaguered democracy in a sea of hatred"-or phrases to that effect). Along a second dimension, we may contrast decisions made in the executive branch of government with those of the legislative branch. Along the third dimension we contrast bureaucrats-the "permanent government"-with elected politicians and political appointees. To make matters more challenging, there is memory and time. Organisations and individuals set down markers, establishing positions and understandings as they go.
Take this matrix and hurl it through time, marking inertia and creativity as competing forces as administrations come and go, and one has an approximate verisimilitude of how decisions get made.
In any 2x2x2 matrix we see eight boxes, but unlike in geometry or mathematics we can make no assumption about symmetry. More decisions are made in the bureaucracy (including among the armed services and intelligence bureaucracies) and in the Congress than in the upper reaches of the executive branch, but not the most important ones. Sometimes soft factors intrude on very consequential decisions, and often hard factors figure in minor ones. In short, the decision system with which we are dealing is complex and its inner dynamics somewhat variable. None the less, it can be simplified somewhat, to wit: decisions to do with major strategic interests, especially those that elide on matters of war and peace, and decisions that are initiatory rather than reactive, tend to be made in the executive branch by political actors; more routine kinds of policy maintenance where "soft" factors come more into play tend to happen in Congress and in the bureaucracy.
Devoted lobbyists are not stupid; they understand this system-though some better than others. Lind observes that the pro-Israel lobby, which consists of organisations, networks and individuals, is unusually sophisticated and successful. He outlines some of the lobby's modalities, acknowledging as he goes that the lobby does not always get its way, that its views are not monolithic, and that its avenues of access into the policy process are affected by whether a Democratic or Republican administration is in office and whether the House of Representatives and the Senate have Democratic or Republican majorities.
All of this is reasonably accurate as far as it goes, but so what? This is the system for which the US Constitution provides. The system is set up so that the two elected members of the executive branch-the president and the vice-president-can appoint to high positions people who share their views in order that elections make a difference. Congress is supposed to reflect how the people feel, and the truth is that pro-Israeli views have always made good politics. Every poll taken on how Americans feel about Israel and its conflict with the Arabs indicates strong (and recently, strengthening) support for Israel. This is how a mass democracy is supposed to work. The assertion in Lind's peroration, that "we must reform our political system to purge it of the corrupting of ethnic lobbies... all of them" takes one's breath away. How, without violating the political rights of all Americans in a democracy, does he plan to do that?
Lind makes two other claims about executive branch appointments that need to be taken up here: that Martin Indyk (and let's add Dennis Ross and Aaron David Miller, too-both Jewish and both in high positions in US peace policy efforts for years) could not be an honest broker for Israeli-Palestinian peace in the Clinton period because he is a Jew with pro-Israel sympathies; and that people like Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith-all in service to the present administration-have the interests of a foreign government more at heart than they do those of the US. "Their chief concern," writes Lind, "is the power and reputation of Israel." For this, Lind offers not a scintilla of evidence to support a charge that not only impugns their integrity but carries more than a whiff of an accusation of their disloyalty to the United States. This is a shameful argument, equalled only by a comic debasement-when Lind asks us to accept at face value Clinton's explanation that it was the Israelis who somehow convinced him to pardon Marc Rich.
The real issue here is that Lind assumes a huge divergence between US and Israeli interests, believing that the intimacy of US-Israeli relations is on balance bad for the US. Wolfowitz, Perle and Feith, and many others, do not agree. Now, one side or the other of this argument is likely to be mistaken, but Lind presumes that these individuals cannot be right, and hence must care more about Israel than about the US. He thus postulates that a right-wing Zionist cabal inside the administration has turned the head of an innocent President away from the sagacious views of secretary of state Colin Powell. This is nonsense. President Bush (and Powell, too) has come to share the views of these men on many aspects of the current conflict between Israelis and Arabs, not because he is a captive of some lobby or cabal, but because Yasser Arafat's conduct-particularly his signature on documents tying him directly to terrorism and arms purchases from Iran-has persuaded him that they are right. (He was not always so clearly persuaded. Around the time that Lind's essay was published, a very heated debate was taking place in the US over what to do; and pace Lind, no restraints or restrictions existed in this debate, in the media or anywhere else. Lobby or no, it was not obvious how things would turn out. )
Lind thus exaggerates the lobby's power because he cannot credit as sincere views on the substance of policy that differ from his own. But it is obvious to any objective observer that pro-Israel policies have often not prevailed. The lobby could not persuade the US government to sell Israel major weapons platforms before 1968. It could not prevent the enormous pressure on Israel after the October 1973 war, amid the step-by-step diplomacy to withdraw from Egyptian and Syrian territories. It could not prevent the "comprehensive" diplomacy of the Carter administration. It did not prevent the sale of AWACS to Saudi Arabia during the Reagan administration, or the huge and bitter US-Israeli disagreements over Israeli military actions in Lebanon. It did not prevent the linkage of loan guarantees to settlement activity in the first Bush administration. It has not prevented, in this administration, the president from saying, as he did on 24th June, that the Israeli occupation is untenable and must end (a view shared by parts of the pro-Israel lobby in the US for many years).
These are not minor matters. It is true that the lobby's networks can complicate the day-to-day diplomacy of the US at sensitive times; officials are moved to say things (or not to say things) that, left to their own devices, they would avoid. The pressure can be a real pain in the ass, no doubt about it and, at least at the margins, it can distort how policy is couched to the public. It is true, too, that the lobby can get Congress to give Israel loans and grants on special terms. It probably has affected some marginal decisions, like UN General Assembly votes (but so has oil industry pressure in the opposite direction). But the fact is that every major US decision regarding the middle east during the past 50 years, throughout the cold war and since, has been made by the highest officials of the executive branch with primary attention given to US strategic interests. Whether those decisions have run in parallel to Israeli interests, as they have much of the time, or against them, as they have more than occasionally, they were made without any lobby being able to veto them or even to influence the decision process seriously. Just as supporters of Israel did not need to explain to a US President that Israel was a strategic asset during the cold war, oil industry lobbyists did not need to explain that middle east oil was a strategic commodity. At that level of the decision process, the Israel lobby has had but modest influence-less over the years, to be sure, than that of the oil lobby.
But even supposing that it has had a major influence, how has the US done in the middle east diplomatically? Well even before the end of the cold war, the US was the dominant power in the region. A skillful diplomacy, marshalling Israel as a strategic asset, achieved the expulsion of Soviet influence from Egypt in 1972, a major coup. The US was able in 1990-1991 to assemble a broad coalition for a successful war against Iraq, and get others to pay for 80 per cent of it. Today, every Arab country knows both that Israel is strong and that the key to a Palestinian state lies in US hands, and so they come to Washington to parley. Were this all the lobby's doing, then Americans would owe it a hearty round of applause.
Maybe, however, 11th September has changed the calculus. If America's pro-Israel policies were responsible for that attack, then these other achievements may not be so significant. But the mostly Saudi terrorists listed US presence on Saudi soil and US policy towards Iraq as their big complaints. And the double game of the Saudi regime-providing a social and religious milieu that incubates hatred for foreigners, and then deflecting that hatred onto the US and Israel-is the biggest single factor explaining 11th September. Now which lobby has urged the US government to coddle the Saudis all these years? The Israel lobby? I don't think so.
This leads us to Lind's oddest claim of all-his first one: that until recently the middle east was just a peripheral concern of US foreign policy. This is just wrong; since the end of the second world war, the middle east has never been peripheral to US concerns, and the centrality of the American role there dates not from the end of the cold war, as Lind says, but from the Truman Doctrine of 1947, if not from the US-Saudi "understanding" of 1945. How could it have been peripheral, as the repository of the oil that was the lifeblood of the post-second world war liberal international order, as the site of several dangerous crises and wars (1956, 1958, 1967, 1970, 1973), many of which threatened escalation to a superpower nuclear exchange, and as an actively contested area of US-Soviet competition? Here Lind contradicts his own excellent analysis in Vietnam: The Necessary War, where he correctly observes that southeast Asia was strategic because it could be contested without necessarily blowing up the world. If that was so for southeast Asia, then it was so in spades for the middle east.
Oddity aside, we come now to Lind's most important claim: that the Israel lobby demands "unconditional" US support for Israel. Here is the core upon which Lind's argument rests, and the occasion for his most astonishing error. His misunderstands the lobby's objectives and power because he misunderstands the US policy it is trying to influence. Lind thinks that the only proper, logical, and nearly universally agreed territorial settlement between Israel and a future Palestinian state has to be along the 4th June 1967 lines. He also claims that there is now a consensus on the Palestinian side for such a solution; thus, he writes that Israel is "no longer threatened with extinction by its neighbours."
As he sees it, the only real problem is the occupation, and the settlements-and supposed US support for both. The people Lind calls pro-Israel dispute the first point about the 4th June lines (as, of course, does the Israeli government) and most are deeply sceptical about the threat of extinction being lifted. If they are right and Lind is wrong on this second point, then the occupation, and the settlements, should be seen logically as consequences over many years of Arab attitudes and behaviours, not causes for them.
Clearly, there is disagreement about what is standing now in the way of a peaceful settlement, but there can be no disagreement about what US policy has been since 1967-one would think. And yet Lind manages to misread it. He evidently holds that US and Israeli understandings of UN Security Council Resolution 242 have been at odds all these years, and that US support for Israel could and should have been used to bring Israel's views in line with our own. But US policy has never held that UNSCR 242 calls for Israeli withdrawal to the 4th June lines; it calls for secure and recognised boundaries to be negotiated directly by the parties. A US-inspired and written resolution, it calls for Israel to withdraw "from territories," not "from the territories," occupied in June 1967 in return for real peace. The Israel lobby has thus never demanded an unconditionally supportive position from the US government on this point, simply because agreement on it has always existed. Rather, the lobby has consistently asked for conditional US efforts to bring peace, the main condition being that Israel should not be asked to jeopardise its control of territories captured in a defensive war until Arab partners, sincere in their peaceful intentions, emerged.
Lind rails at the American media for not providing proper context for their stories, but he is guilty here of that very sin. There are good reasons for US policy on UNSCR 242. Ever since June 1967, Israel waited for sincere peace partners who accepted that resolution's essential political meaning and, when it found such partners, first in Egypt and then in Jordan, peace treaties were negotiated and signed. Those treaties reinstated the 4th June 1967 lines because, in these cases, those lines were international borders before 1967 and all parties agreed that they constituted "secure and recognised" borders. The lines of 4th June 1967 between Israel and Jordan's West Bank, however, were not international boundaries but armistice lines negotiated in 1949 on the isle of Rhodes-geographically ridiculous lines that were the result of a war in which several Arab countries (and the Palestinians) tried to prevent the State of Israel from coming into existence, as mandated by the UN. As Henry Kissinger has put it, "I have known Israeli prime ministers and chiefs of staffs for 40 years; none has ever considered these lines defensible. For its part, the US has supported the phraseology of UN Security Council resolutions calling for 'secure borders,' not necessarily those of 1967."
Now, most Israelis thought with the Oslo accords of 1993 that the Palestinians had finally developed a leadership capable of making peace, which meant, amongst other things, sitting down to draw a sensible border. Few Israelis still believe that, and they have every reason to have been disabused.
It may be that Palestinians lack the power to destroy Israel. It may be that most Palestinians in the territories would be satisfied with a negotiated two-state solution. But the current leadership of the Palestinian Authority (PA) appears to have a different view. While Yasser Arafat has repeatedly sent his underlings on fishing expeditions in negotiations to reduce Israel's diplomatic posture, he himself has not confirmed a single concession of principle, not on borders, not on Jerusalem, not on the Palestinian "right of return." His speech last year at Durban shows that he sees Israel as a colonial-settler state like apartheid South Africa, and that Israel has no more right to exist than did the apartheid regime. He claimed at Camp David that there never was a Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, a calumny repeated by many other Palestinians. On the PLO website you will see a map that bears no mention of Israel; the same goes for the maps in Palestinian textbooks. Reliable Palestinian polling data show that absolute majorities of Palestinians in the territories now approve of suicide bombings against Israeli civilians inside Israel proper, and believe that the purpose of the "intifada" is not to end the occupation but to destroy Israel. This is partly because they do not realise that there is another way, for Arafat has never described to the Palestinian people the positions that Ehud Barak put before him at Camp David in summer 2000 and again at Taba in February 2001 (and Lind apparently does not understand those positions either: there is no way to return 94 to 97 per cent of the West Bank and end up, as he claims, with Palestinian "Bantustans" there).
Instead, PA media spew out Judeo-Nazi incitement, and the PA administration encourages and finances terrorism. That is what it means when Arafat calls for "100,000 martyrs marching to Jerusalem" because a suicide bomber is a martyr (shahid) in Palestinian parlance, and that is what Arafat's signature on Al-Aksa Brigade documents means. The purpose of the attacks, as German intelligence learned, was to copy the "Kosovo model": using terrorism to provoke Israeli "massacres," the better to catalyse international "humanitarian intervention" that would undermine Israel's effort to protect its people and provide a shield for the next stage of Palestinian military activity.
The reader of Lind's piece, again, would know none of this, for no appropriate historical context is provided. What context he does offer instead compares Palestinians under occupation to slaves in the American south. This suggests either that Lind has never spent much time in the territories, or that he has an amazingly benign view of what slavery must have been like for blacks.
One final point. Lind seems to equate Islamic fundamentalism with Jewish Orthodoxy and what he calls neo-Orthodoxy, and he refers to both Shari'a and the Jewish law (Halacha) as "pre-modern." He even appears to label Senator Joseph Lieberman, and me, as reactionaries who believe that Jewish traditions are "being destroyed by secular western values, including feminism, religious tolerance and natural science." Statements such as these reveal Lind's very limited grasp of these subjects.
As all standard works will tell you, Islamic fundamentalism is an attempt to politicise Islamic law and traditions in a way that puts it at odds with Shari'a. Fundamentalist currents within Islam have always been present at the margins, with the Salafiya movement and, in more modern times, a well-financed Wahhabism centered in Saudi Arabia, but fundamentalist Islam cannot be equated with orthodox Islam. Indeed, what fundamentalists, both Sunni and Shi'a, have been trying to do to Shari'a in recent decades is post-modern, not pre-modern; they have been de- and reconstructing it in ways that the vast majority of pious Muslims over the centuries would have regarded as impermissible. Orthodox Judaism, on the other hand, (with the exception of a small shard of the Lubavitch movement) has no such revisionist fundamentalism associated with it. The line of halachic authority remains essentially unbroken, just as it does in orthodox Shari'a law in its various schools. This is so whether one is born into an observant family or comes to observance later in life: either way, it is the same Halacha. So there is no parallel between Joe Lieberman and Osama bin Laden.
As for Lind's use of the term pre-modern, this is simply strange. Every significant legal code in existence started out as pre-modern for the simple reason that they are all very old. That goes for common law, the Napoleonic code and even the US federal code. What makes any legal system serviceable is that it maintains processes wherein competent legal authorities can address contemporary questions. Shari`a law does so, and so does Halacha. Both, for example, evince sophisticated views on cloning, euthanasia and a host of other bioscience-related questions. There is nothing pre-modern about them.
American Jews who respect Jewish religious law have not the slightest problem with equal legal and political rights for women, with religious tolerance or with natural science. Is Joe Lieberman out there trying to overturn the 19th amendment, or supporting legislation demanding less pay for equal work done by women? Do Orthodox Jews want to shut down churches or drive respect for religion out of the public sphere? Are they refusing to teach their children chemistry, physics and biology in their parochial schools, and are they the ones demanding that textbooks in Texas public schools should not mention evolution as a scientific theory? Let's be clear here: most Orthodox Jews, and most observant Muslims as well, do disagree, for example, with radical feminist theories about supposedly innate patriarchal violence and the complete social construction of gender differences. Most do oppose the explicit cultural and legal equalisation of homosexual lifestyles with heterosexual ones. Most do believe that secular culture, if left unbalanced by religious tradition and discipline within the family, can run to excess and become morally compromised. But that is hardly the same as opposing "secularism," "pluralism," "religious toleration" and "natural science." Rejecting notions that compose the left fringe of the culture wars is not rejecting "western values" as virtually anyone in the west would have defined them even half a century ago-and as, I think, most westerners would wish them still defined today.
I hold much of Lind's work in high regard. He is a creative thinker, a skilled writer, and a man whose good intentions I have never had reason to doubt. But in his April essay for Prospect he is out of his depth. This subject is difficult and emotional enough as it is; the last thing any of us needs is to have to take time and energy to duck yet another half-brick.
