This is most likely the most detailed paper you will find on Israeli influence on America's foreign policy.Of course these two gentlemen published this paper at great personal career expense and deserve our admiration for following their conscience and seeing the project to it's completion.Some 50 years ago,Johnson made a great error in judgment by allowing the State of Israel to get away with the murder of 34 Americans aboard the Liberty.Allowing them to get away with murder embolden Israel to the point that they openly practice apartheid without care for the worlds opinion.
This country should have never gotten involved in the Middle East.They say Israel is our friend and ally, but I just do not see it. Someone help me out here, because I cannot recall one instance where the nation of Israel did anything for America.Can someone explain the 38 BILLION over 10 years earmarked to what might as well be a 51st state by Obama right before he left office. 3.8 Billion a year is an obscene sin against the American people and this needs to stop NOW.
John J. Mearsheimer
Department of Political Science
University of Chicago
Stephen M. Walt
John F. Kennedy School of Government
Harvard University
THE ISRAEL LOBBY AND
U.S. FOREIGN POLICY
U.S. foreign policy shapes events in every corner of the globe. Nowhere is this
truer than in the Middle East, a region of recurring instability and enormous
strategic importance. Most recently, the Bush Administration’s attempt to
transform the region into a community of democracies has helped produce a
resilient insurgency in Iraq, a sharp rise in world oil prices, and terrorist
bombings in Madrid, London, and Amman. With so much at stake for so many,
all countries need to understand the forces that drive U.S. Middle East policy.
The U.S. national interest should be the primary object of American foreign
policy. For the past several decades, however, and especially since the Six Day
War in 1967, the centerpiece of U.S. Middle East policy has been its relationship
with Israel. The combination of unwavering U.S. support for Israel and the
related effort to spread democracy throughout the region has inflamed Arab and
Islamic opinion and jeopardized U.S. security.
This situation has no equal in American political history. Why has the United
States been willing to set aside its own security in order to advance the interests
of another state? One might assume that the bond between the two countries is
based on shared strategic interests or compelling moral imperatives. As we
show below, however, neither of those explanations can account for the
remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the United States
provides to Israel.
Instead, the overall thrust of U.S. policy in the region is due almost entirely to
U.S. domestic politics, and especially to the activities of the “Israel Lobby.” Other
special interest groups have managed to skew U.S. foreign policy in directions
they favored, but no lobby has managed to divert U.S. foreign policy as far from
what the American national interest would otherwise suggest, while
simultaneously convincing Americans that U.S. and Israeli interests are
essentially identical.1
In the pages that follow, we describe how the Lobby has accomplished this feat,
and how its activities have shaped America’s actions in this critical region.Given the strategic importance of the Middle East and its potential impact on others, both Americans and non‐Americans need to understand and address the
Lobby’s influence on U.S. policy.
Some readers will find this analysis disturbing, but the facts recounted here are
not in serious dispute among scholars. Indeed, our account relies heavily on the
work of Israeli scholars and journalists, who deserve great credit for shedding
light on these issues. We also rely on evidence provided by respected Israeli and
international human rights organizations. Similarly, our claims about the
Lobby’s impact rely on testimony from the Lobby’s own members, as well as
testimony from politicians who have worked with them. Readers may reject our
conclusions, of course, but the evidence on which they rest is not controversial.
THE GREAT BENEFACTOR
Since the October War in 1973, Washington has provided Israel with a level of
support dwarfing the amounts provided to any other state. It has been the
largest annual recipient of direct U.S. economic and military assistance since 1976
and the largest total recipient since World War II. Total direct U.S. aid to Israel
amounts to well over $140 billion in 2003 dollars.2 Israel receives about $3 billion
in direct foreign assistance each year, which is roughly one‐fifth of America’s
foreign aid budget. In per capita terms, the United States gives each Israeli a
direct subsidy worth about $500 per year.3 This largesse is especially striking
when one realizes that Israel is now a wealthy industrial state with a per capita
income roughly equal to South Korea or Spain.4
Israel also gets other special deals from Washington.5 Other aid recipients get
their money in quarterly installments, but Israel receives its entire appropriation
at the beginning of each fiscal year and thus earns extra interest. Most recipients
of American military assistance are required to spend all of it in the United
States, but Israel can use roughly twenty‐five percent of its aid allotment to
subsidize its own defense industry. Israel is the only recipient that does not have
to account for how the aid is spent, an exemption that makes it virtually
impossible to prevent the money from being used for purposes the United States
opposes, like building settlements in the West Bank.
Moreover, the United States has provided Israel with nearly $3 billion to develop
weapons systems like the Lavi aircraft that the Pentagon did not want or need,
while giving Israel access to top‐drawer U.S. weaponry like Black hawk
helicopters and F‐16 jets. Finally, the United States gives Israel access to intelligence that it denies its NATO allies and has turned a blind eye towards
Israel’s acquisition of nuclear weapons.6
In addition, Washington provides Israel with consistent diplomatic support.
Since 1982, the United States has vetoed 32 United Nations Security Council
resolutions that were critical of Israel, a number greater than the combined total
of vetoes cast by all the other Security Council members.7 It also blocks Arab
states’ efforts to put Israel’s nuclear arsenal on the International Atomic Energy
Agency’s agenda.8
The United States also comes to Israel’s rescue in wartime and takes its side
when negotiating peace. The Nixon Administration re‐supplied Israel during the
October War and protected Israel from the threat of Soviet intervention.
Washington was deeply involved in the negotiations that ended that war as well
as the lengthy “step‐by‐step” process that followed, just as it played a key role in
the negotiations that preceded and followed the 1993 Oslo Accords.9 There were
occasional frictions between U.S. and Israeli officials in both cases, but the United
States coordinated its positions closely with Israel and consistently backed the
Israeli approach to the negotiations. Indeed, one American participant at Camp
David (2000) later said, “far too often, we functioned . . . as Israel’s lawyer.”10
As discussed below, Washington has given Israel wide latitude in dealing with
the occupied territories (the West Bank and Gaza Strip), even when its actions
were at odds with stated U.S. policy. Moreover, the Bush Administration’s
ambitious strategy to transform the Middle East—beginning with the invasion of
Iraq—is at least partly intended to improve Israel’s strategic situation. Apart
from wartime alliances, it is hard to think of another instance where one country
has provided another with a similar level of material and diplomatic support for
such an extended period. America’s support for Israel is, in short, unique.
This extraordinary generosity might be understandable if Israel were a vital
strategic asset or if there were a compelling moral case for sustained U.S.
backing. But neither rationale is convincing.
A STRATEGIC LIABILITY
According to the American‐Israel Public Affairs Committee’s (A.I.P.A.C) website,
“the United States and Israel have formed a unique partnership to meet the
growing strategic threats in the Middle East . . . . This cooperative effort provides
significant benefits for both the United States and Israel.”11 This claim is an article of faith among Israel’s supporters and is routinely invoked by Israeli
politicians and pro‐Israel Americans.
Israel may have been a strategic asset during the Cold War.12 By serving as America’s proxy after the Six Day War (1967), Israel helped contain Soviet expansion in the region and inflicted humiliating defeats on Soviet clients like Egypt and Syria. Israel occasionally helped protect other U.S. allies (like Jordan’s King Hussein) and its military prowess forced Moscow to spend more backing its losing clients. Israel also gave the United States useful intelligence about Soviet capabilities.
Israel’s strategic value during this period should not be overstated, however.13 Backing Israel was not cheap, and it complicated America’s relations with the Arab world. For example, the U.S. decision to give Israel $2.2 billion in emergency military aid during the October War triggered an OPEC oil embargo that inflicted considerable damage on Western economies. Moreover, Israel’s military could not protect U.S. interests in the region. For example, the United States could not rely on Israel when the Iranian Revolution in 1979 raised concerns about the security of Persian Gulf oil supplies, and had to create its own “Rapid Deployment Force” instead.
Even if Israel was a strategic asset during the Cold War, the first Gulf War (1990‐ 91) revealed that Israel was becoming a strategic burden. The United States could not use Israeli bases during the war without rupturing the anti‐Iraq coalition, and it had to divert resources (e.g., Patriot missile batteries) to keep Tel Aviv from doing anything that might fracture the alliance against Saddam. History repeated itself in 2003: although Israel was eager for the United States to attack Saddam, President Bush could not ask it to help without triggering Arab opposition. So Israel stayed on the sidelines again.14
Beginning in the 1990's, and especially after 9/11, U.S. support for Israel has been justified by the claim that both states are threatened by terrorist groups originating in the Arab or Muslim world, and by a set of “rogue states” that back these groups and seek WMD. This rationale implies that Washington should give Israel a free hand in dealing with the Palestinians and not press Israel to make concessions until all Palestinian terrorists are imprisoned or dead. It also implies that the United States should go after countries like the Islamic Republic of Iran, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and Bashar al‐Assad’s Syria. Israel is thus seen as a crucial ally in the war on terror, because its enemies are America’s enemies.
This new rationale seems persuasive, but Israel is in fact a liability in the war on terror and the broader effort to deal with rogue states.
To begin with, “terrorism” is a tactic employed by a wide array of political groups; it is not a single unified adversary. The terrorist organizations that threaten Israel (e.g., Hamas or Hezbollah) do not threaten the United States, except when it intervenes against them (as in Lebanon in 1982). Moreover, Palestinian terrorism is not random violence directed against Israel or “the West”; it is largely a response to Israel’s prolonged campaign to colonize the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
More importantly, saying that Israel and the United States are united by a shared terrorist threat has the causal relationship backwards: rather, the United States has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel, not the other way around. U.S. support for Israel is not the only source of anti‐ American terrorism, but it is an important one, and it makes winning the war on terror more difficult.15 There is no question, for example, that many al Qaeda leaders, including bin Laden, are motivated by Israel’s presence in Jerusalem and the plight of the Palestinians. According to the U.S. 9/11 Commission, bin Laden explicitly sought to punish the United States for its policies in the Middle East, including its support for Israel, and he even tried to time the attacks to highlight this issue.16
Equally important, unconditional U.S. support for Israel makes it easier for extremists like bin Laden to rally popular support and to attract recruits. Public opinion polls confirm that Arab populations are deeply hostile to American support for Israel, and the U.S. State Department’s Advisory Group on Public Diplomacy for the Arab and Muslim world found that “citizens in these countries are genuinely distressed at the plight of the Palestinians and at the role they perceive the United States to be playing.”17
As for so‐called rogue states in the Middle East, they are not a dire threat to vital U.S. interests, apart from the U.S. commitment to Israel itself. Although the United States does have a number of disagreements with these regimes, Washington would not be nearly as worried about Iran, Ba’thist Iraq, or Syria were it not so closely tied to Israel. Even if these states acquire nuclear weapons—which is obviously not desirable—it would not be a strategic disaster for the United States. Neither America nor Israel could be blackmailed by a nuclear‐armed rogue, because the blackmailer could not carry out the threat without receiving overwhelming retaliation. The danger of a “nuclear hand off” to terrorists is equally remote, because a rogue state could not be sure the transfer would be undetected or that it would not be blamed and punished afterwards.
Furthermore, the U.S. relationship with Israel actually makes it harder to deal with these states. Israel’s nuclear arsenal is one reason why some of its neighbors want nuclear weapons, and threatening these states with regime change merely increases that desire. Yet Israel is not much of an asset when the United States contemplates using force against these regimes, because it cannot participate in the fight.
In short, treating Israel as America’s most important ally in the campaign against terrorism and assorted Middle East dictatorships both exaggerates Israel’s ability to help on these issues and ignores the ways that Israel’s policies make U.S. efforts more difficult.
Unquestioned support for Israel also weakens the U.S. position outside the Middle East. Foreign elites consistently view the United States as too supportive of Israel, and think its tolerance of Israeli repression in the occupied territories is morally obtuse and a handicap in the war on terrorism.18 In April 2004, for example, 52 former British diplomats sent Prime Minister Tony Blair a letter saying that the Israel‐Palestine conflict had “poisoned relations between the West and the Arab and Islamic worlds,” and warning that the policies of Bush and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon were “one‐sided and illegal.”19
A final reason to question Israel’s strategic value is that it does not act like a loyal ally. Israeli officials frequently ignore U.S. requests and renege on promises made to top U.S. leaders (including past pledges to halt settlement construction and to refrain from “targeted assassinations” of Palestinian leaders).20 Moreover, Israel has provided sensitive U.S. military technology to potential U.S. rivals like China, in what the U.S. State Department Inspector‐General called “a systematic and growing pattern of unauthorized transfers.”21 According to the U.S. General Accounting Office, Israel also “conducts the most aggressive espionage operations against the U.S. of any ally.”22 In addition to the case of Jonathan Pollard, who gave Israel large quantities of classified material in the early 1980's (which Israel reportedly passed onto the Soviet Union to gain more exit visas for Soviet Jews), a new controversy erupted in 2004 when it was revealed that a key Pentagon official (Larry Franklin) had passed classified information to an Israeli diplomat, allegedly aided by two A.I.P.A.C officials.23 Israel is hardly the only country that spies on the United States, but its willingness to spy on its principal patron casts further doubt on its strategic value.
On close inspection, however, each of these arguments is unpersuasive. There is a strong moral case for supporting Israel’s existence, but that is not in jeopardy. Viewed objectively, Israel’s past and present conduct offers no moral basis for privileging it over the Palestinians.
Today, Israel is the strongest military power in the Middle East. Its conventional forces are far superior to its neighbors and it is the only state in the region with nuclear weapons. Egypt and Jordan signed peace treaties with Israel and Saudi Arabia has offered to do so as well. Syria has lost its Soviet patron, Iraq has been decimated by three disastrous wars, and Iran is hundreds of miles away. The Palestinians barely have effective police, let alone a military that could threaten Israel. According to a 2005 assessment by Tel Aviv University’s prestigious Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, “the strategic balance decidedly favors Israel, which has continued to widen the qualitative gap between its own military capability and deterrence powers and those of its neighbors.”25 If backing the underdog were a compelling rationale, the United States would be supporting Israel’s opponents.
The “shared democracy” rationale is also weakened by aspects of Israeli democracy that are at odds with core American values. The United States is a liberal democracy where people of any race, religion, or ethnicity are supposed to enjoy equal rights. By contrast, Israel was explicitly founded as a Jewish state and citizenship is based on the principle of blood kinship.26 Given this conception of citizenship, it is not surprising that Israel’s 1.3 million Arabs are treated as second‐class citizens, or that a recent Israeli government commission found that Israel behaves in a “neglectful and discriminatory” manner towards them.27
Similarly, Israel does not permit Palestinians who marry Israeli citizens to become citizens themselves, and does not give these spouses the right to live in Israel. The Israeli human rights organization B’tselem called this restriction “a racist law that determines who can live here according to racist criteria.”28 Such laws may be understandable given Israel’s founding principles, but they are not consistent with America’s image of democracy.
Israel’s democratic status is also undermined by its refusal to grant the Palestinians a viable state of their own. Israel controls the lives of about 3.8 million Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, while colonizing lands on which the Palestinians have long dwelt. Israel is formally democratic, but the millions of Palestinians that it controls are denied full political rights and the “shared democracy” rationale is correspondingly weakened.
There is no question that Jews suffered greatly from the despicable legacy of anti‐ Semitism, and that Israel’s creation was an appropriate response to a long record of crimes. This history, as noted, provides a strong moral case for supporting Israel’s existence. But the creation of Israel involved additional crimes against a largely innocent third party: the Palestinians.
The history of these events is well‐understood. When political Zionism began in earnest in the late 19th century, there were only about 15,000 Jews in Palestine.29 In 1893, for example, the Arabs comprised roughly 95 percent of the population, and though under Ottoman control, they had been in continuous possession of this territory for 1300 years.30 Even when Israel was founded, Jews were only about 35 percent of Palestine’s population and owned 7 percent of the land.31
The mainstream Zionist leadership was not interested in establishing a bi‐
national state or accepting a permanent partition of Palestine. The Zionist
leadership was sometimes willing to accept partition as a first step, but this was a
tactical maneuver and not their real objective. As David Ben‐Gurion put it in the
late 1930's, “After the formation of a large army in the wake of the establishment
of the state, we shall abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine.”32
To achieve this goal, the Zionists had to expel large numbers of Arabs from the territory that would eventually become Israel. There was simply no other way to accomplish their objective. Ben‐Gurion saw the problem clearly, writing in 1941 that “it is impossible to imagine general evacuation [of the Arab population] without compulsion, and brutal compulsion.”33 Or as Israeli historian Benny Morris puts it, “the idea of transfer is as old as modern Zionism and has accompanied its evolution and praxis during the past century.”34
This opportunity came in 1947‐48, when Jewish forces drove up to 700,000 Palestinians into exile.35 Israeli officials have long claimed that the Arabs fled because their leaders told them to, but careful scholarship (much of it by Israeli historians like Morris) have demolished this myth. In fact, most Arab leaders urged the Palestinian population to stay home, but fear of violent death at the hands of Zionist forces led most of them to flee.36 After the war, Israel barred the return of the Palestinian exiles.
The fact that the creation of Israel entailed a moral crime against the Palestinian people was well understood by Israel’s leaders. As Ben‐Gurion told Nahum Goldmann, president of the World Jewish Congress, “If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. . . . We come from Israel, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti‐Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?”37
Since then, Israeli leaders have repeatedly sought to deny the Palestinians’ national ambitions.38 Prime Minister Golda Meir famously remarked that “there was no such thing as a Palestinian,” and even Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who signed the 1993 Oslo Accords, nonetheless opposed creating a full‐fledged Palestinian state.39 Pressure from extremist violence and the growing Palestinian population has forced subsequent Israeli leaders to disengage from some of the occupied territories and to explore territorial compromise, but no Israeli government has been willing to offer the Palestinians a viable state of their own. Even Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s purportedly generous offer at Camp David in July 2000 would only have given the Palestinians a disarmed and dismembered set of “Bantustans” under de facto Israeli control.40
Europe’s crimes against the Jews provide a clear moral justification for Israel’s right to exist. But Israel’s survival is not in doubt—even if some Islamic extremists make outrageous and unrealistic references to “wiping it off the map”—and the tragic history of the Jewish people does not obligate the United States to help Israel no matter what it does today.
Israeli scholarship shows that the early Zionists were far from benevolent towards the Palestinian Arabs.42 The Arab inhabitants did resist the Zionists’ encroachments, which is hardly surprising given that the Zionists were trying to create their own state on Arab lands. The Zionists responded vigorously, and neither side owns the moral high ground during this period. This same scholarship also reveals that the creation of Israel in 1947‐48 involved explicit acts of ethnic cleansing, including executions, massacres, and rapes by Jews.43
Furthermore, Israel’s subsequent conduct towards its Arab adversaries and its Palestinian subjects has often been brutal, belying any claim to morally superior conduct. Between 1949 and 1956, for example, Israeli security forces killed between 2,700 and 5000 Arab infiltrators, the overwhelming majority of them unarmed.44 The I.D.F conducted numerous cross‐border raids against its neighbors in the early 1950's, and though these actions were portrayed as defensive responses, they were actually part of a broader effort to expand Israel’s borders. Israel’s expansionist ambitions also led it to join Britain and France in attacking Egypt in 1956, and Israel withdrew from the lands it had conquered only in the face of intense U.S. pressure. 45
The I.D.F also murdered hundreds of Egyptian prisoners‐of‐war in both the 1956 and 1967 wars.46 In 1967, it expelled between 100,000 and 260,000 Palestinians from the newly‐conquered West Bank, and drove 80,000 Syrians from the Golan Heights.47 It was also complicit in the massacre of 700 innocent Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps following its invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and an Israeli investigatory commission found then‐Defense Minister Sharon “personally responsible” for these atrocities.48
Israeli personnel have tortured numerous Palestinian prisoners, systematically humiliated and inconvenienced Palestinian civilians, and used force indiscriminately against them on numerous occasions. During the First Intifida (1987‐1991), for example, the I.D.F distributed truncheons to its troops and encouraged them to break the bones of Palestinian protesters. The Swedish “Save the Children” organization estimated that “23,600 to 29,900 children required medical treatment for their beating injuries in the first two years of the intifida, with nearly one‐third sustaining broken bones. Nearly one‐third of the beaten children were aged ten and under.”49
Israel’s response to the Second Intifida (2000‐2005) has been even more violent, leading Ha’aretz to declare that “the I.D.F … is turning into a killing machine whose efficiency is awe‐inspiring, yet shocking.”50 The I.D.F fired one million bullets in the first days of the uprising, which is far from a measured response.51 Since then, Israel has killed 3.4 Palestinians for every Israeli lost, the majority of whom have been innocent bystanders; the ratio of Palestinian to Israeli children killed is even higher (5.7 to 1).52 Israeli forces have also killed several foreign peace activists, including a 23 year‐old American woman crushed by an Israeli bulldozer in March 2003.53
These facts about Israel’s conduct have been amply documented by numerous human rights organizations—including prominent Israeli groups—and are not disputed by fair‐minded observers. And that is why four former officials of Shin Bet (the Israeli domestic security organization) condemned Israel’s conduct during the Second Intifada in November 2003. One of them declared “we are behaving disgracefully,” and another termed Israel’s conduct “patently immoral.”54
But isn’t Israel entitled to do whatever it takes to protect its citizens? Doesn’t the unique evil of terrorism justify continued U.S. support, even if Israel often responds harshly?
In fact, this argument is not a compelling moral justification either. Palestinians have used terrorism against their Israeli occupiers, and their willingness to attack innocent civilians is wrong. This behavior is not surprising, however, because the Palestinians believe they have no other way to force Israeli concessions. As former Prime Minister Barak once admitted, had he been born a Palestinian, he “would have joined a terrorist organization.”55
Finally, we should not forget that the Zionists used terrorism when they were in
a similarly weak position and trying to obtain their own state. Between 1944 and
1947, several Zionist organizations used terrorist bombings to drive the British
from Palestine, and took the lives of many innocent civilians along the way.56
Israeli terrorists also murdered U.N. mediator Count Folke Bernadotte in 1948,
because they opposed his proposal to internationalize Jerusalem.57 Nor were the
perpetrators of these acts isolated extremists: the leaders of the murder plot were
eventually granted amnesty by the Israeli government and one of them was
elected to the Knesset. Another terrorist leader, who approved the murder but
was not tried, was future Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. Indeed, Shamir openly
argued that “neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism
as a means of combat.” Rather, terrorism had “a great part to play … in our war
against the occupier [Britain].”58 If the Palestinians’ use of terrorism is morally
reprehensible today, so was Israel’s reliance upon it in the past, and thus one
cannot justify U.S. support for Israel on the grounds that its past conduct was
morally superior.59
Israel may not have acted worse than many other countries, but it clearly has not acted any better. And if neither strategic nor moral arguments can account for America’s support for Israel, how are we to explain it?
The core of the Lobby is comprised of American Jews who make a significant effort in their daily lives to bend U.S. foreign policy so that it advances Israel’s interests. Their activities go beyond merely voting for candidates who are pro‐ Israel to include letter‐writing, financial contributions, and supporting pro‐Israel organizations. But not all Jewish‐Americans are part of the Lobby, because Israel is not a salient issue for many of them. In a 2004 survey, for example, roughly 36 percent of Jewish‐Americans said they were either “not very” or “not at all” emotionally attached to Israel.60
Jewish‐Americans also differ on specific Israeli policies. Many of the key organizations in the Lobby, like A.I.P.A.C and the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations (C.P.M.J.O), are run by hardliners who generally supported the expansionist policies of Israel’s Likud Party, including its hostility to the Oslo Peace Process. The bulk of U.S. Jewry, on the other hand, is more favorably disposed to making concessions to the Palestinians, and a few groups—such as Jewish Voice for Peace—strongly advocate such steps.61 Despite these differences, moderates and hardliners both support steadfast U.S. support for Israel.
Not surprisingly, American Jewish leaders often consult with Israeli officials, so that the former can maximize their influence in the United States. As one activist with a major Jewish organization wrote, “it is routine for us to say: ‘This is our policy on a certain issue, but we must check what the Israelis think.’ We as a community do it all the time.”62 There is also a strong norm against criticizing Israeli policy, and Jewish‐American leaders rarely support putting pressure on Israel. Thus, Edgar Bronfman Sr., the president of the World Jewish Congress, was accused of “perfidy” when he wrote a letter to President Bush in mid‐2003 urging Bush to pressure Israel to curb construction of its controversial “security fence.”63 Critics declared that, “It would be obscene at any time for the president of the World Jewish Congress to lobby the president of the United States to resist policies being promoted by the government of Israel.”
Similarly, when Israel Policy Forum president Seymour Reich advised Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to pressure Israel to reopen a critical border crossing in the Gaza Strip in November 2005, critics denounced his action as “irresponsible behavior,” and declared that, “There is absolutely no room in the Jewish mainstream for actively canvassing against the security‐related policies . . . of Israel.”64 Recoiling from these attacks, Reich proclaimed that “the word pressure is not in my vocabulary when it comes to Israel.”
Jewish‐Americans have formed an impressive array of organizations to influence American foreign policy, of which A.I.P.A.C is the most powerful and well known.In 1997, Fortune magazine asked members of Congress and their staffs to list the most powerful lobbies in Washington.65 A.I.P.A.C was ranked second behind the American Association of Retired People (A.A.R.P), but ahead of heavyweight lobbies like the A.F.L‐C.I.O and the National Rifle Association. A National Journal study in March 2005 reached a similar conclusion, placing A.I.P.A.C in second place (tied with A.A.R.P) in the Washington’s “muscle rankings.”66
The Lobby also includes prominent Christian evangelicals like Gary Bauer, Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed, and Pat Robertson, as well as Dick Armey and Tom DeLay, former majority leaders in the House of Representatives. They believe Israel’s rebirth is part of Biblical prophecy, support its expansionist agenda, and think pressuring Israel is contrary to God’s will.67 In addition, the Lobby’s membership includes neoconservative gentiles such as John Bolton, the late Wall Street Journal editor Robert Bartley, former Secretary of Education William Bennett, former U.N. Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick, and columnist George Will.
The Israel Lobby’s power flows from its unmatched ability to play this game of interest group politics. In its basic operations, it is no different from interest groups like the Farm Lobby, steel and textile workers, and other ethnic lobbies. What sets the Israel Lobby apart is its extraordinary effectiveness. But there is nothing improper about American Jews and their Christian allies attempting to sway U.S. policy towards Israel. The Lobby’s activities are not the sort of conspiracy depicted in anti‐Semitic tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. For the most part, the individuals and groups that comprise the Lobby are doing what other special interest groups do, just much better. Moreover, pro‐Arab interest groups are weak to non‐existent, which makes the Lobby’s task even easier.68
Second, the Lobby strives to ensure that public discourse about Israel portrays it in a positive light, by repeating myths about Israel and its founding and by publicizing Israel’s side in the policy debates of the day. The goal is to prevent critical commentary about Israel from getting a fair hearing in the political arena. Controlling the debate is essential to guaranteeing U.S. support, because a candid discussion of U.S.‐Israeli relations might lead Americans to favor a different policy.
One reason for the Lobby’s success with Congress is that some key members are
Christian Zionists like Dick Armey, who said in September 2002 that “My No. 1
priority in foreign policy is to protect Israel.”69 One would think that the number
1 priority for any congressman would be to “protect America,” but that is not
what Armey said. There are also Jewish senators and congressmen who work to
make U.S. foreign policy support Israel’s interests.
Pro‐Israel congressional staffers are another source of the Lobby’s power. As
Morris Amitay, a former head of A.I.P.A.C, once admitted, “There are a lot of guys
at the working level up here [on Capitol Hill] … who happen to be Jewish, who
are willing … to look at certain issues in terms of their Jewishness …. These are
all guys who are in a position to make the decision in these areas for those
senators …. You can get an awful lot done just at the staff level.”70
It is A.I.P.A.C itself, however, that forms the core of the Lobby’s influence in Congress. A.I.P.A.C’s success is due to its ability to reward legislators and congressional candidates who support its agenda, and to punish those who challenge it. Money is critical to U.S. elections (as the recent scandal over lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s various shady dealings reminds us), and A.I.P.A.C makes sure that its friends get strong financial support from the myriad pro‐Israel political action committees. Those seen as hostile to Israel, on the other hand, can be sure that A.I.P.A.C will direct campaign contributions to their political opponents. A.I.P.A.C also organizes letter‐writing campaigns and encourages newspaper editors to endorse pro‐Israel candidates.
There is no doubt about the potency of these tactics. To take but one example, in
1984 A.I.P.A.C helped defeat Senator Charles Percy from Illinois, who, according to
one prominent Lobby figure, had “displayed insensitivity and even hostility to our concerns.” Thomas Dine, the head of A.I.P.A.C at the time, explained what
happened: “All the Jews in America, from coast to coast, gathered to oust Percy.
And the American politicians ‐‐ those who hold public positions now, and those
who aspire ‐‐ got the message.”71 A.I.P.A.C prizes its reputation as a formidable
adversary, of course, because it discourages anyone from questioning its agenda.
A.I.P.A.C’s influence on Capitol Hill goes even further, however. According to Douglas Bloomfield, a former A.I.P.A.C staff member, “It is common for members of Congress and their staffs to turn to A.I.P.A.C first when they need information, before calling the Library of Congress, the Congressional Research Service, committee staff or administration experts.”72 More importantly, he notes that A.I.P.A.C is “often called upon to draft speeches, work on legislation, advise on tactics, perform research, collect co‐sponsors and marshal votes.”
The bottom line is that A.I.P.A.C, which is a de facto agent for a foreign government,
has a stranglehold on the U.S. Congress.73 Open debate about U.S. policy
towards Israel does not occur there, even though that policy has important
consequences for the entire world. Thus, one of the three main branches of the
U.S. government is firmly committed to supporting Israel. As former Senator
Ernest Hollings (D‐SC) noted as he was leaving office, “You can’t have an Israeli
policy other than what A.I.P.A.C gives you around here.”74 Small wonder that
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon once told an American audience. “When
people ask me how they can help Israel, I tell them—Help A.I.P.A.C.”75
Key organizations in the Lobby also directly target the administration in power. For example, pro‐Israel forces make sure that critics of the Jewish state do not get important foreign‐policy appointments. Jimmy Carter wanted to make George Ball his first secretary of state, but he knew that Ball was perceived as critical of Israel and that the Lobby would oppose the appointment.77 This litmus test forces any aspiring policymaker to become an overt supporter of Israel, which is why public critics of Israeli policy have become an endangered species in the U.S. foreign policy establishment.
These constraints still operate today. When 2004 presidential candidate Howard Dean called for the United States to take a more “even‐handed role” in the Arab‐ Israeli conflict, Senator Joseph Lieberman accused him of selling Israel down the river and said his statement was “irresponsible.”78 Virtually all of the top Democrats in the House signed a hard‐hitting letter to Dean criticizing his comments, and the Chicago Jewish Star reported that “anonymous attackers … are clogging the e‐mail inboxes of Jewish leaders around the country, warning ‐‐ without much evidence ‐‐ that Dean would somehow be bad for Israel.”79
This worry was absurd, however, because Dean is in fact quite hawkish on Israel.80 His campaign co‐chair was a former A.I.P.A.C president, and Dean said his own views on the Middle East more closely reflected those of A.I.P.A.C than the more moderate Americans for Peace Now. Dean had merely suggested that to “bring the sides together,” Washington should act as an honest broker. This is hardly a radical idea, but it is anathema to the Lobby, which does not tolerate the idea of even‐handedness when it comes to the Arab‐Israeli conflict.
The Lobby’s goals are also served when pro‐Israel individuals occupy important
positions in the executive branch. During the Clinton Administration, for
example, Middle East policy was largely shaped by officials with close ties to
Israel or to prominent pro‐Israel organizations—including Martin Indyk, the
former deputy director of research at A.I.P.A.C and co‐founder of the pro‐Israel
Washington Institute for Near East Policy (W.I.N.E.P); Dennis Ross, who joined
W.I.N.E.P after leaving government in 2001; and Aaron Miller, who has lived in
Israel and often visits there.81
These men were among President Clinton’s closest advisers at the Camp David summit in July 2000. Although all three supported the Oslo peace process and favored creation of a Palestinian state, they did so only within the limits of what would be acceptable to Israel.82 In particular, the American delegation took its cues from Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, coordinated negotiating positions in advance, and did not offer its own independent proposals for settling the conflict. Not surprisingly, Palestinian negotiators complained that they were “negotiating with two Israeli teams ‐‐ one displaying an Israeli flag, and one an American flag.”83
The situation is even more pronounced in the Bush Administration, whose ranks include fervently pro‐Israel individuals like Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, I. Lewis (“Scooter”) Libby, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and David Wurmser. As we shall see, these officials consistently pushed for policies favored by Israel and backed by organizations in the Lobby.
The Lobby’s perspective on Israel is widely reflected in the mainstream media in good part because most American commentators are pro‐Israel. The debate among Middle East pundits, journalist Eric Alterman writes, is “dominated by people who cannot imagine criticizing Israel.”84 He lists 61 “columnists and commentators who can be counted upon to support Israel reflexively and without qualification.” Conversely, Alterman found just five pundits who consistently criticize Israeli behavior or endorse pro‐Arab positions. Newspapers occasionally publish guest op‐eds challenging Israeli policy, but the balance of opinion clearly favors the other side.
This pro‐Israel bias is reflected in the editorials of major newspapers. Robert Bartley, the late editor of the Wall Street Journal, once remarked that, “Shamir, Sharon, Bibi – whatever those guys want is pretty much fine by me.”85 Not surprisingly, the Journal, along with other prominent newspapers like The Chicago Sun‐Times and The Washington Times regularly run editorials that are strongly pro‐Israel. Magazines like Commentary, the New Republic, and the Weekly Standard also zealously defend Israel at every turn.
Editorial bias is also found in papers like the New York Times. The Times occasionally criticizes Israeli policies and sometimes concedes that the Palestinians have legitimate grievances, but it is not even‐handed. In his memoirs, for example, former Times executive editor Max Frankel acknowledged the impact his own pro‐Israel attitude had on his editorial choices. In his words: “I was much more deeply devoted to Israel than I dared to assert.” He goes on: “Fortified by my knowledge of Israel and my friendships there, I myself wrote most of our Middle East commentaries. As more Arab than Jewish readers recognized, I wrote them from a pro‐Israel perspective.” 86
to be continued...
notes
1 Indeed, the mere existence of the Lobby suggests that unconditional support for Israel is not in the American national interest. If it was, one would not need an organized special interest group to bring it about. But because Israel is a strategic and moral liability, it takes relentless political pressure to keep U.S. support intact. As Richard Gephardt, the former House Minority Leader, told the American‐Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), “Without [your] constant support . . . and all your fighting on a daily basis to strengthen that relationship, it would not be.” This quote was downloaded from the AIPAC website [http://www.aipac.org/] on January 12, 2004. Also see Michael Kinsley, “J’Accuse, Sort Of,” Slate, March 12, 2003.
2 According to the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID) “Greenbook,” which reports “overseas loans and grants,” Israel has received $140,142,800 (in constant 2003 dollars) from the United States through 2003. Downloaded from the “Greenbook” web site [http://qesdb.cdie.org/gbk/] on November 8, 2005.
3 According to the “Greenbook,” Israel received about $3.7 billion in direct aid from the United States in 2003. Israel’s population according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies [IISS] and the CIA is 6,276,883. IISS, The Military Balance: 2005‐2006 (Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2005), p. 192; http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/. That averages out to $589 per Israeli. If one assumes the same population size and $3 billion in total aid, then each Israeli receives $478.
4 See http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/; World Bank Atlas (Washington, DC: Development Data Group, World Bank, September 2004), pp. 64‐65.
5 For a discussion of the various special deals that Israel receives, see Clyde R. Mark, “Israel: U.S. Foreign Assistance,” Issue Brief for Congress (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, April 26, 2005).
6 Avner Cohen, Israel and the Bomb (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Seymour M. Hersh, The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy (New York: Random House, 1991).
7 “Report of the Open‐Ended Working Group on the Question of Equitable Representation on and Increase in the Membership of the Security Council and Other Matters Related to the Security Council,” Annex III, U.N. General Assembly Official Records, 58th Session, Supplement No. 47, 2004, pp. 13‐14; Donald Neff, “An Updated List of Vetoes Cast by the United States to Shield Israel from Criticism by the U.N. Security Council,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, May/June 2005; Stephen Zunes, “U.S. Declares Open Season on UN Workers,” CommonDreams.org, January 10, 43 2003. There were also many resolutions that never came to a vote because Security Council members knew that the United States would veto them. Given the difficulty of criticizing specific Israeli actions in the Security Council, criticism has often come from the U.N. General Assembly, where no state has a veto. In those instances, the United States invariably finds itself on the short end of lopsided votes on the order of say 133‐4, where the dissenters include Micronesia and the Marshall Islands as well as Israel and the United States. In response, the Forward reported in November 2003 that the Bush Administration, at the instigation of the American Jewish Committee, was “embarking on the most comprehensive campaign in years to reduce the number of anti‐Israel resolutions routinely passed by the United Nations General Assembly.” Marc Perelman, “Washington Seeking to Reduce Number of Anti‐Israel Votes at U.N.,” Forward, November 14, 2003.
8 Marc Perelman, “International Agency Eyes Israeli Nukes,” Forward, September 5, 2003.
9 William B. Quandt, Peace Process: American Diplomacy and the Arab‐Israeli Conflict since 1967, 3rd ed. (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2005), chapters 5‐7, 10‐12.
10 Nathan Guttman, “U.S. Accused of Pro‐Israel Bias at 2000 Camp David,” Ha’aretz, April 29, 2005. Also see Aaron D. Miller, “Israel’s Lawyer,” Washington Post, May 23, 2005; “Lessons of Arab‐Israeli Negotiating: Four Negotiators Look Back and Ahead,” Transcript of panel discussion, Middle East Institute, April 25, 2005. For general discussions of how the United States consistently favors Israel over the Palestinians, see Noam Chomsky, Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1999); Kathleen Christison, Perceptions of Palestine: Their Influence on U.S. Middle East Policy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001); Naseer H. Aruri, Dishonest Broker: The U.S. Role in Israel and Palestine (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2003). It is also worth noting that the British favored the Zionists over the Palestinians during the period of the British Mandate (1919‐1948). See Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate (New York: Henry Holt, 2000).
11 Downloaded from AIPAC’s website [http://aipac.org/documents/unitedefforts.html] on January 12, 2006.
12 See, for example, Warren Bass, Support Any Friend: Kennedy’s Middle East and the Making of the US‐Israel Alliance (NY: Oxford University Press, 2003); A.F.K. Organski, The $36 Billion Bargain: Strategy and Politics in U.S. Assistance to Israel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); Steven L. Spiegel, “Israel as a Strategic Asset,” Commentary, June 1983, pp. 51‐ 55; Idem, The Other Arab‐Israeli Conflict: Making America’s Middle East Policy, from Truman to Reagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). 44
13 This point was not lost on Moshe Dayan, who, remembering a talk he had with Henry Kissinger at the time of the October 1973 War, noted that “though I happened to remark that the United States was the only country that was ready to stand by us, my silent reflection was that the United States would really rather support the Arabs.” Moshe Dayan, Moshe Dayan: Story of My Life (NY: William Morrow, 1976), pp. 521‐513. Also see Zach Levey, “The United States’ Skyhawk Sale to Israel, 1966: Strategic Exigencies of an Arms Deal,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 28, No. 2 (April 2004), pp.255‐276.
14 Bernard Lewis wrote in 1992, “Whatever value Israel might have had as a strategic asset during the Cold War, that value obviously ended when the Cold War itself came to a close. The change was clearly manifested in the Gulf War last year, when what the United States most desired from Israel was to keep out of the conflict ‐‐ to be silent, inactive and, as far as possible, invisible …. Israel was not an asset, but an irrelevance ‐‐ some even said a nuisance. Some of the things that the Israeli government later said and did were unlikely to change this perception.” “Rethinking the Middle East,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 71, No. 4, (Fall 1992), pp. 110‐111.
15 According to Middle East expert Shibley Telhami, “No other issue resonates with the public in the Arab world, and many other parts of the Muslim world, more deeply than Palestine. No other issue shapes the regional perceptions of America more fundamentally than the issue of Palestine.” The Stakes: America and the Middle East (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2002), p. 96. Lakhdar Brahimi, the former U.N. special envoy to Iraq, who the Bush Administration enlisted to help form an interim Iraqi government in June 2004, said that Israeli policy toward the Palestinians is “the great poison in the region,” and that “in the region, and beyond” people recognized the “injustice of this policy and the equally unjust support of the United States for this policy.” See Warren Hoge, “U.N. Moves to Disassociate Itself from Remarks by Envoy to Iraq,” New York Times, April 23, 2004; “Brahimi’s Israel Comments Draw Annan, Israel Ire,” Ha’aretz, April 24, 2004. Also see the comments of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in “Mubarak: Arab Hatred of America Growing,” Washington Post, April 20, 2004. Finally, see Ami Eden, “9/11 Commission Finds Anger at Israel Fueling Islamic Terrorism Wave,” Forward, July 30, 2004.
16 National Commission on Terrorist Attacks against the United States, “Outline of the 9/11 Plot,” Staff Statement No. 16, June 16, 2004. Also see Nathan Guttman, “Al‐Qaida Planned Attacks during PM’s Visit to White House,” Ha’aretz, June 17, 2004; and Marc Perelman, “Bin Laden Aimed to Link Plot to Israel,” Forward, June 25, 2004. Pro‐Israel supporters often argue that bin Laden only became interested in the Israel‐Palestinian conflict after 9/11, and only because he thought that it was good for recruiting purposes. Thus, there is virtually no connection between what happened on 9/11 and U.S. support for Israel. See Andrea Levin, “Don’t Scapegoat Israel,” Boston Globe, October 6, 2001; Norman Podhoretz, “Israel Isn’t the Issue,” Wall Street Journal, September 20, 2001. Note 45 that both of these pieces were published right after the Twin Towers fell. However, we now have a substantial number of bin Laden’s writings and talks from the 1980s and 1990s, and it is clear that he cared deeply about matters relating to Jerusalem and the Palestinians long before 9/11. See, for example, “Jihad against Jews and Crusaders,” World Islamic Front Statement, February 23, 1998; Transcript of Osama bin Laden’s March 20, 1997 interview with Peter Arnett of CNN (first broadcast on May 10, 1997). Also “New Osama bin Laden Video Contains Anti‐Israel and Anti‐American Statements,” downloaded from the Anti‐Defamation League (ADL) website [http://www.adl.org/terrorism_america/bin_l_print.asp] on March 8, 2004.
17 Changing Minds, Winning Peace: A New Strategic Direction for U.S. Public Diplomacy in the Arab and Muslim World, Report of the Advisory Group on Public Diplomacy for the Arab and Muslim World, Submitted to the Committee on Appropriations, U.S. House of Representatives, October 1, 2003, p. 18. Also see The Pew Global Attitudes Project, Views of a Changing World 2003: War With Iraq Further Divides Global Publics (Washington, DC: The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, June 3, 2003); Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Strategic Communication (Washington, DC: Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, September 2004); Shibley Telhami, “Arab Public Opinion: A Survey in Six Countries,” San Jose Mercury, March 16, 2003; John Zogby, The Ten Nation Impressions of America Poll (Utica, NY: Zogby International, April 11, 2002); Idem, Impressions of America 2004: How Arabs View America, How Arabs Learn about America (Six Nation Survey), (Utica, NY: Zogby International, 2004).
18 See The Pew Global Attitudes Project, America Admired, Yet Its New Vulnerability Seen As Good Thing, Say Opinion Leaders (Washington, DC: The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, December 19, 2001); Pew Global Attitudes Project, Views of a Changing World 2003, p. 5.
19 For a copy of the letter, see “Doomed to Failure in the Middle East,” The Guardian, April 27, 2004. Also see Nicholas Blanford, “US Moves Inflame Arab Moderates,” The Christian Science Monitor, April 26, 2004; Rupert Cornwell, “Allies Warn Bush that Stability in Iraq Demands Arab‐Israeli Deal,” The Independent, June 10, 2004; Glenn Kessler and Robin Wright, “Arabs and Europeans Question ‘Greater Middle East’ Plan,” Washington Post, February 22, 2004; Paul Richter, “U.S. Has Fresh Hope for Mideast,” Los Angeles Times, November 7, 2004; Robin Wright and Glenn Kessler, “U.S. Goals for Middle East Falter,” Washington Post, April 21, 2004. Even some Israelis understand that “the continuation of this conflict, including the Israeli occupation, will most certainly lead to new waves of terror; international terrorism, which the Americans fear so much, will spread.” Ze’ev Schiff, “Fitting into America’s Strategy,” Ha’aretz, August 1, 2003. It is also worth noting that some 50 retired American diplomats wrote a letter in May 2004 to President Bush similar to the letter that the British diplomats sent to Tony Blair. A 46 copy of the American letter was published in The New York Review of Books, November 18, 2004.
20 Consider, for example, the controversy that erupted in 2005 over Israel’s decision to expand its settlements in the West Bank. See Aluf Benn, “We Can’t Expect Explicit U.S. Okay to Build in Settlements,” Ha’aretz, March 28, 2005; Akiva Eldar, “Bush: End Expansion of Settlements,” Ha’aretz, May 27, 2005; “Bush Warns Israel over West Bank,” BBC News Online, April 11, 2005; Donald Macintyre, “Sharon Vows to Defy Bush over Expansion of Israeli Settlements,” Independent, April 22, 2005; “Sharon Brushes Off Warning from Bush,” MSNBC.com, April 12, 2005; Amy Teibel, “U.S. to Israel: Stop Expanding Settlements,” Washington Post, June 26, 2005; Ze’ev Schiff, “U.S.: Israel Shirking Its Promises on Settlement Boundaries,” Ha’aretz, March 15, 2005. Regarding targeted assassinations Prime Minister Sharon promised Secretary of State Colin Powell in May 2003 that Israel would refrain from killing Palestinian leaders unless there was a “ticking bomb” (an imminent attack). Ze’ev Schiff, “Focus/Americans Fear Abu Mazen Is Further Weakened,” Ha’aretz, June 12, 2003. But one month later, after Bush made a high‐profile visit to the Middle East and the prospects for negotiations between the warring parties looked promising, Sharon launched seven assassination missions in five days, none involving a “ticking bomb.” Bradley Burston, “Background: Has Sharon’s Hamas Hitlist Converted Bush?” Ha’aretz, June 17, 2003. Also see Uri Avnery, “Avoiding a Road Map to the Abyss,” Arab News (online), August 26, 2003; Glenn Kessler, “White House Backs Latest Israeli Attacks,” Washington Post, June 13, 2003; Laura King, “Sharon Lauds Hebron Killing,” Los Angeles Times, June 23, 2003; Gideon Levy, “Who Violated the Hudna?” Tikkun (online), August 17, 2003. In March 2004, the IDF killed Hamas spiritual leader Sheik Yassin, even though he was not an imminent threat, and even though his death damaged America’s position in the Middle East. Georgie Anne Geyer, “Ariel Sharon Complicates U.S. Mission,” Chicago Tribune, March 26, 2004; H.D.S. Greenway, “Assassination Fallout Bodes Ill for US,” Boston Globe, March 26, 2004; Tony Karon, “How Israel’s Hamas Killing Affects the U.S.,” Time, March 23, 2004; David R. Sands, “Israel’s Killing of Yassin Puts US in Line of Fire,” Washington Times, March 23, 2004. As Jim Hoagland said in the wake of Yassin’s killing, “With the possible exception of Charles de Gaulle, no friendly foreign leader has complicated modern American diplomacy more consistently or gravely than Ariel Sharon. He pursues Israel’s interests with a warrior’s tenacity and directness that takes away the breath, and the options, of everyone else.” See “Consequences for Sharon ‐‐ and the U.S.,” Chicago Tribune, March 26, 2004.
21 Quoted in Duncan L. Clarke, “Israel’s Unauthorized Arms Transfers,” Foreign Policy, No. 99 (Summer 1995), p. 94. This article provides an excellent discussion of the problem. There was a bitter controversy in 2004‐2005 between the United States and Israel over Israeli arms sales to China. See Aluf Benn and Amnon Barzilai, “Pentagon Official Wants Yaron Fired,” Ha’aretz, December 16, 2004; Aluf Benn, “U.S. Keeps Israel 47 Out of New Fighter‐Jet Development Program,” Ha’aretz, October 12, 2005; Nina Gilbert, “Yaron Won’t Give Info on Arms Sales to China,” Jerusalem Post, December 30, 2004; “Israeli, U.S. Talks on Weapons Deals with China End without Result,” Ha’aretz, June 29, 2005; Marc Perelman, “Spat Over Sales of Weapons Chilling Ties between Jerusalem and Beijing,” Forward, December 23, 2004; Marc Perelman, “China Crisis Straining U.S.‐Israel Ties,” Forward, August 5, 2005; Marc Perelman, “Israel Miffed over Lingering China Flap,” Forward, October 7, 2005; Ze’ev Schiff, “U.S.‐Israel Crisis Deepens over Defense Exports to China,” Ha’aretz, July 27, 2005.
22 Quoted in Duncan L. Clarke, “Israel’s Economic Espionage in the United States,” Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 27, No. 4 (Summer 1998), p. 21. Also see Bob Drogin and Greg Miller, “Israel Has Long Spied on U.S. Say Officials,” Los Angeles Times, September 3, 2004; “FBI Says Israel a Major Player in Industrial Espionage,” Jewish Bulletin, January 16, 1998; Clyde R. Mark, “Israeli‐United States Relations,” Issue Brief for Congress (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, November 9, 2004), pp. 14‐15; Joshua Mitnick, “U.S. Accuses Officials of Spying,” Washington Times, December 16, 2004.
23 On the Pollard affair, see Hersh, Samson Option, pp. 285‐305; Idem, “The Traitor: Why Pollard Should Never Be Released,” New Yorker, Vol. 74, issue 42 (January 18, 1999), pp. 26‐33. There are a huge number of articles on the internet dealing with the Franklin Affair. For a good overview of the case, see Jeffrey Goldberg, “Real Insiders: A Pro‐Israel Lobby and an F.B.I. Sting,” New Yorker, Vol. 81, issue 19 (July 4, 2005), pp. 34‐40.
24 Trevor N. Dupuy, Elusive Victory: The Arab‐Israeli Wars, 1947‐1974 (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), pp. 3‐19, 121‐125, 146‐147, 212‐214, 231‐244, 333‐340, 388‐390, 597‐605, 623‐633; Simha Flapan, The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987), pp. 189‐199; Rashid Khalidi, “The Palestinians and 1948: The Underlying Causes of Failure,” in Eugene L. Rogan and Avi Shlaim, eds., The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948 (NY: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 12‐36; Haim Levenberg, Military Preparations of the Arab Community in Palestine, 1945‐1948 (London: Frank Cass, 1993); Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), chapters 1,3. Idem, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist‐Arab Conflict, 1881‐1999 (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1999), pp. 187‐ 189, 191‐196, 217‐223, 235‐236, 241‐242, 286‐291, 311‐313, 393‐395; Martin Van Creveld, The Sword and the Olive: A Critical History of the Israeli Defense Forces (NY: Public Affairs, 1998), pp. 77‐82, 137‐138, 179‐182.
25 Amos Harel, “Israel Maintains Its Strategic Advantage, Says Jaffee Center,” Ha’aretz, November 23, 2005. Also see, Uri Bar‐Joseph, “The Paradox of Israeli Power,” Survival, Vol. 46, No. 4 (Winter 2004‐05), pp. 137‐156; Martin Van Creveld, “Opportunity Beckons,” Jerusalem Post, May 15, 2003. 48
26 For three instructive pieces on this matter from the Israeli press, see Amiram Barkat, “Majority of Israelis Are Opposed to Intermarriage, Survey Finds,” Ha’aretz, September 15, 2003; Nicky Blackburn, “Better a Jew,” Ha’aretz, April 21, 2004; Lily Galili, “Hitting Below the Belt,” Ha’aretz, August 8, 2004.
27 See “The Official Summation of the Or Commission Report,” published in Ha’aretz, September 2, 2003. For evidence of how hostile many Israelis were to the report’s findings and recommendations, see “No Avoiding the Commission Recommendations,” Ha’aretz, September 4, 2003; Molly Moore, “Israeli Report Is Welcomed, Dismissed,” Washington Post, September 3, 2003. Also see Bernard Avishai, “Saving Israel from Itself: A Secular Future for the Jewish State,” Harper’s Magazine, January 2005. It is also worth noting that the Israel Democracy Institute reported in May 2003 that: 53 percent of Israeli Jews “are against full equality for the Arabs”; 77 percent of Israeli Jews believe that “there should be a Jewish majority on crucial political decisions”; only 31 percent “support having Arab political parties in the government”; 57 percent “think that the Arabs should be encouraged to emigrate.” See “The Democracy Index: Major Findings 2003.” Imagine the outcry that would occur if a majority of white Americans declared that blacks, Hispanics, and Asians “should be encouraged” to leave the United States. For more recent surveys, which show little change in Israeli attitudes, see Yulie Khromchenko, “Survey: Most Jewish Israelis Support Transfer of Arabs,” Ha’aretz, June 22, 2004; Yoav Stern, “Poll: Most Israeli Jews Say Israeli Arabs Should Emigrate,” Ha’aretz, April 4, 2005.
28 Quoted in Justin Huggler, “Israel Imposes ‘Racist’ Marriage Law,” Guardian, August 1, 2003. Also see James Bennet, “Israel Blocks Palestinians from Marrying into Residency,” New York Times, July 31, 2003; “Racist Legislation,” Ha’aretz editorial, July, 19, 2004; “Racist Legislation,” Ha’aretz editorial, January 18, 2005. Even the Anti‐Defamation League (ADL) criticized the legislation, albeit mildly. Nathan Guttman, Yair Ettinger, Sharon Sadeh, “ADL Criticizes Law Denying Citizenship to Palestinians,” Ha’aretz, August 5, 2003.
29 The first wave of European Jews to come to Palestine is known as the First Aliyah, and it covers the years from 1882 to 1903. There were slightly more than 15,000 Jews in Palestine in 1882. Justin McCarthy, The Population of Palestine: Population History and Statistics of the Late Ottoman Period and the Mandate (NY: Columbia University Press, 1990), p.11, which has excellent data for the years from 1850 to 1915. Also see Mark Tessler, A History of the Israeli‐Palestinian Conflict (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 124.
30 The total population of Palestine in 1893 was roughly 530,000, of whom about 19,000 were Jewish (3.6 percent). Arabs comprised the vast majority of the remaining population. McCarthy, Population of Palestine, p. 11. 49
31 Flapan, Birth of Israel, p. 44; Morris, Righteous Victims, p. 186.
32 Flapan, Birth of Israel, p 22. Similarly, Ben‐Gurion told his son, “I am certain we will be able to settle in all the other parts of the country, whether through agreement and mutual agreement with our Arab neighbors or in another way.” He went on to say, “Erect a Jewish State at once, even if it is not in the whole of the land. The rest will come in the course of time. It must come.” Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (NY: Norton, 2000), p. 21. Also see Flapan, Birth of Israel, pp. 13‐53; Nur Masalah, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of Transfer in Zionist Political Thought, 1882‐1948 (Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992), chapter 2; Morris, Righteous Victims, pp. 138‐139; Avi Shlaim, The Politics of Partition: King Abdullah, the Zionists, and Palestine, 1921‐1951 (NY: Oxford University Press, 1999).
33 Masalah, Expulsion of the Palestinians, p. 128. Also see Morris, Righteous Victims, pp. 140, 142, 168‐169.
34 Benny Morris, “A New Exodus for the Middle East?” Guardian, October 3, 2002. On the pervasiveness of transfer thinking among Zionists before Israel was established in 1948, see Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians; Morris, “Revisiting the Palestinian Exodus of 1948,” in Rogan and Shlaim, War for Palestine, pp. 39‐48; Morris, Birth Revisited, chapter 2; Ari Shavit, “Survival of the Fittest,” Ha’aretz, January 9, 2004.
35 Morris, Birth Revisited, provides a detailed account of this event. Also see Meron Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948, trans. Maxine Kaufman‐Lacusta (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), chapters 3‐4. The only remaining debate of real significance regarding the expulsion of the Palestinians from their homeland is whether it was “born of war,” as Morris argues, or by design, as Norman Finkelstein argues in Image and Reality of the Israel‐Palestine Conflict (London: Verso, 1995), chapter 3.
36 Erskine Childers, “The Other Exodus,” Spectator, May 12, 1961; Flapan, Birth of Israel, pp. 81‐118; Walid Khalidi, “Why Did the Palestinians Leave Revisited,” Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 34, No. 2 ( Winter 2005), pp. 42‐54; Idem, “The Fall of Haifa,” Middle East Forum, Vol. 35, No. 10 (December, 1959), pp. 22‐32; Morris, Birth Revisited.
37 Nahum Goldmann, The Jewish Paradox, trans. Steve Cox (NY: Grosset and Dunlap, 1978), p. 99. Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founding father of the Israeli right, made essentially the same point when he wrote, “Colonization is self‐explanatory and what it implies is fully understood by every sensible Jew and Arab. There can only be one purpose in colonization. For the country’s Arabs that purpose is essentially unacceptable. This is a natural reaction and nothing will change it.” Quoted in Ian Lustick, “To Build and To 50 Be Built By: Israel and the Hidden Logic of the Iron Wall,” Israel Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Spring 1996), p. 200.
38 See Geoffrey Aronson, Israel, Palestinians, and the Intifada: Creating Facts on the West Bank (London: Kegan Paul International, 1990); Amnon Barzilai, “A Brief History of the Missed Opportunity,” Ha’aretz, June 5, 2002; Idem, “Some Saw the Refugees as the Key to Peace,” Ha’aretz, June 11, 2002; Moshe Behar, “The Peace Process and Israeli Domestic Politics in the 1990s,” Socialism and Democracy, Current Issue Number 32, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Summer‐Fall 2002), pp. 34‐47; Adam Hanieh and Catherine Cook, “A Road Map to the Oslo Cul‐de‐Sac,” Middle East Report Online, May 15, 2003; “Israel’s Interests Take Primacy: An Interview with Dore Gold,” in bitterlemons.org, “What Constitutes a Viable Palestinian State?” March 15, 2004, Edition 10; Nur Masalha, Imperial Israel and the Palestinians: The Politics of Expansion (London: Pluto Press, 2000); Sara Roy, “Erasing the ‘Optics’ of Gaza,” The Daily Star On Line, February 14, 2004; “36 Years, and Still Counting,” Ha’aretz, September 26, 2003.
39 Rahid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (NY: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 147. Meir also said, “It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.” Masalha, Imperial Israel, p. 47. Rabin said in 1995, two years after signing the Oslo accords, “I seek peaceful coexistence between Israel as a Jewish state, not all over the land of Israel, or most of it; its capital, the united Jerusalem; its security border with Jordan rebuilt; next to it, a Palestinian entity, less than a state, that runs the life of Palestinians …. This is my goal, not to return to the pre‐Six Day War lines but to create two entities, a separation between Israel and the Palestinians who reside in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.” Hanieh and Cook, “Road Map.” Also see Akiva Eldar, “On the Same Page, Ten Years On,” Ha’aretz, November 5, 2005; David Grossman, “The Night Our Hope for Peace Died,” Guardian, November 4, 2005; Michael Jansen, “A Practice that Prevents the Emergence of a Palestinian State,” Jordan Times, November 10, 2005. It is worth noting that in the spring of 1998, Israel and its American supporters sharply criticized First Lady Hillary Clinton for saying that, “It would be in the long‐ term interests of peace in the Middle East for there to be a state of Palestine, a functioning modern state that is on the same footing as other states.” Tom Rhodes and Christopher Walker, “Congress Tells Israel to Reject Clinton’s Pullout Plan,” New York Times, May 8, 1998; James Bennet, “Aides Disavow Mrs. Clinton on Mideast,” New York Times, May 8, 1998.
40 Charles Enderlein, Shattered Dreams: The Failure of the Peace Process in the Middle East, 1995‐2002, trans. Susan Fairfield (NY: Other Press, 2003), pp. 201, 207‐208; Jeremy Pressman, “Visions in Collision: What Happened at Camp David and Taba? International Security, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Fall 2003), p. 17; Deborah Sontag, “Quest for Mideast Peace: 51 How and Why It Failed,” New York Times, July 26, 2001; Clayton E. Swisher, The Truth about Camp David: The Untold Story about the Collapse of the Peace Process (NY: Nation Books, 2004), pp. 284, 318, 325. Barak himself said after Camp David that “the Palestinians were promised a continuous piece of sovereign territory except for a razor‐ thin Israeli wedge running from Jerusalem through from Maale Adumim to the Jordan River,” which effectively would have been under Israel’s control. Benny Morris, “Camp David and After: An Exchange (1. An Interview with Ehud Barak)”, New York Review of Books, Vol. 49, No. 10 (June 13, 2002), p. 44. Also see the map Israeli negotiators presented to the Palestinians at Camp David, a copy of which can be found in Roane Carey, ed., The New Intifada: Resisting Israel’s Apartheid (London: Verso, 2001), p. 36.
41 See Alan Dershowitz, The Case for Israel (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2003). For a telling critique of Dershowitz’s book, see Norman G. Finkelstein, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti‐Semitism and the Abuse of History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). Also see “Dershowitz v. Desch,” American Conservative, January 16, 2005.
42 Morris, Righteous Victims, chapters 2‐5.
43 Morris, Birth Revisited. It should be noted that many Israeli documents concerning the events of 1948 remain classified; Morris expects “that with respect to both expulsions and atrocities, we can expect additional revelations as the years pass and more Israeli records become available.” Morris, “Revisiting the Palestinian Exodus,” in Rogan and Shlaim, War for Palestine, p. 49. In fact, he maintains that the reported cases of rape he knows about are “just the tip of the iceberg.” See Shavit, “Survival of the Fittest.”
44 Benny Morris, Israel’s Border Wars, 1949‐1956 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 432. Also see ibid., pp. 126‐153, 178‐184. For evidence of similar behavior after the 1967 War, see Uri Avnery, “Crying Wolf?” CounterPunch, March 15, 2003; Ami Kronfeld, “Avnery on Ethnic Cleansing and a Personal Note,” in Jewish Voice for Peace, Jewish Peace News, March 17, 2003; Katherine M. Metres, “As Evidence Mounts, Toll of Israeli Prisoner of War Massacres Grows,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, February/March 1996, pp. 17, 104‐105.
45 During his negotiations with the British and French governments over the launching of the 1956 war, Ben‐Gurion proposed a grand plan for reordering the region that would have divided Jordan between Israel and Iraq, transferred all of Lebanon south of the Litani River to Israel, and given Israel portions of the Sinai as well. On Israel’s policies in the 1950s, see Morris, Israel’s Border Wars; Morris, Righteous Victims, chapter 6, especially pp. 289‐290; Shlaim, Iron Wall, chapters 3‐4, especially pp.184‐185; Kennett Love, Suez: the Twice Fought War (New York: McGraw‐Hill, 1969), pp. 589‐638; Michael Brecher, Decisions in Israel’s Foreign Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), pp. 282‐283.
46 Gabby Bron, “Egyptian POWs Ordered to Dig Graves, Then Shot by Israeli Army,” Yedioth Ahronoth, August 17, 1995; Ronal Fisher, “Mass Murder in the 1956 Sinai War,” Ma’ariv, August 8, 1995 [Copies of these two pieces can be found in Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Spring 1996), pp. 148‐155]; Galal Bana, “Egypt: We Will Turn to the International War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague if Israel Will Not Compensate Murdered Prisoners of War,” Ha’aretz, July 24, 2002; Zehavat, Friedman, “Personal Reminiscence: Remembering Ami Kronfeld,” in Jewish Voice for Peace, Jewish Peace News, September 25, 2005; Metres, “As Evidence Mounts.”
47 Avnery, “Crying Wolf”; Robert Blecher, “Living on the Edge: The Threat of ‘Transfer’ in Israel and Palestine,” MERIP, Middle East Report 225, Winter 2002; Baruch Kimmerling, Politicide: Ariel Sharon’s War against the Palestinians (London: Verso, 2003), p. 28. Also see Chomsky, Fateful Triangle, p. 97; Morris, Righteous Victims, pp. 328‐329; Tanya Reinhart, Israel/Palestine: How to End the War of 1948 (NY: Seven Stories Press, 2002), p. 8. Morris reports (p. 329) that 120,000 Palestinians applied to return to their homes right after the 1967 War, but Israel allowed only about 17,000 to come back. Amnesty International estimated in mid‐2003 that in the years since Israel had acquired the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, it had destroyed more than 10,000 Palestinian homes in those areas. Danny Rubinstein, “Roads, Fences and Outposts Maintain Control in the Territories,” Ha’aretz, August 12, 2003.
48 “Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Events at the Refugee Camps in Beirut,” February 7, 1983. The report is commonly called “The Kahan Commission Report” after its chairman, Yitzhak Kahan.
49 Swedish Save the Children, “The Status of Palestinian Children during the Uprising in the Occupied Territories,” Excerpted Summary Material, Jerusalem, 1990, in Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 19, No. 4 (Summer 1990), pp. 136‐146. Also see Joshua Brilliant, “Officer Tells Court Villagers Were Bound, Gagged and Beaten. ‘Not Guilty’ Plea at ‘Break Bones’ Trial,” Jerusalem Post, March 30, 1990; Joshua Brilliant, “‘Rabin Ordered Beatings’, Meir Tells Military Court,” Jerusalem Post, June 22, 1990; Jackson Diehl, “Rights Group Accuses Israel of Violence Against Children in Palestinian Uprising,” Washington Post, May 17, 1990; James A. Graff, “Crippling a People: Palestinian Children and Israeli State Violence,” Alif, No. 13 (1993), pp. 46‐63; Ronald R. Stockton, “Intifada Deaths,” Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 19, No. 4 (Summer 1990), pp. 86‐95. Ehud Barak, the IDF’s Deputy Chief of Staff during the First Intifada, said at the time, “We do not want children to be shot under any circumstances …. When you see a child you don’t shoot.” Nevertheless, the Swedish Save the Children report estimated that 6,500 to 8,000 children were wounded by gunfire during the first two years of the Intifada. Researchers investigated 66 of the 106 recorded cases of “child gunshot deaths.” They concluded that: almost all of them “were hit by directed ‐‐ not random or ricochet ‐‐ gunfire”; nearly twenty percent suffered multiple gunshot wounds; twelve percent were shot from behind; fifteen percent of the children were ten years of age or younger; “most children were not participating in a stone‐throwing demonstration when shot dead”; and “nearly one‐fifth of the children were shot dead while at home or within ten meters of their homes.”
50 “Unbridled Force,” Ha’aretz editorial, March 16, 2003. For other evidence, see Jonathan Cook, “Impunity on Both Sides of the Green Line,” MERIP, Middle East Report Online, November 23, 2005; “When Everything Is Permissible,” Ha’aretz editorial, June 6, 2005; “It Can Happen Here,” Ha’aretz editorial, November 22, 2004; Chris McGreal, “Snipers with Children in Their Sights,” Guardian, June 28, 2005; Idem, “Israel Shocked by Image of Soldiers Forcing Violinist to Play at Roadblock,” Guardian, November 29, 2004; Greg Myre, “Former Israeli Soldiers Tell of Harassment of Palestinians,” New York Times, June 24, 2004; Reuven Pedatzur, “The Message to the Soldiers Was Clear,” Ha’aretz, December 13, 2004; Conal Urquhart, “Israeli Soldiers Tell of Indiscriminate Killings by Army and A Culture of Impunity,” Guardian, September 6, 2005.
51 See Swisher, Truth about Camp David, p. 387.
52 According to B’tselem, between September 29, 2000, and December 31, 2005, 3,386 Palestinians were killed by the Israelis, of whom 676 were children. Of those 3,386 deaths, 1,185 were bystanders, 1,008 were killed while fighting the Israelis, and the circumstances of 563 deaths are unknown. During the same period, 992 Israelis were killed by the Palestinians, 118 of whom were children. Of those 992 deaths, 683 were civilians and 309 belonged to Israeli security forces. B’tselem press release, January 4, 2006.
53 Nathan Guttman, “‘It’s a Terrible Thing, Living with the Knowledge that You Crushed Our Daughter’,” Ha’aretz, April 30, 2004; Adam Shapiro, “Remembering Rachel Shapiro,” Nation, March 18, 2004; Tsahar Rotem, “British Peace Activist Shot by IDF Troops in Gaza Strip,” Ha’aretz, April 11, 2003.
54 Molly Moore, “Ex‐Security Chiefs Turn on Sharon,” Washington Post, November 15, 2003; “Ex‐Shin Bet Heads Warn of ‘Catastrophe’ without Peace Deal,” Ha’aretz, November 15, 2003. These comments were based on an interview in the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth on November 14, 2003. For a copy of that interview, see “We Are Seriously Concerned about the Fate of the State of Israel,” The Alternative Information Center, December 1, 2003.
55 Bill Maxwell, “U.S. Should Reconsider Aid to Israel,” St. Petersburg Times, December 16, 2001.
56 See J. Bowyer Bell, Terror Out of Zion: The Fight for Israeli Independence ( New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1996); Joseph Heller, The Stern Gang: Ideology, Politics and Terror, 1940‐1949 (London: Frank Cass, 1995); Bruce Hoffmann, The Failure of British Military Strategy within Palestine, 1939‐1947 (Israel: Bar‐Ilan University, 1983); Morris, Righteous Victims, pp. 173‐180; Segev, One Palestine, pp. 468‐486. According to Haim Levenberg, 210 of the 429 casualties from Jewish terrorism in Palestine during 1946 were civilians. The other 219 were police and soldiers. Levenberg, Military Preparations, p. 72. Furthermore, it was Jewish terrorists from the infamous Irgun who in late 1937 introduced the practice of placing bombs in buses and large crowds. Benny Morris speculates that, “The Arabs may well have learned the value of terrorist bombings from the Jews.” Righteous Victims, pp. 147, 201. Also see Lenni Brenner, The Iron Wall: Zionist Revisionism from Jabotinsky to Shamir (London: Zed Books, 1984), p. 100; Yehoshua Porath, The Palestinian Arab National Movement: from Riots to Rebellion, Vol. II, 1929‐1939 (London: Frank Cass, 1977), p. 238. Finally, Morris notes that during the 1948 war the main Jewish terrorist groups “knowingly planted bombs in bus stops with the aim of killing non‐combatants, including women and children.” Birth Revisited, p. 80.
57 Bell, Terror Out of Zion, pp. 336‐340.
58 Quoted in Chomsky, Fateful Triangle, pp. 485‐486. Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol used to call Menachem Begin “the terrorist.” Barzilai, “Brief History.” On Shamir, see Avishai Margalit, “The Violent Life of Yitzhak Shamir,” New York Review of Books, May 14, 1992, pp. 18‐24.
59 Moreover, Israel’s claim to a morally superior status is undermined by some of its other policies. Israel once cultivated close ties with apartheid‐era South Africa and aided the white minority government’s nuclear weapons program. Peter Liberman, “Israel and the South African Bomb,” The Nonproliferation Review, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Summer 2004), pp. 46‐80. In 1954, Israeli intelligence forces bombed a U.S. diplomatic facility in Cairo in a bungled attempt to sow discord between Egypt and the United States. Shlaim, Iron Wall, pp. 110‐113.
60 Steven M. Cohen, The 2004 National Survey of American Jews, sponsored by the Jewish Agency for Israel’s Department of Jewish‐Zionist Education, February 24, 2005. The figure two years earlier was 28 percent. See Steven M. Cohen, The 2002 National Survey of American Jews, sponsored by the Jewish Agency for Israel’s Department of Jewish‐Zionist Education, conducted in November‐December 2002. Also see Amiran Barkat, “Young American Jews Are More Ambivalent Toward Israel, Study Shows,” Ha’aretz, March 7, 2005; Steven M. Cohen, “Poll: Attachment of U.S. Jews to Israel Falls in Past 2 Years,” Forward, March 4, 2005; M.J. Rosenberg, “Letting Israel Sell Itself,” Israel Policy Forum Issue Brief #218, March 18, 2005. 55
61 J.J. Goldberg, “Old Friend, Shattered Dreams,” Forward, December 24, 2004; Esther Kaplan, “The Jewish Divide on Israel,” Nation, July 12, 2004; Michael Massing, “Conservative Jewish Groups Have Clout,” Los Angeles Times, March 10, 2002; Eric Yoffie, “Reform the Conference,” Forward, August 2, 2002.
62 Ori Nir, “FBI Probe: More Questions Than Answers.” Forward, May 13, 2005.
63 Inigo Gilmore, “U.S. Jewish Leader Hit over Letter,” London Sunday Telegraph, August 12, 2003; Isi Liebler, “When Seymour Met Condi,” Jerusalem Post, November 24, 2005. Also see Sarah Bronson, “Orthodox Leader: U.S. Jews Have No Right to Criticize Israel, Ha’aretz, August 2, 2004.
64 Liebler, “When Seymour Met Condi”; Ori Nir, “O.U. Chief Decries American Pressure on Israel,” Forward, December 2, 2005; Idem, “Rice Trip Raises Concern over U.S. Pressure on Israel,” Forward, November 18, 2005; Seymour D. Reich, “Listen to America,” Jerusalem Post, November 13, 2005.
65 Jeffrey H. Birnbaum, “Washington’s Power 25,” Fortune, December 8, 1997. AIPAC was ranked number 4 in a similar study conducted in 2001. See Jeffrey H. Birnbaum and Russell Newell, “Fat and Happy in D.C.,” Fortune, May 28, 2001.
66 Richard E. Cohen and Peter Bell, “Congressional Insiders Poll,” National Journal. March 5, 2005; James D. Besser, “Most Muscle? It’s NRA, Then AIPAC and AARP,” Chicago Jewish Star, March 11‐24, 2005.
67 See Max Blumenthal, “Born‐Agains for Sharon,” salon.com, October 30, 2004; Darrell L. Bock, “Some Christians See a ‘Road Map’ to End Times,” Los Angeles Times, June 18, 2003; Nathan Guttman, “Wiping Out Terror, Brining On Redemption,” Ha’aretz, April 29, 2002; Tom Hamburger and Jim VandeHei, “Chosen People: How Israel Became a Favorite Cause of Christian Right,” Wall Street Journal, May 23, 2002; Paul Nussbaum, “Israel Finds an Ally in American Evangelicals,” Philadelphia Inquirer, November 17, 2005. Daniel Pipes maintains that, “other than the Israel Defense Forces, America’s Christian Zionists may be the Jewish state’s ultimate strategic asset.” “[Christian Zionism:] Israel’s Best Weapon?” New York Post, July 15, 2003.
68 The weakness of the “Palestinian Lobby” in the United States is captured in the headlines of these two articles: Nora Boustany, “Palestinians’ Lone Hand in Washington,” Washington Post, April, 19, 2002; George Gedda, “PLO Loses D.C. Office Because of Unpaid Rent,” Chicago Tribune, April 12, 2002. On the weak impact of the “Arab Lobby,” see Ali A. Mazrui, “Between the Crescent and the Star‐Spangled Banner: American Muslims and U.S. Foreign Policy,” International Affairs, Vol. 72, No. 3 (July 1996), pp. 493‐506; Nabeel A. Khoury, “The Arab Lobby: Problems and Prospects,” 56 Middle East Journal, Vol. 41, No. 3 (Summer 1987), pp. 379‐396; Andrea Barron, “Jewish and Arab Diasporas in the United States and Their Impact on U.S. Middle East Policy,” in Yehuda Lukacs and Abdalla M. Battah, eds., The Arab‐Israeli Conflict: Two Decades of Change (London: Westview, 1988), pp. 238‐259.
69 Jake Tapper, “Questions for Dick Armey: Retiring, Not Shy,” New York Times Magazine, September 1, 2002. Also, Tom DeLay has called himself “an Israeli at heart.” See James Bennet, “DeLay Says Palestinians Bear Burden for Achieving Peace,” New York Times, July 30, 2003.
70 Quoted in Mitchell Bard, “Israeli Lobby Power,” Midstream, Vol. 33, No. 1 (January 1987), pp. 6‐8.
71 Quoted in Edward Tivnan, The Lobby: Jewish Political Power and American Foreign Policy (NY: Simon and Schuster, 1987), p. 191. J.J. Goldberg, the editor of the Forward, said in 2002, “There is this image in Congress that you don’t cross these people or they take you down.” Quoted in John Diamond and Brianna B. Piec, “Pro‐Israel Groups Intensify Political Front in U.S.,” Chicago Tribune, April 16, 2002.
72 Quoted in Camille Mansour, Beyond Alliance: Israel in U.S. Foreign Policy, trans. James A. Cohen (NY: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 242.
73 Although AIPAC has been able to use its political muscle to avoid having to register as a foreign agent for another government, it is especially concerned about that problem today because of the Larry Franklin spy scandal, and thus it is going to considerable lengths to emphasize its “American side.” See Ori Nir, “Leaders Fear Probe Will Force Pro‐Israel Lobby to File as ‘Foreign Agent’ Could Fuel Dual Loyalty Talk,” Forward, December 31, 2004; Idem, “Leaders Stress American Side of AIPAC,” Forward, May 27, 2005.
74 “Sen. Hollings Floor Statement Setting the Record Straight on His Mideast Newspaper Column,” May 20, 2004, a copy of which can be found on the former Senator’s web site.
75 Published in an AIPAC advertisement in the Chicago Jewish Star, August 29 – September 11, 2003. Sharon is not alone in his appraisal of AIPAC’s power. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid says that “I canʹt think of a policy organization in the country as well‐organized or respected [as AIPAC]” and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich called it “the most effective general interest group . . . across the entire planet.” Former President Bill Clinton described AIPAC as “stunningly effective” and “better than anyone else lobbying in this town.” Quotations downloaded from the AIPAC website on January 14, 2005 [www.aipac.org/documents/whoweare.html#say]. 57
76 Thomas B. Edsall and Alan Cooperman, “GOP Uses Remarks to Court Jews,” Washington Post, March 13, 2003. Also see James D. Besser, “Jews’ Primary Role Expanding,” Jewish Week, January 23, 2004; Alexander Bolton, “Jewish Defections Irk Democrats,” The Hill, March 30, 2004; E.J. Kessler, “Ancient Woes Resurfacing as Dean Eyes Top Dem Post,” Forward, January 28, 2005. Hamilton Jordan wrote a memorandum to President Jimmy Carter in June 1977, in which he said: “Out of 125 members of the Democratic National Finance Council, over 70 are Jewish; In 1976, over 60% of the large donors to the Democratic Party were Jewish; Over 60% of the monies raised by Nixon in 1972 was from Jewish contributors; Over 75% of the monies raised in Humphrey’s 1968 campaign was from Jewish contributors; Over 90% of the monies raised by Scoop Jackson in the Democratic primaries was from Jewish contributors; In spite of the fact that you were a long shot and came from an area of the country where there is a smaller Jewish community, approximately 35% of our primary funds were from Jewish supporters. Wherever there is major political fundraising in this country, you will find American Jews playing a significant role.” Hamilton Jordan, Confidential File, Box 34, File “Foreign Policy/Domestic Politics Memo, HJ Memo, 6/77,” declassified June 12, 1990.
77 Douglas Brinkley, “Out of the Loop,” The New York Times, December 29, 2002. Lawrence Kaplan reports that after Bruce Riedel, the Middle East expert on the National Security Council, left his job at the end of 2001, the Pentagon “held up the appointment of Riedel’s designated successor, Middle East expert Alina Romanowski, whom Pentagon officials suspect of being insufficiently supportive of the Jewish state.” “Torpedo Boat: How Bush Turned on Arafat,” New Republic, February 18, 2003. The position was eventually filled by Elliot Abrams, a fervent supporter of Israel. “Indeed, for the government of Israel,” Nathan Guttman wrote, “it is a gift from heaven.” See “From Clemency to a Senior Post,” Ha’aretz, December 16, 2002.
78 E.J. Kessler, “Lieberman and Dean Spar Over Israel,” Forward, September 9, 2003; Stephen Zunes, “Attacks on Dean Expose Democrats’ Shift to the Right,” Tikkun, November/December 2003.
79 Zunes, “Attacks on Dean”; James D. Besser, “Dean’s Jewish Problem,” Chicago Jewish Star, December 19, 2003 ‐‐ January 8, 2004.
80 E.J. Kessler, “Dean Plans to Visit Israel, Political Baggage in Tow,” Forward, July 8, 2005; Zunes, “Attacks on Dean.”
81 Laura Blumenfeld, “Three Peace Suits; For These Passionate American Diplomats, a Middle East Settlement is the Goal of a Lifetime,” Washington Post, February 24, 1997. 58
82 Samuel (“Sandy”) Berger, President Clinton’s National Security Advisor, reports that at one point during the negotiations at Camp David (July 2000), Dennis Ross made the remarkable comment that, “If Barak offers anything more, I’ll be against this agreement.” Unedited transcript of “Comments by Sandy Berger at the Launch of How Israelis and Palestinians Negotiate (USIP Press, 2005),” U.S. Institute of Peace, Washington, DC, June 7, 2005.
83 Quoted in Blumenfeld, “Three Peace Suits.”
84 Eric Alterman, “Intractable Foes, Warring Narratives,” MSNBC.com, March 28, 2002.
85 Quoted in Bret Stephens, “Eye on the Media by Bret Stephens: Bartley’s Journal,” Jerusalem Post, November 21, 2002.
86 Max Frankel, The Times of My Life And My Life with the Times (NY: Random House, 1999), pp. 401‐403
Israel may have been a strategic asset during the Cold War.12 By serving as America’s proxy after the Six Day War (1967), Israel helped contain Soviet expansion in the region and inflicted humiliating defeats on Soviet clients like Egypt and Syria. Israel occasionally helped protect other U.S. allies (like Jordan’s King Hussein) and its military prowess forced Moscow to spend more backing its losing clients. Israel also gave the United States useful intelligence about Soviet capabilities.
Israel’s strategic value during this period should not be overstated, however.13 Backing Israel was not cheap, and it complicated America’s relations with the Arab world. For example, the U.S. decision to give Israel $2.2 billion in emergency military aid during the October War triggered an OPEC oil embargo that inflicted considerable damage on Western economies. Moreover, Israel’s military could not protect U.S. interests in the region. For example, the United States could not rely on Israel when the Iranian Revolution in 1979 raised concerns about the security of Persian Gulf oil supplies, and had to create its own “Rapid Deployment Force” instead.
Even if Israel was a strategic asset during the Cold War, the first Gulf War (1990‐ 91) revealed that Israel was becoming a strategic burden. The United States could not use Israeli bases during the war without rupturing the anti‐Iraq coalition, and it had to divert resources (e.g., Patriot missile batteries) to keep Tel Aviv from doing anything that might fracture the alliance against Saddam. History repeated itself in 2003: although Israel was eager for the United States to attack Saddam, President Bush could not ask it to help without triggering Arab opposition. So Israel stayed on the sidelines again.14
Beginning in the 1990's, and especially after 9/11, U.S. support for Israel has been justified by the claim that both states are threatened by terrorist groups originating in the Arab or Muslim world, and by a set of “rogue states” that back these groups and seek WMD. This rationale implies that Washington should give Israel a free hand in dealing with the Palestinians and not press Israel to make concessions until all Palestinian terrorists are imprisoned or dead. It also implies that the United States should go after countries like the Islamic Republic of Iran, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and Bashar al‐Assad’s Syria. Israel is thus seen as a crucial ally in the war on terror, because its enemies are America’s enemies.
This new rationale seems persuasive, but Israel is in fact a liability in the war on terror and the broader effort to deal with rogue states.
To begin with, “terrorism” is a tactic employed by a wide array of political groups; it is not a single unified adversary. The terrorist organizations that threaten Israel (e.g., Hamas or Hezbollah) do not threaten the United States, except when it intervenes against them (as in Lebanon in 1982). Moreover, Palestinian terrorism is not random violence directed against Israel or “the West”; it is largely a response to Israel’s prolonged campaign to colonize the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
More importantly, saying that Israel and the United States are united by a shared terrorist threat has the causal relationship backwards: rather, the United States has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel, not the other way around. U.S. support for Israel is not the only source of anti‐ American terrorism, but it is an important one, and it makes winning the war on terror more difficult.15 There is no question, for example, that many al Qaeda leaders, including bin Laden, are motivated by Israel’s presence in Jerusalem and the plight of the Palestinians. According to the U.S. 9/11 Commission, bin Laden explicitly sought to punish the United States for its policies in the Middle East, including its support for Israel, and he even tried to time the attacks to highlight this issue.16
Equally important, unconditional U.S. support for Israel makes it easier for extremists like bin Laden to rally popular support and to attract recruits. Public opinion polls confirm that Arab populations are deeply hostile to American support for Israel, and the U.S. State Department’s Advisory Group on Public Diplomacy for the Arab and Muslim world found that “citizens in these countries are genuinely distressed at the plight of the Palestinians and at the role they perceive the United States to be playing.”17
As for so‐called rogue states in the Middle East, they are not a dire threat to vital U.S. interests, apart from the U.S. commitment to Israel itself. Although the United States does have a number of disagreements with these regimes, Washington would not be nearly as worried about Iran, Ba’thist Iraq, or Syria were it not so closely tied to Israel. Even if these states acquire nuclear weapons—which is obviously not desirable—it would not be a strategic disaster for the United States. Neither America nor Israel could be blackmailed by a nuclear‐armed rogue, because the blackmailer could not carry out the threat without receiving overwhelming retaliation. The danger of a “nuclear hand off” to terrorists is equally remote, because a rogue state could not be sure the transfer would be undetected or that it would not be blamed and punished afterwards.
Furthermore, the U.S. relationship with Israel actually makes it harder to deal with these states. Israel’s nuclear arsenal is one reason why some of its neighbors want nuclear weapons, and threatening these states with regime change merely increases that desire. Yet Israel is not much of an asset when the United States contemplates using force against these regimes, because it cannot participate in the fight.
In short, treating Israel as America’s most important ally in the campaign against terrorism and assorted Middle East dictatorships both exaggerates Israel’s ability to help on these issues and ignores the ways that Israel’s policies make U.S. efforts more difficult.
Unquestioned support for Israel also weakens the U.S. position outside the Middle East. Foreign elites consistently view the United States as too supportive of Israel, and think its tolerance of Israeli repression in the occupied territories is morally obtuse and a handicap in the war on terrorism.18 In April 2004, for example, 52 former British diplomats sent Prime Minister Tony Blair a letter saying that the Israel‐Palestine conflict had “poisoned relations between the West and the Arab and Islamic worlds,” and warning that the policies of Bush and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon were “one‐sided and illegal.”19
A final reason to question Israel’s strategic value is that it does not act like a loyal ally. Israeli officials frequently ignore U.S. requests and renege on promises made to top U.S. leaders (including past pledges to halt settlement construction and to refrain from “targeted assassinations” of Palestinian leaders).20 Moreover, Israel has provided sensitive U.S. military technology to potential U.S. rivals like China, in what the U.S. State Department Inspector‐General called “a systematic and growing pattern of unauthorized transfers.”21 According to the U.S. General Accounting Office, Israel also “conducts the most aggressive espionage operations against the U.S. of any ally.”22 In addition to the case of Jonathan Pollard, who gave Israel large quantities of classified material in the early 1980's (which Israel reportedly passed onto the Soviet Union to gain more exit visas for Soviet Jews), a new controversy erupted in 2004 when it was revealed that a key Pentagon official (Larry Franklin) had passed classified information to an Israeli diplomat, allegedly aided by two A.I.P.A.C officials.23 Israel is hardly the only country that spies on the United States, but its willingness to spy on its principal patron casts further doubt on its strategic value.
A DWINDLING MORAL CASE
Apart from its alleged strategic value, Israel’s backers also argue that it deserves
unqualified U.S. support because 1) it is weak and surrounded by enemies, 2) it
is a democracy, which is a morally preferable form of government; 3) the Jewish
people have suffered from past crimes and therefore deserve special treatment,
and 4) Israel’s conduct has been morally superior to its adversaries’ behavior. On close inspection, however, each of these arguments is unpersuasive. There is a strong moral case for supporting Israel’s existence, but that is not in jeopardy. Viewed objectively, Israel’s past and present conduct offers no moral basis for privileging it over the Palestinians.
Backing the Underdog?
Israel is often portrayed as weak and besieged, a Jewish David surrounded by a
hostile Arab Goliath. This image has been carefully nurtured by Israeli leaders
and sympathetic writers, but the opposite image is closer to the truth. Contrary
to popular belief, the Zionists had larger, better‐equipped, and better‐led forces
during the 1947‐49 War of Independence and the Israel Defense Forces (I.D.F) won
quick and easy victories against Egypt in 1956 and against Egypt, Jordan, and
Syria in 1967—before large‐scale U.S. aid began flowing to Israel.24 These victories
offer eloquent evidence of Israeli patriotism, organizational ability, and military
prowess, but they also reveal that Israel was far from helpless even in its earliest
years. Today, Israel is the strongest military power in the Middle East. Its conventional forces are far superior to its neighbors and it is the only state in the region with nuclear weapons. Egypt and Jordan signed peace treaties with Israel and Saudi Arabia has offered to do so as well. Syria has lost its Soviet patron, Iraq has been decimated by three disastrous wars, and Iran is hundreds of miles away. The Palestinians barely have effective police, let alone a military that could threaten Israel. According to a 2005 assessment by Tel Aviv University’s prestigious Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, “the strategic balance decidedly favors Israel, which has continued to widen the qualitative gap between its own military capability and deterrence powers and those of its neighbors.”25 If backing the underdog were a compelling rationale, the United States would be supporting Israel’s opponents.
Aiding a Fellow Democracy?
American backing is often justified by the claim that Israel is a fellow‐democracy
surrounded by hostile dictatorships. This rationale sounds convincing, but it
cannot account for the current level of U.S. support. After all, there are many
democracies around the world, but none receives the lavish support that Israel
does. The United States has overthrown democratic governments in the past and
supported dictators when this was thought to advance U.S. interests, and it has
good relations with a number of dictatorships today. Thus, being democratic
neither justifies nor explains America’s support for Israel. The “shared democracy” rationale is also weakened by aspects of Israeli democracy that are at odds with core American values. The United States is a liberal democracy where people of any race, religion, or ethnicity are supposed to enjoy equal rights. By contrast, Israel was explicitly founded as a Jewish state and citizenship is based on the principle of blood kinship.26 Given this conception of citizenship, it is not surprising that Israel’s 1.3 million Arabs are treated as second‐class citizens, or that a recent Israeli government commission found that Israel behaves in a “neglectful and discriminatory” manner towards them.27
Similarly, Israel does not permit Palestinians who marry Israeli citizens to become citizens themselves, and does not give these spouses the right to live in Israel. The Israeli human rights organization B’tselem called this restriction “a racist law that determines who can live here according to racist criteria.”28 Such laws may be understandable given Israel’s founding principles, but they are not consistent with America’s image of democracy.
Israel’s democratic status is also undermined by its refusal to grant the Palestinians a viable state of their own. Israel controls the lives of about 3.8 million Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, while colonizing lands on which the Palestinians have long dwelt. Israel is formally democratic, but the millions of Palestinians that it controls are denied full political rights and the “shared democracy” rationale is correspondingly weakened.
Compensation for Past Crimes
A third moral justification is the history of Jewish suffering in the Christian West,
especially the tragic episode of the Holocaust. Because Jews were persecuted for centuries and can only be safe in a Jewish homeland, many believe that Israel
deserves special treatment from the United States. [Who the hell are the 'many'? Are they the same 'many' that make covenant with antichrist? D.C] There is no question that Jews suffered greatly from the despicable legacy of anti‐ Semitism, and that Israel’s creation was an appropriate response to a long record of crimes. This history, as noted, provides a strong moral case for supporting Israel’s existence. But the creation of Israel involved additional crimes against a largely innocent third party: the Palestinians.
The history of these events is well‐understood. When political Zionism began in earnest in the late 19th century, there were only about 15,000 Jews in Palestine.29 In 1893, for example, the Arabs comprised roughly 95 percent of the population, and though under Ottoman control, they had been in continuous possession of this territory for 1300 years.30 Even when Israel was founded, Jews were only about 35 percent of Palestine’s population and owned 7 percent of the land.31
To achieve this goal, the Zionists had to expel large numbers of Arabs from the territory that would eventually become Israel. There was simply no other way to accomplish their objective. Ben‐Gurion saw the problem clearly, writing in 1941 that “it is impossible to imagine general evacuation [of the Arab population] without compulsion, and brutal compulsion.”33 Or as Israeli historian Benny Morris puts it, “the idea of transfer is as old as modern Zionism and has accompanied its evolution and praxis during the past century.”34
This opportunity came in 1947‐48, when Jewish forces drove up to 700,000 Palestinians into exile.35 Israeli officials have long claimed that the Arabs fled because their leaders told them to, but careful scholarship (much of it by Israeli historians like Morris) have demolished this myth. In fact, most Arab leaders urged the Palestinian population to stay home, but fear of violent death at the hands of Zionist forces led most of them to flee.36 After the war, Israel barred the return of the Palestinian exiles.
The fact that the creation of Israel entailed a moral crime against the Palestinian people was well understood by Israel’s leaders. As Ben‐Gurion told Nahum Goldmann, president of the World Jewish Congress, “If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. . . . We come from Israel, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti‐Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?”37
Since then, Israeli leaders have repeatedly sought to deny the Palestinians’ national ambitions.38 Prime Minister Golda Meir famously remarked that “there was no such thing as a Palestinian,” and even Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who signed the 1993 Oslo Accords, nonetheless opposed creating a full‐fledged Palestinian state.39 Pressure from extremist violence and the growing Palestinian population has forced subsequent Israeli leaders to disengage from some of the occupied territories and to explore territorial compromise, but no Israeli government has been willing to offer the Palestinians a viable state of their own. Even Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s purportedly generous offer at Camp David in July 2000 would only have given the Palestinians a disarmed and dismembered set of “Bantustans” under de facto Israeli control.40
Europe’s crimes against the Jews provide a clear moral justification for Israel’s right to exist. But Israel’s survival is not in doubt—even if some Islamic extremists make outrageous and unrealistic references to “wiping it off the map”—and the tragic history of the Jewish people does not obligate the United States to help Israel no matter what it does today.
“Virtuous Israelis” versus “Evil Arabs”
The final moral argument portrays Israel as a country that has sought peace at
every turn and showed great restraint even when provoked. The Arabs, by
contrast, are said to have acted with great wickedness. This narrative—which is
endlessly repeated by Israeli leaders and American apologists such as Alan
Dershowitz—is yet another myth.41 In terms of actual behavior, Israel’s conduct
is not morally distinguishable from the actions of its opponents. Israeli scholarship shows that the early Zionists were far from benevolent towards the Palestinian Arabs.42 The Arab inhabitants did resist the Zionists’ encroachments, which is hardly surprising given that the Zionists were trying to create their own state on Arab lands. The Zionists responded vigorously, and neither side owns the moral high ground during this period. This same scholarship also reveals that the creation of Israel in 1947‐48 involved explicit acts of ethnic cleansing, including executions, massacres, and rapes by Jews.43
Furthermore, Israel’s subsequent conduct towards its Arab adversaries and its Palestinian subjects has often been brutal, belying any claim to morally superior conduct. Between 1949 and 1956, for example, Israeli security forces killed between 2,700 and 5000 Arab infiltrators, the overwhelming majority of them unarmed.44 The I.D.F conducted numerous cross‐border raids against its neighbors in the early 1950's, and though these actions were portrayed as defensive responses, they were actually part of a broader effort to expand Israel’s borders. Israel’s expansionist ambitions also led it to join Britain and France in attacking Egypt in 1956, and Israel withdrew from the lands it had conquered only in the face of intense U.S. pressure. 45
The I.D.F also murdered hundreds of Egyptian prisoners‐of‐war in both the 1956 and 1967 wars.46 In 1967, it expelled between 100,000 and 260,000 Palestinians from the newly‐conquered West Bank, and drove 80,000 Syrians from the Golan Heights.47 It was also complicit in the massacre of 700 innocent Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps following its invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and an Israeli investigatory commission found then‐Defense Minister Sharon “personally responsible” for these atrocities.48
Israeli personnel have tortured numerous Palestinian prisoners, systematically humiliated and inconvenienced Palestinian civilians, and used force indiscriminately against them on numerous occasions. During the First Intifida (1987‐1991), for example, the I.D.F distributed truncheons to its troops and encouraged them to break the bones of Palestinian protesters. The Swedish “Save the Children” organization estimated that “23,600 to 29,900 children required medical treatment for their beating injuries in the first two years of the intifida, with nearly one‐third sustaining broken bones. Nearly one‐third of the beaten children were aged ten and under.”49
Israel’s response to the Second Intifida (2000‐2005) has been even more violent, leading Ha’aretz to declare that “the I.D.F … is turning into a killing machine whose efficiency is awe‐inspiring, yet shocking.”50 The I.D.F fired one million bullets in the first days of the uprising, which is far from a measured response.51 Since then, Israel has killed 3.4 Palestinians for every Israeli lost, the majority of whom have been innocent bystanders; the ratio of Palestinian to Israeli children killed is even higher (5.7 to 1).52 Israeli forces have also killed several foreign peace activists, including a 23 year‐old American woman crushed by an Israeli bulldozer in March 2003.53
These facts about Israel’s conduct have been amply documented by numerous human rights organizations—including prominent Israeli groups—and are not disputed by fair‐minded observers. And that is why four former officials of Shin Bet (the Israeli domestic security organization) condemned Israel’s conduct during the Second Intifada in November 2003. One of them declared “we are behaving disgracefully,” and another termed Israel’s conduct “patently immoral.”54
But isn’t Israel entitled to do whatever it takes to protect its citizens? Doesn’t the unique evil of terrorism justify continued U.S. support, even if Israel often responds harshly?
In fact, this argument is not a compelling moral justification either. Palestinians have used terrorism against their Israeli occupiers, and their willingness to attack innocent civilians is wrong. This behavior is not surprising, however, because the Palestinians believe they have no other way to force Israeli concessions. As former Prime Minister Barak once admitted, had he been born a Palestinian, he “would have joined a terrorist organization.”55
Israel may not have acted worse than many other countries, but it clearly has not acted any better. And if neither strategic nor moral arguments can account for America’s support for Israel, how are we to explain it?
THE ISRAEL LOBBY
The explanation lies in the unmatched power of the Israel Lobby. Were it not for
the Lobby’s ability to manipulate the American political system, the relationship
between Israel and the United States would be far less intimate than it is today.
What Is The Lobby?
We use “the Lobbyʺ as a convenient short‐hand term for the loose coalition of
individuals and organizations who actively work to shape U.S. foreign policy in
a pro‐Israel direction. Our use of this term is not meant to suggest that ʺthe
Lobbyʺ is a unified movement with a central leadership, or that individuals
within it do not disagree on certain issues. The core of the Lobby is comprised of American Jews who make a significant effort in their daily lives to bend U.S. foreign policy so that it advances Israel’s interests. Their activities go beyond merely voting for candidates who are pro‐ Israel to include letter‐writing, financial contributions, and supporting pro‐Israel organizations. But not all Jewish‐Americans are part of the Lobby, because Israel is not a salient issue for many of them. In a 2004 survey, for example, roughly 36 percent of Jewish‐Americans said they were either “not very” or “not at all” emotionally attached to Israel.60
Jewish‐Americans also differ on specific Israeli policies. Many of the key organizations in the Lobby, like A.I.P.A.C and the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations (C.P.M.J.O), are run by hardliners who generally supported the expansionist policies of Israel’s Likud Party, including its hostility to the Oslo Peace Process. The bulk of U.S. Jewry, on the other hand, is more favorably disposed to making concessions to the Palestinians, and a few groups—such as Jewish Voice for Peace—strongly advocate such steps.61 Despite these differences, moderates and hardliners both support steadfast U.S. support for Israel.
Not surprisingly, American Jewish leaders often consult with Israeli officials, so that the former can maximize their influence in the United States. As one activist with a major Jewish organization wrote, “it is routine for us to say: ‘This is our policy on a certain issue, but we must check what the Israelis think.’ We as a community do it all the time.”62 There is also a strong norm against criticizing Israeli policy, and Jewish‐American leaders rarely support putting pressure on Israel. Thus, Edgar Bronfman Sr., the president of the World Jewish Congress, was accused of “perfidy” when he wrote a letter to President Bush in mid‐2003 urging Bush to pressure Israel to curb construction of its controversial “security fence.”63 Critics declared that, “It would be obscene at any time for the president of the World Jewish Congress to lobby the president of the United States to resist policies being promoted by the government of Israel.”
Similarly, when Israel Policy Forum president Seymour Reich advised Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to pressure Israel to reopen a critical border crossing in the Gaza Strip in November 2005, critics denounced his action as “irresponsible behavior,” and declared that, “There is absolutely no room in the Jewish mainstream for actively canvassing against the security‐related policies . . . of Israel.”64 Recoiling from these attacks, Reich proclaimed that “the word pressure is not in my vocabulary when it comes to Israel.”
Jewish‐Americans have formed an impressive array of organizations to influence American foreign policy, of which A.I.P.A.C is the most powerful and well known.In 1997, Fortune magazine asked members of Congress and their staffs to list the most powerful lobbies in Washington.65 A.I.P.A.C was ranked second behind the American Association of Retired People (A.A.R.P), but ahead of heavyweight lobbies like the A.F.L‐C.I.O and the National Rifle Association. A National Journal study in March 2005 reached a similar conclusion, placing A.I.P.A.C in second place (tied with A.A.R.P) in the Washington’s “muscle rankings.”66
The Lobby also includes prominent Christian evangelicals like Gary Bauer, Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed, and Pat Robertson, as well as Dick Armey and Tom DeLay, former majority leaders in the House of Representatives. They believe Israel’s rebirth is part of Biblical prophecy, support its expansionist agenda, and think pressuring Israel is contrary to God’s will.67 In addition, the Lobby’s membership includes neoconservative gentiles such as John Bolton, the late Wall Street Journal editor Robert Bartley, former Secretary of Education William Bennett, former U.N. Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick, and columnist George Will.
Sources of Power
The United States has a divided government that offers many ways to influence
the policy process. As a result, interest groups can shape policy in many
different ways—by lobbying elected representatives and members of the
executive branch, making campaign contributions, voting in elections, molding
public opinion, etc.
Furthermore, special interest groups enjoy disproportionate power when they
are committed to a particular issue and the bulk of the population is indifferent.
Policymakers will tend to accommodate those who care about the issue in
question, even if their numbers are small, confident that the rest of the
population will not penalize them. The Israel Lobby’s power flows from its unmatched ability to play this game of interest group politics. In its basic operations, it is no different from interest groups like the Farm Lobby, steel and textile workers, and other ethnic lobbies. What sets the Israel Lobby apart is its extraordinary effectiveness. But there is nothing improper about American Jews and their Christian allies attempting to sway U.S. policy towards Israel. The Lobby’s activities are not the sort of conspiracy depicted in anti‐Semitic tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. For the most part, the individuals and groups that comprise the Lobby are doing what other special interest groups do, just much better. Moreover, pro‐Arab interest groups are weak to non‐existent, which makes the Lobby’s task even easier.68
Strategies for Success
The Lobby pursues two broad strategies to promote U.S. support for Israel. First,
it wields significant influence in Washington, pressuring both Congress and the
Executive branch to support Israel down the line. Whatever an individual
lawmaker or policymaker’s own views, the Lobby tries to make supporting Israel
the “smart” political choice. Second, the Lobby strives to ensure that public discourse about Israel portrays it in a positive light, by repeating myths about Israel and its founding and by publicizing Israel’s side in the policy debates of the day. The goal is to prevent critical commentary about Israel from getting a fair hearing in the political arena. Controlling the debate is essential to guaranteeing U.S. support, because a candid discussion of U.S.‐Israeli relations might lead Americans to favor a different policy.
Influencing Congress
A key pillar of the Lobby’s effectiveness is its influence in the U.S. Congress,
where Israel is virtually immune from criticism. This is in itself a remarkable
situation, because Congress almost never shies away from contentious issues.
Whether the issue is abortion, affirmative action, health care, or welfare, there is
certain to be a lively debate on Capitol Hill. Where Israel is concerned, however,
potential critics fall silent and there is hardly any debate at all. It is A.I.P.A.C itself, however, that forms the core of the Lobby’s influence in Congress. A.I.P.A.C’s success is due to its ability to reward legislators and congressional candidates who support its agenda, and to punish those who challenge it. Money is critical to U.S. elections (as the recent scandal over lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s various shady dealings reminds us), and A.I.P.A.C makes sure that its friends get strong financial support from the myriad pro‐Israel political action committees. Those seen as hostile to Israel, on the other hand, can be sure that A.I.P.A.C will direct campaign contributions to their political opponents. A.I.P.A.C also organizes letter‐writing campaigns and encourages newspaper editors to endorse pro‐Israel candidates.
A.I.P.A.C’s influence on Capitol Hill goes even further, however. According to Douglas Bloomfield, a former A.I.P.A.C staff member, “It is common for members of Congress and their staffs to turn to A.I.P.A.C first when they need information, before calling the Library of Congress, the Congressional Research Service, committee staff or administration experts.”72 More importantly, he notes that A.I.P.A.C is “often called upon to draft speeches, work on legislation, advise on tactics, perform research, collect co‐sponsors and marshal votes.”
Influencing the Executive
The Lobby also has significant leverage over the Executive branch. That power
derives in part from the influence Jewish voters have on presidential elections.
Despite their small numbers in the population (less than 3 percent), they make
large campaign donations to candidates from both parties. The Washington Post
once estimated that Democratic presidential candidates “depend on Jewish
supporters to supply as much as 60 percent of the money.”76 Furthermore,
Jewish voters have high turn‐out rates and are concentrated in key states like
California, Florida, Illinois, New York, and Pennsylvania. Because they matter in
close elections, Presidential candidates go to great lengths not to antagonize
Jewish voters. Key organizations in the Lobby also directly target the administration in power. For example, pro‐Israel forces make sure that critics of the Jewish state do not get important foreign‐policy appointments. Jimmy Carter wanted to make George Ball his first secretary of state, but he knew that Ball was perceived as critical of Israel and that the Lobby would oppose the appointment.77 This litmus test forces any aspiring policymaker to become an overt supporter of Israel, which is why public critics of Israeli policy have become an endangered species in the U.S. foreign policy establishment.
These constraints still operate today. When 2004 presidential candidate Howard Dean called for the United States to take a more “even‐handed role” in the Arab‐ Israeli conflict, Senator Joseph Lieberman accused him of selling Israel down the river and said his statement was “irresponsible.”78 Virtually all of the top Democrats in the House signed a hard‐hitting letter to Dean criticizing his comments, and the Chicago Jewish Star reported that “anonymous attackers … are clogging the e‐mail inboxes of Jewish leaders around the country, warning ‐‐ without much evidence ‐‐ that Dean would somehow be bad for Israel.”79
This worry was absurd, however, because Dean is in fact quite hawkish on Israel.80 His campaign co‐chair was a former A.I.P.A.C president, and Dean said his own views on the Middle East more closely reflected those of A.I.P.A.C than the more moderate Americans for Peace Now. Dean had merely suggested that to “bring the sides together,” Washington should act as an honest broker. This is hardly a radical idea, but it is anathema to the Lobby, which does not tolerate the idea of even‐handedness when it comes to the Arab‐Israeli conflict.
These men were among President Clinton’s closest advisers at the Camp David summit in July 2000. Although all three supported the Oslo peace process and favored creation of a Palestinian state, they did so only within the limits of what would be acceptable to Israel.82 In particular, the American delegation took its cues from Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, coordinated negotiating positions in advance, and did not offer its own independent proposals for settling the conflict. Not surprisingly, Palestinian negotiators complained that they were “negotiating with two Israeli teams ‐‐ one displaying an Israeli flag, and one an American flag.”83
The situation is even more pronounced in the Bush Administration, whose ranks include fervently pro‐Israel individuals like Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, I. Lewis (“Scooter”) Libby, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and David Wurmser. As we shall see, these officials consistently pushed for policies favored by Israel and backed by organizations in the Lobby.
Manipulating the Media
In addition to influencing government policy directly, the Lobby strives to shape
public perceptions about Israel and the Middle East. It does not want an open
debate on issues involving Israel, because an open debate might cause Americans
to question the level of support that they currently provide. Accordingly, pro‐
Israel organizations work hard to influence the media, think tanks, and
academia, because these institutions are critical in shaping popular opinion. The Lobby’s perspective on Israel is widely reflected in the mainstream media in good part because most American commentators are pro‐Israel. The debate among Middle East pundits, journalist Eric Alterman writes, is “dominated by people who cannot imagine criticizing Israel.”84 He lists 61 “columnists and commentators who can be counted upon to support Israel reflexively and without qualification.” Conversely, Alterman found just five pundits who consistently criticize Israeli behavior or endorse pro‐Arab positions. Newspapers occasionally publish guest op‐eds challenging Israeli policy, but the balance of opinion clearly favors the other side.
This pro‐Israel bias is reflected in the editorials of major newspapers. Robert Bartley, the late editor of the Wall Street Journal, once remarked that, “Shamir, Sharon, Bibi – whatever those guys want is pretty much fine by me.”85 Not surprisingly, the Journal, along with other prominent newspapers like The Chicago Sun‐Times and The Washington Times regularly run editorials that are strongly pro‐Israel. Magazines like Commentary, the New Republic, and the Weekly Standard also zealously defend Israel at every turn.
Editorial bias is also found in papers like the New York Times. The Times occasionally criticizes Israeli policies and sometimes concedes that the Palestinians have legitimate grievances, but it is not even‐handed. In his memoirs, for example, former Times executive editor Max Frankel acknowledged the impact his own pro‐Israel attitude had on his editorial choices. In his words: “I was much more deeply devoted to Israel than I dared to assert.” He goes on: “Fortified by my knowledge of Israel and my friendships there, I myself wrote most of our Middle East commentaries. As more Arab than Jewish readers recognized, I wrote them from a pro‐Israel perspective.” 86
to be continued...
notes
1 Indeed, the mere existence of the Lobby suggests that unconditional support for Israel is not in the American national interest. If it was, one would not need an organized special interest group to bring it about. But because Israel is a strategic and moral liability, it takes relentless political pressure to keep U.S. support intact. As Richard Gephardt, the former House Minority Leader, told the American‐Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), “Without [your] constant support . . . and all your fighting on a daily basis to strengthen that relationship, it would not be.” This quote was downloaded from the AIPAC website [http://www.aipac.org/] on January 12, 2004. Also see Michael Kinsley, “J’Accuse, Sort Of,” Slate, March 12, 2003.
2 According to the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID) “Greenbook,” which reports “overseas loans and grants,” Israel has received $140,142,800 (in constant 2003 dollars) from the United States through 2003. Downloaded from the “Greenbook” web site [http://qesdb.cdie.org/gbk/] on November 8, 2005.
3 According to the “Greenbook,” Israel received about $3.7 billion in direct aid from the United States in 2003. Israel’s population according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies [IISS] and the CIA is 6,276,883. IISS, The Military Balance: 2005‐2006 (Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2005), p. 192; http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/. That averages out to $589 per Israeli. If one assumes the same population size and $3 billion in total aid, then each Israeli receives $478.
4 See http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/; World Bank Atlas (Washington, DC: Development Data Group, World Bank, September 2004), pp. 64‐65.
5 For a discussion of the various special deals that Israel receives, see Clyde R. Mark, “Israel: U.S. Foreign Assistance,” Issue Brief for Congress (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, April 26, 2005).
6 Avner Cohen, Israel and the Bomb (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Seymour M. Hersh, The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy (New York: Random House, 1991).
7 “Report of the Open‐Ended Working Group on the Question of Equitable Representation on and Increase in the Membership of the Security Council and Other Matters Related to the Security Council,” Annex III, U.N. General Assembly Official Records, 58th Session, Supplement No. 47, 2004, pp. 13‐14; Donald Neff, “An Updated List of Vetoes Cast by the United States to Shield Israel from Criticism by the U.N. Security Council,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, May/June 2005; Stephen Zunes, “U.S. Declares Open Season on UN Workers,” CommonDreams.org, January 10, 43 2003. There were also many resolutions that never came to a vote because Security Council members knew that the United States would veto them. Given the difficulty of criticizing specific Israeli actions in the Security Council, criticism has often come from the U.N. General Assembly, where no state has a veto. In those instances, the United States invariably finds itself on the short end of lopsided votes on the order of say 133‐4, where the dissenters include Micronesia and the Marshall Islands as well as Israel and the United States. In response, the Forward reported in November 2003 that the Bush Administration, at the instigation of the American Jewish Committee, was “embarking on the most comprehensive campaign in years to reduce the number of anti‐Israel resolutions routinely passed by the United Nations General Assembly.” Marc Perelman, “Washington Seeking to Reduce Number of Anti‐Israel Votes at U.N.,” Forward, November 14, 2003.
8 Marc Perelman, “International Agency Eyes Israeli Nukes,” Forward, September 5, 2003.
9 William B. Quandt, Peace Process: American Diplomacy and the Arab‐Israeli Conflict since 1967, 3rd ed. (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2005), chapters 5‐7, 10‐12.
10 Nathan Guttman, “U.S. Accused of Pro‐Israel Bias at 2000 Camp David,” Ha’aretz, April 29, 2005. Also see Aaron D. Miller, “Israel’s Lawyer,” Washington Post, May 23, 2005; “Lessons of Arab‐Israeli Negotiating: Four Negotiators Look Back and Ahead,” Transcript of panel discussion, Middle East Institute, April 25, 2005. For general discussions of how the United States consistently favors Israel over the Palestinians, see Noam Chomsky, Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1999); Kathleen Christison, Perceptions of Palestine: Their Influence on U.S. Middle East Policy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001); Naseer H. Aruri, Dishonest Broker: The U.S. Role in Israel and Palestine (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2003). It is also worth noting that the British favored the Zionists over the Palestinians during the period of the British Mandate (1919‐1948). See Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate (New York: Henry Holt, 2000).
11 Downloaded from AIPAC’s website [http://aipac.org/documents/unitedefforts.html] on January 12, 2006.
12 See, for example, Warren Bass, Support Any Friend: Kennedy’s Middle East and the Making of the US‐Israel Alliance (NY: Oxford University Press, 2003); A.F.K. Organski, The $36 Billion Bargain: Strategy and Politics in U.S. Assistance to Israel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); Steven L. Spiegel, “Israel as a Strategic Asset,” Commentary, June 1983, pp. 51‐ 55; Idem, The Other Arab‐Israeli Conflict: Making America’s Middle East Policy, from Truman to Reagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). 44
13 This point was not lost on Moshe Dayan, who, remembering a talk he had with Henry Kissinger at the time of the October 1973 War, noted that “though I happened to remark that the United States was the only country that was ready to stand by us, my silent reflection was that the United States would really rather support the Arabs.” Moshe Dayan, Moshe Dayan: Story of My Life (NY: William Morrow, 1976), pp. 521‐513. Also see Zach Levey, “The United States’ Skyhawk Sale to Israel, 1966: Strategic Exigencies of an Arms Deal,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 28, No. 2 (April 2004), pp.255‐276.
14 Bernard Lewis wrote in 1992, “Whatever value Israel might have had as a strategic asset during the Cold War, that value obviously ended when the Cold War itself came to a close. The change was clearly manifested in the Gulf War last year, when what the United States most desired from Israel was to keep out of the conflict ‐‐ to be silent, inactive and, as far as possible, invisible …. Israel was not an asset, but an irrelevance ‐‐ some even said a nuisance. Some of the things that the Israeli government later said and did were unlikely to change this perception.” “Rethinking the Middle East,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 71, No. 4, (Fall 1992), pp. 110‐111.
15 According to Middle East expert Shibley Telhami, “No other issue resonates with the public in the Arab world, and many other parts of the Muslim world, more deeply than Palestine. No other issue shapes the regional perceptions of America more fundamentally than the issue of Palestine.” The Stakes: America and the Middle East (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2002), p. 96. Lakhdar Brahimi, the former U.N. special envoy to Iraq, who the Bush Administration enlisted to help form an interim Iraqi government in June 2004, said that Israeli policy toward the Palestinians is “the great poison in the region,” and that “in the region, and beyond” people recognized the “injustice of this policy and the equally unjust support of the United States for this policy.” See Warren Hoge, “U.N. Moves to Disassociate Itself from Remarks by Envoy to Iraq,” New York Times, April 23, 2004; “Brahimi’s Israel Comments Draw Annan, Israel Ire,” Ha’aretz, April 24, 2004. Also see the comments of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in “Mubarak: Arab Hatred of America Growing,” Washington Post, April 20, 2004. Finally, see Ami Eden, “9/11 Commission Finds Anger at Israel Fueling Islamic Terrorism Wave,” Forward, July 30, 2004.
16 National Commission on Terrorist Attacks against the United States, “Outline of the 9/11 Plot,” Staff Statement No. 16, June 16, 2004. Also see Nathan Guttman, “Al‐Qaida Planned Attacks during PM’s Visit to White House,” Ha’aretz, June 17, 2004; and Marc Perelman, “Bin Laden Aimed to Link Plot to Israel,” Forward, June 25, 2004. Pro‐Israel supporters often argue that bin Laden only became interested in the Israel‐Palestinian conflict after 9/11, and only because he thought that it was good for recruiting purposes. Thus, there is virtually no connection between what happened on 9/11 and U.S. support for Israel. See Andrea Levin, “Don’t Scapegoat Israel,” Boston Globe, October 6, 2001; Norman Podhoretz, “Israel Isn’t the Issue,” Wall Street Journal, September 20, 2001. Note 45 that both of these pieces were published right after the Twin Towers fell. However, we now have a substantial number of bin Laden’s writings and talks from the 1980s and 1990s, and it is clear that he cared deeply about matters relating to Jerusalem and the Palestinians long before 9/11. See, for example, “Jihad against Jews and Crusaders,” World Islamic Front Statement, February 23, 1998; Transcript of Osama bin Laden’s March 20, 1997 interview with Peter Arnett of CNN (first broadcast on May 10, 1997). Also “New Osama bin Laden Video Contains Anti‐Israel and Anti‐American Statements,” downloaded from the Anti‐Defamation League (ADL) website [http://www.adl.org/terrorism_america/bin_l_print.asp] on March 8, 2004.
17 Changing Minds, Winning Peace: A New Strategic Direction for U.S. Public Diplomacy in the Arab and Muslim World, Report of the Advisory Group on Public Diplomacy for the Arab and Muslim World, Submitted to the Committee on Appropriations, U.S. House of Representatives, October 1, 2003, p. 18. Also see The Pew Global Attitudes Project, Views of a Changing World 2003: War With Iraq Further Divides Global Publics (Washington, DC: The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, June 3, 2003); Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Strategic Communication (Washington, DC: Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, September 2004); Shibley Telhami, “Arab Public Opinion: A Survey in Six Countries,” San Jose Mercury, March 16, 2003; John Zogby, The Ten Nation Impressions of America Poll (Utica, NY: Zogby International, April 11, 2002); Idem, Impressions of America 2004: How Arabs View America, How Arabs Learn about America (Six Nation Survey), (Utica, NY: Zogby International, 2004).
18 See The Pew Global Attitudes Project, America Admired, Yet Its New Vulnerability Seen As Good Thing, Say Opinion Leaders (Washington, DC: The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, December 19, 2001); Pew Global Attitudes Project, Views of a Changing World 2003, p. 5.
19 For a copy of the letter, see “Doomed to Failure in the Middle East,” The Guardian, April 27, 2004. Also see Nicholas Blanford, “US Moves Inflame Arab Moderates,” The Christian Science Monitor, April 26, 2004; Rupert Cornwell, “Allies Warn Bush that Stability in Iraq Demands Arab‐Israeli Deal,” The Independent, June 10, 2004; Glenn Kessler and Robin Wright, “Arabs and Europeans Question ‘Greater Middle East’ Plan,” Washington Post, February 22, 2004; Paul Richter, “U.S. Has Fresh Hope for Mideast,” Los Angeles Times, November 7, 2004; Robin Wright and Glenn Kessler, “U.S. Goals for Middle East Falter,” Washington Post, April 21, 2004. Even some Israelis understand that “the continuation of this conflict, including the Israeli occupation, will most certainly lead to new waves of terror; international terrorism, which the Americans fear so much, will spread.” Ze’ev Schiff, “Fitting into America’s Strategy,” Ha’aretz, August 1, 2003. It is also worth noting that some 50 retired American diplomats wrote a letter in May 2004 to President Bush similar to the letter that the British diplomats sent to Tony Blair. A 46 copy of the American letter was published in The New York Review of Books, November 18, 2004.
20 Consider, for example, the controversy that erupted in 2005 over Israel’s decision to expand its settlements in the West Bank. See Aluf Benn, “We Can’t Expect Explicit U.S. Okay to Build in Settlements,” Ha’aretz, March 28, 2005; Akiva Eldar, “Bush: End Expansion of Settlements,” Ha’aretz, May 27, 2005; “Bush Warns Israel over West Bank,” BBC News Online, April 11, 2005; Donald Macintyre, “Sharon Vows to Defy Bush over Expansion of Israeli Settlements,” Independent, April 22, 2005; “Sharon Brushes Off Warning from Bush,” MSNBC.com, April 12, 2005; Amy Teibel, “U.S. to Israel: Stop Expanding Settlements,” Washington Post, June 26, 2005; Ze’ev Schiff, “U.S.: Israel Shirking Its Promises on Settlement Boundaries,” Ha’aretz, March 15, 2005. Regarding targeted assassinations Prime Minister Sharon promised Secretary of State Colin Powell in May 2003 that Israel would refrain from killing Palestinian leaders unless there was a “ticking bomb” (an imminent attack). Ze’ev Schiff, “Focus/Americans Fear Abu Mazen Is Further Weakened,” Ha’aretz, June 12, 2003. But one month later, after Bush made a high‐profile visit to the Middle East and the prospects for negotiations between the warring parties looked promising, Sharon launched seven assassination missions in five days, none involving a “ticking bomb.” Bradley Burston, “Background: Has Sharon’s Hamas Hitlist Converted Bush?” Ha’aretz, June 17, 2003. Also see Uri Avnery, “Avoiding a Road Map to the Abyss,” Arab News (online), August 26, 2003; Glenn Kessler, “White House Backs Latest Israeli Attacks,” Washington Post, June 13, 2003; Laura King, “Sharon Lauds Hebron Killing,” Los Angeles Times, June 23, 2003; Gideon Levy, “Who Violated the Hudna?” Tikkun (online), August 17, 2003. In March 2004, the IDF killed Hamas spiritual leader Sheik Yassin, even though he was not an imminent threat, and even though his death damaged America’s position in the Middle East. Georgie Anne Geyer, “Ariel Sharon Complicates U.S. Mission,” Chicago Tribune, March 26, 2004; H.D.S. Greenway, “Assassination Fallout Bodes Ill for US,” Boston Globe, March 26, 2004; Tony Karon, “How Israel’s Hamas Killing Affects the U.S.,” Time, March 23, 2004; David R. Sands, “Israel’s Killing of Yassin Puts US in Line of Fire,” Washington Times, March 23, 2004. As Jim Hoagland said in the wake of Yassin’s killing, “With the possible exception of Charles de Gaulle, no friendly foreign leader has complicated modern American diplomacy more consistently or gravely than Ariel Sharon. He pursues Israel’s interests with a warrior’s tenacity and directness that takes away the breath, and the options, of everyone else.” See “Consequences for Sharon ‐‐ and the U.S.,” Chicago Tribune, March 26, 2004.
21 Quoted in Duncan L. Clarke, “Israel’s Unauthorized Arms Transfers,” Foreign Policy, No. 99 (Summer 1995), p. 94. This article provides an excellent discussion of the problem. There was a bitter controversy in 2004‐2005 between the United States and Israel over Israeli arms sales to China. See Aluf Benn and Amnon Barzilai, “Pentagon Official Wants Yaron Fired,” Ha’aretz, December 16, 2004; Aluf Benn, “U.S. Keeps Israel 47 Out of New Fighter‐Jet Development Program,” Ha’aretz, October 12, 2005; Nina Gilbert, “Yaron Won’t Give Info on Arms Sales to China,” Jerusalem Post, December 30, 2004; “Israeli, U.S. Talks on Weapons Deals with China End without Result,” Ha’aretz, June 29, 2005; Marc Perelman, “Spat Over Sales of Weapons Chilling Ties between Jerusalem and Beijing,” Forward, December 23, 2004; Marc Perelman, “China Crisis Straining U.S.‐Israel Ties,” Forward, August 5, 2005; Marc Perelman, “Israel Miffed over Lingering China Flap,” Forward, October 7, 2005; Ze’ev Schiff, “U.S.‐Israel Crisis Deepens over Defense Exports to China,” Ha’aretz, July 27, 2005.
22 Quoted in Duncan L. Clarke, “Israel’s Economic Espionage in the United States,” Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 27, No. 4 (Summer 1998), p. 21. Also see Bob Drogin and Greg Miller, “Israel Has Long Spied on U.S. Say Officials,” Los Angeles Times, September 3, 2004; “FBI Says Israel a Major Player in Industrial Espionage,” Jewish Bulletin, January 16, 1998; Clyde R. Mark, “Israeli‐United States Relations,” Issue Brief for Congress (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, November 9, 2004), pp. 14‐15; Joshua Mitnick, “U.S. Accuses Officials of Spying,” Washington Times, December 16, 2004.
23 On the Pollard affair, see Hersh, Samson Option, pp. 285‐305; Idem, “The Traitor: Why Pollard Should Never Be Released,” New Yorker, Vol. 74, issue 42 (January 18, 1999), pp. 26‐33. There are a huge number of articles on the internet dealing with the Franklin Affair. For a good overview of the case, see Jeffrey Goldberg, “Real Insiders: A Pro‐Israel Lobby and an F.B.I. Sting,” New Yorker, Vol. 81, issue 19 (July 4, 2005), pp. 34‐40.
24 Trevor N. Dupuy, Elusive Victory: The Arab‐Israeli Wars, 1947‐1974 (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), pp. 3‐19, 121‐125, 146‐147, 212‐214, 231‐244, 333‐340, 388‐390, 597‐605, 623‐633; Simha Flapan, The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987), pp. 189‐199; Rashid Khalidi, “The Palestinians and 1948: The Underlying Causes of Failure,” in Eugene L. Rogan and Avi Shlaim, eds., The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948 (NY: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 12‐36; Haim Levenberg, Military Preparations of the Arab Community in Palestine, 1945‐1948 (London: Frank Cass, 1993); Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), chapters 1,3. Idem, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist‐Arab Conflict, 1881‐1999 (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1999), pp. 187‐ 189, 191‐196, 217‐223, 235‐236, 241‐242, 286‐291, 311‐313, 393‐395; Martin Van Creveld, The Sword and the Olive: A Critical History of the Israeli Defense Forces (NY: Public Affairs, 1998), pp. 77‐82, 137‐138, 179‐182.
25 Amos Harel, “Israel Maintains Its Strategic Advantage, Says Jaffee Center,” Ha’aretz, November 23, 2005. Also see, Uri Bar‐Joseph, “The Paradox of Israeli Power,” Survival, Vol. 46, No. 4 (Winter 2004‐05), pp. 137‐156; Martin Van Creveld, “Opportunity Beckons,” Jerusalem Post, May 15, 2003. 48
26 For three instructive pieces on this matter from the Israeli press, see Amiram Barkat, “Majority of Israelis Are Opposed to Intermarriage, Survey Finds,” Ha’aretz, September 15, 2003; Nicky Blackburn, “Better a Jew,” Ha’aretz, April 21, 2004; Lily Galili, “Hitting Below the Belt,” Ha’aretz, August 8, 2004.
27 See “The Official Summation of the Or Commission Report,” published in Ha’aretz, September 2, 2003. For evidence of how hostile many Israelis were to the report’s findings and recommendations, see “No Avoiding the Commission Recommendations,” Ha’aretz, September 4, 2003; Molly Moore, “Israeli Report Is Welcomed, Dismissed,” Washington Post, September 3, 2003. Also see Bernard Avishai, “Saving Israel from Itself: A Secular Future for the Jewish State,” Harper’s Magazine, January 2005. It is also worth noting that the Israel Democracy Institute reported in May 2003 that: 53 percent of Israeli Jews “are against full equality for the Arabs”; 77 percent of Israeli Jews believe that “there should be a Jewish majority on crucial political decisions”; only 31 percent “support having Arab political parties in the government”; 57 percent “think that the Arabs should be encouraged to emigrate.” See “The Democracy Index: Major Findings 2003.” Imagine the outcry that would occur if a majority of white Americans declared that blacks, Hispanics, and Asians “should be encouraged” to leave the United States. For more recent surveys, which show little change in Israeli attitudes, see Yulie Khromchenko, “Survey: Most Jewish Israelis Support Transfer of Arabs,” Ha’aretz, June 22, 2004; Yoav Stern, “Poll: Most Israeli Jews Say Israeli Arabs Should Emigrate,” Ha’aretz, April 4, 2005.
28 Quoted in Justin Huggler, “Israel Imposes ‘Racist’ Marriage Law,” Guardian, August 1, 2003. Also see James Bennet, “Israel Blocks Palestinians from Marrying into Residency,” New York Times, July 31, 2003; “Racist Legislation,” Ha’aretz editorial, July, 19, 2004; “Racist Legislation,” Ha’aretz editorial, January 18, 2005. Even the Anti‐Defamation League (ADL) criticized the legislation, albeit mildly. Nathan Guttman, Yair Ettinger, Sharon Sadeh, “ADL Criticizes Law Denying Citizenship to Palestinians,” Ha’aretz, August 5, 2003.
29 The first wave of European Jews to come to Palestine is known as the First Aliyah, and it covers the years from 1882 to 1903. There were slightly more than 15,000 Jews in Palestine in 1882. Justin McCarthy, The Population of Palestine: Population History and Statistics of the Late Ottoman Period and the Mandate (NY: Columbia University Press, 1990), p.11, which has excellent data for the years from 1850 to 1915. Also see Mark Tessler, A History of the Israeli‐Palestinian Conflict (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 124.
30 The total population of Palestine in 1893 was roughly 530,000, of whom about 19,000 were Jewish (3.6 percent). Arabs comprised the vast majority of the remaining population. McCarthy, Population of Palestine, p. 11. 49
31 Flapan, Birth of Israel, p. 44; Morris, Righteous Victims, p. 186.
32 Flapan, Birth of Israel, p 22. Similarly, Ben‐Gurion told his son, “I am certain we will be able to settle in all the other parts of the country, whether through agreement and mutual agreement with our Arab neighbors or in another way.” He went on to say, “Erect a Jewish State at once, even if it is not in the whole of the land. The rest will come in the course of time. It must come.” Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (NY: Norton, 2000), p. 21. Also see Flapan, Birth of Israel, pp. 13‐53; Nur Masalah, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of Transfer in Zionist Political Thought, 1882‐1948 (Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992), chapter 2; Morris, Righteous Victims, pp. 138‐139; Avi Shlaim, The Politics of Partition: King Abdullah, the Zionists, and Palestine, 1921‐1951 (NY: Oxford University Press, 1999).
33 Masalah, Expulsion of the Palestinians, p. 128. Also see Morris, Righteous Victims, pp. 140, 142, 168‐169.
34 Benny Morris, “A New Exodus for the Middle East?” Guardian, October 3, 2002. On the pervasiveness of transfer thinking among Zionists before Israel was established in 1948, see Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians; Morris, “Revisiting the Palestinian Exodus of 1948,” in Rogan and Shlaim, War for Palestine, pp. 39‐48; Morris, Birth Revisited, chapter 2; Ari Shavit, “Survival of the Fittest,” Ha’aretz, January 9, 2004.
35 Morris, Birth Revisited, provides a detailed account of this event. Also see Meron Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948, trans. Maxine Kaufman‐Lacusta (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), chapters 3‐4. The only remaining debate of real significance regarding the expulsion of the Palestinians from their homeland is whether it was “born of war,” as Morris argues, or by design, as Norman Finkelstein argues in Image and Reality of the Israel‐Palestine Conflict (London: Verso, 1995), chapter 3.
36 Erskine Childers, “The Other Exodus,” Spectator, May 12, 1961; Flapan, Birth of Israel, pp. 81‐118; Walid Khalidi, “Why Did the Palestinians Leave Revisited,” Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 34, No. 2 ( Winter 2005), pp. 42‐54; Idem, “The Fall of Haifa,” Middle East Forum, Vol. 35, No. 10 (December, 1959), pp. 22‐32; Morris, Birth Revisited.
37 Nahum Goldmann, The Jewish Paradox, trans. Steve Cox (NY: Grosset and Dunlap, 1978), p. 99. Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founding father of the Israeli right, made essentially the same point when he wrote, “Colonization is self‐explanatory and what it implies is fully understood by every sensible Jew and Arab. There can only be one purpose in colonization. For the country’s Arabs that purpose is essentially unacceptable. This is a natural reaction and nothing will change it.” Quoted in Ian Lustick, “To Build and To 50 Be Built By: Israel and the Hidden Logic of the Iron Wall,” Israel Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Spring 1996), p. 200.
38 See Geoffrey Aronson, Israel, Palestinians, and the Intifada: Creating Facts on the West Bank (London: Kegan Paul International, 1990); Amnon Barzilai, “A Brief History of the Missed Opportunity,” Ha’aretz, June 5, 2002; Idem, “Some Saw the Refugees as the Key to Peace,” Ha’aretz, June 11, 2002; Moshe Behar, “The Peace Process and Israeli Domestic Politics in the 1990s,” Socialism and Democracy, Current Issue Number 32, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Summer‐Fall 2002), pp. 34‐47; Adam Hanieh and Catherine Cook, “A Road Map to the Oslo Cul‐de‐Sac,” Middle East Report Online, May 15, 2003; “Israel’s Interests Take Primacy: An Interview with Dore Gold,” in bitterlemons.org, “What Constitutes a Viable Palestinian State?” March 15, 2004, Edition 10; Nur Masalha, Imperial Israel and the Palestinians: The Politics of Expansion (London: Pluto Press, 2000); Sara Roy, “Erasing the ‘Optics’ of Gaza,” The Daily Star On Line, February 14, 2004; “36 Years, and Still Counting,” Ha’aretz, September 26, 2003.
39 Rahid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (NY: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 147. Meir also said, “It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.” Masalha, Imperial Israel, p. 47. Rabin said in 1995, two years after signing the Oslo accords, “I seek peaceful coexistence between Israel as a Jewish state, not all over the land of Israel, or most of it; its capital, the united Jerusalem; its security border with Jordan rebuilt; next to it, a Palestinian entity, less than a state, that runs the life of Palestinians …. This is my goal, not to return to the pre‐Six Day War lines but to create two entities, a separation between Israel and the Palestinians who reside in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.” Hanieh and Cook, “Road Map.” Also see Akiva Eldar, “On the Same Page, Ten Years On,” Ha’aretz, November 5, 2005; David Grossman, “The Night Our Hope for Peace Died,” Guardian, November 4, 2005; Michael Jansen, “A Practice that Prevents the Emergence of a Palestinian State,” Jordan Times, November 10, 2005. It is worth noting that in the spring of 1998, Israel and its American supporters sharply criticized First Lady Hillary Clinton for saying that, “It would be in the long‐ term interests of peace in the Middle East for there to be a state of Palestine, a functioning modern state that is on the same footing as other states.” Tom Rhodes and Christopher Walker, “Congress Tells Israel to Reject Clinton’s Pullout Plan,” New York Times, May 8, 1998; James Bennet, “Aides Disavow Mrs. Clinton on Mideast,” New York Times, May 8, 1998.
40 Charles Enderlein, Shattered Dreams: The Failure of the Peace Process in the Middle East, 1995‐2002, trans. Susan Fairfield (NY: Other Press, 2003), pp. 201, 207‐208; Jeremy Pressman, “Visions in Collision: What Happened at Camp David and Taba? International Security, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Fall 2003), p. 17; Deborah Sontag, “Quest for Mideast Peace: 51 How and Why It Failed,” New York Times, July 26, 2001; Clayton E. Swisher, The Truth about Camp David: The Untold Story about the Collapse of the Peace Process (NY: Nation Books, 2004), pp. 284, 318, 325. Barak himself said after Camp David that “the Palestinians were promised a continuous piece of sovereign territory except for a razor‐ thin Israeli wedge running from Jerusalem through from Maale Adumim to the Jordan River,” which effectively would have been under Israel’s control. Benny Morris, “Camp David and After: An Exchange (1. An Interview with Ehud Barak)”, New York Review of Books, Vol. 49, No. 10 (June 13, 2002), p. 44. Also see the map Israeli negotiators presented to the Palestinians at Camp David, a copy of which can be found in Roane Carey, ed., The New Intifada: Resisting Israel’s Apartheid (London: Verso, 2001), p. 36.
41 See Alan Dershowitz, The Case for Israel (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2003). For a telling critique of Dershowitz’s book, see Norman G. Finkelstein, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti‐Semitism and the Abuse of History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). Also see “Dershowitz v. Desch,” American Conservative, January 16, 2005.
42 Morris, Righteous Victims, chapters 2‐5.
43 Morris, Birth Revisited. It should be noted that many Israeli documents concerning the events of 1948 remain classified; Morris expects “that with respect to both expulsions and atrocities, we can expect additional revelations as the years pass and more Israeli records become available.” Morris, “Revisiting the Palestinian Exodus,” in Rogan and Shlaim, War for Palestine, p. 49. In fact, he maintains that the reported cases of rape he knows about are “just the tip of the iceberg.” See Shavit, “Survival of the Fittest.”
44 Benny Morris, Israel’s Border Wars, 1949‐1956 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 432. Also see ibid., pp. 126‐153, 178‐184. For evidence of similar behavior after the 1967 War, see Uri Avnery, “Crying Wolf?” CounterPunch, March 15, 2003; Ami Kronfeld, “Avnery on Ethnic Cleansing and a Personal Note,” in Jewish Voice for Peace, Jewish Peace News, March 17, 2003; Katherine M. Metres, “As Evidence Mounts, Toll of Israeli Prisoner of War Massacres Grows,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, February/March 1996, pp. 17, 104‐105.
45 During his negotiations with the British and French governments over the launching of the 1956 war, Ben‐Gurion proposed a grand plan for reordering the region that would have divided Jordan between Israel and Iraq, transferred all of Lebanon south of the Litani River to Israel, and given Israel portions of the Sinai as well. On Israel’s policies in the 1950s, see Morris, Israel’s Border Wars; Morris, Righteous Victims, chapter 6, especially pp. 289‐290; Shlaim, Iron Wall, chapters 3‐4, especially pp.184‐185; Kennett Love, Suez: the Twice Fought War (New York: McGraw‐Hill, 1969), pp. 589‐638; Michael Brecher, Decisions in Israel’s Foreign Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), pp. 282‐283.
46 Gabby Bron, “Egyptian POWs Ordered to Dig Graves, Then Shot by Israeli Army,” Yedioth Ahronoth, August 17, 1995; Ronal Fisher, “Mass Murder in the 1956 Sinai War,” Ma’ariv, August 8, 1995 [Copies of these two pieces can be found in Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Spring 1996), pp. 148‐155]; Galal Bana, “Egypt: We Will Turn to the International War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague if Israel Will Not Compensate Murdered Prisoners of War,” Ha’aretz, July 24, 2002; Zehavat, Friedman, “Personal Reminiscence: Remembering Ami Kronfeld,” in Jewish Voice for Peace, Jewish Peace News, September 25, 2005; Metres, “As Evidence Mounts.”
47 Avnery, “Crying Wolf”; Robert Blecher, “Living on the Edge: The Threat of ‘Transfer’ in Israel and Palestine,” MERIP, Middle East Report 225, Winter 2002; Baruch Kimmerling, Politicide: Ariel Sharon’s War against the Palestinians (London: Verso, 2003), p. 28. Also see Chomsky, Fateful Triangle, p. 97; Morris, Righteous Victims, pp. 328‐329; Tanya Reinhart, Israel/Palestine: How to End the War of 1948 (NY: Seven Stories Press, 2002), p. 8. Morris reports (p. 329) that 120,000 Palestinians applied to return to their homes right after the 1967 War, but Israel allowed only about 17,000 to come back. Amnesty International estimated in mid‐2003 that in the years since Israel had acquired the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, it had destroyed more than 10,000 Palestinian homes in those areas. Danny Rubinstein, “Roads, Fences and Outposts Maintain Control in the Territories,” Ha’aretz, August 12, 2003.
48 “Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Events at the Refugee Camps in Beirut,” February 7, 1983. The report is commonly called “The Kahan Commission Report” after its chairman, Yitzhak Kahan.
49 Swedish Save the Children, “The Status of Palestinian Children during the Uprising in the Occupied Territories,” Excerpted Summary Material, Jerusalem, 1990, in Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 19, No. 4 (Summer 1990), pp. 136‐146. Also see Joshua Brilliant, “Officer Tells Court Villagers Were Bound, Gagged and Beaten. ‘Not Guilty’ Plea at ‘Break Bones’ Trial,” Jerusalem Post, March 30, 1990; Joshua Brilliant, “‘Rabin Ordered Beatings’, Meir Tells Military Court,” Jerusalem Post, June 22, 1990; Jackson Diehl, “Rights Group Accuses Israel of Violence Against Children in Palestinian Uprising,” Washington Post, May 17, 1990; James A. Graff, “Crippling a People: Palestinian Children and Israeli State Violence,” Alif, No. 13 (1993), pp. 46‐63; Ronald R. Stockton, “Intifada Deaths,” Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 19, No. 4 (Summer 1990), pp. 86‐95. Ehud Barak, the IDF’s Deputy Chief of Staff during the First Intifada, said at the time, “We do not want children to be shot under any circumstances …. When you see a child you don’t shoot.” Nevertheless, the Swedish Save the Children report estimated that 6,500 to 8,000 children were wounded by gunfire during the first two years of the Intifada. Researchers investigated 66 of the 106 recorded cases of “child gunshot deaths.” They concluded that: almost all of them “were hit by directed ‐‐ not random or ricochet ‐‐ gunfire”; nearly twenty percent suffered multiple gunshot wounds; twelve percent were shot from behind; fifteen percent of the children were ten years of age or younger; “most children were not participating in a stone‐throwing demonstration when shot dead”; and “nearly one‐fifth of the children were shot dead while at home or within ten meters of their homes.”
50 “Unbridled Force,” Ha’aretz editorial, March 16, 2003. For other evidence, see Jonathan Cook, “Impunity on Both Sides of the Green Line,” MERIP, Middle East Report Online, November 23, 2005; “When Everything Is Permissible,” Ha’aretz editorial, June 6, 2005; “It Can Happen Here,” Ha’aretz editorial, November 22, 2004; Chris McGreal, “Snipers with Children in Their Sights,” Guardian, June 28, 2005; Idem, “Israel Shocked by Image of Soldiers Forcing Violinist to Play at Roadblock,” Guardian, November 29, 2004; Greg Myre, “Former Israeli Soldiers Tell of Harassment of Palestinians,” New York Times, June 24, 2004; Reuven Pedatzur, “The Message to the Soldiers Was Clear,” Ha’aretz, December 13, 2004; Conal Urquhart, “Israeli Soldiers Tell of Indiscriminate Killings by Army and A Culture of Impunity,” Guardian, September 6, 2005.
51 See Swisher, Truth about Camp David, p. 387.
52 According to B’tselem, between September 29, 2000, and December 31, 2005, 3,386 Palestinians were killed by the Israelis, of whom 676 were children. Of those 3,386 deaths, 1,185 were bystanders, 1,008 were killed while fighting the Israelis, and the circumstances of 563 deaths are unknown. During the same period, 992 Israelis were killed by the Palestinians, 118 of whom were children. Of those 992 deaths, 683 were civilians and 309 belonged to Israeli security forces. B’tselem press release, January 4, 2006.
53 Nathan Guttman, “‘It’s a Terrible Thing, Living with the Knowledge that You Crushed Our Daughter’,” Ha’aretz, April 30, 2004; Adam Shapiro, “Remembering Rachel Shapiro,” Nation, March 18, 2004; Tsahar Rotem, “British Peace Activist Shot by IDF Troops in Gaza Strip,” Ha’aretz, April 11, 2003.
54 Molly Moore, “Ex‐Security Chiefs Turn on Sharon,” Washington Post, November 15, 2003; “Ex‐Shin Bet Heads Warn of ‘Catastrophe’ without Peace Deal,” Ha’aretz, November 15, 2003. These comments were based on an interview in the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth on November 14, 2003. For a copy of that interview, see “We Are Seriously Concerned about the Fate of the State of Israel,” The Alternative Information Center, December 1, 2003.
55 Bill Maxwell, “U.S. Should Reconsider Aid to Israel,” St. Petersburg Times, December 16, 2001.
56 See J. Bowyer Bell, Terror Out of Zion: The Fight for Israeli Independence ( New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1996); Joseph Heller, The Stern Gang: Ideology, Politics and Terror, 1940‐1949 (London: Frank Cass, 1995); Bruce Hoffmann, The Failure of British Military Strategy within Palestine, 1939‐1947 (Israel: Bar‐Ilan University, 1983); Morris, Righteous Victims, pp. 173‐180; Segev, One Palestine, pp. 468‐486. According to Haim Levenberg, 210 of the 429 casualties from Jewish terrorism in Palestine during 1946 were civilians. The other 219 were police and soldiers. Levenberg, Military Preparations, p. 72. Furthermore, it was Jewish terrorists from the infamous Irgun who in late 1937 introduced the practice of placing bombs in buses and large crowds. Benny Morris speculates that, “The Arabs may well have learned the value of terrorist bombings from the Jews.” Righteous Victims, pp. 147, 201. Also see Lenni Brenner, The Iron Wall: Zionist Revisionism from Jabotinsky to Shamir (London: Zed Books, 1984), p. 100; Yehoshua Porath, The Palestinian Arab National Movement: from Riots to Rebellion, Vol. II, 1929‐1939 (London: Frank Cass, 1977), p. 238. Finally, Morris notes that during the 1948 war the main Jewish terrorist groups “knowingly planted bombs in bus stops with the aim of killing non‐combatants, including women and children.” Birth Revisited, p. 80.
57 Bell, Terror Out of Zion, pp. 336‐340.
58 Quoted in Chomsky, Fateful Triangle, pp. 485‐486. Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol used to call Menachem Begin “the terrorist.” Barzilai, “Brief History.” On Shamir, see Avishai Margalit, “The Violent Life of Yitzhak Shamir,” New York Review of Books, May 14, 1992, pp. 18‐24.
59 Moreover, Israel’s claim to a morally superior status is undermined by some of its other policies. Israel once cultivated close ties with apartheid‐era South Africa and aided the white minority government’s nuclear weapons program. Peter Liberman, “Israel and the South African Bomb,” The Nonproliferation Review, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Summer 2004), pp. 46‐80. In 1954, Israeli intelligence forces bombed a U.S. diplomatic facility in Cairo in a bungled attempt to sow discord between Egypt and the United States. Shlaim, Iron Wall, pp. 110‐113.
60 Steven M. Cohen, The 2004 National Survey of American Jews, sponsored by the Jewish Agency for Israel’s Department of Jewish‐Zionist Education, February 24, 2005. The figure two years earlier was 28 percent. See Steven M. Cohen, The 2002 National Survey of American Jews, sponsored by the Jewish Agency for Israel’s Department of Jewish‐Zionist Education, conducted in November‐December 2002. Also see Amiran Barkat, “Young American Jews Are More Ambivalent Toward Israel, Study Shows,” Ha’aretz, March 7, 2005; Steven M. Cohen, “Poll: Attachment of U.S. Jews to Israel Falls in Past 2 Years,” Forward, March 4, 2005; M.J. Rosenberg, “Letting Israel Sell Itself,” Israel Policy Forum Issue Brief #218, March 18, 2005. 55
61 J.J. Goldberg, “Old Friend, Shattered Dreams,” Forward, December 24, 2004; Esther Kaplan, “The Jewish Divide on Israel,” Nation, July 12, 2004; Michael Massing, “Conservative Jewish Groups Have Clout,” Los Angeles Times, March 10, 2002; Eric Yoffie, “Reform the Conference,” Forward, August 2, 2002.
62 Ori Nir, “FBI Probe: More Questions Than Answers.” Forward, May 13, 2005.
63 Inigo Gilmore, “U.S. Jewish Leader Hit over Letter,” London Sunday Telegraph, August 12, 2003; Isi Liebler, “When Seymour Met Condi,” Jerusalem Post, November 24, 2005. Also see Sarah Bronson, “Orthodox Leader: U.S. Jews Have No Right to Criticize Israel, Ha’aretz, August 2, 2004.
64 Liebler, “When Seymour Met Condi”; Ori Nir, “O.U. Chief Decries American Pressure on Israel,” Forward, December 2, 2005; Idem, “Rice Trip Raises Concern over U.S. Pressure on Israel,” Forward, November 18, 2005; Seymour D. Reich, “Listen to America,” Jerusalem Post, November 13, 2005.
65 Jeffrey H. Birnbaum, “Washington’s Power 25,” Fortune, December 8, 1997. AIPAC was ranked number 4 in a similar study conducted in 2001. See Jeffrey H. Birnbaum and Russell Newell, “Fat and Happy in D.C.,” Fortune, May 28, 2001.
66 Richard E. Cohen and Peter Bell, “Congressional Insiders Poll,” National Journal. March 5, 2005; James D. Besser, “Most Muscle? It’s NRA, Then AIPAC and AARP,” Chicago Jewish Star, March 11‐24, 2005.
67 See Max Blumenthal, “Born‐Agains for Sharon,” salon.com, October 30, 2004; Darrell L. Bock, “Some Christians See a ‘Road Map’ to End Times,” Los Angeles Times, June 18, 2003; Nathan Guttman, “Wiping Out Terror, Brining On Redemption,” Ha’aretz, April 29, 2002; Tom Hamburger and Jim VandeHei, “Chosen People: How Israel Became a Favorite Cause of Christian Right,” Wall Street Journal, May 23, 2002; Paul Nussbaum, “Israel Finds an Ally in American Evangelicals,” Philadelphia Inquirer, November 17, 2005. Daniel Pipes maintains that, “other than the Israel Defense Forces, America’s Christian Zionists may be the Jewish state’s ultimate strategic asset.” “[Christian Zionism:] Israel’s Best Weapon?” New York Post, July 15, 2003.
68 The weakness of the “Palestinian Lobby” in the United States is captured in the headlines of these two articles: Nora Boustany, “Palestinians’ Lone Hand in Washington,” Washington Post, April, 19, 2002; George Gedda, “PLO Loses D.C. Office Because of Unpaid Rent,” Chicago Tribune, April 12, 2002. On the weak impact of the “Arab Lobby,” see Ali A. Mazrui, “Between the Crescent and the Star‐Spangled Banner: American Muslims and U.S. Foreign Policy,” International Affairs, Vol. 72, No. 3 (July 1996), pp. 493‐506; Nabeel A. Khoury, “The Arab Lobby: Problems and Prospects,” 56 Middle East Journal, Vol. 41, No. 3 (Summer 1987), pp. 379‐396; Andrea Barron, “Jewish and Arab Diasporas in the United States and Their Impact on U.S. Middle East Policy,” in Yehuda Lukacs and Abdalla M. Battah, eds., The Arab‐Israeli Conflict: Two Decades of Change (London: Westview, 1988), pp. 238‐259.
69 Jake Tapper, “Questions for Dick Armey: Retiring, Not Shy,” New York Times Magazine, September 1, 2002. Also, Tom DeLay has called himself “an Israeli at heart.” See James Bennet, “DeLay Says Palestinians Bear Burden for Achieving Peace,” New York Times, July 30, 2003.
70 Quoted in Mitchell Bard, “Israeli Lobby Power,” Midstream, Vol. 33, No. 1 (January 1987), pp. 6‐8.
71 Quoted in Edward Tivnan, The Lobby: Jewish Political Power and American Foreign Policy (NY: Simon and Schuster, 1987), p. 191. J.J. Goldberg, the editor of the Forward, said in 2002, “There is this image in Congress that you don’t cross these people or they take you down.” Quoted in John Diamond and Brianna B. Piec, “Pro‐Israel Groups Intensify Political Front in U.S.,” Chicago Tribune, April 16, 2002.
72 Quoted in Camille Mansour, Beyond Alliance: Israel in U.S. Foreign Policy, trans. James A. Cohen (NY: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 242.
73 Although AIPAC has been able to use its political muscle to avoid having to register as a foreign agent for another government, it is especially concerned about that problem today because of the Larry Franklin spy scandal, and thus it is going to considerable lengths to emphasize its “American side.” See Ori Nir, “Leaders Fear Probe Will Force Pro‐Israel Lobby to File as ‘Foreign Agent’ Could Fuel Dual Loyalty Talk,” Forward, December 31, 2004; Idem, “Leaders Stress American Side of AIPAC,” Forward, May 27, 2005.
74 “Sen. Hollings Floor Statement Setting the Record Straight on His Mideast Newspaper Column,” May 20, 2004, a copy of which can be found on the former Senator’s web site.
75 Published in an AIPAC advertisement in the Chicago Jewish Star, August 29 – September 11, 2003. Sharon is not alone in his appraisal of AIPAC’s power. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid says that “I canʹt think of a policy organization in the country as well‐organized or respected [as AIPAC]” and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich called it “the most effective general interest group . . . across the entire planet.” Former President Bill Clinton described AIPAC as “stunningly effective” and “better than anyone else lobbying in this town.” Quotations downloaded from the AIPAC website on January 14, 2005 [www.aipac.org/documents/whoweare.html#say]. 57
76 Thomas B. Edsall and Alan Cooperman, “GOP Uses Remarks to Court Jews,” Washington Post, March 13, 2003. Also see James D. Besser, “Jews’ Primary Role Expanding,” Jewish Week, January 23, 2004; Alexander Bolton, “Jewish Defections Irk Democrats,” The Hill, March 30, 2004; E.J. Kessler, “Ancient Woes Resurfacing as Dean Eyes Top Dem Post,” Forward, January 28, 2005. Hamilton Jordan wrote a memorandum to President Jimmy Carter in June 1977, in which he said: “Out of 125 members of the Democratic National Finance Council, over 70 are Jewish; In 1976, over 60% of the large donors to the Democratic Party were Jewish; Over 60% of the monies raised by Nixon in 1972 was from Jewish contributors; Over 75% of the monies raised in Humphrey’s 1968 campaign was from Jewish contributors; Over 90% of the monies raised by Scoop Jackson in the Democratic primaries was from Jewish contributors; In spite of the fact that you were a long shot and came from an area of the country where there is a smaller Jewish community, approximately 35% of our primary funds were from Jewish supporters. Wherever there is major political fundraising in this country, you will find American Jews playing a significant role.” Hamilton Jordan, Confidential File, Box 34, File “Foreign Policy/Domestic Politics Memo, HJ Memo, 6/77,” declassified June 12, 1990.
77 Douglas Brinkley, “Out of the Loop,” The New York Times, December 29, 2002. Lawrence Kaplan reports that after Bruce Riedel, the Middle East expert on the National Security Council, left his job at the end of 2001, the Pentagon “held up the appointment of Riedel’s designated successor, Middle East expert Alina Romanowski, whom Pentagon officials suspect of being insufficiently supportive of the Jewish state.” “Torpedo Boat: How Bush Turned on Arafat,” New Republic, February 18, 2003. The position was eventually filled by Elliot Abrams, a fervent supporter of Israel. “Indeed, for the government of Israel,” Nathan Guttman wrote, “it is a gift from heaven.” See “From Clemency to a Senior Post,” Ha’aretz, December 16, 2002.
78 E.J. Kessler, “Lieberman and Dean Spar Over Israel,” Forward, September 9, 2003; Stephen Zunes, “Attacks on Dean Expose Democrats’ Shift to the Right,” Tikkun, November/December 2003.
79 Zunes, “Attacks on Dean”; James D. Besser, “Dean’s Jewish Problem,” Chicago Jewish Star, December 19, 2003 ‐‐ January 8, 2004.
80 E.J. Kessler, “Dean Plans to Visit Israel, Political Baggage in Tow,” Forward, July 8, 2005; Zunes, “Attacks on Dean.”
81 Laura Blumenfeld, “Three Peace Suits; For These Passionate American Diplomats, a Middle East Settlement is the Goal of a Lifetime,” Washington Post, February 24, 1997. 58
82 Samuel (“Sandy”) Berger, President Clinton’s National Security Advisor, reports that at one point during the negotiations at Camp David (July 2000), Dennis Ross made the remarkable comment that, “If Barak offers anything more, I’ll be against this agreement.” Unedited transcript of “Comments by Sandy Berger at the Launch of How Israelis and Palestinians Negotiate (USIP Press, 2005),” U.S. Institute of Peace, Washington, DC, June 7, 2005.
83 Quoted in Blumenfeld, “Three Peace Suits.”
84 Eric Alterman, “Intractable Foes, Warring Narratives,” MSNBC.com, March 28, 2002.
85 Quoted in Bret Stephens, “Eye on the Media by Bret Stephens: Bartley’s Journal,” Jerusalem Post, November 21, 2002.
86 Max Frankel, The Times of My Life And My Life with the Times (NY: Random House, 1999), pp. 401‐403
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