McPeak, Obama and the "Israel Lobby": Why the Right is Wrong, Gidon D. Remba

A new tempest in a teapot has broken out over remarks from 2003 unearthed by a conservative magazine about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by Gen. Merrill A. "Tony" McPeak, Senator Barack Obama’s campaign co-chair. The Republican Jewish Coalition claims that McPeak “blames American Jews rather than Palestinians” for the failure of the peace process.

The Obama campaign issued the following statement on McPeak: "Senator Obama's longstanding commitment to Israel is clear to anyone who has reviewed his voting record, read his speeches or looked at his policy papers. As he has said, his support for our democratic ally Israel is based on America's national interests and our shared values. Neither Senator Clinton nor Senator Obama agrees with every position their advisors take, and in this case Senator Obama disagrees with General McPeak's comments."

The RJC says this is not enough and that Sen. Obama should remove Gen. McPeak. The RJC calls McPeak’s comments from the 2003 interview “offensive” and in its second press release on the subject in 24 hours says that “more telling are the comments General McPeak made to The Oregonian on Wednesday, March 26 [2008] when he said he 'stood by his position that U.S. policy in the Mideast is influenced by pro-Israeli voters'"…The issue is not whether American Jews have any influence, the issue is who is to blame for the problems in the Middle East. General McPeak blamed American Jews in 2003 and he blames them still today. It is painfully clear he does not understand the offensive nature of these comments.”

McPeak’s sin is that he does not subscribe to the dogma that Israel is always the righteous victim and the Palestinians are nothing if not evil terrorists; that all right and good inures to Israel and all wrong falls on the Palestinians. The Republican Jewish Coalition, like the Israeli and American Jewish right, will countenance only the most simplistic Manichean view of the conflict: Israel is the innocent angel and the Palestinians genocidal demons. Israel can do no wrong, nor can any Israeli policy be objectionable or possibly dim the prospects for peace.

McPeak pointed to the role that Israel’s West Bank settlements play in obstructing a two-state solution, and the support Israel’s settlement project receives in some American Jewish quarters. These forces help to reinforce a laissez faire American approach to Israeli construction beyond the Green Line, even as US officials regularly bloviate about the “unhelpfulness” of Israel's long-running West Bank extravaganza. Gen. McPeak rightly challenged the central taboo of the Jewish right’s worldview. (Even some on the Israeli Labor party’s right-wing, including Defense Minister Ehud Barak, have bought into to this, in Barak's case, self-serving, black-and-white portrait.)

But once we acknowledge that US policy in the Mideast is influenced by pro-Israeli voters in the American Jewish community, as even the RJC admits, it’s hard to see why it should be offensive to grant that the way in which that influence is exercised does not always serve Israel’s or America’s interests. It would come as a great surprise to AIPAC, widely considered to be among the most successful and influential lobbies in Washington, that it, and the American Jews it represents, have no influence on US policy vis-à-vis Israel. But as far as the RJC is concerned anything an American Jewish organization lobbies for must ipso facto be as good for Israel and America as hummus and apple pie.

The RJC irresponsibly conflates McPeak’s acknowledgement of that political reality, and his criticism of the misguided policies it sometimes abets, with the recklessly flawed Carter-Walt-Mearsheimer view. (I’ve debunked both Carter and Mearsheimer/Walt in previous publications, while recognizing the grain of truth in their views). But this trio ill-served their own cause by giving a bad name to a well-founded thesis held by many staunchly pro-Israel Jews: that AIPAC and fundamentalist Christian Zionists often exercise their influence and that of the citizens they represent in ways that are harmful to Israel’s security, and may even clash with the Israeli government’s policies. To affirm this one needn’t swallow the wholesale warped worldview of Carter, Mearsheimer and Walt: that Jews have excessive influence on US policy, or that the "Israel lobby" or Jewish neocons betrayed the United States by goading American leaders to invade Iraq for Israel’s sake. But such is the RJC’s standard MO: tar all moderate and liberal pro-Israel Jews by collapsing their views into the most egregious and wrong-headed theories of the far left, and then attack the moderates for buying into the whole noxious mix.

In reality, American Jews do not have enough influence on US policy: the moderate majority is, in fact, not well represented by the mainstream pro-Israel lobbying organizations. It is therefore welcome news that, according to news reports, a moderate pro-Israel lobby is, at long last, now aborning.

Gen. McPeak told the Oregonian on March 26 2008 that “he worked closely with the Israeli military as an Air Force officer and considers himself a strong ally of Israel. But, he added, "the way to get to peace is to find some way out of the box canyon that Israel has built for itself with the West Bank settlements. . . . And it is just a fact that the [pro] Israeli vote -- or the Jewish vote -- is something that all politicians have to consider."

The American Jewish Committee’s Annual Survey of Jewish Opinion for 2007 (November 6-25, 2007) found that while 46% of American Jews favored the establishment of a Palestinian state “in the current situation,” 43% oppose. Let’s set aside, for the purposes of this discussion, how the wording of this question influenced the respondents’ replies, and take the result at face value. Other polls have shown broader American Jewish support for a two-state solution and a robust American role in Palestinian-Israeli negotiations.

This poll suggests that there is a significant minority of American Jews which opposes the creation of a Palestinian state. Given that American Jews are concentrated in major states like New York and Florida, and have among the highest percentages of voter turnout of any religious or ethnic group in the U.S., it is unsurprising that an administration which seeks to invest political capital into brokering a Palestinian-Israeli peace agreement will need to be concerned about the significant minority of Jewish voters—particularly in those two states—who oppose the creation of a Palestinian state, one of the primary outcomes of such negotiations.

Significant American Jewish opposition to US engagement in brokering peace negotiations is indeed a factor in the failure of the Bush Administration, and previous administrations, to become more actively involved in peace efforts, even now as it pursues the “Annapolis peace process.” But still, McPeak is wrong: the neoconservative ideology of the Bush Administration has been the overriding reason why for the last seven years it has not assumed an active role in backing or brokering Palestinian-Israeli peace talks. Under that doctrine—held by Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush—the US must first vanquish radical states like Iraq, Syria and Iran, sapping the Hezbollah and Hamas terrorists they underwrite; peace negotiations must be deferred until the radicals have been neutered by force of arms.

As it faces its final year in search of a legacy, left with the dismal results of its polices from Iraq to Iran, Lebanon and Gaza, the Bush administration--mugged by reality--has been forced to do an about face and, after seven years of malign neglect, had little choice but to get behind a new attempt at Palestinian-Israeli negotiations. This it has done despite the finding of the recent AJC poll that a significant minority of American Jews opposes the intended outcome of those negotiations: a two-state peace deal eventuating in a Palestinian state. The grand failure of its Middle East strategy after eight years is an awful legacy to bequeath the Republican party, this country, and America’s allies from Israel to pro-Western Arab states. Seizing even the appearance of triumph from the jaws of chaos and defeat trumps the wishes of a divided American Jewish public. The opinion of the wider American public as it enters a new presidential election, and the judgement of history, is a far greater burden to bear.

Judas and the "Israel Lobby", by Gidon D. Remba

Judas and the "Israel Lobby", Jerusalem Report
(Also published as "The 'Israel Lobby' and the Persian Gulf Wars")

JUF NEWS, May 2006
This essay also appeared in the Jerusalem Report as a Viewpoint column in the June 12, 2006 issue.

By Gidon D. Remba

http://www.juf.org/news_public_affairs/article.asp?key=6972

An Egyptian papyrus containing a lost gospel written some 1,700 years ago, The Gospel of Judas, was recently discovered offering an alternate version of the crucifixion of Jesus which, as told by the New Testament, helped fuel centuries of Christian persecution of Jews. Now we learn that when Judas Iscariot turned Jesus over to the Romans, he was acting on orders from Jesus, making Judas not the great traitor, but Jesus’ most favored disciple and his willing collaborator.

Judas had become emblematic of Judaism throughout history, of the Jew who would do anything for money, including betray Christians. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion refined the classical antisemitic image of the treacherous, evil, self-aggrandizing Jew into the modern agent of a conspiracy to subvert the great powers of the world to serve Jewish ends.

Now come two of the most distinguished political scientists in America, John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, and Stephen Walt of Harvard, to enlighten us in “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," a “working paper" posted on the website of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, excerpted in the London Review of Books. This new gospel bears the revelation that the US embarked on what is now widely viewed as a disastrous war in Iraq largely thanks to the perverse influence of a vast coalition they dub the “Israel Lobby. "The Lobby," we learn, succeeded in skewing the foreign policy of the United States to wage a war motivated mainly by the desire to make Israel more secure while willfully sacrificing America’s own national interests. It is this "Lobby," consisting of all the major Jewish organizations, pro-Israel media, Christian Zionists and others, the authors warn, which is now pushing America into an unnecessary and catastrophic clash with the fundamentalist Islamic, terrorist supporting and nuclear arming Iran.

But "the Lobby" could not have succeeded in its grand act of perfidy, we further learn, were it not for the presence in high places in the Bush Administration of a coterie of "fervent advocates of the Israeli cause" a small band of neoconservatives, many with ties to Likud," until recently Israel’s dominant right-wing political bloc. The Jewish neocons steered the US military into a Middle East morass out of loyalty to Israel and in betrayal of their sworn duty to serve the U.S. national interest, say these eminent scholars. Indeed, there are Jewish senators and congressmen who work to ensure that US foreign policy supports Israel’s interests," rather than America’s, they charge. The Jewish pro-Likud neocons, and Jewish organizations, left, right and center, have betrayed the United States and its interests. They are, for Mearsheimer and Walt, the Judases of America, who would drag their government into wars to serve their pro-Israel Jewish agenda.

But like the new Judas, the Jewish neocons are no traitors: their affinity to Israel is not the source of their scheme to transform the Middle East by force of arms. Nor is it their Jewishness which caused them, or their many non-Jewish superiors in the administration, from Bush to Cheney, Rumsfeld to Rice, to pursue their Mideast regime change agenda. Like the new Jesus of the Judas Gospel, who is the real prime mover of the action, the Jewish neocons’ Christian leaders have followed a long-standing American tradition of forcibly overthrowing regimes which are hostile to America. Theirs was a gambit to roll back the forces of radicalism and Islamic terrorism in the Arab world by forcibly implanting democracy or America-friendly rule. Their project may be delusional, dangerous and inimical to a clear-headed picture of our best interests, as many now have come to believe. But that same clarity requires us to see that their flawed perspective on America’s security stems from a time-honored worldview shared by Jewish and non-Jewish hawks alike, spawning a hundred years of American military interventions and coups d’etat in over a dozen countries, including oil-rich Iran in 1953.

Despite their reputation as “realists" in foreign policy, Mearsheimer and Walt give short shrift to an array of material interests which many observers see as heavily influencing US global conduct: the need to secure the flow of affordable oil from the Middle East, given the growing US dependence on imported petroleum as an energy source, and to curry favor with Arab states like Saudi Arabia whose oil production affects energy prices and the overall health of the US economy. Dismissing the leverage of the Saudi, US oil and defense industry lobbies on an administration led by a former Texas oilman and the ex-CEO of Halliburton–one of the world's largest providers of products and services to the oil and gas industries, which has reaped billions of dollars in no-bid government contracts for rebuilding Iraq’s oil refineries and other post-war reconstruction–is hardly realistic.

Consider: fully two-thirds of the world’s proven oil reserves lie in just seven Muslim-ruled Persian Gulf countries (Iran and 6 Arab states, with Saudi Arabia and Iraq the top two). Of the seven major Persian Gulf oil producing states, only two were not US allies, and instead were leaders of the radical anti-American front in the Arab and Muslim worlds: Iraq and Iran. Both have sought to dominate their Muslim Arab neighbors in the Persian Gulf, and Israel, as Mearsheimer’s own theory of regional hegemony predicts.

All this is swept under the rug by the new gospel of Mearsheimer and Walt, who prefer to exaggerate Jewish influence by largely blaming Israel and American Jewish leaders for snookering the US into war in Iraq–and next Iran–for Israel’s sake. Their polemic echoes antisemitic stereotypes and diverts our attention from the real motives driving our leaders down the perilous path on which America now finds itself.

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Gidon D. Remba, a political analyst specializing in the Arab-Israel conflict, served as Senior Foreign Press Editor in the Israel Prime Minister's Office from 1977-1978 during the Egyptian-Israeli Camp David peace process. Co-author of a forthcoming volume, From Gaza to Jerusalem: A New Road to Middle East Peace?, his essays have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun Times, the New York Times, the Nation, the Jerusalem Report, Chicago Jewish News, the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles, JUF News and the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle, where he is a columnist on Israel and Jewish affairs.