Public Comment
Israel and the Iran Deal: Who has the Power?
Author's Note: This op-ed was written (struggled over) for a couple of weeks before today’s (Wednesday, September 02, 2015) announcement that Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), will support the Iran agreement, insuring that it will be veto-proof in the Senate and thus implemented. As I have here argued, I believe the president’s victory has major implications for U.S.-Israel relations and for Israel’s American Jewish supporters.
On the U.S. left, there has long been a “which is the dog/which the tail?” argument with regard to our government and the state of Israel. Is the Israel lobby so powerful that it controls the foreign policy of the World’s Only Superpower? Did we actually go to war in Iraq because it was good for Israel? Or—as Noam Chomsky, for example, has long argued—is Israel’s power merely apparent because Israel serves U.S. interests and will therefore evaporate the moment Israel shifts from the asset to the problem category?
Upcoming soon is an event which should finally resolve this question: the congressional vote on the Iran nuclear agreement. It’s hard to imagine a starker test. The Obama administration negotiated long and hard to reach the agreement and backs it fully for rational geopolitical reasons. The four other permanent members of the U.N. Security Council—China, Russia, the U.K., and France—are signatories, as are Germany and the European Union. And every country in the world which has stated an opinion has expressed approval—except Israel and North Korea. Finally, many U.S. companies are eagerly anticipating the lifting of sanctions and the chance to enter a large, wealthy market which has been closed for so long.
This time it absolutely is the entire world—including the U.S. corporate lobby, which usually gets what it wants—versus a tiny country half a planet away. That the outcome is not only still far from clear but that it is even in doubt is already a testament to Israel’s amazing power.
How is that power exercised? Let’s look at a simple but all-important fact. Of the world’s roughly 13 million Jews, about 45% reside in Israel and 45% in the United States.
Two different countries, two different everything. But due to a relentless propaganda campaign, the Jews of the United States (at least those who are paying any attention to it) are convinced of two things. First, that all Jews, taken together, constitute “a people.” And second, that Israel is their state, the “state of the Jewish people.”
Consider this sentence from the handbook accompanying the Shalom Hartman Institute’s nine-week lecture series Engaging Israel: Foundations for a New Relationship. “Israel cannot be the project of Israelis alone, with the rest of world Jewry acting as spectators. The new covenant must grant world Jewry the rights and responsibilities that come with being a partner in building and shaping the future of Israel.”
Since non-citizens lack actual “rights” and “responsibilities,” this is code for: (1) send us money and (2) do our political work for us in your country because we’re a foreign government and are therefore not allowed to.
American Jews can, by the way, carry out the latter function because in a process of massive circularity, both the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, despite their fervent desire to compel AIPAC (and its forerunner, the American Zionist Council) to register as agents of a foreign government, were prevented from doing so by the American Jewish lobby.
Thus Israel has the perfect set-up: a powerful agent legally and openly operating in the U.S. which can directly lobby; indirectly give and withhold cash as needed; and pass on instructions to thousands of brain-washed workers who, despite being American citizens, believe that Israel is in some way “their state” from which it is perfectly kosher (if you will forgive the expression) to take marching orders.
This is not hypothetical nor do I exaggerate. On August 4th, for example, Benjamin Netanyahu—a man without limits and without shame—under the auspices of the Jewish Federations and the member organizations of the Congress of Presidents of American Jewish Organizations (I name these two in full because they are the major conduits for passing on directions to the cadres) directly addressed 10,000 Americans (presumably most of them Jewish) via conference call and webcam. “The days when the Jewish people could not or would not speak up for themselves, those days are over,” he exhorted. “Today we can speak out. Today we must speak out.”
He meant of course, get out there and prevent the Iran deal.
Nor was his directive without results. For example, on a pro-Israel website (American Thinker), a blogger boasts that “four to five volunteers from around the country in less than a week” persuaded 190 retired generals and admirals to sign a letter urging Congress to vote no. The most successful of these volunteers, “a woman named Marsha Halteman from New Orleans,” in 2014 received the Outstanding Civilian Service Medal from the U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) for her fund-raising on behalf of military personnel and their families. She is the former director of programs for JINSA, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, a Washington-based outfit which primarily treats American military officers and law-enforcement executives to all-expense-paid trips to and training sessions in Israel.
The retired military count on Obama’s side, by the way, is 36. The implication, sadly, is that certain Jewish Americans, working at the behest of and on behalf of a foreign country, have managed to foster closer, friendlier relations with America’s top brass—the kind of relations on the basis of which a favor can be elicited by a mere phone call—than has the president of the United States.
It might be hard to believe that the prime minister of any country has the chutzpah (if you will forgive the expression) to directly address citizens of another country urging them to pressure their own government on behalf of his government’s desires. And this in the name of some mystical connectedness that appears to transcend every legal and political category. And yet this is the way Zionism has always operated since the days when Theodor Herzl raced from sultan to tzar to kaiser to pope seeking sponsorship for his project, while operatives rabble-roused the impoverished Jewish immigrants of London’s East End. Israel would never have come into existence without the lobbying efforts of Jewish citizens of potential sponsor countries, mainly in Britain and the U.S., and the Zionists did not give up what works in 1948 simply because they had successfully created a new nation. Their needs grew even greater, and “the Diaspora” remains an apparently inexhaustible resource on which to draw.
The great question now is how long can this state of affairs continue? How long are other nations—the U.S. in particular—going to allow it? And my tentative answer is…not forever. Even, possibly, not a great deal longer. And that is because for the past fifty years U.S. and Israeli objectives have—usually—been aligned and Israel has—mostly—proved so useful that its drawbacks could—in the main—be ignored.
But the times are changing. (1) With the end of the two-state solution, Israel is now officially apartheid and this makes Western governments deeply uncomfortable. (2) The boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign is proving to have broad popular appeal, and international grassroots pressure is building with increasingly significant results. (3) In light of (1) and (2) above, Israel is rapidly tossing aside all attempts to present itself in appealing ways, shifting instead to the “why bother, they’re all anti-Semitic” approach (see, for example, the recent appointment of Danny Danon—variously described as ultra rightwing and “a thug”—as Israel’s ambassador to the U.N.: not your diplomat’s diplomat). Finally, and perhaps most important, (4) under current conditions Israel can no longer fill its longstanding role as cop on the Middle East beat: it is now just one of the countless warring parties, each with its own agenda. All of this together implies that the potentially fatal slippage from asset to liability may already be well underway.
Note that Israel’s “mowing the grass” operations, such as last year’s attack on Gaza; and its settlement operations, such as the planned bulldozing of the tiny hamlet of Susya, now on hold; and its pogrom operations, like the house arson which in July killed a Palestinian two-year-old and his father, are suddenly attracting a kind of international attention—and even official protest—such as they have never received in the past.
Note too that Israel’s current meddling has already had significant consequences within the American political system. For example, after 60 years of carefully building bipartisan support, AIPAC is now overtly aligned with the Republican Party—mostly through the largesse of one very rich Jew, Sheldon Adelson. Israel’s current ambassador to the U.S., the American-born (and only recently Israeli) Ron Dermer, is a former Republican party operative, a protégé of Frank Luntz. Further, with the defection of the powerful senator Chuck Schumer (and NJ’s Robert Menendez), a specifically Israel lobby wedge has now split the Democratic Party. The Democrats, at least, have a lot of reason to be angry.
Perhaps that is why, in his August 5th speech at American University (coincidentally, the day after Netanyahu’s webchat), President Obama, in his usual calm, reasonable tones, pointed to Israel’s machinations as a major—if not the major—obstacle to his campaign for congressional approval of the Iran deal (and according to some readings may even, a couple of weeks earlier at the VFW convention, have obliquely fingered certain Jewish neocons as responsible for the 2003 invasion of Iraq). This is not absolutely unprecedented. Other presidents have occasionally squeaked, and as recently as last March, John Kerry, testifying before Congress, blamed Israel for the final collapse of Oslo. But those were moments of exhaustion and loss of control. This was a planned and vetted script from which the president read.
While AIPAC runs a $10 million advertising campaign and the troops are out and about doing their duty, some American Jewish leaders have been accusing Obama of anti-Semitism for suggesting that Jews would even dream of doing such things. Mike Huckabee talks menacingly of ovens and headlines abound about who is throwing whom under the bus. But if I were one of those American Jewish leaders, I hope I would look up now and then and notice that the passing scenery is changing.
Because doesn’t it seem that Israel has in fact created an under-the-bus situation for the American Jewish establishment, no matter what the outcome? If Congress approves the Iran deal, then an all-out no-expenses-spared no-holds-barred campaign by the Israel lobby will have been defeated, and I would guess that politicians (and others) who may be sick and tired of kowtowing will take serious note. If, on the other hand, Congress rejects the deal and U.S. companies are therefore denied entry into an Iran market open to the whole rest of the world, the Israel lobby may well find it has made more enemies—and more powerful enemies—than winning Netanyahu’s battle could possibly be worth.
