The Israel Lobby
An analysis of the inconvenient truths regarding the relationship between Washington and Tel Aviv
"Israel is our greatest ally." This phrase is commonly used by many in the American political establishment in instances in which tensions between Israel and its neighbors flare up to justify the large amounts of military aid the United States gives to Israel without addressing the reasons why America has the relationship with Israel that it does. Addressing such a topic would risk exposing inconvenient truths regarding the partnership between Washington and Tel Aviv.
Historical context is important to understand both why Israeli-American relations are the way they are and the consequences that have emerged due to such relations. After all, the United States and Israel didn't always have such a special relationship. The current relationship between the United States and Israel is the product of numerous events and decisions made over decades to bring about such a state of affairs.
In 1896, Austro-Hungarian Jewish political activist Theodor Herzl published Der Judenstaat, in which he argued that the solution to the anti-Semitic sentiment faced by Jews in Europe was the establishment of a Jewish state. This idea of Herzl's was known as political Zionism. 1897 would see the World Zionist Organization founded and the First Zionist Congress proclaim its objective of establishing a nation for the Jewish people in the land known as Palestine.
However, it wasn't until after the Second World War that the Zionists achieved their objective. The genocide carried out against European Jews by the Third Reich caused many to flee to Palestine despite limits placed on Jewish immigration to the region by the British who administrated the area at the time. Eventually, conflict broke out between Zionist militias, Palestinian Arab fighters, and British troops.
In 1947, Britain announced that it would terminate its Mandate for Palestine and requested that the United Nations General Assembly handle the question of Palestine. That same year, the United Nations voted to partition Palestine. According to the partition plan, a little over half of Palestine was to make up the territory of the Jewish state, and the territory not allotted to the Jewish state would be considered the Arab nation of Palestine.
The United Nations failed to address how the new Zionist nation could be a Jewish state when half of its inhabitants were Palestinians. Unsurprisingly, the Palestinians and the Arab world, in general, rejected the partition plan. The Zionists, for their part, saw opportunities present themselves.
The British withdrawal from Palestine meant that there would be no one to stop the Zionists from seizing more territory than the United Nations had given them. It wouldn't be long until Zionist militias engaged in acts of terrorism, such as the use of car bombs and the launching of attacks on Palestinian villages to drive Palestinians out of their communities. By the time Britain terminated its Mandate for Palestine, nearly a quarter of a million Palestinians had fled.
The day before Britain terminated its Mandate for Palestine, Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion declared the founding of the State of Israel, the nation that emerged from the territory allotted to the Zionists and the territory that the Zionists seized from the Palestinians. Though President Harry S. Truman recognized the State of Israel, American policymakers took a moderate approach to relations with Israel for fear of alienating Arab nations. It wasn't until the Kennedy administration that the first large-scale arms shipment to Israel was authorized.
J.J. Goldberg, editor emeritus of the newspaper for Jewish-American audiences known as The Forward, states in his book, Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment, "Zionist influence increased exponentially during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations because the affluence and influence of Jews in American society had increased. Jews had become vital donors to the Democratic Party; they were key figures in the organized labor movement, which was essential to the Democratic Party; they were major figures in liberal intellectual, cultural, and academic circles. More than any of their predecessors in the Oval Office, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson counted numerous Jews among their close advisers, donors, and personal friends.” With this, one could say that the shift toward a more explicitly pro-Israel foreign policy where Middle Eastern affairs are concerned came about as a consequence of the rising influence of the Israel lobby in liberal politics.
Israel's victory in the 1967 Six-Day War saw American military aid to Israel increase to unprecedented levels. Before that conflict, American officials believed Israel was too weak to be used to counter Soviet influence. However, Israel's military victories were beginning to prove otherwise. Following the Six-Day War, American aid to Israel increased rapidly.
By 1971, American aid to Israel surpassed half a billion dollars a year, with eighty-five percent of that being pure military aid. This amount quintupled after the 1973 Yom Kippur War. By 1976, Israel had become the largest recipient of American foreign aid, a status that it has maintained into the present day as of the writing of this article.
Over the years, Congress has granted Israel certain privileges to receive more aid and more expediently than other nations. John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt explain in their book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, "Most recipients of American foreign aid get their money in quarterly installments, but since 1982, the annual foreign aid bill has included a special clause specifying that Israel is to receive its entire annual appropriation in the first thirty days of the fiscal year." In other words, the official policy of the American government is for Israel to receive special treatment.
What's more, the Foreign Military Financing program usually requires recipients of American military assistance to spend all of the money in the United States to help maintain the employment of American defense workers. However, Congress grants Israel a special exemption that authorizes it to use approximately one in every four American military aid dollars to subsidize its defense industry. In addition, a 2006 report for the Congressional Research Service noted that no other recipient of American military assistance had received this benefit, while a 2005 Congressional Research Service Report noted that due to American economic aid is given to Israel as direct government-to-government budgetary support without specific project accounting and the money is fungible, there is no way to tell for sure how Israel uses American aid.
With this, one might arrive at the question of why Israel receives this special treatment. Ultimately, this comes down to the influence of the Israel lobby. The Israel lobby is a term used to describe the coalition of individuals and organizations that work to shape American foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction.
The most important organization within the Israel lobby is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee or AIPAC. Part of what makes AIPAC such a powerful organization is its practice of grooming congressional candidates. According to former AIPAC president Howard Friedman, "AIPAC meets with every candidate running for Congress. These candidates receive in-depth briefings to help them completely understand the complexities of Israel's predicament and that of the Middle East as a whole. We even ask each candidate to author a 'position paper' on their views of the U.S.-Israel relationship so it's clear where they stand on the subject."
Another reason why AIPAC is such a powerful organization is its ability to punish those who stand in the way of its objectives. When President Ford's attempts at securing peace between Israel and Egypt stalled due to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's refusal to cede strategic passes in the Sinai as well as oil fields which provided Israel with more than half of its oil, Ford sent Rabin a letter informing him that Washington would reassess its relationship with Tel Aviv. In response, seventy-six senators signed a letter opposing the reassessment of Israeli-American relations. After the letter, Senator Henry Jackson added an amendment to a defense procurement bill that allowed Israel to receive American weaponry at low interest rates. Not only did AIPAC mobilize policymakers to come out in defense of Israel by applying pressure on the administration, but they also managed to secure for Israel an arguably more advantageous position where American military aid to Israel was concerned.
Furthermore, the power of organizations like AIPAC is not limited to merely pushing the American government to give Israel special treatment. These organizations have demonstrated their capacity to drive the American government to sacrifice American citizens on Israel's behalf. In particular, the role of the Israel lobby was just as important as the American government's desire to maintain the hegemony of the U.S. dollar in pushing the United States to invade Iraq in 2003. To understand the role of the Israel lobby in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, one must have historical context. In particular, it is helpful to examine Iraq-Israel relations before 2003.
From Israel's beginning, Iraq had been a thorn in Tel Aviv's side. Immediately following the declaration of the State of Israel, Arab forces, including Iraqi forces, intervened against Israel. Following the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Iraq remained the only Arab nation not to have signed a ceasefire agreement with Israel. Over the years, Iraq would play a crucial role in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Iraq participated in both the 1967 Six-Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
During Saddam Hussein's rule over Iraq, tensions increased between Israel and Iraq as multiple clashes between the two nations occurred throughout the 1980s and 1990s. These clashes include the instance in which Israel bombed Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981 to stifle Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons development program and the incident that occurred during the Persian Gulf War in which Saddam Hussein fired Scud missiles into Israel in the hopes that Israeli entry into the conflict against Iraq might jeopardize the American-led coalition since the coalition included an assortment of nations that had complicated relations with Israel. To prevent the alliance from being jeopardized, the United States pressured Israel into not retaliating against provocations from Iraq. To satisfy Israel, coalition leaders sent special operations forces to seek out and destroy the mobile Scud launchers. During these decades, Israel regarded Iraq as a serious threat, and they longed for regime change in Iraq.
The opportunity for regime change in Iraq arrived following the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001. Not long after the towers came down, the administration of President George W. Bush falsely linked al-Qaeda, the terrorist network that carried out the attacks, to Saddam Hussein's regime. The political faction which led the Bush administration was known as the neoconservatives. Neoconservatism was born out of a sense of disenchantment that many foreign policy hawks felt with the political left during the rise of the counterculture of the 1960s. Neoconservatives favored using American might to reshape politically sensitive areas of the world.
Under the administration of President George H.W. Bush, some neoconservatives held high-ranking positions. Among the most defining moments of the one-term presidency was the Persian Gulf War. During that conflict, George H.W. Bush's administration decided against marching into Baghdad and overthrowing Saddam Hussein's regime, as doing so would have run the risk of destabilizing Iraq. Though the United States achieved victory in the Persian Gulf War, some of the neoconservatives within George H.W. Bush's administration, such as Paul Wolfowitz in particular, felt that by leaving Saddam Hussein in power, the administration didn't go far enough in waging war against Iraq. These neoconservatives would spend the 1990s advocating for regime change in Baghdad even before the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001.
It was under the administration of George H.W. Bush's son, George W. Bush, that regime change would come to Iraq. Some of the neoconservatives who held positions in George H.W. Bush's administration would hold positions in his son's administration. It would come as no surprise then that these neoconservatives would be among the leading voices calling for regime change in Iraq. Among the most prominent ways in which they pushed for regime change was the use of propaganda to drum up support for military intervention in Iraq. The terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001 provided neoconservatives the opportunity to feed the panicked American people propaganda, which falsely linked the terrorist network that conducted the attack to Saddam Hussein's regime.
Another untruth told to sell military intervention in Iraq was the myth of Iraq having weapons of mass destruction. Following the end of the Persian Gulf War, Iraq accepted the terms of United Nations Security Council Resolution 687. This resolution set the terms with which Iraq was to comply after losing the war. The resolution forbade Iraq from developing, possessing, or using chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. The United Nations Special Commission, or UNSCOM, was an inspection regime established to ensure Iraq's compliance with the destruction of their weapons of mass destruction.
Scott Ritter is a former United States Marine Corps intelligence officer who joined UNSCOM as an inspector. In 1999, he noted that Iraq no longer possessed a meaningful weapons of mass destruction capability. August of 1998 saw the Iraqis suspend cooperation with the inspectors entirely out of concern that the inspectors were collecting intelligence on behalf of the United States, an accusation that turned out to be true. The enactment of the Iraq Liberation Act in October 1998 made the removal of Saddam Hussein from power official American foreign policy. This act provided nearly a hundred million dollars for opposition groups in Iraq.
During the 2000 United States presidential election, the Republican Party's platform called for the full implementation of the Iraq Liberation Act. Running for the Republican Party was none other than George W. Bush. The Bush administration would get its chance to implement the Iraq Liberation Act in full following the September 11th terrorist attacks when it launched a propaganda campaign to motivate the American public to support a military intervention in Iraq. President Bush laid some of the groundwork for an eventual invasion of Iraq in his January 2002 State of the Union Address, in which he called Iraq a member of a so-called "axis of evil" along with Iran and North Korea and accused Iraq of pursuing weapons of mass destruction. Bush began formally making a case to the international community for an invasion of Iraq in an address he delivered to the United Nations Security Council on September 12th, 2002.
Before Bush's address to the United Nations Security Council, a September 5th report from Major General Glen Shaffer revealed that America based its assessments regarding Iraq and weapons of mass destruction on imprecise intelligence and assumptions rather than hard evidence. What's more, is that the British government was also unable to find hard evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. America's ally, Britain, agreed with America's hawkish stance toward Iraq, while others, such as France and Germany, argued instead for diplomacy and more weapons inspections. After much debate, the United Nations Security Council adopted a compromise solution, United Nations Security Council Resolution 1441, which authorized the resuming of weapons inspections and warned of dire consequences for non-compliance. France and Russia, members of the United Nations Security Council, made it known that they did not consider these dire consequences to include the use of military force to overthrow Saddam Hussein's regime, to which the American and British ambassadors to the United Nations publicly confirmed this interpretation of the resolution.
Despite the compromise resolution, in October 2002, Congress passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002, which authorized the president to "use any means necessary" against Iraq. While the United States was preparing to use military force against Iraq, Saddam Hussein agreed to United Nations Security Council Resolution 1441 on November 13th, and weapons inspectors returned to Iraq under the direction of lead United Nations weapons inspector Hans Blix. On February 5th, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell appeared before the United Nations to present evidence that Iraq was hiding weapons. In his presentation, Powell included information from a defector from Iraq whom British and German intelligence had already deemed untrustworthy, and Powell also made sensational claims accusing Iraq of harboring and supporting al-Qaeda terrorists and alleging that al-Qaeda had been attempting to acquire weapons of mass destruction from Iraq. In March 2003, Blix stated that the weapons inspectors found no evidence of Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction.
As it became increasingly clear that most of the United Nations Security Council members would not support a resolution that would lead to a war with Iraq, the United States and its "coalition of the willing" began preparing to invade Iraq without authorization from the United Nations. On March 17th, 2003, President Bush made an address in which he stated that Saddam Hussein and his sons would have two days to leave Iraq. After this deadline passed, the invasion commenced. Baghdad fell to American forces in April 2003, but Saddam Hussein wasn't until December 13th, 2003, that American troops captured Saddam Hussein. His execution took place on December 30th, 2006.
The invasion resulted in the destabilization of Iraq, thereby allowing Iran to exert influence over its Arab neighbor, America becoming locked in a nearly decade-long conflict that cost the lives of five hundred thousand to a million people in a nation with complicated internal politics without a proper exit strategy, and the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant whose rapid takeover of areas of Iraq and Syria caused the return of American troops to Iraq. And there were no weapons of mass destruction found after the invasion. That was because Iraq no longer possessed them by 2003. The rationale for the war offered by the American political establishment was a pack of lies. And such as the case with most lies throughout history, one might ask who benefitted from the lies told.
As it turned out, it was Israel who benefitted from the lies that formed the basis for the invasion of Iraq. The fact of the matter is that the United States invaded Iraq in part to safeguard Israel's security. After all, Israel wanted Saddam Hussein's regime overthrown due to the security threat that they believed Iraq posed. The neoconservatives, who are staunch supporters of Israel, also wished to see Saddam Hussein's regime overthrown to safeguard Israel's security as well as other reasons. In this regard, the neoconservatives were doing the bidding of Israel.
The notion that Israel was a leading factor in the decision to invade Iraq has been controversial, and many have asked the question of how Israel could have been a leading factor in the decision to invade Iraq when the mention of Israel was often absent from the words of Bush administration officials in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Evidence of Israel being a leading factor in the decision to invade Iraq exists not in the rhetoric of Bush administration officials but in the rhetoric of Israeli officials at that time and the methods used by the Israel lobby to prevent the American people from perceiving the war as being driven by Israeli interests. In the run-up to the invasion, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon praised President Bush for pursuing a war with Iraq while also attempting to disavow Israeli involvement. The Israel lobby sought to protect Israel's standing in American public opinion while the Bush administration pursued war with Iraq. An example of this is the way the Israel Project sent a memo urging pro-Israel leaders to keep silent on Iraq so that public perception wouldn't be that of Israel instigating the war with Iraq.
In addition, multiple Bush administration officials held membership in pro-Israel think tanks. John Bolton, who would serve as the United States Ambassador to the United Nations, had been a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and an advisor to the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. Furthermore, Bush's vice president Dick Cheney and former director of central intelligence James Woolsey have also served on the advisory board of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. There are many more examples of key figures from Bush's presidency having affiliations with pro-Israel organizations that collectively make up the Israel lobby. America's decision to invade Iraq at Israel's behest was the ultimate show of their loyalty to Israel.
Another pro-Israel organization that played a notable role in America's decision to invade Iraq was AIPAC. Though some claim that AIPAC did not advocate for war with Iraq, evidence to the contrary exists. Former AIPAC executive director Howard Kohr described in a 2003 interview with the New York Sun 'quietly' lobbying Congress to approve the use of force against Iraq as one of AIPAC's successes over that past year. Additionally, Jeffrey Goldberg of The New Yorker reported in a profile of Steven J. Rosen, AIPAC's policy director during the run-up to the Iraq War, that AIPAC lobbied Congress in favor of going to war with Iraq. It's also worth mentioning the fact that AIPAC generally supports what Israel wants; Israel wanted the toppling of Saddam Hussein's regime.
In summary, the American government sacrificed the lives of brave men and women serving in uniform and destabilized Iraq over the security concerns of Israel. The Israel lobby had the power to do this. Some might write this off as a product of the past, unable to affect us in the present. Others might ask why they should care about this in the present. The fact of the matter is that the current relationship that exists between Washington and Tel Aviv threatens to bring about future disasters comparable to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
As of the writing of this article, the Biden administration has announced plans to send a billion dollars in weapons to Israel as Israel continues its fight against Hamas, even though current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had previously propped up Hamas with Qatari money as a divide-and-conquer strategy and evidence has since come to light pointing to Israeli intelligence having ignored warnings about the attacks launched by Hamas which acted as the catalyst for the ongoing conflict in Gaza. It's also worth noting that Israel has been committing a series of atrocities against the people of Gaza, including the bombing of homes, mosques, schools, and hospitals in keeping with the Dahiya doctrine, a terrorist tactic employed by Israel in which the Israel Defense Forces disproportionally attack civilian areas in response to rocket attacks to terrorize Palestinian civil society into putting pressure on Hamas, the blocking of the delivery of water, food, and fuel to Gazans, the razing of agricultural land to deprive Gazans of food, the forced displacement of Gazan civilians by bombing their homes, and the punishing of families of alleged attackers with forcible transfers and home demolitions among other means of collective punishment. Even with the International Criminal Court's chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, having applied for an arrest warrant for Netanyahu, President Biden continues to defend the Israeli prime minister, describing the move as "outrageous" and claiming there to be no equivalence between Israel and Hamas. In addition to aiding Israel materially, the United States remains militarily engaged in the Middle East, often finding itself in confrontations with Israel's enemies. Now is the time for the American public to be made aware of the kind of influence that the Israel lobby holds over our leaders so they can equip themselves to tell Washington that the time has come for America to unshackle itself from the chains of Tel Aviv's interests and this unshackling may be a necessary stepping stone to a future in which the people of Palestine may enjoy the same level of sovereignty as the people of Israel.