Juan Cole at Informed Comment has a meditation in defense of the recent essay regarding pro-Israel lobbies in the US, authored by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt and published in the London Review of Books. They argue that the collective power exercised by those lobbies has had the effect of suppressing Congressional opposition to, and enhancing support for, Israeli policies that subvert U.S. interests.

I’m among those who think Mearsheimer and Walt overstated their case. It’s beyond argument that US support of Israel has at times, perhaps often, been counterproductive to US interests, but the genesis of US support, and the inclination toward the “what’s good for Israel is good for the US” syndrome is complex, and it seems to me that in at least some instances, the two mistake a natural affinity for Likudnik policies for subornation by proponents of them.

I write from the perspective of a leftist Jew with a strong interest in seeing Israel realize its democratic potential. I think the relationship, particularly in its empowerment of Ariel Sharon, has been at least as counterproductive for Israel as it has for us. Ultimately, the best and possibly only entry point for liberal democracy in the Middle East, given Lebanon’s travails — which involve a prime example of Israel behaving counter to US interests, although a lot of US officials didn’t believe so at the time — is (or was before Sharon) a prosperous, secure, democratic Palestine.

There seem to me to be several strong historical currents in play here. US support for Israel began in earnest with the 1967 war. At that time, the creation of the state and the impetus for it was still relatively fresh in the minds of senior US policy makers, most of whom cut their teeth during World War II and the early days of the Cold War. The 1967 war was a reminder that Israel’s continued existence was by no means secure.

From a Cold War political and strategic perspective, the 1967 and 1973 wars served to curtail Soviet influence in the region. We owned Iran at the time, and Israel had just crushed the militaries of Soviet-leaning Egypt and Syria. So for a great many people in the US government at the time, and for a great many people who would eventually arrive in government before the fall of the Soviet Union, Israel was an unalloyed strategic asset, even taking into account Egypt’s 1972 severance of military ties with the Soviets; it was still, after all, a Soviet-built military that Israel defeated.

Going back to the issue of Israel’s survival: there’s a cultural current in play as well. The 1967 war was a seminal instrument in that, and the 1972 Olympic kidnappings and murders of Israeli athletes was as well. School children in the US who grew up during the 1960′s and early 1970′s, many of whom went into government, were weaned on “A land without a people for a people without a land.” In many respects, then, Israel had become iconic: a small nation, established in response to the epic horror of the Holocaust, that took no crap from anyone.

That status was enhanced by the 1976 hostage rescue at the airport in Entebbe, Uganda — a country ruled by an indisputably bad guy, Idi Amin — the story of which was almost immediately made into a film starring Burt Lancaster and Elizabeth Taylor. The only image most Americans had of Palestine at the time was that of the masked gunmen at the Olympics and the Entebbe hijackers.

So as we headed into the 1980′s, Israel was viewed as a staunch and valuable US ally despite its tendency toward independent actions that weren’t always congruent with US interests. Moreover, the Israeli air and ground tactics in the 1973 war were widely admired by the US military, and bear a striking resemblance to those used in our invasion of Iraq.

Obviously there are nuances here. The US governments weren’t wild about the prospect of the 1967 war or the 1973 one, but ultimately supported Israel in both, and there have been constant irritants such as the Jonathon Pollard affair.

One result of all that was the mainstreaming of Jewish lobbies and their accumulation of political capital both within the US government and in the larger culture. I vividly remember when the “plant a tree in Israel” campaign, which raised an enormous amount of money for Jewish organizations, broke out of its largely Jewish confines into the broader public.

During the 1980′s, Israel retained its image as a constraint against the Soviet Union, and it proved useful as a backchannel for consummating activities the US didn’t want to undertake publicly. The two most significant examples with respect to the current Bush administration were Israel’s involvement in both Iran-Contra and the proxy war against the Soviets in Afghanistan; a large number of Bush administration officials were involved in one or the other or both of those affairs; they’re by no means all Jewish, and pro-Israel lobbies had little, if anything, to do with the affairs.

That period, from 1967 up through the fall of the Soviet Union, coincided with the development and codification of neoconservatism. Most of its seminal figures are Jewish, but Henry Jackson remains an iconic figure in the movement and many of its most powerful adherents aren’t Jewish. Among them is Dick Cheney, who presided over the 1992 Defense Policy Guidance Review that essentially made the case for a post-Cold War neoconservative approach to geopolitics, although the final version was toned down.

The primary authors of that document were Lewis Libby and Paul Wolfowitz, and it was more or less duplicated in the Project for a New American Century’s flagship document, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses.” Signatories to the PNAC statement of principles include Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, Zalmay Khalilzad and Don Rumsfeld, along with the most prominent neoconservative Jews in the Bush administration.

There is no question that a number of neoconservative Jews in and around the Bush administration are staunch supporters of Likud. Several of them actually worked for Likud during the Clinton era. The most commonly cited example of that association is the “Clean Break” document written for Benjamin Netanyahu in, I think, 1995, which advocated, among other things, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Less noted is that the “clean break” of the title was a recommendation that Israel wean itself from the US teat because of the restraints US aid imposed on Israeli policy, or at least the Likud version of it.

That last obviously didn’t happen, and with the ascension of the Bush administration, the perceived constraints vanished.

So what’s the collective role of Jewish lobbies in all this? From a policy standpoint, it’s been to suppress Congressional opposition to policies espoused by neoconservatives and their fellow travelers in government. From a public relations standpoint, it’s been to maintain the public perception of Israel as a pristine force for good in the Middle East, an unwavering US ally and a victim of invidious forces.

One unsavory element of that lobbying effort is the ready charge of anti-Semitism against any opponent, something I’ve experienced because of my position on the necessity of a functional Palestinian state, and something with which Cole, Mearsheimer and Walt and a host of others are intimately familiar. Often enough, those who level the charge are positively hysterical: Alan Dershowitz, once an implacable advocate of civil rights in the US but an implacable opponent of them for Palestinians and suspected terrorists, provides a good example of that syndrome.

It’s easy enough to identify instances in which Israeli actions and policies have been and continue to run counter to US interests. What’s more difficult, in my view, is to separate out the ones that resulted in unforeseen blowback — something that isn’t limited to Israel, as witness our support and abandonment of Afghanistan’s anti-Soviet resistance and our Reagan-Bush era support for Iraq — from the ones that were recognized as counter-productive and tolerated either because Israel was viewed as more useful than not or from fear of a powerful lobby.

There have long been threads of opposition to our support for Israel. Some of them are in fact the product of anti-Semitism, as with the Klan/White Power movement. Some of them stem from specific instances such as the attack on the USS Liberty during the 1973 war. Some of them arise from Israeli support for or dealings with odious regimes such as apartheid South Africa. Some of them are the product of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, and some of them are a combination of more than one of those things.

But what I think we’re seeing in the Bush administration is a confluence of Scoop Jackson Democrats — now Republicans — radical Republicans such as Cheney, and neoconservatives who are ideologically committed to that “what’s good for Israel is good for the US” meme.

I think the latter have a dramatically defective notion of what’s good for Israel, but it seems to me a genuine belief in the congruence of interests between the two states. I don’t think Cheney really gives a damn about Israel other than as a chess piece, but he obviously brought the Likud supporters, Wolfowitz et al, into the Bush administration to give him sway over the policy apparatus in order to implement what he began with the 1992 Defense Policy Guidance Review.

I think Cheney’s four heart attacks have instilled in him a desperation to achieve the goals laid out in that document and reiterated by PNAC no matter the cost, and I think he continues to see Israel as an integral part of doing so by virtue of its being our second regional big stick, the first being our own military.

Summing up (at long last): Mearsheimer and Walt seem to me to have conflated instances in which Israeli policy is recognizably damaging to our interests — Palestine being the most glaring example — and instances in which Israel’s actions proved to be inimical to our interests but didn’t seem so at the time, or at least not to the people in power in our government. I don’t think Jewish lobbies can be blamed for Rapture-crazed politicians such as Tom DeLay, who held sway over the US purse for some years, and I think the Likud branch office in the Bush administration is mostly the result of that confluence of ideologies I mentioned above.

That said, I’m really glad they published, and I hope that their paper will be the precursor to a national reevaluation of a relationship with Israel that I believe to be counterproductive, although more accidentally than not. And I salute Cole for keeping the discussion going and defending their right to make their case without suffering the sort of abuse that’s been directed at them.

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