Opinion | Columnists
Israel lobby calls the shots in US
Presidential candidates will go to extremes, often pathetic extremes, to woo the American Jewish community.
- By Fawaz Turki, Special to Gulf News
- Published: 00:04 August 2, 2008
A funny thing happened to Barack Obama on the way to Palestine recently - he chose to forget that there were Palestinians there who had lived and suffered grievously under a foreign occupation for 40 years.
In Israel, he visited Sderot, the town abutting the Gaza border, to express solemn sympathy for the 13 civilians killed there by Gazan militants in recent years, making no reference to the fact that this would equal the number of Palestinians killed by Israelis on a slow weekend. In the West Bank, where his motorcade skirted that wall of hate snaking in places for miles into Palestinian territory, and where for four decades Palestinians have had to endure checkpoints, land expropriation, curfews and collective punishment, there was nary a word of commiseration for the victims.
By why blame Obama, an American politician, for being an American politician? The man was trolling for American Jewish votes back home, and where else do American politicians traditionally go to do that but Israel, for which you're expected to demonstrate your undying love? That's the way it has always been for presidential candidates, who rarely worry about adjusting their comments to accomodate Arab-American internet groups but are always mindful to appease a well-organised, affluent and influential Jewish lobby. And this goes back, all the way back, to president Harry Truman who once famously remarked, "In all of my political experience, I don't ever recall the Arab vote swinging a close election".
The Jewish vote, however, does swing an election. And candidates for public office, including presidential aspirants, will go to extremes, often pathetic extremes, to get the votes of the Jewish community.
Look at it this way: As early as 2007, the field was crowded with presidential hopefuls who profoundly disagreed on issues facing the nation, but they all spoke with one voice about Israel, "competing to see who can be most strident in defense of the Jewish state", as Jewish Week reported at the time. It is always so for a presidential candidate, and remains so for a president in the White House.
Seminal work
As John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, the two prominent academics whose seminal work, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, which caused a firestorm upon its publication last year, explained: "There is no compelling moral rationale for America's uncritical and uncompromising relationship with Israel ... [G]iven Israel's brutal treatment of the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, moral consideration might suggest that the United States pursue a more evenhanded policy towards the two sides, and maybe even lean towards the Palestinians. Yet we are unlikely to hear that sentiment expressed by anyone who wants to be president, or anyone who wants to occupy a position in Congress".
To be sure, the influence of the Jewish community in the US, contrary to the view of Arab conspiracy theorists, is not due to the existence of a Jewish cabal that exercises underhand power over the legislative and executive branches of government. That community is simply actively engaged, and its members are educated, affluent and wield major clout in the world of academe, the media, literature and the arts, which translates into a formidably sophisticated, not to mention powerful, pressure group that seeks to swing US foreign policy in a direction responsive to Israel's interests. And lobbying your political representatives is as old as the hills in the Euro-American tradition, going back to the 1870s in Britain when favour-seeking constituents would wait in the lobby, outside the chambers at Westminster, to collar their elected parliamentarians, demanding that close attention be paid to their wishes.
And in the US, when issues relating to Israel come up for debate, Congressmen always vote, almost without exception, and almost always in overwhelming numbers, to endorse the Jewish lobby's wishes.
The Jewish community in the US may be small (at six million, it represents a mere 3 per cent of the population), but it can wield disproportionate influence in both the political process and the public debate, not only because Jewish Americans tend to be articulate, focused and well organised, but also because the existence of a weak or bumbling opposing interest group, in this case an Arab-American lobby, makes it easier for the public to hear only one side of the story.
Moreover, Jewish Americans are traditionally generous with their campaign donations. According to an article in the Washington Post in March 2003, it is estimated that presidential candidates from the Democratic party "depend on Jewish supporters to supply as much as 60 per cent of the money raised from private sources". You get the bulk of your funds from Jewish Americans and the odds are you will back Israel down the line, and escape the fate of Howard Dean who in the 2004 presidential campaign was accused of "selling Israel down the river" because he recommended (the horror of it!) that the US adopt a more "even-handed" policy in the Palestine conflict.
And no, I don't blame Obama, an American politician running for office, for those pathetic statements he made publicly in Palestine last week, anymore than I blame the beast of prey for being a beast of prey. If you run for office, you don't say out loud - for all Jewish voters to hear - what you feel privately about that part of the world.
Still, Barack, I want back that hundred bucks I contributed to your primary campaign last March when I had thought you were a a genuine idealist.
Fawaz Turki is a veteran journalist, lecturer and author of several books, including The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile. He lives in Washington D.C.
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