Israel’s Lobby debunked in a new book by
two American professors
By Uli Schmetzer
January 2, 2008 - Bungled wars, like the current debacle in Iraq, leave disastrous fallouts and kindle
soul-searching for causes and culprits. Suddenly alliances are challenged, accepted truisms disputed and victims
metamorphose into villains, villains into victims.
In this atmosphere of escalating introspection in the U.S. two American professors have managed to
publish a meticulous investigation into the negative effects of the Israeli lobby over the last 45 years on the foreign
policy of the United States.
In the process they exposed the intimidating power ‘The Lobby’ wields in suppressing
academic and media criticism of the Jewish state.
Their book debunks decades of fake assertions and claims peddled by ‘The Lobby’ to U.S.
politicians and a public nurtured on pro-Israeli films and fairytales whose images of heroic Jews and perfidious Arabs
has remained inoculated in two generations of Americans. In reality the Jewish state was conceived and expanded
thanks to massacres and atrocities committed against a native Palestinian population that was expelled, dispossessed
and sometimes even exterminated (as former Israeli foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami admits in his book: “Scars of
War, Wounds of Peace.�)
The two American professors also expose the lobby’s bullying of media outlets considered
compassionate to the plight of the Palestinians, critical of Israel’s excessive use of military force or questioning
America’s biased role in the Middle East.
Already a best-seller ‘The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy� by professors John J.
Mearsheimer of Chicago and Stephen M. Walt of Harvard depicts a Jewish state still piggy-backing on global sympathy
from the Holocaust while committing brutal human rights violations and ‘targeted killings’ that are in reality
officially sanctioned assassinations.
This Jewish state, so the authors found, has occasionally spied on and even betrayed the United States,
their main benefactor and financier.
Yet from their very first pages the professors make it clear Jews have every right to a
homeland and the existence of Israel is not in question. Nor is U.S. military involvement if Israel’s
survival is threatened.
What is questioned is America’s unconditional and self-damaging support of Israel. This blinkered
support places no onus on Israel to reach a settlement with the Palestinians.
The book demystifies the Jewish state and challenges The Lobby’s assertions. More baffling even:
In spite of the negative effects of the pro-Israel policy American politicians, including each of the presidential candidates
for next year’s election, seem convinced they can win an election only if the Israeli lobby (which represents just five
million American Jews) supports them.
The authors show Arab or Moslem ‘terrorism’ gradually emerged as a desperate reaction by an
inferior military power in its struggle against occupation by a far superior military power; the intransigence of Israel to
make a deal with the Palestinians and Israel’s disproportionate military reactions to perceived threats to national
security (a convenient excuse for any military operation these days, even by the U.S.).
But most significantly terrorism became the only effective tactic to counter-balance Americaâ
€™s total and biased support of the Jewish state.
During peace negotiations U.S. positions nearly always coincide with those of Israel even if
such a position is detrimental to U.S. interests.
The book argues the Israeli lobby in the U.S. not only managed to neutralize any criticism of the
Jewish state but convince Washington that America’s interests were tied to Israel’s interests and U.S. foreign
policy in the Middle East must coincide with Israel’s wish-list on foreign affairs, among them the destruction of Iraq,
the isolation of Syria and hostility towards Iran.
‘The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy’ illustrates how easy it was (and is) to gradually
push America into an alliance with Israel that may have been of some strategic value during the Cold War but has since
become a strategic liability. Worse, the alliance has been expensive for U.S. taxpayers.
For decades Israel was assured it would always be protected from the threat of international boycotts
or sanctions by the U.S. veto in the U.N. Security Council (nearly 50 vetoes so far). U.S. military power would rearm or
upgrade Israel’s depleted arsenals and seemingly unlimited funds from Washington would refinance empty coffers.
This was possible only because a largely uncritical U.S. media consistently applauded and
glorified the Jewish state or treated its ‘misdemeanors’ with kid gloves.
With surgical precision the two professors dissect item by item the lobby’s much peddled claims
beginning with the fake assertion Israel wanted peace the Palestinians did not. They show Israel’s offer of a
Palestinian state at Oslo and Camp David was a joke since the deal ‘cantonized’ the Occupied Territories,
leaving pieces of a Palestine wedged between Israeli territory, no right to an army, no right to airspace and all vital water
resources under Israeli control.
Even Israel’s former foreign minister and chief negotiator, Shlomo Ben-Ami is quoted saying: â
€œIf I were a Palestinian I would have rejected Camp David as well.â€�
In fact the book makes it clear hard core Zionism does not want and never wanted peace with the
Palestinians but sees the West Bank as part of a Greater Israel. If peace had been their intention why was a notorious
hawk like Ariel Sharon allowed to ascend to the Al-Aqsa mosque, Islam’s second most sacred site, accompanied by
one thousand policemen at a time when post-Oslo and Camp David negotiations between Yasser Arafat and Prime
Minister Ehud Barak appeared headed for a Palestinian state?
Sharon, vilified as a murderer in Lebanon by the Arabs, the man who exhorted 100,000 settlers to
sink roots in the Occupied Territories and an outspoken opponent of any deal with the Palestinians wiped out any
further negotiations with his Al Aqsa visit. He also precipitated the Second Intifada, the most savage.
(One may well ask how would the Israelis have reacted if Yasser Arafat and one thousand of his
Fatah fighters had suddenly decided to visit the Wailing Wall at the same Temple Mount?)
What Mearsheimer and Walt make also clear is the hypocrisy of an Israeli lobby harping on the â
€˜terrorist’ tactics of Palestinians who, for good or for bad, are fighting to liberate their country from Israeli
occupation.
They remind their readers the Zionists employed the same ‘terrorist’ tactics to wrest a
homeland from Palestinians when Palestine was still a British mandate. They point out placing bombs in crowded buses
and public places was first used in the region, with devastating consequences to civilians, by the Zionist ‘terrorist’
group Irgun in 1937. The group was headed by Menachem Begin who, together with another former Zionist ‘terrorist,â
€™ Yitzhak Shamir, later became Prime Minister.
“The Arabs may well have learned the value of terrorist bombings from the Jews,� the book
quotes author Benny Morris.
The book also quotes extracts from the diaries and statements of Israeli leaders to counter The
Lobby’s claims the U.S. must be Israel’s partner on moral grounds and Israel pursues the same lofty and
democratic ideals as the U.S.
“Neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat. Rather
terrorism has a great part to play in our war against the occupiers (the British at the time)� wrote Shamir.
Later as Prime Minister he indignantly denounced the Palestinians for using the same tactics to
liberate their land from the Israeli ‘occupiers.’ Terrorism may have been justified for the Zionists to gain the land
but it was ‘inhuman’ for the Palestinians to use the same tactics in defense of their land.
On January 1, 1948 Ben-Gurion wrote into his diary his thoughts about dealing with Palestinians,
an exhortation that seems to be still guiding Israeli forces today: “There is a need now for strong and brutal reaction.
We need to be accurate about timing, place and those we hit. If we accuse a family, we need to harm them without
mercy, women and children included. Otherwise this is not an effective reaction….there is no need to distinguish
between guilty and not guilty.�
The book gives as example of this no mercy policy the murder by Israeli soldiers of hundreds of
Egyptian prisoners of war in both the 1956 and 1967 wars, the expulsion of 100,000 to 260,000 Palestinians from the
newly conquered West Bank in 1967 and the campaign to drive 80,000 Syrians from the Golan Heights, shooting dead
many of those who tried to sneak back to their homes.
The book asks why as a victim of racism throughout Jewish history the Jewish state also practices
this despicable scourge. The answer is simple: No one, especially the U.S., dares to rap Israel over the knuckles
because the instant reaction would be a charge of ‘anti-Semitism.’
Yet Menachem Begin called Palestinians “beasts walking on two legs� and former IDF Chief
of Staff Rafael Eiton called them “drugged roaches in a bottle.â€� And he added: “A good Arab is a dead Arab.â
€� Former chief of Staff Moshe Ya’alon said Palestinians were like ‘a cancer’ on which he was performing â
€˜chemotherapy.’
The authors of ‘The Israeli Lobby’ felt America would not tolerate such racist remarks
expressed by public leaders in any other country, certainly not at home if these were made against Afro-Americans or
Hispanics. But America tolerated and tolerates these and other racist slurs made in Israel without criticism.
The authors argue this lack of criticism allowed Israel, between 1967 and 2003, to demolish more
then 10,000 homes in the Occupied Territories, confiscate more then 40,000 acres of Palestinian land build 250 miles of
settlers’ bypass roads, 30 new settlements and sent 100,000 new settlers onto Palestinian land doubling the
number of settlers.
The claim Israel practices restraint when it comes to dealing with its enemies (as The Lobby keeps
proclaiming) went up in smoke in the brutal carpet-bombing of Lebanon in 2006, so the authors content.
The book concludes there are neither moral, strategic or material benefits for the current U.S.
alliance with Israel. Worse, it finds the alliance is mainly responsible for the escalation of terrorism, global anti-
Americanism and a messy Middle East situation.
The two blame the Israeli anti-Iraq agenda for exaggerated information that helped push the U.S. into
the disastrous invasion of Iraq. In fact they argue it was not U.S. oil interests that wanted U.S. troops in Iraq but the
Israelis.
Today The Lobby wants the U.S. to ‘punish’ their other perceived enemy, Iran, a nation the
Israelis armed with weaponry during the Iraq-Iran war (when the U.S. supported Iraq) and supplied with military
equipment even in the days when the Iranians held hostage American diplomats. This kind of commercial back-stabbing,
the authors feel, is not expected from an ally. Yet Israel frequently placed such business deals above its friendship with
the U.S.
What the two strongly question is the superior moral tone the Israeli lobby has adopted vis-Ã -vis the
Palestinians, as if the Palestinians who have lived in Palestine for 1,300 consecutive years had no rights to live on
territory now claimed by Jews. In order to wrest this land from the Palestinians the Zionists committed the same kind of
atrocities as did Europeans in the conquest of the Americas, Africa and Australia.
The Lobby has turned these acts of aggression into acts of self-defense, the perpetuators into the
victims, their aggression into a desperate endeavor by displaced persons seeking a home and the Arabs into anti-
Semite fanatics rather then defenders of their homes against invaders. It is obvious the Palestinians would have fought
back also if these invaders had been Americans, Germans or Mongolians.
These twisted moral justifications for the occupation of Palestine are then supposed to excuse what the
two professors define as excessive military retaliation by the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) and even Israeli historians
have labeled ‘massacres’ and ‘atrocities.’
There is not one single argument by ‘The Lobby’ that is not debunked including the myth of the
Israeli ‘David verses Goliath’ victories against Arab forces superior in numbers - when the opposite was true.
“Israel won the 1948 war so conclusively,� writes Ben-Ami “precisely because her forces
were larger and better trained then the poorly equipped and ill-commanded armies of her enemies.�
The authors content Israel at times supplied misleading intelligence information ‘in order to
encourage the US to take an action that Israel wanted� (e.g. alarmist reports about Iraqi weapons of mass
destruction).
But all this did not dent the perception of Americans who, so the authors say, continue to view Arabs as
villains and cowards and the Jews as victims and heroes.’
This belief, they said, goes back to Leon Uris’ emotional 1960 best-seller ‘Exodus.’ The
legacy of the book has left an indelible impression on American psyches, an impression still lingering unfairly today and
which served as the foundation on which the Israeli lobby build its image of a heroic Jewish state battling vicious
enemies all around.
The authors write today Israel, a never-declared nuclear power, faces no viable external
threats to its survival. In fact the Jewish state should not be exempt from criticism or sanctions for
violations of human rights by the memory of the vile Holocaust and the historic persecution of Jews.
But what the book probably demands most is a reassessment of America’s alliance with
Israel.
The authors say for years, ever since the end of the Cold War, the Jewish state has not merited nor
required the annual injection of about $4.3 billion in American grants, soft loans, military equipment and way-out-front
favored son treatment. Israel is the only recipient nation that receives these grants 12 months in advance. This allows
the Jewish state to invest not immediately required funds in U.S. bonds so accruing another $600 million in interest that
could have been earned by the donor nation, the U.S.
Since the early 1960s when John F. Kennedy’s administration decided Israel needed to be
supported (to the initial tune of 200 M48A tanks shipped via West Germany so as not to upset the Arabs) United States
taxpayers by 2005 had poured $154 billion dollars, most of it in direct grants, into Israel’s coffers.
The authors argue this amount is significantly higher if one includes other forms of material
assistance, most of it in military hardware under different tags and the annual millions of dollars in donation from
American Jews.
Today Israel is one of the most modern military powers, an industrial high-tech powerhouse and the
26th richest nation in the world. It hardly needs U.S. largesse to survive and thrive – but still receives it.
THE LOBBY DISSECTED:
The core of the book examines in detail the composition and modus operandi of the Israeli
lobby (often called the Jewish lobby).
It finds ‘The Lobby’ is not a cabal, not a unified movement with central leadership â
€œbut a broad coalition of individuals and groups that work to shape U.S. foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction.â€�
They quote historian Melvin J. Urofsky saying: “No other ethnic group in American
history has so extensive an involvement with a foreign nation.�
Scientist Robert H. Trice found the lobby comprises at least 75 separate organizations
that push and support Israel’s actions and policies writing letters to politicians and news organizations, making
financial contributions to pro-Israel candidates and influencing senior legislators and presidential advisers through close
friendships and campaign funds.
Mearsheimer and Walt believe the core of the neo-conservative school (The Chicago
Boys) which has virtually guided U.S. affairs and believes in military force to impose U.S. interests was basically a pro-
Israel school of thought. They write that neo-conservatism ‘has been described as American-Jewish conservatism.â
€™
But they point out not all neo-cons are Jewish. Among those who are not but are staunch
advocates of the school are former U.N. ambassador John Bolton, Jeane Kirkpatrick and former CIA director James
Woolsey.
The book attributes the success of ‘The Lobby’ to America’s right of free speech
and a system in which campaign contributions are ‘weakly regulated.’ This gives interest groups (especially
intense ones) a chance to gain influence by directing campaign contributions to favored candidates.
Another factor is that American Jews are relatively prosperous, well-educated, philanthropic
and heavily represented in academia and the media.
According to the Washington Post 60 per cent of a presidential candidate’s campaign
funds can come from private Jewish supporters. Jewish voters have high turnout rates. John F. Kennedy received 82
per cent of the Jewish vote in 1960 (and repaid it by sending Israel 200 tanks) while Jimmy Carter’s more even
handed approach to the Middle East dilemma won him only 45 per cent of the Jewish vote in 1980.
(Carter’s recent book “Palestine: Peace not Apartheid’ became the target of the
most savage smear-campaign by The Lobby, according to the two professors, one of the reasons that prompted them
to write their book).
Already presidential candidates John Edwards, Mitt Romney, John McCain and Hillary Clinton
made euphoric speeches and promises to Jewish voters and Israel, perhaps to avoid the fate of Howard Dean in 2004
whose presidential ambitions virtually collapsed after he called for a more even-handed American approach to the Israel-
Palestinian question. (Dean’s wife is Jewish and his children are Jewish educated).
‘The Lobby,’ the authors found, ‘does not want an even-handed approach by the U.S.
’
Commenting on the fact that Jews make up only three per cent of America’s population
but their vote has a lopsided effect on elections the two authors write the lobby is an example ‘that in a democracy
even small groups can wield disproportionate influence if they are deeply committed.�
Though media experts may differ, the authors assert ‘The Lobby’ is most successful
on Capitol Hill among legislators, staffers and donors.�
At the same time they admit that “a key part of preserving positive public attitudes
towards Israel is to ensure that the mainstream media’s coverage of Israel and the Middle East consistently favors
Israel and does not call U.S. support into question in any way…..the American media’s coverage of Israel tends to
be strongly biased in Israel’s favor….media critic Eric Alterman in 2002 listed 56 columnists and commentators who
can be counted upon to support Israel reflexively and without qualification. He identified only five critics who hold a pro-
Arab position.�
(The Jewish state annually sponsors visits by U.S. talk show hosts and commentators. In Israel
they are wined, dined and flooded with the positive images of the Jewish state. Few of them ever venture into the
Occupied Territories and if they do it is on ‘safe’ settlers’ roads and to visit Israeli settlements on their hilltops
and surrounded by ‘hostile Arab villages.’
The authors comment: “The (Wall Street) Journal, along with other prominent newspapers
like the Chicago Sun-Times, the New York Sun and the Washington Times regularly run editorials that read as if they
were written by the Israeli Prime Minister’s press office.�
However they feel reporting from Israel is often less slanted because, unlike commentators
and columnists, reporters do go into the Occupied Territories on their own where they witness Israeli aggression,
violence and bullying and develop sympathies for the Palestinians as underdogs.
This is often reflected in their reports. However even these reports are watered down by
editors afraid of massive letter-writing and phone-call campaigns or demonstrations outside their offices by the activated
members of the Jewish lobby who are quick and ruthless in issuing boycotts or charges of anti-Semitism against mass
media outlets.
The book quotes Menachem Shalev, former spokesman for the Israeli consulate in New York
saying: “Of course a lot of self censorship goes on. Journalists, editors and politicians are going to think twice about
criticizing Israel if they know they are going to get thousands of angry calls in a matter of hours. The Jewish lobby is
good at orchestrating pressure.�
This book is obligatory reading for those who dislike being mislead, for those who say â
€˜enough’ to American largesse to a wealthy state, those angered by Israel’s use of disproportionate, often
massive military reaction to perceived threats to national security and those of the mass media who for years grudgingly
regurgitated the same arrogant and repetitive Israeli explanations for military excesses and crimes.
As a former foreign correspondent covering Israel periodically for an American daily I was
often stunned by the vicious and unfair campaigns unleashed whenever The Lobby considered a story negative to
Israel’s image and positive to the Palestinians.
Once you are on their black list The Lobby pursues you like a pack of wolves waiting
for a weakness.
On one occasion I wrote about a German doctor killed in an Israeli artillery attack on a
Palestinian village. This was considered by the ‘Jewish Media Watch’ (CAMERA) as pro-Palestinian propaganda
and filled with factual errors (like all critical reports) prompting my editor to plead with me over the phone: ‘Can you
find something on the Israeli side to shut them up?�
I went to a hospital in Jerusalem to interview crippled victims of past Palestinian suicide
bomb attacks and filed it the same day, something I would not have done in normal circumstances since the injuries
were old news that had already been reported.
Just how acutely editors in the US fear the lobby’s threats to cut off advertising and
classify the paper as ‘anti-Semitic’ was illustrated to me when I quoted a foreign minister saying Israel would build
its security fence (known by the Palestinians as the Apartheid Wall) along the route it had chosen ‘whether America
likes it or not.’
The stand-in foreign editor substituted this quote for an old citation from then Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon. During a visit to Washington Sharon had placated his hosts by saying Israel would ‘consider the U.S.
recommendations about changing the route of the security fence.’
This gave the story about Israeli deference to American wishes a completely different slant.
In the end, of course, Israel did not change the route of the security wall, ignoring America’s suggestions, as bluntly
stated by the minister.
The same editor, whether for fear of adverse reaction or personal sympathy, also refused to
run a quote by a senior mayor of an Israeli settlement in the West Bank. The outspoken lady mayor said she considered
the security fence built on Palestinian land ‘blatant land grabbing’ by the State of Israel. The editor called the
mayor ‘a well-known nutcase.�
The Lobby also bitterly complained when I called the security fence (which annexed 13
percent of Palestinian land) another ‘Berlin Wall.’ They argued the Israeli ‘fence’ was to protect people
while the Berlin Wall had imprisoned people.
But doesn’t the Israeli ‘fence’ also imprison people or do Palestinians no
longer qualify as people?
Not surprisingly I often found Israelis far more critical of their own government and its actions
then Americans and the Israeli media far more critical then the American media. The Israeli government rarely, if ever,
complained about unfair reporting. Perhaps it left these complaints to its U.S. lobby. Besides, nearly all Israelis are
former soldiers in the IDF (the draft) and realize and often admit privately that “bad things do happen out there.â
€™
In the end, for the sake of being left alone, the American media capitulates often to pressure
and appoints Israeli-Americans (dual passport holders) as correspondents to Israel. This is not only highly unfair to
readers but to the Jewish correspondent caught between loyalty to his profession and loyalty to his ethnicity.
It is obvious, as the authors of ‘The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy’ point out,
that only a more critical and more even-handed U.S. policy can bring about a solution to the Israel-Palestinian question
and defuse the indignation of the Moslem world with America’s lopsided Middle East politics.
At the same time the Israeli lobby must be curbed by more open and more courageous
discussions on the Jewish state - for the good of both countries.
And news organizations must stand up to The Lobby by going public each time the lobbyists
threaten them with boycotts or sanctions, instead of caving in quietly as they do now.
* Uli Schmetzer, a veteran foreign correspondent, is completing a novel on the brotherhood between a post-war
German and a Diaspora Jew, both burdened by the Holocaust. The friendship flourishes but begins to fall apart once
the German, a journalist, periodically covers news events in Israel and the Diaspora Jew keeps visiting Israel as a guest
of Zionist organizations.
two American professors
By Uli Schmetzer
January 2, 2008 - Bungled wars, like the current debacle in Iraq, leave disastrous fallouts and kindle
soul-searching for causes and culprits. Suddenly alliances are challenged, accepted truisms disputed and victims
metamorphose into villains, villains into victims.
In this atmosphere of escalating introspection in the U.S. two American professors have managed to
publish a meticulous investigation into the negative effects of the Israeli lobby over the last 45 years on the foreign
policy of the United States.
In the process they exposed the intimidating power ‘The Lobby’ wields in suppressing
academic and media criticism of the Jewish state.
Their book debunks decades of fake assertions and claims peddled by ‘The Lobby’ to U.S.
politicians and a public nurtured on pro-Israeli films and fairytales whose images of heroic Jews and perfidious Arabs
has remained inoculated in two generations of Americans. In reality the Jewish state was conceived and expanded
thanks to massacres and atrocities committed against a native Palestinian population that was expelled, dispossessed
and sometimes even exterminated (as former Israeli foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami admits in his book: “Scars of
War, Wounds of Peace.�)
The two American professors also expose the lobby’s bullying of media outlets considered
compassionate to the plight of the Palestinians, critical of Israel’s excessive use of military force or questioning
America’s biased role in the Middle East.
Already a best-seller ‘The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy� by professors John J.
Mearsheimer of Chicago and Stephen M. Walt of Harvard depicts a Jewish state still piggy-backing on global sympathy
from the Holocaust while committing brutal human rights violations and ‘targeted killings’ that are in reality
officially sanctioned assassinations.
This Jewish state, so the authors found, has occasionally spied on and even betrayed the United States,
their main benefactor and financier.
Yet from their very first pages the professors make it clear Jews have every right to a
homeland and the existence of Israel is not in question. Nor is U.S. military involvement if Israel’s
survival is threatened.
What is questioned is America’s unconditional and self-damaging support of Israel. This blinkered
support places no onus on Israel to reach a settlement with the Palestinians.
The book demystifies the Jewish state and challenges The Lobby’s assertions. More baffling even:
In spite of the negative effects of the pro-Israel policy American politicians, including each of the presidential candidates
for next year’s election, seem convinced they can win an election only if the Israeli lobby (which represents just five
million American Jews) supports them.
The authors show Arab or Moslem ‘terrorism’ gradually emerged as a desperate reaction by an
inferior military power in its struggle against occupation by a far superior military power; the intransigence of Israel to
make a deal with the Palestinians and Israel’s disproportionate military reactions to perceived threats to national
security (a convenient excuse for any military operation these days, even by the U.S.).
But most significantly terrorism became the only effective tactic to counter-balance Americaâ
€™s total and biased support of the Jewish state.
During peace negotiations U.S. positions nearly always coincide with those of Israel even if
such a position is detrimental to U.S. interests.
The book argues the Israeli lobby in the U.S. not only managed to neutralize any criticism of the
Jewish state but convince Washington that America’s interests were tied to Israel’s interests and U.S. foreign
policy in the Middle East must coincide with Israel’s wish-list on foreign affairs, among them the destruction of Iraq,
the isolation of Syria and hostility towards Iran.
‘The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy’ illustrates how easy it was (and is) to gradually
push America into an alliance with Israel that may have been of some strategic value during the Cold War but has since
become a strategic liability. Worse, the alliance has been expensive for U.S. taxpayers.
For decades Israel was assured it would always be protected from the threat of international boycotts
or sanctions by the U.S. veto in the U.N. Security Council (nearly 50 vetoes so far). U.S. military power would rearm or
upgrade Israel’s depleted arsenals and seemingly unlimited funds from Washington would refinance empty coffers.
This was possible only because a largely uncritical U.S. media consistently applauded and
glorified the Jewish state or treated its ‘misdemeanors’ with kid gloves.
With surgical precision the two professors dissect item by item the lobby’s much peddled claims
beginning with the fake assertion Israel wanted peace the Palestinians did not. They show Israel’s offer of a
Palestinian state at Oslo and Camp David was a joke since the deal ‘cantonized’ the Occupied Territories,
leaving pieces of a Palestine wedged between Israeli territory, no right to an army, no right to airspace and all vital water
resources under Israeli control.
Even Israel’s former foreign minister and chief negotiator, Shlomo Ben-Ami is quoted saying: â
€œIf I were a Palestinian I would have rejected Camp David as well.â€�
In fact the book makes it clear hard core Zionism does not want and never wanted peace with the
Palestinians but sees the West Bank as part of a Greater Israel. If peace had been their intention why was a notorious
hawk like Ariel Sharon allowed to ascend to the Al-Aqsa mosque, Islam’s second most sacred site, accompanied by
one thousand policemen at a time when post-Oslo and Camp David negotiations between Yasser Arafat and Prime
Minister Ehud Barak appeared headed for a Palestinian state?
Sharon, vilified as a murderer in Lebanon by the Arabs, the man who exhorted 100,000 settlers to
sink roots in the Occupied Territories and an outspoken opponent of any deal with the Palestinians wiped out any
further negotiations with his Al Aqsa visit. He also precipitated the Second Intifada, the most savage.
(One may well ask how would the Israelis have reacted if Yasser Arafat and one thousand of his
Fatah fighters had suddenly decided to visit the Wailing Wall at the same Temple Mount?)
What Mearsheimer and Walt make also clear is the hypocrisy of an Israeli lobby harping on the â
€˜terrorist’ tactics of Palestinians who, for good or for bad, are fighting to liberate their country from Israeli
occupation.
They remind their readers the Zionists employed the same ‘terrorist’ tactics to wrest a
homeland from Palestinians when Palestine was still a British mandate. They point out placing bombs in crowded buses
and public places was first used in the region, with devastating consequences to civilians, by the Zionist ‘terrorist’
group Irgun in 1937. The group was headed by Menachem Begin who, together with another former Zionist ‘terrorist,â
€™ Yitzhak Shamir, later became Prime Minister.
“The Arabs may well have learned the value of terrorist bombings from the Jews,� the book
quotes author Benny Morris.
The book also quotes extracts from the diaries and statements of Israeli leaders to counter The
Lobby’s claims the U.S. must be Israel’s partner on moral grounds and Israel pursues the same lofty and
democratic ideals as the U.S.
“Neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat. Rather
terrorism has a great part to play in our war against the occupiers (the British at the time)� wrote Shamir.
Later as Prime Minister he indignantly denounced the Palestinians for using the same tactics to
liberate their land from the Israeli ‘occupiers.’ Terrorism may have been justified for the Zionists to gain the land
but it was ‘inhuman’ for the Palestinians to use the same tactics in defense of their land.
On January 1, 1948 Ben-Gurion wrote into his diary his thoughts about dealing with Palestinians,
an exhortation that seems to be still guiding Israeli forces today: “There is a need now for strong and brutal reaction.
We need to be accurate about timing, place and those we hit. If we accuse a family, we need to harm them without
mercy, women and children included. Otherwise this is not an effective reaction….there is no need to distinguish
between guilty and not guilty.�
The book gives as example of this no mercy policy the murder by Israeli soldiers of hundreds of
Egyptian prisoners of war in both the 1956 and 1967 wars, the expulsion of 100,000 to 260,000 Palestinians from the
newly conquered West Bank in 1967 and the campaign to drive 80,000 Syrians from the Golan Heights, shooting dead
many of those who tried to sneak back to their homes.
The book asks why as a victim of racism throughout Jewish history the Jewish state also practices
this despicable scourge. The answer is simple: No one, especially the U.S., dares to rap Israel over the knuckles
because the instant reaction would be a charge of ‘anti-Semitism.’
Yet Menachem Begin called Palestinians “beasts walking on two legs� and former IDF Chief
of Staff Rafael Eiton called them “drugged roaches in a bottle.â€� And he added: “A good Arab is a dead Arab.â
€� Former chief of Staff Moshe Ya’alon said Palestinians were like ‘a cancer’ on which he was performing â
€˜chemotherapy.’
The authors of ‘The Israeli Lobby’ felt America would not tolerate such racist remarks
expressed by public leaders in any other country, certainly not at home if these were made against Afro-Americans or
Hispanics. But America tolerated and tolerates these and other racist slurs made in Israel without criticism.
The authors argue this lack of criticism allowed Israel, between 1967 and 2003, to demolish more
then 10,000 homes in the Occupied Territories, confiscate more then 40,000 acres of Palestinian land build 250 miles of
settlers’ bypass roads, 30 new settlements and sent 100,000 new settlers onto Palestinian land doubling the
number of settlers.
The claim Israel practices restraint when it comes to dealing with its enemies (as The Lobby keeps
proclaiming) went up in smoke in the brutal carpet-bombing of Lebanon in 2006, so the authors content.
The book concludes there are neither moral, strategic or material benefits for the current U.S.
alliance with Israel. Worse, it finds the alliance is mainly responsible for the escalation of terrorism, global anti-
Americanism and a messy Middle East situation.
The two blame the Israeli anti-Iraq agenda for exaggerated information that helped push the U.S. into
the disastrous invasion of Iraq. In fact they argue it was not U.S. oil interests that wanted U.S. troops in Iraq but the
Israelis.
Today The Lobby wants the U.S. to ‘punish’ their other perceived enemy, Iran, a nation the
Israelis armed with weaponry during the Iraq-Iran war (when the U.S. supported Iraq) and supplied with military
equipment even in the days when the Iranians held hostage American diplomats. This kind of commercial back-stabbing,
the authors feel, is not expected from an ally. Yet Israel frequently placed such business deals above its friendship with
the U.S.
What the two strongly question is the superior moral tone the Israeli lobby has adopted vis-Ã -vis the
Palestinians, as if the Palestinians who have lived in Palestine for 1,300 consecutive years had no rights to live on
territory now claimed by Jews. In order to wrest this land from the Palestinians the Zionists committed the same kind of
atrocities as did Europeans in the conquest of the Americas, Africa and Australia.
The Lobby has turned these acts of aggression into acts of self-defense, the perpetuators into the
victims, their aggression into a desperate endeavor by displaced persons seeking a home and the Arabs into anti-
Semite fanatics rather then defenders of their homes against invaders. It is obvious the Palestinians would have fought
back also if these invaders had been Americans, Germans or Mongolians.
These twisted moral justifications for the occupation of Palestine are then supposed to excuse what the
two professors define as excessive military retaliation by the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) and even Israeli historians
have labeled ‘massacres’ and ‘atrocities.’
There is not one single argument by ‘The Lobby’ that is not debunked including the myth of the
Israeli ‘David verses Goliath’ victories against Arab forces superior in numbers - when the opposite was true.
“Israel won the 1948 war so conclusively,� writes Ben-Ami “precisely because her forces
were larger and better trained then the poorly equipped and ill-commanded armies of her enemies.�
The authors content Israel at times supplied misleading intelligence information ‘in order to
encourage the US to take an action that Israel wanted� (e.g. alarmist reports about Iraqi weapons of mass
destruction).
But all this did not dent the perception of Americans who, so the authors say, continue to view Arabs as
villains and cowards and the Jews as victims and heroes.’
This belief, they said, goes back to Leon Uris’ emotional 1960 best-seller ‘Exodus.’ The
legacy of the book has left an indelible impression on American psyches, an impression still lingering unfairly today and
which served as the foundation on which the Israeli lobby build its image of a heroic Jewish state battling vicious
enemies all around.
The authors write today Israel, a never-declared nuclear power, faces no viable external
threats to its survival. In fact the Jewish state should not be exempt from criticism or sanctions for
violations of human rights by the memory of the vile Holocaust and the historic persecution of Jews.
But what the book probably demands most is a reassessment of America’s alliance with
Israel.
The authors say for years, ever since the end of the Cold War, the Jewish state has not merited nor
required the annual injection of about $4.3 billion in American grants, soft loans, military equipment and way-out-front
favored son treatment. Israel is the only recipient nation that receives these grants 12 months in advance. This allows
the Jewish state to invest not immediately required funds in U.S. bonds so accruing another $600 million in interest that
could have been earned by the donor nation, the U.S.
Since the early 1960s when John F. Kennedy’s administration decided Israel needed to be
supported (to the initial tune of 200 M48A tanks shipped via West Germany so as not to upset the Arabs) United States
taxpayers by 2005 had poured $154 billion dollars, most of it in direct grants, into Israel’s coffers.
The authors argue this amount is significantly higher if one includes other forms of material
assistance, most of it in military hardware under different tags and the annual millions of dollars in donation from
American Jews.
Today Israel is one of the most modern military powers, an industrial high-tech powerhouse and the
26th richest nation in the world. It hardly needs U.S. largesse to survive and thrive – but still receives it.
THE LOBBY DISSECTED:
The core of the book examines in detail the composition and modus operandi of the Israeli
lobby (often called the Jewish lobby).
It finds ‘The Lobby’ is not a cabal, not a unified movement with central leadership â
€œbut a broad coalition of individuals and groups that work to shape U.S. foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction.â€�
They quote historian Melvin J. Urofsky saying: “No other ethnic group in American
history has so extensive an involvement with a foreign nation.�
Scientist Robert H. Trice found the lobby comprises at least 75 separate organizations
that push and support Israel’s actions and policies writing letters to politicians and news organizations, making
financial contributions to pro-Israel candidates and influencing senior legislators and presidential advisers through close
friendships and campaign funds.
Mearsheimer and Walt believe the core of the neo-conservative school (The Chicago
Boys) which has virtually guided U.S. affairs and believes in military force to impose U.S. interests was basically a pro-
Israel school of thought. They write that neo-conservatism ‘has been described as American-Jewish conservatism.â
€™
But they point out not all neo-cons are Jewish. Among those who are not but are staunch
advocates of the school are former U.N. ambassador John Bolton, Jeane Kirkpatrick and former CIA director James
Woolsey.
The book attributes the success of ‘The Lobby’ to America’s right of free speech
and a system in which campaign contributions are ‘weakly regulated.’ This gives interest groups (especially
intense ones) a chance to gain influence by directing campaign contributions to favored candidates.
Another factor is that American Jews are relatively prosperous, well-educated, philanthropic
and heavily represented in academia and the media.
According to the Washington Post 60 per cent of a presidential candidate’s campaign
funds can come from private Jewish supporters. Jewish voters have high turnout rates. John F. Kennedy received 82
per cent of the Jewish vote in 1960 (and repaid it by sending Israel 200 tanks) while Jimmy Carter’s more even
handed approach to the Middle East dilemma won him only 45 per cent of the Jewish vote in 1980.
(Carter’s recent book “Palestine: Peace not Apartheid’ became the target of the
most savage smear-campaign by The Lobby, according to the two professors, one of the reasons that prompted them
to write their book).
Already presidential candidates John Edwards, Mitt Romney, John McCain and Hillary Clinton
made euphoric speeches and promises to Jewish voters and Israel, perhaps to avoid the fate of Howard Dean in 2004
whose presidential ambitions virtually collapsed after he called for a more even-handed American approach to the Israel-
Palestinian question. (Dean’s wife is Jewish and his children are Jewish educated).
‘The Lobby,’ the authors found, ‘does not want an even-handed approach by the U.S.
’
Commenting on the fact that Jews make up only three per cent of America’s population
but their vote has a lopsided effect on elections the two authors write the lobby is an example ‘that in a democracy
even small groups can wield disproportionate influence if they are deeply committed.�
Though media experts may differ, the authors assert ‘The Lobby’ is most successful
on Capitol Hill among legislators, staffers and donors.�
At the same time they admit that “a key part of preserving positive public attitudes
towards Israel is to ensure that the mainstream media’s coverage of Israel and the Middle East consistently favors
Israel and does not call U.S. support into question in any way…..the American media’s coverage of Israel tends to
be strongly biased in Israel’s favor….media critic Eric Alterman in 2002 listed 56 columnists and commentators who
can be counted upon to support Israel reflexively and without qualification. He identified only five critics who hold a pro-
Arab position.�
(The Jewish state annually sponsors visits by U.S. talk show hosts and commentators. In Israel
they are wined, dined and flooded with the positive images of the Jewish state. Few of them ever venture into the
Occupied Territories and if they do it is on ‘safe’ settlers’ roads and to visit Israeli settlements on their hilltops
and surrounded by ‘hostile Arab villages.’
The authors comment: “The (Wall Street) Journal, along with other prominent newspapers
like the Chicago Sun-Times, the New York Sun and the Washington Times regularly run editorials that read as if they
were written by the Israeli Prime Minister’s press office.�
However they feel reporting from Israel is often less slanted because, unlike commentators
and columnists, reporters do go into the Occupied Territories on their own where they witness Israeli aggression,
violence and bullying and develop sympathies for the Palestinians as underdogs.
This is often reflected in their reports. However even these reports are watered down by
editors afraid of massive letter-writing and phone-call campaigns or demonstrations outside their offices by the activated
members of the Jewish lobby who are quick and ruthless in issuing boycotts or charges of anti-Semitism against mass
media outlets.
The book quotes Menachem Shalev, former spokesman for the Israeli consulate in New York
saying: “Of course a lot of self censorship goes on. Journalists, editors and politicians are going to think twice about
criticizing Israel if they know they are going to get thousands of angry calls in a matter of hours. The Jewish lobby is
good at orchestrating pressure.�
This book is obligatory reading for those who dislike being mislead, for those who say â
€˜enough’ to American largesse to a wealthy state, those angered by Israel’s use of disproportionate, often
massive military reaction to perceived threats to national security and those of the mass media who for years grudgingly
regurgitated the same arrogant and repetitive Israeli explanations for military excesses and crimes.
As a former foreign correspondent covering Israel periodically for an American daily I was
often stunned by the vicious and unfair campaigns unleashed whenever The Lobby considered a story negative to
Israel’s image and positive to the Palestinians.
Once you are on their black list The Lobby pursues you like a pack of wolves waiting
for a weakness.
On one occasion I wrote about a German doctor killed in an Israeli artillery attack on a
Palestinian village. This was considered by the ‘Jewish Media Watch’ (CAMERA) as pro-Palestinian propaganda
and filled with factual errors (like all critical reports) prompting my editor to plead with me over the phone: ‘Can you
find something on the Israeli side to shut them up?�
I went to a hospital in Jerusalem to interview crippled victims of past Palestinian suicide
bomb attacks and filed it the same day, something I would not have done in normal circumstances since the injuries
were old news that had already been reported.
Just how acutely editors in the US fear the lobby’s threats to cut off advertising and
classify the paper as ‘anti-Semitic’ was illustrated to me when I quoted a foreign minister saying Israel would build
its security fence (known by the Palestinians as the Apartheid Wall) along the route it had chosen ‘whether America
likes it or not.’
The stand-in foreign editor substituted this quote for an old citation from then Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon. During a visit to Washington Sharon had placated his hosts by saying Israel would ‘consider the U.S.
recommendations about changing the route of the security fence.’
This gave the story about Israeli deference to American wishes a completely different slant.
In the end, of course, Israel did not change the route of the security wall, ignoring America’s suggestions, as bluntly
stated by the minister.
The same editor, whether for fear of adverse reaction or personal sympathy, also refused to
run a quote by a senior mayor of an Israeli settlement in the West Bank. The outspoken lady mayor said she considered
the security fence built on Palestinian land ‘blatant land grabbing’ by the State of Israel. The editor called the
mayor ‘a well-known nutcase.�
The Lobby also bitterly complained when I called the security fence (which annexed 13
percent of Palestinian land) another ‘Berlin Wall.’ They argued the Israeli ‘fence’ was to protect people
while the Berlin Wall had imprisoned people.
But doesn’t the Israeli ‘fence’ also imprison people or do Palestinians no
longer qualify as people?
Not surprisingly I often found Israelis far more critical of their own government and its actions
then Americans and the Israeli media far more critical then the American media. The Israeli government rarely, if ever,
complained about unfair reporting. Perhaps it left these complaints to its U.S. lobby. Besides, nearly all Israelis are
former soldiers in the IDF (the draft) and realize and often admit privately that “bad things do happen out there.â
€™
In the end, for the sake of being left alone, the American media capitulates often to pressure
and appoints Israeli-Americans (dual passport holders) as correspondents to Israel. This is not only highly unfair to
readers but to the Jewish correspondent caught between loyalty to his profession and loyalty to his ethnicity.
It is obvious, as the authors of ‘The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy’ point out,
that only a more critical and more even-handed U.S. policy can bring about a solution to the Israel-Palestinian question
and defuse the indignation of the Moslem world with America’s lopsided Middle East politics.
At the same time the Israeli lobby must be curbed by more open and more courageous
discussions on the Jewish state - for the good of both countries.
And news organizations must stand up to The Lobby by going public each time the lobbyists
threaten them with boycotts or sanctions, instead of caving in quietly as they do now.
* Uli Schmetzer, a veteran foreign correspondent, is completing a novel on the brotherhood between a post-war
German and a Diaspora Jew, both burdened by the Holocaust. The friendship flourishes but begins to fall apart once
the German, a journalist, periodically covers news events in Israel and the Diaspora Jew keeps visiting Israel as a guest
of Zionist organizations.