Israel no longer a key US asset

President George Washington in his Farewell Address, 1796, presciently warned his fellow countrymen about passionate attachment to a foreign country. A "passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils.

Sympathy for the favourite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification," Washington said.

But that is what has exactly happened in the US-Israel special relationship. Two pre-eminent American professors, John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, and Stephen Walt of Harvard University, set out to bodaciously explain the special relationship in an article published in London Review of Books (March 23, 2006).

Mearsheimer and Walt argued that "for the past several decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the centrepiece of US Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with Israel."

The authors ask a key question: "Why has the US been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another state?" Before explaining their case the authors deconstruct the usual explanation given for the special relationship and they take no prisoners. The argument that Israel is a strategic asset is thoroughly panned by them.

Even if one concedes that Israel was once a strategic asset during the Cold War, Israel has become a liability since, Mearsheimer and Walt argued. The relationship is quite costly and complicates the relationship with Arab countries.

The US decision to provide emergency military aid during the October War of 1973 "triggered an Opec oil embargo that inflicted considerable damage on Western economies". And for all of this price Israel was of no value when push had came to shove. Israel was utterly unable to protect the Shah of Iran during the 1979 Revolution, and proved to be a strategic burden during the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq.

Common enemy

The authors even dispute the notion that the US and Israel are facing a common enemy in terrorism since 1990, especially after 9/11: The causal relationship between the two is in reverse. The "US has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel, not the other way around. 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."

Moreover, Israel has shown itself to be an unfaithful ally as the cases of spying by Israel against the US would show; not to speak of passing sensitive military technology to the US potential rival, China, prompting the US Department of State inspector-general to chastise Israel for "a systematic and growing pattern of unauthorised transfers".

What about the assertion that both the US and Israel share common democratic values, and Israel as the only democracy facing hostile authoritarian states deserves US unstinting political, economic, and military support.

Not a chance, according to the authors, some of Israel's practices are at odds with core American values. Israel from its inception was conceived as an exclusively Jewish state and treats its Arab minority as second class citizens, and an Israeli government commission report criticised Israel for having engaged in "neglectful and discriminatory" policies against its Arab minority. "Its democratic status is also undermined by its refusal to grant the Palestinians a viable state of their own or full political rights," the authors declared.

Moral grounds

But are there moral grounds for the unqualified support and the financial largesse that Israel receives? The fact that the Jewish people suffered historically at the hands of European Christians culminating in the Holocaust not only justifies US support, but makes it a moral imperative.

Though the authors recognise the history of oppression endured by the Jews and accept the moral reasoning for the creation of a Jewish state, nevertheless, they argued, it "also brought about fresh crimes against a largely innocent third party: the Palestinians."

So if it isn't for strategic nor ideological and moral reasons, what then accounts for the special relationship that is described by the authors as having "no equal in American political history". Their answer which has ruffled many feathers and touched a raw nerve is the powerful pro-Israeli lobby.

The authors illustrate the influence and power of the lobby and they don't pull any punches. Even George H.W. Bush's national security adviser Brent Scowcroft avowed, in October 2004, that Sharon has Bush "wrapped around his little finger".

If the lobby is responsible for the wrong-headed US policy towards the Middle East, then this article serves as a crack in the wall, or the proverbial nail in the lobby's coffin.

But as student of political science I have to ask the mischievous question: who was responsible for the equally perverse US policy towards the apartheid regime in South Africa from 1948 to the 1990's? If anything, the lobby, i.e. the African-American community, had been on the other side of that policy.

Dr Albadr S.S. Alshateri is a UAE-based political analyst and writer.