This is the way it works in a nutshell: Congress appropriates vast
sums of money for Israel. Israel shunts some of this money back to
Congress via. AIPAC. In appreciation, Congress radically skews
American foreign policy in favor Israel. That's why Jews can kill
babies in their cribs and the United States government calls it
"self-defense." Money-talks, shit-walks, in ZOG-USA.

Its Origins and Growth
The Power of the Israel Lobby
http://www.counterpunch.org/christison06162006.html

By KATHLEEN and BILL CHRISTISON
Former CIA analysts

Editors' Note: Ten, even five years ago, a fierce public debate
over the nature and activities of the Israeli lobby would have been
impossible. It was as verboten as the use of the word Empire, to
describe the global reach of the United States. Through its disdain for
the usual proprieties decorously observed by Republican and Democratic
administrations in the past , the Bush administration has hauled many
realities of our political economy center stage. Open up the New York
Times or the Washington Post over the recent past and there, like as
not, is another opinion column about the Lobby.

CounterPunch has hosted some of the most vigorous polemics on the
Lobby. In May we asked two of our most valued contributors, Kathy and
Bill Christison, to offer their evaluation of the debate on the Lobby's
role and power. As our readers know, Bill and Kathy both had
significant careers as CIA analysts. Bill was a National Intelligence
Officer. In the aftermath of the September, 2001, attacks we published
here his trenchant and influential essay on "the war on terror". Kathy
has written powerfully on our website on the topic of Palestine.
Specifically on the Lobby they contributed an unsparing essay on the
topic of "dual loyalty" which can bed found in our CounterPunch
collection, The Politics of Anti-Semitism.

In mid May they sent us the detailed, measured commentary, rich in
historical detail, that we are delighted to print below in its
entirety. Which is the tail? Which is the dog? asked Uri Avnery in our
newsletter, a few issues back, apropos the respective roles of the
Israel Lobby and the US in the exercise of US policy in the Middle
East. Here's an answer that will be tough to challenge.

-- A.C./J.S.C.

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, the University of Chicago and
Harvard political scientists who published in March of this years a
lengthy, well documented study on the pro-Israel lobby and its
influence on U.S. Middle East policy in March , have already
accomplished what they intended. They have successfully called
attention to the often pernicious influence of the lobby on
policymaking. But, unfortunately, the study has aroused more criticism
than debate ­ not only the kind of criticism one would anticipate from
the usual suspects among the very lobby groups Mearsheimer and Walt
described, but also from a group on the left that might have been
expected to support the study's conclusions.

The criticism has been partly silly, often malicious, and almost
entirely off-point. The silly, insubstantial criticisms ­ such as
former presidential adviser David Gergen's earnest comment that through
four administrations he never observed an Oval Office decision that
tilted policy in favor of Israel at the expense of U.S. interests ­
can easily be dismissed as nonsensical . Most of the extensive
malicious criticism, coming largely from the hard core of Israeli
supporters who make up the very lobby under discussion and led by a
hysterical Alan Dershowitz, has been so specious and sophomoric, that
it too could be dismissed were it not for precisely the pervasive
atmosphere of reflexive support for Israel and silenced debate that
Mearsheimer and Walt describe.

Most disturbing and harder to dismiss is the criticism of the study
from the left, coming chiefly from Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein,
and abetted less cogently by Stephen Zunes of Foreign Policy in Focus
and Joseph Massad of Columbia University. These critics on the left
argue from a assumption that U.S. foreign policy has been monolithic
since World War II, a coherent progression of decision-making directed
unerringly at the advancement of U.S. imperial interests. All U.S.
actions, these critics contend, are part of a clearly laid-out strategy
that has rarely deviated no matter what the party in power. They
believe that Israel has served throughout as a loyal agent of the U.S.,
carrying out the U.S. design faithfully and serving as a base from
which the U.S. projects its power around the Middle East. Zunes says it
most clearly, affirming that Israel "still is very much the junior
partner in the relationship." These critics do not dispute the
existence of a lobby, but they minimize its importance, claiming that
rather than leading the U.S. into policies and foreign adventures that
stand against true U.S. national interests, as Mearsheimer and Walt
assert, the U.S. is actually the controlling power in the relationship
with Israel and carries out a consistent policy, using Israel as its
agent where possible.

Finkelstein summarized the critics' position in a recent CounterPunch
article ("The Israel Lobby," May 1,
http://www.counterpunch.org/finkelstein05012006.html), emphasizing that
the issue is not whether U.S. interests or those of the lobby take
precedence but rather that there has been such coincidence of U.S. and
Israeli interests over the decades that for the most part basic U.S.
Middle East policy has not been affected by the lobby. Chomsky
maintains that Israel does the U.S. bidding in the Middle East in
pursuit of imperial goals that Washington would pursue even without
Israel and that it has always pursued in areas outside the Middle East
without benefit of any lobby. Those goals have always included
advancement of U.S. corporate-military interests and political
domination through the suppression of radical nationalisms and the
maintenance of stability in resource-rich countries, particularly oil
producers, everywhere. In the Middle East, this was accomplished
primarily through Israel's 1967 defeat of Egypt's Gamal Abdul Nasser
and his radical Arab nationalism, which had threatened U.S. access to
the region's oil resources. Both Chomsky and Finkelstein trace the
strong U.S.-Israeli tie to the June 1967 war, which they believe
established the close alliance and marked the point at which the U.S.
began to regard Israel as a strategic asset and a stable base from
which U.S. power could be projected throughout the Middle East.

Joseph Massad ("Blaming the Israel Lobby," CounterPunch, March 25/26,
http://www.counterpunch.org/massad03252006.html) argues along similar
lines, describing developments in the Middle East and around the world
that he believes the U.S. engineered for its own benefit and would have
carried out even without Israel's assistance. His point, like
Chomsky's, is that the U.S. has a long history of overthrowing regimes
in Central America, in Chile, in Indonesia, in Africa, where the Israel
lobby was not involved and where Israel at most assisted the U.S. but
did not benefit directly itself. He goes farther than Chomsky by
claiming that with respect to the Middle East Israel has been such an
essential tool that its very usefulness is what accounts for the
strength of the lobby. "It is in fact the very centrality of Israel to
U.S. strategy in the Middle East," Massad contends with a kind of
backward logic, "that accounts, in part, for the strength of the
pro-Israel lobby and not the other way around." (One wonders why, if
this were the case, there would be any need for a lobby at all. What
would be a lobby's function if the U.S. already regarded Israel as
central to its strategy?)

The principal problem with these arguments from the left is that they
assume a continuity in U.S. strategy and policymaking over the decades
that has never in fact existed. The notion that there is any defined
strategy that links Eisenhower's policy to Johnson's to Reagan's to
Clinton's gives far more credit than is deserved to the extremely ad
hoc, hit-or-miss nature of all U.S. foreign policy. Obviously, some
level of imperial interest has dictated policy in every administration
since World War II and, obviously, the need to guarantee access to
vital natural resources around the world, such as oil in the Middle
East and elsewhere, has played a critical role in determining policy.
But beyond these evident, and not particularly significant, truths, it
can accurately be said, at least with regard to the Middle East, that
it has been a rare administration that has itself ever had a coherent,
clearly defined, and consistent foreign policy and that, except for a
broadly defined anti-communism during the Cold War, no administration's
strategy has ever carried over in detail to succeeding administrations.

The ad hoc nature of virtually every administration's policy planning
process cannot be overemphasized. Aside from the strong but amorphous
political need felt in both major U.S. parties and nurtured by the
Israel lobby that "supporting Israel" was vital to each party's own
future, the inconsistent, even short-term randomness in the detailed
Middle East policymaking of successive administrations has been
remarkable. This lack of clear strategic thinking at the very top
levels of several new administrations before they entered office
enhanced the power of individuals and groups that did have clear goals
and plans already in hand ­ such as, for instance, the pro-Israeli
Dennis Ross in both the first Bush and the Clinton administrations, and
the strongly pro-Israeli neo-cons in the current Bush administration.

The critics on the left argue that because the U.S. has a history of
opposing and frequently undermining or actually overthrowing radical
nationalist governments throughout the world without any involvement by
Israel, any instance in which Israel acts against radical nationalism
in the Arab world is, therefore, proof that Israel is doing the United
States' work for it . The critics generally believe, for instance, that
Israel's political destruction of Egypt's Nasser in 1967 was done for
the U.S. Most if not all believe that Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon
was undertaken at U.S.behest, to destroy the PLO.

This kind of argumentation assumes too much on a presumption of policy
coherence. Lyndon Johnson most certainly did abhor Nasser and was not
sorry to see him and his pan-Arab ambitions defeated, but there is
absolutely no evidence that the Johnson administration ever seriously
planned to unseat Nasser, formulated any other action plan against
Egypt, or pushed Israel in any way to attack. Johnson did apparently
give a green light to Israel's attack plans after they had been
formulated, but this is quite different from initiating the plans.
Already mired in Vietnam, Johnson was very much concerned not to be
drawn into a war initiated by Israel and was criticized by some Israeli
supporters for not acting forcefully enough on Israel's behalf. In any
case, Israel needed no prompting for its pre-emptive attack, which had
long been in the works.

Indeed, far from Israel functioning as the junior partner carrying out
a U.S. plan, it is clear that the weight of pressure in 1967 was on the
U.S. to go along with Israel's designs and that this pressure came from
Israel and its agents in the U.S. The lobby in this instance ­ as
broadly defined by Mearsheimer and Walt: "the loose coalition of
individuals and organizations who actively work to shape U.S. foreign
policy in a pro-Israel direction" ­ was in fact a part of Johnson's
intimate circle of friends and advisers.

These included the number-two man at the Israeli embassy, a close
personal friend; the strongly pro-Israeli Rostow brothers, Walt and
Eugene, who were part of the national security bureaucracy in the
administration; Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas; U.N. Ambassador
Arthur Goldberg; and numerous others who all spent time with Johnson at
the LBJ Ranch in Texas and had the personal access and the leisure time
in an informal setting to talk with Johnson about their concern for
Israel and to influence him heavily in favor of Israel. This circle had
already begun to work on Johnson long before Israel's pre-emptive
attack in 1967, so they were nicely placed to persuade Johnson to go
along with it despite Johnson's fears of provoking the Soviet Union and
becoming involved in a military conflict the U.S. was not prepared for.

In other words, Israel was beyond question the senior partner in this
particular policy initiative; Israel made the decision to go to war,
would have gone to war with or without the U.S. green light, and used
its lobbyists in the U.S. to steer Johnson administration policy in a
pro-Israeli direction. Israel's attack on the U.S. naval vessel, the
USS Liberty, in the midst of the war ­ an attack conducted in broad
daylight that killed 34 American sailors ­ was not the act of a junior
partner. Nor was the U.S. cover-up of this atrocity the act of a
government that dictated the moves in this relationship.

The evidence is equally clear that Israel was the prime mover in the
1982 invasion of Lebanon and led the U.S. into that morass, rather than
the other way around. Although Massad refers to the U.S. as Israel's
master, in this instance as in many others including 1967, Israel has
clearly been its own master. Chomsky argues in support of his case that
Reagan ordered Israel to call off the invasion in August, two months
after it was launched. This is true, but in fact Israel did not pay any
attention; the invasion continued, and the U.S. got farther and farther
embroiled.

When, as occurred in Lebanon, the U.S. has blundered into misguided
adventures to support Israel or to rescue Israel or to further Israel's
interests, it is a clear denial of reality to say that Israel and its
lobby have no significant influence on U.S. Middle East policy. Even
were there not an abundance of other examples, Lebanon alone, with its
long-term implications, proves the truth of the Mearsheimer-Walt
conclusion that the U.S. "has set aside its own security in order to
advance the interests of another state" and that "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.'"

As a general proposition, the left critics' argumentation is much too
limiting. While there is no question that modern history is replete, as
they argue, with examples of the U.S. acting in corporate interests ­
overthrowing nationalist governments perceived to be threatening U.S.
business and economic interests, as in Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954,
Chile in 1973, and elsewhere ­ this frequent convergence of corporate
with government interests does not mean that the U.S. never acts in
other than corporate interests. The fact of a strong
government-corporate alliance does not in any way preclude situations
­ even in the Middle East, where oil is obviously a vital corporate
resource ­ in which the U.S. acts primarily to benefit Israel rather
than serve any corporate or economic purpose. Because it has a deep
emotional aspect and involves political, economic, and military ties
unlike those with any other nation, the U.S. relationship with Israel
is unique, and there is nothing in the history of U.S. foreign policy,
nothing in the government's entanglement with the military-industrial
complex, to prevent the lobby from exerting heavy influence on policy.
Israel and its lobbyists make their own "corporation" that, like the
oil industry (or Chiquita Banana or Anaconda Copper in other areas), is
clearly a major factor driving U.S. foreign policy.

There is no denying the intricate interweaving of the U.S.
military-industrial complex with Israeli military-industrial interests.
Chomsky acknowledges that there is "plenty of conformity" between the
lobby's position and the U.S. government-corporate linkage and that the
two are very difficult to disentangle. But, although he tends to
emphasize that the U.S. is always the senior partner and suggests that
the Israeli side does little more than support whatever the U.S. arms,
energy, and financial industries define as U.S. national interests, in
actual fact the entanglement is much more one between equals than the
raw strengths of the two parties would suggest. "Conformity" hardly
captures the magnitude of the relationship. Particularly in the defense
arena, Israel and its lobby and the U.S. arms industry work hand in
glove to advance their combined, very compatible interests. The
relatively few very powerful and wealthy families that dominate the
Israeli arms industry are just as interested in pressing for
aggressively militaristic U.S. and Israeli foreign policies as are the
CEOs of U.S. arms corporations and, as globalization has progressed, so
have the ties of joint ownership and close financial and technological
cooperation among the arms corporations of the two nations grown ever
closer. In every way, the two nations' military industries work
together very easily and very quietly, to a common end. The
relationship is symbiotic, and the lobby cooperates intimately to keep
it alive; lobbyists can go to many in the U.S. Congress and tell them
quite credibly that if aid to Israel is cut off, thousands of
arms-industry jobs in their own districts will be lost. That's power.
The lobby is not simply passively supporting whatever the U.S.
military-industrial complex wants. It is actively twisting arms ­ very
successfully ­ in both Congress and the administration to perpetuate
acceptance of a definition of U.S. "national interests" that many
Americans believe is wrong, as does Chomsky himself.

Clearly, the advantages in the relationship go in both directions:
Israel serves U.S. corporate interests by using, and often helping
develop, the arms that U.S. manufacturers produce, and the U.S. serves
Israeli interests by providing a constant stream of high-tech equipment
that maintains Israel's vast military superiority in the region. But
simply because the U.S. benefits from this relationship, it cannot be
said that the U.S. is Israel's master, or that Israel always does the
U.S. bidding, or that the lobby, which helps keep this arms alliance
alive, has no significant power. It's in the nature of a symbiosis that
both sides benefit, and the lobby has clearly played a huge role in
maintaining the interdependence.

The left's arguments also tend to be much too conspiratorial.
Finkelstein, for instance, describes a supposed strategy in which the
U.S. perpetually undermines Israeli-Arab reconciliation because it does
not want an Israel at peace with its neighbors, since Israel would then
loosen its dependence on the U.S. and become a less reliable proxy.
"What use," he asks, "would a Paul Wolfowitz have of an Israel living
peacefully with its Arab neighbors and less willing to do the U.S.'s
bidding?" Not only does this give the U.S. far more credit than it has
ever deserved for long-term strategic scheming and the ability to carry
out such a conspiracy, but it begs a very important question that
neither Finkelstein nor the other left critics, in their dogged effort
to mold all developments to their thesis, never examine: just what
U.S.'s bidding is Israel doing nowadays?

Although the leftist critics speak of Israel as a base from which U.S.
power is projected throughout the Middle East, they do not clearly
explain how this works. Any strategic value Israel had for the U.S.
diminished drastically with the collapse of the Soviet Union. They may
believe that Israel keeps Saudi Arabia's oil resources safe from Arab
nationalists or Muslim fundamentalists or Russia, but this is highly
questionable. Israel clearly did us no good in Lebanon, but rather the
U.S. did Israel's bidding and fumbled badly, so this cannot be how the
U.S. uses Israeli to project its power. In Palestine, Finkelstein
himself acknowledges that the U.S. gains nothing from the occupation
and Israeli settlements, so this can't be where Israel is doing the
U.S.'s bidding. (With this acknowledgement, Finkelstein, perhaps
unconsciously, seriously undermines his case against the importance of
the lobby, unless he somehow believes the occupation is only of
incidental significance, in which case he undermines the thesis of much
of his own body of writing.)

Owning the Policymakers

In the clamor over the Mearsheimer-Walt study, critics on both the left
and the right have tended to ignore the slow evolutionary history of
U.S. Middle East policymaking and of the U.S. relationship with Israel.
The ties to Israel and earlier to Zionism go back more than a century,
predating the formation of a lobby, and they have remained firm even at
periods when the lobby has waned. But it is also true that the lobby
has sustained and formalized a relationship that otherwise rests on
emotions and moral commitment. Because the bond with Israel has been a
steadily evolving continuum, dating back to well before Israel's formal
establishment, it is important to emphasize that there is no single
point at which it is possible to say, this is when Israel won the
affections of America, or this is when Israel came to be regarded as a
strategic asset, or this is when the lobby became an integral part of
U.S. policymaking.

The left critics of the lobby study mark the Johnson administration as
the beginning of the U.S.-Israeli alliance, but almost every
administration before Johnson's, going back to Woodrow Wilson,
ratcheted up the relationship in some significant way and could
justifiably claim to have been the progenitor of the bond.
Significantly, in almost all cases, policymakers acted as they did
because of the influence of pro-Zionist or pro-Israeli lobbyists:
Wilson would not have supported the Zionist enterprise to the extent he
did had it not been for the influence of Zionist colleagues like Louis
Brandeis; nor would Roosevelt; Truman would probably not have been as
supportive of establishing a Jewish state without the heavy influence
of his very pro-Zionist advisers.

After the Johnson administration as well, the relationship has
continued to grow in remarkable leaps. The Nixon-Kissinger regime could
claim that they were the administration that cemented the alliance by
exponentially increasing military aid ­ from an annual average of
under $50 million in military credits to Israel in the late 1960s to an
average of almost $400 million and, in the year following the 1973 war,
to $2.2 billion. It is not for nothing that Israelis have informally
dubbed almost every president since Johnson ­ with the notable
exceptions of Jimmy Carter and the senior George Bush ­ as "the most
pro-Israeli president ever"; each one has achieved some landmark in the
effort to please Israel.

The U.S.-Israeli bond has always had its grounding more in soft
emotions than in the hard realities of geopolitical strategy. Scholars
have always described the tie in almost spiritual terms never applied
to ties with other nations. A Palestinian-French scholar has described
the United States' pro-Israeli tilt as a "predisposition," a natural
inclination that precedes any consideration of interest or of cost.
Israel, he said, takes part in the very "being" of American society and
therefore participates in its integrity and its defense. This is not
simply the biased perspective of a Palestinian. Other scholars of
varying political inclinations have described a similar spiritual and
cultural identity: the U.S. identifies with Israel's "national style";
Israel is essential to the "ideological prospering" of the U.S.; each
country has "grafted" the heritage of the other onto itself. This
applies even to the worst aspects of each nation's heritage.
Consciously or unconsciously, many Israelis even today see the U.S.
conquest of the American Indians as something "good," something to
emulate and, which is worse, many Americans even today are happy to
accept the "compliment" inherent in Israel's effort to copy us.

This is no ordinary state-to-state relationship, and the lobby does not
function like any ordinary lobby. It is not a great exaggeration to say
that the lobby could not thrive without a very willing host ­ that is,
a series of U.S. policymaking establishments that have always been
locked in to a mindset singularly focused on Israel and its interests
­ and, at the same time, that U.S. policy in the Middle East would not
possibly have remained so singularly focused on and so tilted toward
Israel were it not for the lobby. One thing is certain: with the
possible exceptions of the Carter and the first Bush administrations,
the relationship has grown noticeably closer and more solid with each
administration, in almost exact correlation with the growth in size and
budget and political clout of the pro-Israel lobby.

All critics of the lobby study have failed to note a critical point
during the Reagan administration, surrounding the debacle in Lebanon,
when it can reasonably be said that policymaking tipped over from a
situation in which the U.S. was more often the controlling agent in the
relationship to one in which Israel and its advocates in the U.S. have
increasingly determined the course and the pace of developments. The
organized lobby, meaning AIPAC and the several formal Jewish American
organizations, truly came into its own during the Reagan years with a
massive expansion of memberships, budgets, propaganda activities, and
contacts within Congress and government, and it has been consolidating
power and influence for the last quarter century, so that today the
broadly defined lobby, including all those who work for Israel, has
become an integral part of U.S. society and U.S. policymaking.

The situation during the Reagan administration demonstrates very
clearly the closeness of the bond. The events of these years illustrate
how an already very Israel-centered mindset in the U.S., which had been
developing for decades, was transformed into a concrete,
institutionalized relationship with Israel via the offices of Israeli
supporters and agents in the U.S.

The seminal event in the growth of AIPAC and the organized lobby was
the battle over the administration's proposed sale of AWACS aircraft to
Saudi Arabia in 1981, Reagan's first year in office. Paradoxically,
although AIPAC lost this battle in a head-on struggle with Reagan and
the administration, and the sale to the Saudis went forward, AIPAC and
the lobby ultimately won the war for influence. Reagan was determined
that the sale go through; he regarded the deal as an important part of
an ill-conceived attempt to build an Arab-Israeli consensus in the
Middle East to oppose the Soviet Union and, perhaps even more
important, saw the battle in Congress as a test of his own prestige. By
winning the battle, he demonstrated that any administration, at least
up to that point, could exert enough pressure to push an issue opposed
by Israel through Congress, but the struggle also demonstrated just how
exhausting and politically costly such a battle can be, and no one
around Reagan was willing to go to the mat in this way again. In a real
sense, despite AIPAC's loss, the fight showed just how much the lobby
limited policymaker freedom, even more than 20 years ago, in any
transaction that concerned Israel.

The AWACS imbroglio galvanized AIPAC into action, at precisely the time
the administration was subsiding in exhaustion, and under an aggressive
and energetic leader, former congressional aide Thomas Dine, AIPAC
quadrupled its budget, increased its grassroots support immensely, and
vastly expanded its propaganda effort. This last and perhaps most
significant accomplishment was achieved when Dine established an
analytical unit inside AIPAC that published in-depth analyses and
position papers for congressmen and policymakers. Dine believed that
anyone who could provide policymakers with books and papers focusing on
Israel's strategic value to the U.S. would effectively "own" the
policymakers.

With the rising power and influence of the lobby, and following the
U.S. debacle in Lebanon ­ which began with Israel's 1982 invasion and
ended for the U.S. with the withdrawal of its Marine contingent in
early 1984, after the Marines had become involved in fighting to
protect Israel's invasion force and 241 U.S. military had been killed
in a truck bombing ­ the Reagan administration effectively handed over
the policy initiative in the Middle East to Israel and its American
advocates.

Israel and its agents began, with amazing effrontery, to complain that
the U.S. failure to clean up in Lebanon was interfering with Israel's
own designs there ­ from which arrogance Reagan and company concluded,
in an astounding twist of logic, that the only way to restore stability
was through closer alliance with Israel. As a result, in the fall of
1983 Reagan sent a delegation to ask the Israelis for closer strategic
ties, and shortly thereafter forged a formal strategic alliance with
Israel with the signing of a "memorandum of understanding on strategic
cooperation." In 1987, the U.S. designated Israel a "major non-NATO
ally," thus giving it access to military technology not available
otherwise. The notion of demanding concessions from Israel in return
for this favored status ­ such as, for instance, some restraint in its
settlement-construction in the West Bank ­ was specifically rejected.
The U.S. simply very deliberately and abjectly retreated into policy
inaction, leaving Israel with a free hand to proceed as it wished
wherever it wished in the Middle East and particularly in the occupied
Palestinian territories.

Even Israel, by all accounts, was surprised by this demonstration of
the United States' inability to see beyond Israel's interests. Prime
Minister Menachem Begin had attempted from early in the Carter
administration to push the notion that Israel was a strategic Cold War
asset to the U.S. but, because Israel did not in fact perform a
significant strategic role for the U.S. and was in many ways more a
liability than an asset, Carter never paid serious attention to the
Israeli overtures. Begin feared that the United States' moral and
emotional commitment to Israel might ultimately not be enough to
sustain the relationship through possible hard times, and so he
attempted to put Israel forward as a strategically indispensable ally
and a good investment for U.S. security, a move that would essentially
reverse the two nations' roles, altering the relationship from one of
Israeli indebtedness to the U.S. to one in which the United States was
in Israel's debt for its vital strategic role.

Carter was having none of this, but the notion of strategic cooperation
germinated in Israel and among its U.S. supporters until the moment
became ripe during the Reagan administration. By the end of the Lebanon
mess, the notion that the U.S. needed Israel's friendship had so taken
hold among the Reaganites that, as one former national security aide
observed in a stunning upending of logic, they began to view closer
strategic ties as a necessary means of "restor[ing] Israeli confidence
in American reliability." Secretary of State George Shultz wrote in his
memoirs years later of the U.S. need "to lift the albatross of Lebanon
from Israel's neck." Recall, as Shultz must not have been able to do,
that the debt here was rightly Israel's: Israel put the albatross
around its own neck, and the U.S. stumbled into Lebanon after Israel,
not the other way around.

AIPAC and the neo-conservatives who rose to prominence during the
Reagan years played a major role in building the strategic alliance.
AIPAC in particular became in every sense of the word a partner of the
U.S. in forging Middle East policy from the mid-1980s on. Thomas Dine's
vision of "owning" policymakers by providing them with position papers
geared to Israel's interests went into full swing. In 1984, AIPAC spun
off a think tank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, that
remains one of the pre-eminent think tanks in Washington and that has
sent its analysts into policymaking jobs in several administrations.
Dennis Ross, the senior Middle East policymaker in the administrations
of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, came from the Washington
Institute and returned there after leaving government service. Martin
Indyk, the Institute's first director, entered a senior policymaking
position in the Clinton administration from there.

Today, John Hannah, who has served on Vice President Cheney's national
security staff since 2001 and succeeded Lewis Libby last year as
Cheney's leading national security adviser, comes from the Institute.
AIPAC also continues to do its own analyses in addition to the
Washington Institute's. A recent Washington Post profile of Steven
Rosen, the former senior AIPAC foreign policy analyst who is about to
stand trial with a colleague for receiving and passing on classified
information to Israel, noted that two decades ago Rosen began a
practice of lobbying the executive branch, rather than simply
concentrating on Congress, as a way, in the words of the Post article,
"to alter American foreign policy" by "influencing government from the
inside." Over the years, he "had a hand in writing several policies
favored by Israel."

In the Reagan years, AIPAC's position papers were particularly welcomed
by an administration already more or less convinced of Israel's
strategic value and obsessed with impeding Soviet advances.
Policymakers began negotiating with AIPAC before presenting legislation
in order to help assure passage, and Congress consulted the lobby on
pending legislation. Congress eagerly embraced almost every legislative
initiative proposed by the lobby and came to rely on AIPAC for
information on all issues related to the Middle East. The close
cooperation between the administration and AIPAC soon began to stifle
discourse inside the bureaucracy. Middle East experts in the State
Department and other agencies were almost completely cut out of
decision-making, and officials throughout government became
increasingly unwilling to propose policies or put forth analysis likely
to arouse opposition from AIPAC or Congress. One unnamed official
complained that "a lot of real analysis is not even getting off
people's desks for fear of what the lobby will do"; he was speaking to
a New York Times correspondent, but otherwise his complaints fell on
deaf ears.

This kind of pervasive influence, a chill on discourse inside as well
as outside policymaking councils, does not require the sort of
clear-cut, concrete pro-Israeli decisions in the Oval Office that David
Gergen naively thought he should have witnessed if the lobby had any
real influence. This kind of influence, which uses friendly persuasion,
along with just enough direct pressure, on a broad range of
policymakers, legislators, media commentators, and grassroots activists
to make an impression across the spectrum, cannot be defined in terms
of narrow, concrete policy commands, but becomes an unchanging,
unchallengeable mindset, a sentimental environment that restricts
debate, restricts thinking, and determines actions and policies as
surely as any command from on high. When Israel's advocates, its
lobbyists, in the U.S. become an integral part of the policymaking
apparatus, as they have particularly since the Reagan years ­ and as
they clearly have been during the current Bush administration ­ there
is no way to separate the lobby's interests from U.S. policies.
Moreover, because Israel's strategic goals in the region are more
clearly defined and more urgent than those of the United States,
Israel's interests most often dominate.

Chomsky himself acknowledges that the lobby plays a significant part in
shaping the political environment in which support for Israel becomes
automatic and unquestioned. Even Chomsky believes that what he calls
the intellectual political class is a critical, and perhaps the most
influential, component of the lobby because these elites determine the
shaping of news and information in the media and academia. On the other
hand, he contends that, because the lobby already includes most of this
intellectual political class, the thesis of lobby power "loses much of
its content". But, on the contrary, this very fact would seem to prove
the point, not undermine it. The fact of the lobby's pervasiveness, far
from rendering it less powerful, magnifies its importance tremendously.

Indeed, this is the crux of the entire debate. It is the very power of
the lobby to continue shaping the public mindset, to mold thinking and,
perhaps most important, to instill fear of deviation that brings this
intellectual political class together in an unswerving determination to
work for Israel. Is there not a heavy impact on Middle East
policymaking when, for instance, a lobby has the power to force the
electoral defeat of long-serving congressmen, as occurred to
Representative Paul Findley in 1982 and Senator Charles Percy in 1984
after both had deviated from political correctness by speaking out in
favor of negotiating with the PLO? AIPAC openly crowed about the defeat
of both men ­ both Republicans serving during the Republican Reagan
administration, who had been in Congress for 22 and 18 years
respectively. Similarly, does not the media's silence on Israel's
oppressive measures in the occupied territories, as well as the
concerted, and openly acknowledged, efforts of virtually every
pro-Israeli organization in the U.S. to suppress information and quash
debate on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, have an immense impact on
policy? Today, even the most outspoken of leftist radio hosts and other
commentators, such as Randi Rhodes, Mike Malloy, and now Cindy Sheehan,
almost always avoid talking and writing about this issue.

Does not the massive effort by AIPAC, the Washington Institute, and
myriad other similar organizations to spoon-feed policymakers and
congressmen selective information and analysis written only from
Israel's perspective have a huge impact on policy? In the end, even
Chomsky and Finkelstein acknowledge the power of the lobby in
suppressing discussion and debate about Middle East policy. The
mobilization of public opinion, Finkelstein writes, "can have a real
impact on policy-making ­ which is why the Lobby invests so much
energy in suppressing discussion." It is difficult to read statement
except as a ringing acknowledgement of the massive and very central
power of the lobby to control discourse and to control policymaking on
the most critical Middle East policy issue.

Interchangeable Interests

The principal problem with the left critics' analysis is that it is too
rigid. There is no question that Israel has served the interests of the
U.S. government and the military-industrial complex in many areas of
the world by, for instance, aiding some of the rightist regimes of
Central America, by skirting arms and trade embargoes against apartheid
South Africa and China (until the neo-conservatives turned off the tap
to China and, in a rare disagreement with Israel, forced it to halt),
and during the Cold War by helping, at least indirectly, to hold down
Arab radicalism. There is also no question that, no matter which party
has been in power, the U.S. has over the decades advanced an
essentially conservative global political and pro-business agenda in
areas far afield of the Middle East, without reference to Israel or the
lobby. The U.S. unseated Mossadegh in Iran and Arbenz in Guatemala and
Allende in Chile, along with many others, for its own corporate and
political purposes, as the left critics note, and did not use Israel.

But these facts do not minimize the power the lobby has exerted in
countless instances over the course of decades, and particularly in
recent years, to lead the U.S. into situations that Israel initiated,
that the U.S. did not plan, and that have done harm, both singly and
cumulatively, to U.S. interests. One need only ask whether particular
policies would have been adopted in the absence of pressure from some
influential persons and organizations working on Israel's behalf in
order to see just how often Israel or its advocates in the U.S., rather
than the United States or even U.S. corporations, have been the policy
initiators. The answers give clear evidence that a lobby, as broadly
defined by Mearsheimer and Walt, has played a critical and, as the
decades have gone on, increasingly influential role in policymaking.

For instance, would Harry Truman have been as supportive of
establishing Israel as a Jewish state if it had not been for heavy
pressure from what was then a very loose grouping of strong Zionists
with considerable influence in policymaking circles? It can reasonably
be argued that he might not in fact have supported Jewish statehood at
all, and it is even more likely that his own White House advisers ­
all strong Zionist proponents themselves ­ would not have twisted arms
at the United Nations to secure the 1947 vote in favor of partitioning
Palestine if these lobbyists had not been a part of Truman's
policymaking circle. Truman himself did not initially support the
notion of founding a state based on religion, and every national
security agency of government, civilian and military , strongly opposed
the partition of Palestine out of fear that this would lead to warfare
in which the U.S. might have to intervene, would enhance the Soviet
position in the Middle East, and would endanger U.S. oil interests in
the area. But even in the face of this united opposition from within
his own government, Truman found the pressures of the Zionists among
his close advisers and among influential friends of the administration
and of the Democratic Party too overwhelmingly strong to resist.

Questions like this arise for virtually every presidential
administration. Would Jimmy Carter, for instance, have dropped his
pursuit of a resolution of the Palestinian problem if the Israel lobby
had not exerted intense pressure on him? Carter was the first president
to recognize the Palestinian need for some kind of "homeland," as he
termed it, and he made numerous efforts to bring Palestinians into a
negotiating process and to stop Israeli settlement-building, but
opposition from Israel and pressures from the lobby were so heavy that
he was ultimately worn down and defeated.

It is also all but impossible to imagine the U.S. supporting Israel's
actions in the occupied Palestinian territories without pressure from
the lobby. No conceivable U.S. national interest served ­ even in the
United States' own myopic view ­ by its support for Israel's harshly
oppressive policy in the West Bank and Gaza, and furthermore this
support is a dangerous liability. As Mearsheimer and Walt note, most
foreign elites view the U.S. tolerance of Israeli repression as
"morally obtuse and a handicap in the war on terrorism," and this
tolerance is a major cause of terrorism against the U.S. and the West.
The impetus for oppressing the Palestinians clearly comes and has
always come from Israel, not the United States, and the impetus for
supporting Israel and facilitating this oppression has come, very
clearly and directly, from the lobby, which goes to great lengths to
justify the occupation and to advocate on behalf of Israeli policies.

It is tempting, and not at all out of the realm of possibility, to
imagine Bill Clinton having forged a final Palestinian-Israeli peace
agreement were it not for the influence of his notably pro-Israeli
advisers. By the time Clinton came to office, the lobby had become a
part of the policymaking apparatus, in the persons of Israeli advocates
Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk, both of whom entered government service
from lobby organizations. Both also returned at the end of the Clinton
administration to organizations that advocate for Israel: Ross to the
Washington Institute and Indyk to the Brookings Institution's Saban
Center for Middle East Policy, which is financed by and named for a
notably pro-Israeli benefactor. The scope of the lobby's infiltration
of government policymaking councils has been unprecedented during the
current Bush administration. Some of the left critics dismiss the
neo-cons as not having any allegiance to Israel; Finkelstein thinks it
is naïve to credit them with any ideological conviction, and Zunes
claims they are uninterested in benefiting Israel because they are not
religious Jews (as if only religious Jews care about Israel). But it
simply ignores reality to deny the neo-cons' very close ties, both
ideological and pragmatic, to Israel's right wing.

Both Finkelstein and Zunes glaringly fail to mention the strategy paper
that several neo-cons wrote in the mid-1990s for an Israeli prime
minister, laying out a plan for attacking Iraq these same neo-cons
later carried out upon entering the Bush administration. The strategy
was designed both to assure Israel's regional dominance in the Middle
East and to enhance U.S. global hegemony. One of these authors, David
Wurmser, remains in government as Cheney's Middle East adviser ­ one
of several lobbyists inside the henhouse. The openly trumpeted plan,
crafted by the neo-cons, is to "transform" the Middle East by unseating
Saddam Hussein, and the notion, also openly touted, that the path to
peace in Palestine-Israel ran through Baghdad grew out of the neo-cons'
overriding concern for Israel. Both Finkelstein and Zunes also fail to
take note of the long record of advocacy on behalf of Israel that
almost all the neo-cons (Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith,
David Wurmser, Elliott Abrams, John Bolton, and their cheerleaders on
the sidelines such as William Kristol, Robert Kagan, Norman Podhoretz,
Jeane Kirkpatrick, and numerous right-wing, pro-Israeli think tanks in
Washington) have compiled over the years. The fact that these
individuals and organizations are all also advocates of U.S. global
hegemony does not diminish their allegiance to Israel or their desire
to assure Israel's regional hegemony in alliance with the U.S.

The claimed interchangeability of U.S. and Israeli interests ­ and the
fact that certain individuals for whom a primary objective is to
advance Israel's interests now reside inside the councils of government
­ proves the truth of the Mearsheimer-Walt's principal conclusion that
the lobby has been able to convince most Americans, contrary to
reality, that there is an essential identity of U.S. and Israeli
interests and that the lobby has succeeded for this reason in forging a
relationship of unmatched intimacy. The "overall thrust of policy" in
the Middle East, they observe quite accurately, is "almost entirely"
attributable to the lobby's activities. The fact that the U.S.
occasionally acts without reference to Israel in areas outside the
Middle East, and that Israel does occasionally serve U.S. interests
rather than the other way around, takes nothing away from the
significance of this conclusion.

The tragedy of the present situation is that it has become impossible
to separate Israeli from alleged U.S. interests ­ that is, not what
should be real U.S. national interests, but the selfish and
self-defined "national interests" of the political-corporate-military
complex that dominates the Bush administration, Congress, and both
major political parties. The specific groups that now dominate the U.S.
government are the globalized arms, energy, and financial industries,
and the entire military establishments, of the U.S. and of Israel ­
groups that have quite literally hijacked the government and stripped
it of most vestiges of democracy.

This convergence of manipulated "interests" has a profound effect on
U.S. policy choices in the Middle East. When a government is unable to
distinguish its own real needs from those of another state, it can no
longer be said that it always acts in its own interests or that it does
not frequently do grave damage to those interests. Until the system of
sovereign nation-states no longer exists ­ and that day may never come
­ no nation's choices should ever be defined according to the demands
of another nation. Accepting a convergence of U.S. and Israeli
interests means that the U.S. can never act entirely as its own agent,
will never examine its policies and actions entirely from the vantage
point of its own long-term self interest, and can, therefore, never
know why it is devising and implementing a particular policy. The
failure to recognize this reality is where the left critics' belittling
of the lobby's power and their acceptance of U.S. Middle East policy as
simply an unchangeable part of a longstanding strategy is particularly
dangerous.

Kathleen Christison is a former CIA political analyst and has worked on
Middle East issues for 30 years. She is the author of Perceptions of
Palestine and The Wound of Dispossession.

Bill Christison was a senior official of the CIA. He served as a
National Intelligence Officer and as Director of the CIA's Office of
Regional and Political Analysis. He is a contributor to Imperial
Crusades, CounterPunch's history of the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan.

They can be reached at kathy.bill@christison-santafe.com.