In the months since my essay "The Israel lobby" appeared (Prospect, April 2002), US foreign policy has been aligned with-if not subordinated to-that of Ariel Sharon's Israel to a degree that nobody could have imagined last spring. To the dismay of moderate Israelis and our European allies, President Bush has endorsed Sharon's policies of reoccupation, the repudiation of the Oslo negotiations, the dismantling of the Palestinian Authority, and the diplomatic isolation of Arafat, while announcing unrealistic conditions for Palestinian statehood that give Israel a licence for indefinite rule over almost 4m conquered subjects.
If Adam Garfinkle-in his reply to my essay (Prospect, September 2002) -is to be believed, this represents a cold calculation of America's long-term national interest: "At that level of the decision process, the Israel lobby has had but modest influence..." If this is modest influence, one wonders what might be the result of major influence.
I would welcome serious criticism by Garfinkle, who succeeded me as executive editor of the National Interest and became editor when the magazine was taken over by Conrad Black's Hollinger International. Unfortunately, instead of addressing the major points I made in my essay, Garfinkle tosses out a number of arguments unrelated to my thesis.
For example, he argues that US policy-makers often repudiated Israeli policies between 1948 and 1992. I agree. I said the same thing in my essay. The extreme tilt toward Israel is a dramatic break with American tradition that took place in the Clinton administration and-to a greater degree-the Bush administration. The only evidence to the contrary that Garfinkle offers is Bush's "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)." Garfinkle's parenthesis negates the force of his example. Even Sharon pays lip service to the idea of Palestinian statehood, while doing his best to make it impossible for ten or 20 years. Garfinkle himself is on the record opposing Palestinian independence. In an essay in the National Interest, co-authored with Daniel Pipes, he wrote that "the only thing worse for Israeli and US security interests than a fully independent Palestinian state on the west bank is one on the east bank."
Another irrelevancy is Garfinkle's digression about the oil lobby. Garfinkle laments its influence on US middle east policy. So do I. Both the Israel lobby and the oil lobby have warped policy in the middle east. American patriots, rather than siding with one lobby or the other, can reject both.
Garfinkle confuses the issue further with quibbles about the "4th June 1967 lines." In my essay I did not offer a peace plan. The internationally-recognised borders of Israel and the sovereign state of Palestine are to be determined by the UN, not by the two parties alone, and certainly not by me. But any viable Palestinian state must have contiguous, compact territory that is not divided into multiple Bantustans by Israel. This requires something pretty close to the 1967 borders. Israel would keep roughly 78 per cent of the Palestine Mandate, rather than the half that the international community assigned it in 1947-48. You would think that four-fifths of the Mandate would be enough for a Jewish population that in a generation or two will be smaller than the Arab population crammed into the remaining one fifth.
Garfinkle writes, "As he [Lind] sees it, the only real problem is the occupation, and the settlements-and supposed US support for both." This is a misrepresentation of my position. As many Israelis who, unlike American Zionist hawks, must live with the consequences have observed, the Israeli regime is fighting two wars-a justified war of defence against Palestinian factions like Hamas that want to destroy Israel, and an immoral war of annexation and ethnic cleansing. The US and its allies should support Israel's legitimate policies of self-defence, even as they oppose Israel's colonialism. In defending itself against attacks on its pre-1967 territory, Israel, like any other country with borders recognised by the international community, has a right to undertake temporary occupations of enemy territory for military reasons. However, under the post-1945 international rules of war, embodied in the Geneva Conventions, those military occupations must be temporary and cannot result in annexations or the displacement or maltreatment of native populations. Israel has no more right to give homes to Jewish settlers from Israel, the US, Russia and elsewhere on occupied Arab land than the US military authorities presently occupying parts of Afghanistan have a right to confiscate land from Afghans and give it to settlers from California and Kansas.
Garfinkle thinks I am too unkind to the Wolfowitz-Perle-Feith clique at the Pentagon. In the months since I published my essay, individuals associated with this group, both in the government and outside, have proposed the following measures, among others: the US invasion and occupation of Iraq; US bombing of Iran's nuclear facilities on behalf of Israel; US seizure of the Saudi oil fields and toppling of the Saudi monarchy; and the dispersal throughout the world of US anti-terrorist hit teams, modelled on Israel's death squads, which would murder people without arrest or trial on the territories of foreign countries. Meanwhile, Douglas Feith has been appointed to head a new Israeli-American counter-terrorist organisation from which our European allies are excluded.
Moreover, an ever-expanding rift has opened between the civilian Wolfowitz clique and America's career soldiers, many of whom do not want to be cannon fodder in a crusade supported by American Zionists and Southern Baptists to establish an Israeli-American condominium over the middle east. Career military officers, in an attempt to subvert the Wolfowitz team, are leaking documents to the press on a scale not seen since the closing years of the Vietnam war. In private, our soldiers deride the bloodthirsty neo-conservative civilian policymakers and pundits, many of whom avoided service in the US military before the draft was abolished, as "chickenhawks."
None of Garfinkle's arguments refute my own assertions, which can be restated as follows. First, the formerly limited influence of the Israel lobby on foreign policy has grown to be unchecked during the Clinton years and even more during George W Bush's presidency. Second, the lobby's influence derives primarily from the large sums spent by pro-Israel Jewish donors, liberals as well as conservatives, in US political campaigns; the Protestant fundamentalist vote plays at most a secondary and supporting role in the south (but not elsewhere in the country). And third, the distortion of US foreign policy-making by pro-Israel political donors and religious-right voters is undermining America's European and middle eastern alliance system and eroding America's historic legitimacy as an anti-colonial power.
America's leadership in the world was in danger when I first addressed this issue last spring. Thanks to the continuing success of the Israel lobby in manipulating US foreign policy, it is in far greater danger today.
