When the puppet runs the puppeteer
DAVID HIRST
New Statesman, 12 July 2004
Israel and the United States - For years, America has given almost uncritical financial and diplomatic support to the Jewish state. Will a breaking point come one day?
Some have taken to calling it the "Israelisation of America". It may not be an extravagant term for the extraordinary influence that a small country at the eastern end of the Mediterranean has acquired over the foreign policies of the world's only superpower.
The hold the Israeli protege has over its American patron is rooted in the domestic political clout and dynamism of what, in his book Jewish Power, JJ Goldberg calls "the largest and most powerful Jewish community in history". It is all the more phenomenal in that, before Israel was born, America's six million Jews, a mere 2 per cent of the population, were far from united behind, or even very interested in, ethnocentric political Zionism.
Yet the American public was well-disposed towards Israel from the outset. So potent was the dominant, pro-Israeli orthodoxy to which the intelligentsia, media, academe and opinion-moulders in general subscribed that, according to a dissident Jewish commentator, the late IF Stone, promoting any view that "departs from the Israeli line is about as easy as selling a thoughtful exposition of atheism to the Osservatore Romano in Vatican City".
This is the climate in which American policy-making is shaped. Politicians are under no pressure to address the other side of the equation: the Palestinians' expulsion and their struggle for self-determination. Stephen Green observes, in his book Taking Sides, that "a strong case can be made that Eisenhower was the last American president actually to make US Middle East policy [rather than] Israel and the friends of Israel in America".
Despite occasional, short-lived bouts of official American "even-handedness", this partisanship has intensified with time, and with the evolution of the conflict on the ground. Since 1977, ultra-nationalist Likud has enjoyed long spells in office, and its kindred spirits in religious guise have emerged as a powerful new force on the political stage. In Washington DC, too, the "friends of Israel" have been growing more extreme, gaining increasing sway. If their influence over the media has remained static, or even declined, they have more than made up for it in both the legislative and executive branches of government.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the most formidable weapon in the Jewish lobby's arsenal of political persuasion, has so mastered Congress that, according to William B Quandt, a former member of the National Security Council, "70 to 80 per cent of its members will go along with whatever they think AIPAC wants". One thing it wanted was an unceasing flow of aid; this became such a cornucopia that, over the years, for every dollar America has spent on an African, it has spent $250 on every citizen of a country whose standard of living has long since come to rival affluent Europe's.
For the past quarter-century, America has been giving Israel about $3bn (