Does Israel dictate US foreign policy?

As the world stares into the abyss of all out war in the Middle East, with every prospect of going global, ¹ the question could not be more pertinent. Israel’s crimes against humanity, before and after October 7, have been enabled on all fronts – military, economic, media ² and UN veto – by the US-led West. Israel as we know it, its nuclear status notwithstanding, could not last a week without that enablement by a Washington now mired in division and confusion.

That Israel has advanced Western elites’ interests in the region is beyond serious dispute. As I have said twice in recent posts, the terrorist state:

… is an outpost for imperialism in an oil rich region all the more significant for standing between the West and a Eurasia perceived as a threat by five centuries of European colonial strategists, and some half century of US imperialists. ³ Israel has a very special role in dividing the Middle East but some aspects are common to all colonial and neo-colonial rule of the global south.

But colonial outposts – apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia spring to mind, as do Algeria and the Six Counties of north east Ireland – have a way, like Dr Frankenstein’s monster, of showing levels of independent ferocity constantly embarrassing, frequently alarming and, in the case of Algeria, even threatening the mother country with regime change. ⁴

A case can be made that Israel’s lobbyists, deeply embedded within the upper echelons of the US oligarchy, have gone further than the above examples, none of which enjoyed the grip on their creators that AIPAC and its cut-outs have on the Beltway. This is the explicit view of men like John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, authors of The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy.

But let’s first remind ourselves of the stakes, since they impact on the question in my title. On October 5 the Guardian ran a piece, Escalation with Iran could be risky: Israel is vulnerable … With a candour rare on so critical an issue – reflecting, as with media now coming clean on Ukraine’s looming defeat, the depth of the pit Washington has dug for us all – Andrew Roth interrogates Jake Sullivan’s claim that Iran’s strike of October 1 was “defeated and ineffective”.

Satellite and social media footage show missile after missile striking the Nevatim airbase in the Negev, setting off at least some secondary explosions. Despite Israel’s Iron Dome and Arrow air defences, Iran’s strikes were more effective than had been admitted …

… those missiles would  have a deadly effect on a city like Tel Aviv, or on high-value targets such as the Bazan Group’s oil refineries near Haifa – potentially creating an ecological disaster next to a big Israeli city.

“Iran has proven it can hit Israel hard if it chooses,”  writes Decker Eveleth of the research and analysis group CNA, who analysed the satellite images for a blogpost. “Airbases are hard targets, and won’t produce many casualties. Iran could choose a densely packed IDF base, or a target within a civilian area.”

That’s an assessment consistent with that of Military Watch as featured in my previous post. As for Israel’s expected response to True Promise 2, the Guardian concludes that:

… Iran has used its most advanced weapons, and has sufficient stockpile to do so for months … unless somebody pulls the plug on this cycle of escalation. The only person with that power is the president of the United States, whose track record doesn’t give us a lot of hope.

So the question – does Israel rule the USA? – is not trivial. Back to Professor Mearsheimer, who on October 3 told Judge Napolitano that:

There is a huge amount of evidence that Israel and the USA were at loggerheads on different issues. Not always. Sometimes they had a common interest in the same policy but there were many times when we were pushing in one direction, the Israelis in another. The evidence is overwhelming that Israel won almost every time.

Not every time in the early years but almost, and it was because of the lobby. Look at when Netanyahu came to address Congress recently. The Senate and House act like lap dogs. Why? Is it because Israel pursues policies in our national interest? I don’t think so. Why did we roll over when its fighter jets destroyed the USS Liberty, killing 34 sailors and injuring 300 more? It was the power of the lobby pure and simple.

A few observations:

• The extract is explicitly aimed at Gilbert Doctorow. While Gilbert is a social conservative – see my December 2022 post, Dress code for a night at the Mariinsky – he shares with the Marxist Stephen Gowans and US marine turned empire scourge Brian Berletic a view diametrically opposed to John’s. All three see Israel, as in the main do I, as the junior partner; albeit far and away the most powerful and unruly in the long and blood-soaked history of such relationships. As I put it two days ago in the context of America driving the three major flash points for world war three:

Like Steve Gowans, Brian Berletic explicitly rejects the claim, often made in tones tainted by antisemitism, ⁵ that Israel rules the US.

I am in 90% agreement, the other 10% falling into two caveats. One is that the Israel Lobby has a grip on US policy which falls well short of upholding the Israel-rules-the-USA thesis but gives the relationship its unique toxicity. Neither Kiev nor Taipei have anything like AIPAC’s cancerous hold on the Beltway …

• “Why did we roll over …?”  In that “we”, John shows both an America-first bias and a flaw hinted at in my September post on his debate with Jeffrey Sachs. His Offensive Realism approach makes him an unusually effective critic of US policy in Middle East and Ukraine but blinds him to the terrifying flailing of a dying empire in a thermonuclear age – never more so than in his inability to see that what is happening in those two flashpoints is of a piece with US provocations, which he acknowledges but defends, in the China Seas.
• Whether and to what extent this eruditely insightful man is right about Israel driving US foreign policy, the example he cites to the Judge is surprisingly weak. Does he really think Washington – with decades of form on sacrificing lofty principles and its own citizens for The Greater Good – would rock so critical a boat over a few sailors coming home in flag-draped coffins?

Scott Ritter is another long term champion – here he is in 2006 – of the thesis that Israel rules US foreign policy. He’s nobody’s fool, nor is John Mearsheimer, and only a fool would dismiss the oceans of evidence to the power of “the lobby”. But one aspect of our human tendency to want things cut and dried, nice and simple, is our propensity to polarise complex subjects along either/or lines. It saves us from having to think or, equally distasteful to us, revising conclusions reached long ago and now ossified.

Which leads me to this Sunday’s sermon, a video interview just shy of an hour and featuring Dimitri Lascaris with another gamekeeper turned poacher, former US marine Matthew Hoh. I urge readers to watch the entire video but, failing that, the fourteen minute segment between 29:53 and 43:57. And failing both, here’s my heavily edited transcript. It misses a ton of detailed insight but, well, half a loaf and all that …

Dimitri: As you know Matt the Biden Administration continues to send huge quantities of military equipment to Israel. It has sent aircraft carrier groups and additional ground troops to the region, we’re told, and has protected Israel at the UN and pressured the IC not to indict Israeli war criminals. This triggers a vigorous debate between some very reputable and widely followed geopolitical analysts

On the one hand you have commentators like Gilbert Doctorow arguing that the Ukraine war and Israel’s wars in West Asia are US proxy wars, with Israel doing what the US government wants it to do. On the other side you have commentators like John Mearsheimer who say the Administration is desperately trying to avoid a broader war in the region but the power of the Israel Lobby is so great that the administration is being dragged reluctantly into a full-blown war with Hezbollah and quite possibly Iran.

Before I ask you to weigh in on this Matt I’d like to show you two excerpts.

[Cut to first Gilbert, then John, from the Napolitano interview already cited]

Before I ask you to weigh in I should say I’m with Gilbert … it seems to me that Mearsheimer is assuming a continuity of leadership in the US … that its foreign policy goals have not evolved. He’s ignoring a key change in the 90s, when the Bush Administration brought in bloodthirsty neocons like Cheney, Wolfowitz, Nuland and all the rest to seize control. ⁶ Their goals are very much aligned with the current Israeli Administration. There’s no reason to suppose it is dragging them by the nose into a war they’ve been seeking for decades. What Gilbert says [in response to Mearsheimer’s already quoted remarks] is that John is not taking into account this change in the foreign policy elite over the past 30 years in the US. So what is your take on all this Matt?

Matt Hoh: It’s chicken and egg. The great shift you speak of, in US foreign policy in the 1990s, came as a result of the end of the Cold War and its new era of unipolarity.

I’d reference Chomsky [with whom John Mearsheimer also disagreed on this question] in the sense that Cheney et al would never have been in office without Israel Lobby approval. So this is a structural issue. We see in the US a legalized bribery system. The Israelis have exploited it just as the banks have. Just as the military industrial complex and the fossil fuel corporations have, just as big pharma and big agriculture have. These are all consequences of our political system being incredibly corrupt and open to the highest bidder.

So both camps are true. Sorry if that sounds wimpy but I see truth in both. Biden and Harris do not want a war with Iran because if its facilities are struck it closes Hormuz Straits, gasoline goes up to $8 a gallon and Harris loses in November. But that’s a very localised view.

At this point Matt makes the case, long argued on this site, that the Neocons have no party allegiance. (This by the way is one reason – another being a husband who co-founded the Project for a New American Century – for seeing Victoria Nuland, who ‘served’ in every post-Clinton administration bar Trump’s, as the perfect embodiment of Neoconservatism.)

He finds merit in both the Mearsheimer and Doctorow takes on US-Israel relations, then adds a third with which the latter would strongly and the former to some extent agree. What passes for democracy in the US is deeply corrupt, its processes open to the highest bidder. ⁷ He concludes that:

… the United States is just adrift in the Middle East because it has no strategic policy. The empire is constantly reacting to the consequences of previous decisions, mostly bad ones, to sustain a dying empire. That’s very bad for the USA and bad for humanity at large.

Amen.

* * *

1. I doubt but can’t rule out that other members of the Axis of Resistance – China, Russia and/or DRK – would fight alongside Iran unless Israel or the US directly attacked them. But aside from the implications of their backing Iran indirectly, e.g. by Russia upping the supply of its formidable S-400 SAM system units, the world would be drawn in via the inevitable soaring of oil (hence food) prices.
2. Two excellent pieces on media complicity in the anguish of Gaza, West Bank and now Lebanon have appeared in the last two days. On October 4, Caitlin Johnstone, under the header The Western Media Helped Create These Horrors, accused:

   All the editors who’ve been running “Gaza child walks into bullet” passive-language headlines designed to mask Israel’s responsibility for the killings.

   That’s a general charge, made in the withering tones she excels at. For his part Jonathan Cook delivered on the same day a quieter but no less effective takedown of one media event: a BBC interview of Hamas deputy political chief, Khalil al-Hayya.

   Both are short – two or three minute reads. For why corporate media are structurally unable to provide truly honest coverage of matters vital to ruling elites, see two of my own posts: Britain decides! and Monolithic control at the Guardian?

   Update. Minutes after writing this post a reader emailed this gem:

   I’ve just been watching Laura  Kuenssberg on BBC1 talk to an Iranian woman in the cabinet. She made some very valid points and when Kuenssberg was losing the argument they suddenly lost the line to Tehran.

3. Israel was a British and to lesser extent colonial and neo-colonial European project – with Suez ’56 both an assertion of US power and slap on the wrists for Britain, France and Israel – until the OPEC crises of the early ’70s saw America take over the reins.
4. Algeria was a French colony unlike any other. Its incorporation into France is the closest thing to a parallel with Ireland following the 1801 Act of Union which made the latter a part of Britain. This is the context for the 1958 putsch – to the strains of Edith Piaf’s Non, je ne regrette rien – against Charles de Gaulle. (The man, not the airport.)
5. To be clear, John Mearsheimer, Scott Ritter and many other people of principle – some Jewish and all alarmed by the Israel Lobby – are not antisemitic. This, alas, is not always the case.
6. For more on the neocon takeover in Washington at this time, see my post of February 2023, Did the crazies capture the USA? How?
7. That openness to “the highest bidder” informs another sermon, by a man much admired on this site. In Let’s Stop Pretending America Is A Functioning Democracy, journalist and Presbyterian minister Chris Hedges fulminated:

   Those who wrote trade deals to profit from unemployment and underemployment of U.S. workers and sweatshop labor overseas are omnipotent. The insurance and pharmaceutical industries that run the healthcare system for profit instead of health are omnipotent. The intelligence agencies that carry out wholesale surveillance of the public are omnipotent. The courts that reinterpret laws to excuse corporate crimes are omnipotent.

   Politics is spectacle, a tawdry carnival act where a constant jockeying for power by the ruling class dominates the news cycles, as if politics were a race to the Superbowl. The real business of ruling is hidden, carried out by corporate lobbyists who write the legislation, banks that loot the Treasury, the war industry and an oligarchy that determines who gets elected and who does not. It is impossible to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs, the fossil fuel industry or Raytheon, no matter which party is in office.