The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy

“As Ben-Gurion told Nahum Goldmann, president of the World Jewish Congress, in 1956, “If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it’s true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been antisemitism, 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?”78”

“Of course, Menachem Begin, who headed the Irgun and later became prime minister, was one of the most prominent Jewish terrorists in the years before Israeli independence. When speaking of Begin, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol often referred to him simply as “the terrorist.”120 The Palestinians’ use of terrorism is morally reprehensible today, but so was the Zionists’ reliance on it in the past. Thus, one cannot justify American support for Israel on the grounds that its past or present conduct was morally superior.”

“Netanyahu also published an op-ed in the Chicago Sun-Times declaring, “No grievance, real or imagined, can ever justify terror … American power topples the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, and the al-Qaida network there crumbles on its own. The United States must now act similarly against the other terror regimes—Iran, Iraq, Yasser Arafat’s dictatorship, Syria, and a few others.”44 His successor, Ehud Barak, repeated this theme in an op-ed in the Times of London, declaring, “The world’s governments know exactly who the terrorists are and exactly which rogue states support and promote their activity. Countries like Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan and North Korea have a proven track-record of sponsoring terrorism, while no one needs reminding of the carnage wrought by the terrorist thugs of Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, and even Yassir Arafat’s own PLO.”45”

“The absence of serious deliberation when Israel is involved was revealed in a hearing on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process held on February 14, 2007, by the Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia in the House of Representatives. With Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice trying to restart the moribund peace process, the subcommittee sought testimony from three witnesses. Despite”

“The Israel lobby is not a cabal or conspiracy or anything of the sort. It is engaged in good old-fashioned interest group politics, which is as American as apple pie.”

“Israelis and their supporters in the United States long claimed that the Arabs fled because their leaders told them to, but scholars have demolished this myth. In”

“Israel gets its aid despite its refusal to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty and its various WMD programs. It gets its aid when it builds settlements in the Occupied Territories (losing only a small amount through reductions in loan guarantees), even though the U.S. government opposes this policy. It also gets its aid when it annexes territory it has conquered (as it did on the Golan Heights and in Jerusalem), sells U.S. military technology to potential enemies like China, conducts espionage operations on U.S. soil, or uses U.S. weapons in ways that violate U.S. law (such as the use of cluster munitions in civilian areas in Lebanon). It gets additional aid when it makes concessions for peace, but it rarely loses American support when it takes actions that make peace more elusive.”

“To be sure, America has occasionally withheld aid temporarily in order to express displeasure over particular Israeli actions, but such gestures are usually symbolic and short-lived, and have little lasting effect on Israeli conduct.”

“A final reason to question Israel’s strategic value is that it sometimes does not act like a loyal ally. Like most states, Israel looks first and foremost to its own interests, and it has been willing to do things contrary to American interests when it believed (rightly or wrongly) that doing so would advance its own national goals. In the notorious “Lavon affair” in 1954, for example, Israeli agents tried to bomb several U.S. government offices in Egypt, in a bungled attempt to sow discord between Washington and Cairo. Israel sold military supplies to Iran while U.S. diplomats were being held hostage there in 1979–80, and it was one of Iran’s main military suppliers during the Iran-Iraq War, even though the United States was worried about Iran and tacitly backing Iraq. Israel later purchased $36 million worth of Iranian oil in 1989 in an attempt to obtain the release of Israeli hostages in Lebanon. All of these acts made sense from Israel’s point of view, but they were contrary to American policy and harmful to overall U.S. interests.90”

“Kennedy stepped up the pressure the following year, however, sending both Ben-Gurion and his successor, Levi Eshkol, several stern letters demanding biannual inspections “in accord with international standards” and warning that “this Government’s commitment to and support of Israel could be seriously jeopardized” if the United States were unable to resolve its concerns about Israel’s nuclear ambitions.65 Kennedy’s threats convinced Israel’s leaders to permit additional visits, but the concession did not lead to compliance. As Eshkol reportedly told his colleagues after receiving Kennedy’s July 1963 demarche:”

“AIPAC itself had explicitly Zionist roots: its founder, I. L. “Si” Kenen, was head of the American Zionist Council in 1951, which was a registered foreign lobbying group. Kenen reorganized it as a U.S. lobbying organization—the American Zionist Committee for Public Affairs—in 1953–54, and the new organization was renamed AIPAC in 1959.”

“In early 2007, Benjamin Netanyahu apologized to ultra-Orthodox Israelis with large families for the hardships that were caused by welfare cuts that he had made in 2002 when he was finance minister. He noted, however, that there was at least one important and unexpected benefit of these cuts: “there was a”

“The discrepancy arises in part because Israel gets its aid under more favorable terms than most other recipients of U.S. assistance.17 Most recipients of American foreign aid get their money in quarterly installments, but since 1982, the annual foreign aid bill has included a special clause specifying that Israel is to receive its entire annual appropriation in the first thirty days of the fiscal year.18 This is akin to receiving your entire annual salary on January 1 and thus being able to earn interest on the unspent portion until you used it.”

“Amplifying these tensions is the extensive espionage that Israel engages in against the United States. According to the GAO, the Jewish state “conducts the most aggressive espionage operations against the United States of any ally.”95 Stealing economic secrets gives Israeli firms important advantages over American businesses in the global marketplace and thus imposes additional costs on U.S. citizens. More worrying, however, are Israel’s continued efforts to steal America’s military secrets. This problem is highlighted by the infamous case of Jonathan Pollard, an American intelligence analyst who gave Israel large quantities of highly classified material between 1984 and 1985. After Pollard was caught, the Israelis refused to tell the United States what Pollard gave them.96 The Pollard case is but the most visible tip of a larger iceberg. Israeli agents tried to steal spy-camera technology from a U.S. firm in 1986, and an arbitration panel later accused Israel of “perfidious,” “unlawful,” and “surreptitious” conduct and ordered it to pay the firm, Recon/Optical Inc., some $3 million in damages. Israeli spies also gained access to confidential U.S. information about a Pentagon electronic intelligence program and tried unsuccessfully to recruit Noel Koch, a senior counterterrorism official in the Defense Department. The Wall Street Journal quoted John Davitt, former head of the Justice Department’s internal security section, saying that “those of us who worked in the espionage area regarded Israel as being the second most active foreign intelligence service in the United States.”97 A new controversy erupted in 2004 when a key Pentagon official, Larry Franklin, was arrested on charges of passing classified information regarding U.S. policy toward Iran to an Israeli diplomat, allegedly with the assistance of two senior AIPAC officials, Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman. Franklin eventually accepted a plea bargain and was sentenced to twelve years in prison for his role in the affair, and Rosen and Weissman are scheduled to go on trial in the fall of 2007.98”

“In 1997, when Fortune magazine asked members of Congress and their staffs to list the most powerful lobbies in Washington, AIPAC came in second behind AARP but ahead of heavyweight lobbies like the AFL-CIO and the NRA.14 A National Journal study in March 2005 reached a similar conclusion, placing AIPAC in second place (tied with AARP) in Washington’s “muscle rankings.”15 Former Congressman Mervyn Dymally (D-CA) once called AIPAC “without question the most effective lobby in Congress,” and the former chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Lee Hamilton, who served in Congress for thirty-four years, said in 1991, “There’s no lobby group that matches it … They’re in a class by themselves.”16”

“In fact, the Gulf War in 1991 provided evidence that Israel was becoming a strategic burden. The United States and its allies eventually assembled more than four hundred thousand troops to liberate Kuwait, but they could not use Israeli bases or allow the IDF to participate without jeopardizing the fragile coalition against Iraq. And when Saddam fired Scud missiles into Israel in the hope of provoking an Israeli response that would fracture the coalition, Washington had to divert resources (such as Patriot missile batteries) to defend Israel and to keep it on the sidelines. Israel was not to blame for this situation, of course, but it illustrates the extent to which it was becoming a liability rather than an asset.”

“Prior to the Six-Day War, for example, Israeli intelligence assessments painted a grim and frightening picture of Egyptian capabilities and intentions, which American intelligence officials believed was both incorrect and politically motivated. As National Security Adviser W. W. Rostow told President Johnson, “We do not believe that the Israeli appreciation presented … was a serious estimate of the sort they would submit to their own high officials. We think it is probably a gambit intended to influence the US to do one or more of the following: (a) provide military supplies, (b) make more public commitments to Israel, (c) approve Israeli military initiatives, and (d) put more pressure on Nasser.”25 As”

“imagine how transfer could be accomplished without “brutal compulsion,” Ben-Gurion went on to say that the Zionists should not “discourage other people, British or American, who favour transfer from advocating this course, but we should in no way make it part of our programme.”70 He was not rejecting this policy, however; he was simply noting that the Zionists should not openly proclaim it. Further reflecting how “highly sensitive” the subject of transfer was to Israel’s founding fathers, Benny Morris notes that “it was common practice in Zionist bodies to order stenographers to ‘take a break’ and thus to exclude from the record discussion on such matters.” Moreover, he notes that “Jewish press reports” describing how Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders reacted to the Peel Commission’s plan for partitioning Palestine “generally failed to mention that Ben-Gurion, or anyone else, had come out strongly in favor of transfer or indeed had even raised the subject.”71”

“The Zionists’ ambitions also went beyond a permanent partition of Palestine. It is widely believed in the United States, especially among Israel’s supporters, that the Zionists were willing to agree to a permanently partitioned Palestine, and indeed they did agree to the partition plans put forward by Britain’s Peel Commission in 1937 and the UN in 1947. But their acceptance of these plans did not mean that they intended to accept only part of Palestine in perpetuity, or that they were willing to support the creation of a Palestinian state. As recent scholarship makes abundantly clear, the Zionist leadership was sometimes willing to accept partition as a first step, but this was a tactical maneuver and not their real objective. They had no intention of coexisting alongside a viable Palestinian state over the long run, as that outcome was in direct conflict with their dream of creating a Jewish state in all of Palestine. There was fierce opposition among the Zionists to the Peel Commission’s partition plan, and their leader, David Ben-Gurion, was barely able to get his fellow Zionists to accept it. They eventually agreed to the proposal, however, because they recognized that Ben-Gurion intended eventually to take all of the land of Palestine. The Zionist leader made this point clearly in the summer of 1937 when he told the Zionist Executive, “After the formation of a large army in the wake of the establishment of the state, we will abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine.” Similarly, he told his son Amos that same year, “Erect a”

“When Israel ignored UN demands that it halt work on a canal to divert water from the Jordan River in September 1953, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles promptly announced that the United States was suspending foreign assistance. The threat worked: Israel agreed to stop the project on October 27 and U.S. aid was restored.5 Similar threats to halt American aid played a key role in convincing Israel to withdraw from the territory it had seized from Egypt in the 1956 Suez War.”

“Second, these organizations go to considerable lengths to ensure that public discourse about Israel is favorable and that it echoes the strategic and moral rationales discussed in Chapters 2 and 3. We”

“The irony is hard to miss: the United States has pressured many other states to join the NPT, imposed sanctions on countries that have defied U.S. wishes and acquired nuclear weapons anyway, gone to war in 2003 to prevent Iraq from pursuing WMD, and contemplated attacking Iran and North Korea for the same reason. Yet Washington has long subsidized an ally whose clandestine WMD activities are well-known and whose nuclear arsenal has given several of its neighbors a powerful incentive to seek WMD themselves.”

“70 The irony is hard to miss: the United States has pressured many other states to join the NPT, imposed sanctions on countries that have defied U.S. wishes and acquired nuclear weapons anyway, gone to war in 2003 to prevent Iraq from pursuing WMD, and contemplated attacking Iran and North Korea for the same reason. Yet Washington has long subsidized an ally whose clandestine WMD activities are well-known and whose nuclear arsenal has given several of its neighbors a powerful incentive to seek WMD themselves.”

“ECONOMIC AID The most obvious indicator of Israel’s favored position is the total amount of foreign aid it has received from America’s taxpayers. As of 2005, direct U.S. economic and military assistance to Israel amounted to nearly $154 billion (in 2005 dollars), the bulk of it comprising direct grants rather than loans.2 As discussed below, the actual total is significantly higher, because direct U.S. aid is given under unusually favorable terms and the United States provides Israel with other forms of material assistance that are not included in the foreign assistance budget.”

“Benny Morris speculates that “the Arabs may well have learned the value of terrorist bombings from the Jews.”116 Between 1944 and 1947, several Zionist organizations used terrorist attacks to drive the British from Palestine and took the lives of many innocent civilians along the way.117”

“After the war, Israel barred the return of the Palestinian exiles. As Ben-Gurion put it in June 1948, “We must prevent at all costs their return.”74 By 1962, Israel owned almost 93 percent of the land inside its borders.75 To achieve this outcome, 531 Arab villages were destroyed “and eleven urban neighborhoods emptied of their inhabitants.”76”

“One might think that U.S. generosity would give Washington considerable leverage over Israel’s conduct, but this has not been the case. When dealing with Israel, in fact, U.S. leaders can usually elicit cooperation only by offering additional carrots (increased assistance) rather than employing sticks (threats to withhold aid). For example, the Israeli Cabinet agreed to publicly endorse UN Resolution 242—which, originally passed in November 1967, called for Israel’s withdrawal from territories seized in the Six-Day War—only after President Richard Nixon gave private assurances that Israel would receive additional U.S. aircraft.”

“The Israel Democracy Institute reported in May 2003 that 57 percent of Israel’s Jews “think that the Arabs should be encouraged to emigrate.” A 2004 survey conducted by Haifa University’s Center for the Study of National Security found that the number had increased to 63.7 percent. One year later, in 2005, the Palestinian Center for Israel Studies found that 42 percent of Israeli Jews believed that their government should encourage Israeli Arabs to leave, while another 17 percent tended to agree with the idea. The following year, the Center for Combating Racism found that 40 percent of Israel’s Jews wanted their leaders to encourage the Arab population to emigrate, while the Israel Democracy Institute found the number to be 62 percent.49 If 40 percent or more of white Americans declared that blacks, Hispanics, and Asians “should be encouraged” to leave the United States, it would surely prompt vehement criticism.”

“dramatic drop in the birth rate” within the “non-Jewish public.”45 For Netanyahu, like many Israelis who are deeply worried about the so-called Arab demographic threat, the fewer Israeli Arab births, the better. Netanyahu’s comments would almost certainly be condemned if made in the United States. Imagine the outcry that would arise here if a U.S. cabinet official spoke of the benefits of a policy that had reduced the birthrates of African Americans and Hispanics, thereby preserving a white majority. But such statements are not unusual in Israel, where important leaders have a history of making derogatory comments about Palestinians and are rarely sanctioned for them. Menachem Begin once said that “Palestinians are beasts walking on two legs,” while former IDF Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan referred to them as “drugged roaches in a bottle” and also said that “a good Arab is a dead Arab.” Another former chief of staff, Moshe Ya’alon, referred to the Palestinian threat as like a “cancer” on which he was performing “chemotherapy.”46”

“Ben-Ami goes even farther, writing that Yitzhak Rabin, the IDF chief of staff, “intentionally led Israel into a war with Syria. Rabin was determined to provoke a war with Syria … because he thought this was the only way to stop the Syrians from supporting Fatah attacks against Israel.”25”