The Israel Lobby: What Everyone Needs to Know (The Washington Report)

The Israel Lobby: What Everyone Needs to Know

WALTER L. HIXSON 2021 JUNE-JULY POSTED ON?JUNE 9, 2021

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs,?June/July 2021, pp. 44-47

2021 Conference Magazine

By Walter L. Hixson

THE ISRAEL LOBBY IS?the most powerful and the most pernicious lobby representing the interest of a foreign nation in all of American history. The little state of Israel, not the behemoths Russia or China as many Americans might imagine or have been led to believe, intrudes more directly into American domestic politics than any other nation in the world. Through these intrusions, the Israel lobby has secured massive American funding for Israel even though it is an apartheid settler colonial state, a regional aggressor, and a major violator of human rights norms.

In addition, Israel and its lobby have been primarily responsible for the failure to achieve a comprehensive Middle East peace. Israel and the lobby have long propelled, in conjunction to be sure with U.S. support for reactionary but oil-rich Arab regimes, a disastrous American foreign policy in the Middle East replete with political instability and forever wars.

While the self-serving purpose of the lobby is apparent, the Israel lobby itself is sprawling and complex. It is not a single monolithic entity, but rather a multifaceted grouping of ideas, individuals and organizations united by the commitment to dispense pro-Israel propaganda and simultaneously to discredit critical analysis of the Zionist state.

The largest and most well-funded Israel lobby organization of course is AIPAC. It’s not only far and away the most powerful foreign policy lobby in Washington; it is one of the most powerful lobbies—period. A colossus in the world of Washington politics, AIPAC is often mentioned in the same breath as the gun, pharmaceutical and retired persons’ lobbies.

As M.J. Rosenberg, a man who should know having worked as an AIPAC propagandist himself for many years in the past, explains, AIPAC uses the resources of wealthy people in the American Jewish community to enforce a kind of political orthodoxy in Congress, on the White House and on the media. Its purpose is to make sure no one in a position of power deviates from the Israel line.

AIPAC has long worked closely with the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. Both groups typically act in lockstep with the Israeli government. The lobby also encompasses wealthy individual donors, political action committees and a myriad of other Jewish and Christian Zionist organizations, federations, pressure groups, media watchdogs, college campus organizations and think tanks. There are literally hundreds of such entities in existence including city, regional and statewide organizations throughout the country and in Europe as well.

ISRAEL IS A SETTLER COLONIAL STATE

An Israeli woman holds a sign that reads “Don′t make Apartheid Great Again” as she protests against her government’s plan to annex parts of the West Bank on June 23, 2020 in Tel Aviv, Israel. (PHOTO BY AMIR LEVY/GETTY IMAGES)

In order to fully appreciate the role of the lobby, to understand why it is so large, so powerful, and so crucial to Israel, it is necessary to understand Israel’s identity as a settler colonial state. More than a trendy term, settler colonialism illuminates the essential mission of settler states, which is to displace or otherwise eliminate the indigenous population.

No one framed the issue more succinctly than the Israeli patriarch David Ben-Gurion who in 1937 declared in a letter to his son, “We must expel Arabs and take their place.” Thus, from the outset, more than a decade before the creation of Israel, the leaders of the Zionist settler colonial movement sought to gain control of as much land as possible with as few indigenous Palestinians as possible remaining on that land. From the?Nakba?to the efforts to drive Palestinians out of East Jerusalem this very day,?Israel has manifested this fundamental core identity. In my view, Israel is thus best understood as a congenitally aggressive settler state.

While Israel had much in common with other settler societies throughout history, in certain crucial respects Zionist settlement was and remains unique. The demonization of Jews, which endured for centuries and reached its apogee in the Nazi genocide, was of course a distinctive and driving force behind the Zionist movement. Scarred by the traumas of historic anti-Semitism, Zionist leaders such as Ben-Gurion, Menachem Begin and many others vowed never again to be the victims. Instead, they became the relentless and unapologetic aggressors in Palestine.

The other distinguishing feature pertains to timing. The Zionist settler state arrived on the international scene much later than the earlier settler societies. Unlike colonial North America, Australia and other settler societies of previous centuries, Israel and the American lobby encountered serious global challenges to settler colonial aggression. World War II and the Nazi genocide had highlighted the horrors of ethnic discrimination and mass killing spurring the creation of the U.N., recognition of the rights of indigenous peoples and the declaration of universal human rights.

The violent removal policies aimed at settling as many Jews with as few Palestinians as possible remaining on the land came in sharp contradiction to the post-war vision of decolonization, international justice and racial equality. Israel thus required powerful international support backed by determined campaigns of disinformation to counter the efforts to call the Zionist state to account for its aggression in Palestine.

The United States—the most powerful country in the world, the nation with the largest Jewish population in the world, the heartland of Christian?Zionism ?and an apartheid nation itself at the time—was the obvious and indispensable ally whose support or absence thereof could make or break the Zionist movement.

As Israel carried out its identity as a reactionary settler state, the U.S. State Department and other countries of the world and the U.N. attempted to reign in Zionist aggression which included ethnic cleansing, disdain for the plight of Palestinian refugees, borderland expansion and laying claim to Jerusalem as the exclusive capital. A massive and perpetual propaganda effort thus arose for the expressed purpose of countering international pressure in the wake of the 1947 partition of Palestine.

Over time the lobby dramatically expanded in scope and sophistication in concert with the unfolding of Israel’s continuous settler colonial aggression. In addition to the assault on Egypt in the 1956 Suez or Sinai War, myriad attacks targeted Jordan and Syria in the years leading up to the June 1967 War, an expansive war that Israel wanted and could not be dissuaded from launching.

Under the influence of the increasingly powerful Israel lobby, the United States provided military assistance including sophisticated jet aircraft even as Israel illegally occupied and began to settle in the territories seized in the Six-Day War; even as it introduced nuclear weapons into the Middle East thus thumbing its nose at the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty; even as it brutally repressed the Palestinian Intifada in the 1980s and 1990s; even as it repeatedly attacked Lebanon and the Gaza Strip killing and injuring tens of thousands of innocent people; and, even as it refused to make peace.

Israel’s American-backed aggression fueled the rise of Islamic militancy, heightened regional political instability; and, though it is often denied, played a prominent role in provoking the September 11th blowback attacks and the subsequent global war on terror. Today, Israeli aggression continues through blatant violations of international law in the construction of Jewish-only settlements, totaling some 700,000 people in the illegally occupied Palestinian territories, as well as in military assaults on Iran and Syria and assassinations that have become routine.

None of this long history of regional aggression would have been possible without American support and largesse secured by the machinations of the metastasizing Israel lobby. In order to secure funding and political support, the lobby obscured Israel’s fundamental identity as a congenitally aggressive settler state running roughshod over indigenous Palestinians. The lobby instead depicted Israel as a beleaguered innocent surrounded by fanatical Arabs who sought to drive the Zionist state into the sea. This disinformation campaign obscured Israel’s history of aggression as well as its military supremacy which had been clearly manifested in the June 1967 War and became even more pronounced thereafter.

Far from the peace-loving sole democracy in the Middle East as lobby propaganda would have it, Israel has been the clear aggressor in the so-called Palestine conflict. Just as we do not blame Indigenous North Americans for the centuries of so-called Indian wars, it is wrong to blame the native residents of Palestine for the Middle East conflict.

Lobby propaganda went on to promote Israel as a Cold War ally and national security asset of the United States, paving the way for the continuous flow of massive U.S. military assistance which has far exceeded that provided to any other nation. As collaboration grew, the United States itself began to mirror the practices of the smaller security state as it instituted increasingly militarized methods of policing at home as well as targeted assassination abroad.

In the face of mounting criticism in recent decades, the Israel lobby has become increasingly aggressive, resorting to disinformation, lawfare, character assassination, attacks on freedom of speech and cynical efforts to equate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. Not content to repress Palestinians, the lobby now seeks to deprive their fellow Americans of the fundamental liberty of freedom of speech.

ISRAEL GETS WHAT IT WANTS FROM CONGRESS

Over the years, AIPAC and its allies have taken command of public discourse and undermined presidential authority, but the lobby has been most pronounced in its domination of the Congress. With rare and anomalous exceptions, Israel gets what it wants from the Congress including, of course, money. Beginning with the Truman administration, when the nascent lobby tapped the Congress for funding, Israel has taken hold of the congressional purse string. Over the ensuing years, the increasingly powerful lobby ensured that Israel received annual allocations that eventually came to be provided through an early distribution process that was made available to Israel alone of all the nations in the world.

According to the Congressional Research Service, since 1948 Israel, a small nation of less than 9 million people, has been the most heavily subsidized foreign country in American history. Since the creation of Israel in 1948, the CRS notes the United States has provided Israel $146 billion current or non-inflation adjusted dollars in bilateral assistance and missile defense funding. These massive allocations have enabled Israel to become one of the most powerful military regimes in the world.

Today the money continues to flow despite Israel’s ongoing aggression and blatant violations of international law. Israel currently enjoys the fruits of a 10-year $38 billion package even though it already has far and away the preeminent military power in the region and does not face any legitimate threats to its security. Like a trained circus animal, the United States thus routinely doles out a billion-dollar annual welfare checks to a foreign country located some 7,000 miles from American shores, a country that has no compelling need for the assistance.

Those annual billions of dollars could of course be devoted instead to critically important domestic needs or be allocated to more deserving countries including, for example, impoverished Central American neighbors whose desperate refugees appear on American doorsteps.

So how can we explain an utterly irrational policy in which the United States routinely doles out billions of dollars to a small, developed and militarized nation? One that openly represses 20 percent of its own population while illegally colonizing adjacent territory, terrorizing its neighbors in the process.

Cultural affinity for Israel, including the religious motivations of Christian Zionism, plays an underlying role to be sure. But the main reason for the American largesse is because Israel and its lobby have a vice grip on Congress. In?Architects of Repression, I offer a detailed history of the tactics the lobby deploys to receive congressional funding including providing or withholding campaign funds, letter-writing campaigns for and against legislation, orchestrated public demonstrations, junkets to Israel and other effective lobbying techniques.

Make no mistake, members of Congress live in mortal fear of AIPAC. They are always made fully aware of AIPAC’s positions on any given matter relating to Israel. They are well trained to toe the pro-Israel line; otherwise, they know they will pay the political consequences. This deplorable situation is about more than money. Fundamentally, it is about the perversion of democracy and the abject failure of a pre-eminent American public institution, the people’s house, the United States Congress.

With the exception of “the squad,” Representative Betty McCollum, Senator Bernie Sanders and a few others, the members of Congress, conservatives and liberals alike, learned to obey the golden rule which is this—Israel gets what it wants. No questions asked. Virtually no criticism allowed.

For decades, Israel and its lobby have been stunningly successful not only in generating lopsided support for Israel but also in deterring analysis of their role in manipulating the American political process. Israel has been enabled through the persistent disinformation campaigns, the chokehold on Congress, and the timidity of the majority of American journalists, academics and publishers. Whenever an effort is made to critically analyze Israeli aggression, the lobby strikes back with disinformation and?ad hominem?attacks as the distinguished scholars John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt discovered some 15 years ago.

Resisting Israel’s Lobby on Campus and in the Community

ROBIN D.G. KELLEY 2021 JUNE-JULY POSTED ON?JUNE 9, 2021

When SJP held a national conference on my campus, UCLA, a couple of years ago, it was not only violently attacked by various Zionist organizations, but Kenneth Marcus, who was Trump’s appointee to the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, opened an investigation into what happened and in fact was demanding the list of speakers at the conference and threatened to punish the students. Pal Legal intervened and ultimately a court ruled that the administration has no legal claim to that list. That was kind of a victory.

Similarly, when Marcus’ outfit investigated SJP at NYU, again triggered by Israel advocates, they found no wrongdoing. But since they couldn’t really prosecute until they find any wrongdoing, they convinced NYU’s president to issue a statement prohibiting discrimination based on the Trump executive order adopting the IHRA [International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance] definition of anti-Semitism.

Just to be clear, the college presidents have been at the forefront of doing the bidding of the lobby. That includes black presidents like Melvin Oliver of Pitzer College who vetoed the college council’s overwhelming decision to temporarily suspend the study abroad program with Haifa University; and his neighbor here in California, the new president of Pomona College, G. Gabrielle Starr, also African-American who essentially condemned the student government’s unanimous adoption of a BDS resolution with regard to student government funds. So usually it’s like the same kind of response.

There are other things we could talk about, but I’m going to skip all of that and turn to the other issue, which is the parallels between South Africa and the movement toward Palestinian liberation as well as solidarity with Black Lives Matter.

First, no matter what, the term apartheid is applicable to Israel especially when we consider the U.N. definition of apartheid—which is not of course limited to South Africa alone. Just a reminder: Apartheid did more than strip South Africans of voting and civil rights, it dispossessed Africans from land through legislative and military acts, razed entire communities, transferred Africans to government townships, into bantustans. It devised a system of racial classification and population control that limited the movement of Africans in towns and cities and denied them social and economic privileges based on race.?

I want to suggest some of the findings of Noura Erakat in her brilliant book?Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine?which shows that, whereas the world condemned South Africa’s bantustan policies under the guise of granting some limited independence for state status, proponents of the two-state solution celebrate the creation of the Palestinian Authority. There’s a kind of refusal to recognize this as apartheid, as a bantustan policy, as the late Edward Said called it.

Okay. Now one question is, you know, how are Black Lives Matter and Palestinian grassroots movements working together? Are they natural allies??

The recognition that the subjugation of Palestinians—both in the occupied territories and within the ’48 borders of Israel—that these are kind of apartheid policies, has become increasingly clear to African-American activists. It has been clear for a while but especially since about 2010-2011 when you’ve had more and more African-American activists joining delegations to Palestine. Out of these encounters, a whole bunch of new organizations emerged that linked Israeli apartheid to anti-Black racism, supporting BDS and also emphasizing Black-Palestinian solidarity.

The turning point of course was the Gaza-Ferguson nexus in 2014 which deepened the relationship between Palestinians, especially in Saint Louis and across the country, as well as in Palestine, as they stood in solidarity with the protests around the killing of Mike Brown. Then in 2016, the Movement for Black Lives, which is a coalition of over a hundred organizations, issued quite a forceful statement labeling Israel an apartheid state, and characterizing the ongoing war in Gaza and the West Bank as a form of genocide.

The parallels of state-sanctioned violence both in Palestine and the occupied territories and the U.S. became a basis for solidarity, but it also gave way to a kind of politics of analogy. As I’ve written elsewhere, analogies can be really useful but they can also obscure more than they reveal. I think it’s important to understand this question of solidarity, especially Black, Brown and Indigenous solidarity with Palestinians. It requires that we move beyond analogies and recognize a longstanding vision of the indivisibility of justice. The basis for solidarity is not analogy, but the realization that these struggles are linked, not only to each other, but to injustice and to oppression around the world. The relationship is more entangled than analogous.?

Like the indivisibility of justice means, it knows no boundaries. It’s founded not on shared experiences but shared principles. That’s why, to really understand it, we need to go back and recognize that the foundation for Black-Palestinian solidarity really goes back to the 1960s and ’70s when we thought of the Palestinian Liberation Movement as a national liberation movement. It’s true that the context was resistance to racialized state-sanctioned violence, to ghetto rebellions of the U.S. in the late ’60s and early ’70s, resistance to occupation—the linking of these things. But these were armed struggles against brutal military regimes.

So the convergence of Black urban rebellions and the Arab-Israeli war birthed the first significant wave of Black-Palestinian solidarity and signaled the demise of the U.S. “Black-Jewish alliance.” I should say that there are many Black-Jewish alliances. The idea that there is a singular one is a mistake. The Communist Party itself was a kind of Black-Jewish alliance that operated within it. But most importantly, that the more traditional civil rights-based Black-Jewish alliance was still founded on a notion of shared analogy. Right? Analogy of oppression, rather than shared principles of liberation.

That’s why, within the left, you do get a segment of anti-Zionist Jews breaking with Zionist Jews, you know, on the left that have a different relationship to Black liberation struggles. That is to say, third world insurgencies and anti-imperialist movements radically reordered the political alliances between 1967 and the mid-1970s. But what was being reordered wasn’t just political alliances but really a vision of the world. The post-’67 radical insurgencies were more nationalist struggles for a modern nation-state as a path of decolonization, but they also ought to be understood as kind of world-making rather than nation-building. So behind these Black expressions of solidarity with Palestine, they have a vision of world-making rather than the politics of analogy or identity.?

So the hardest question to answer, to which I don’t really have a good answer, is, What are the lessons we can learn for today’s activists?

One really important lesson of course is that as our demands as movements—especially coming out of the anti-police protests of spring 2020, the George Floyd protests, the struggle against fascism in this country—the return of Indigenous sovereignty, the abolition of police and prisons, I mean these are the kinds of demands being raised. Alongside, or central to all these, is the fight against Israel’s annexation of Palestinian lands and the ongoing occupation. And that in part requires the defunding of the Israeli apartheid military state, which of course defunding that side of the police is about withdrawing all funds [coming] from the United States.

I think the other lesson is that BDS actually does work. We saw this with South Africa. Along with the labor and civil society insurgencies, it really brought down the formal apartheid state. I mean there are still problems in South Africa, but what I think is really important to remember is that South Africa responded to BDS with reforms. So you have this new constitution being implemented in 1984, which extended limited voting rights to so-called colored people, and opened up the door, but BDS didn’t stop then. In fact, it ramped up. In fact, most of the successes of the BDS movement in South Africa occurred after the adoption of reforms in 1985 where 50 companies pulled out of South Africa. Citibank pulled out. It declared that it would not make any loans to South Africa after 1985. Chase Manhattan did the same thing. So in ’86 you begin to see even more movement out. So that’s to say that even though a lot of us are rethinking the BDS movement, it’s something that should continue to be fought, even if it doesn’t appear to produce immediate results.

Finally, this is not so much a lesson as much as a warning. Palestine, when it comes to some of these solidarity movements in the U.S., tends to ebb and flow. In moments of spectacular violence like Gaza in 2014 or 2009—I mean we see a kind of interest emerging and then a kind of ebb and flow.

With the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the fear of the Trump administration and its relationship to Israel—all this led to a kind of increased interest. But with the Democratic regime in power, there may be a kind of ebb, which we can’t afford right now.

So my concern always is that, as we fight to transform policing in this country, as we fight to end all forms of oppression, that Palestine never leaves its role as a central site of struggle and that we continue to raise our voices around this and fight, because we’re not free until Palestine is free. That is why again our struggles are not analogous, as so much linked.

Robin D.G. Kelley's is the Gary B. Nash professor of American history at UCLA where he earned his master’s and doctorate degrees. He has also taught at the University of Southern California, Columbia University, NYU and Oxford University. His research has explored, among other topics, the history of social movements in the U.S., the African diaspora and Africa; black intellectuals; music and visual culture; and Surrealism and Marxism. His essays have appeared in a wide variety of professional journals as well as general publications, including the?Boston Review, for which he also serves as contributing editor.?

Kelley has authored many books, including?Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination; Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class; and?Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original.He’s currently writing a biography of the late journalist and author Grace Halsell, who was a longtime columnist for the?Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.