USA-Israel relationship: who controls whom

This article has been inspired from the writings of Stephen Zunes in his book, “Tinderbox”. All references have been taken from it.

Air Commodore (Retd) JAMAL HUSSAIN writes about a crucial partnership in the new world order.

For a vast majority in Pakistan, as in most of the Arab world, the stranglehold of the Zionist over USA’s foreign and domestic policies is accepted as an article of faith. For them, every foreign initiative by USA in the Middle East is conducted at the behest of Israel and Israeli interest take precedence over USA’s own national interests. Even the present invasion of Iraq by the Coalition Forces led by USA in their opinion, had enhancement of the security of Israel as its primary objective.

On the surface, there are some very compelling arguments in support of this point of view. To begin with, the Jewish lobby in America is very strong, much stronger than their numbers can justify. They use their considerable financial clout and their monopoly over the media to project and protect the interest of Israel at every level. They also skilfully manipulate the historical anti-Semitic treatment of the Jews by the Christian world, especially during the Holocaust, to emotionally blackmail the predominantly Christian Americans into making concessions to Israel which cannot otherwise be sustained on moral or legal grounds.

The actions of the US Government have lent further credibility to this theory. Since 1967, USA’s support to Israel in military, economic and political fields has been unprecedented. The political support has invariably been at the cost of Israel’s Arab neighbours. The shameful treatment being meted out to the Palestinians in the territories occupied by Israel since 1967 has been condemned by the whole world, including many in USA, yet Israel continues to flout the world opinion with active support and connivance of USA.

Many US Government officials themselves through their public statements give credence to the theory. Conservative political leader Patrick Buchanan, former Congressman Paul Findley and retired State Department official Richard Curtiss claim that the US- Israeli relationship is a case of the “tail wagging the dog”. They argue that tiny Israel – through its agents in the American Jewish community – is manipulating US foreign policy.1 Members of Congress and their aides will claim – always off the record – that they or their boss has to take pro-militarist and anti-Palestinian and anti-human rights position towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because of the need for Jewish campaign contribution.2 Similarly, to divert Arab criticism of US policy makers, American diplomats routinely tell representatives of Arab government that wealthy Jews essentially dictate US Middle East policy.

Does Israel, through the Jews in America have such a stranglehold over the US policy makers? Are the Jews really ten feet tall? To answer these questions, we should examine a little more closely who is the real beneficiary of this great love affair between mighty USA and tiny Israel. 

It would be wrong to assume that US commitment to Israel has primarily a moral base. Were it so, American aid to Israel would have been the highest in the formative years of the existence of the Jewish state, when its democratic institutions were strongest and its strategic situation most vulnerable – and would have declined as its military power grew dramatically and its repression against Palestinians in the occupied territories increased. 4 Instead, the reverse is true. 99 percent of all US military assistance to Israel since its establishment came post-1967, only after Israel proved itself far stronger than the combined Arab armies and after Israeli occupation forces became the rulers of a large Palestinian population.

One of the fundamental principles of international relations is that stable military relationship between adversaries leads to strategic parity, as it provides an effective deterrence to both sides against the launching of a pre-emptive attack. If USA’s sole concern was ensuring Israel’s security, strengthening Israeli defence forces to a level where they would be equal to the combined Arab armed forces should have been the goal. Instead, USA has insisted that rather than military parity, USA must ensure qualitative Israeli military superiority in the region. The continued high levels of US aid to Israel does not come out of concern for Israel’s survival but more from a desire for Israel to continue its political domination over Palestinians and its military dominance in the region.

Why then this extraordinary military support for Israel by USA and who is the bigger beneficiary of this arrangement?

To answer this question, a brief look at state of the American economy is necessary. After WW II, besides being the most powerful nation militarily, USA also was the sole economic power house of the world. Within three decades largely with the help of USA’s Marshal Plan, Europe and Japan emerged as strong economic blocks. After 1980, China and South East Asian (including South Korea) economies also improved dramatically. To maintain its status as the world’s dominant superpower, USA has maintained a very high level of defence expenditure. USA’s defence budget for the current year of over US $ 400 billion is equal to the combined defence budgets of the next twenty five nations. This investment in defence has come at a price.

Today, USA is a heavily indebted nation with a staggering adverse balance of payment. However, in one area where it dominates the rest of the world is in the sphere of arms production. Thanks to its military adventurism (USA has bombed twenty six different countries since WW II)7 and its vast investments in defence related research and development, USA is the predominant arms manufacturer and exporter in the world. In terms of value addition, arms exports exceed any other item by a very wide margin; the profit margin in this field is scandalously exorbitant. US economy, to a large extent is being kept afloat by the arms exports by US Companies. Is it surprising then that the US Defence Industrial Complex has become a key player in formulation of US foreign policies? A tension free world will reduce the demand for weapons and to continue selling high-tech expensive hardware to other countries, tension must continue. A look at US brokered peace deals would bring out some strange (but satisfactory from US point of view) conclusions.

Peace agreements between antagonists have historically promoted varying degree of demilitarization. However, in case of US-brokered agreements between Israel and neighbours, it has resulted in just the opposite. Consider the following:

• 1978 Camp David Accord between Egypt and Israel, heralded as a breakthrough peace treaty, turned out to be more of a tri-partite military pact. Since then Egypt and Israel have annually received US $ 1.2 and 1.8 billion respectively.8

• 1996 peace agreement between Jordan and Israel resulted in additional US $ 200 million aid to Israel of US $ 75 million to Jordan.9

• 1998 Wye River redeployment agreement between Palestinian Authority and Israel resulted in a further US $ 1.2 billion military aid to Israel.

Today, Israel’s security position has markedly improved. It has a longstanding peace treaty with Egypt where a large demilitarized and internationally monitored buffer zone keeps the Egyptian Army at an arms length. Jordan has signed a peace treaty with fully normalized relations and Syria has gradually demilitarized, weakened by the collapse of USSR, its Chief patron. Iraq’s armed forces were devastated during Gulf War I and remained crippled under strict international sanctions. It never threatened Israel in a conventional war and Gulf War II has decimated any remnants of the conventional threat.

Yet US military aid to Israel is much higher during the 1970s, either remaining steady or actually increasing each year since. Even more surprising, US essentially sent no military aid to Israel prior to 1967 when the country was most vulnerable strategically. Virtually all US military aid to Israel came only after its quick and decisive victory in the Six Day War that June when it proved itself to be more powerful than any combination of Arab armies.

Most of the foreign aid the US sends to Israel returns to US arms manufacturers to produce weapon of the Israeli military and to American banks in the form of interest payments on the previous loans for weapons. In Israel, as in all other arms importing nations, US arms transfer cost the Israelis two to three times their value in maintenance, spare parts, training of personnel and other related expenses, which are generally not a part of the aid package.

Israel had announced in 1991 its acceptance of a proposal by arms control advocates that would freeze arms exports to the Middle East. For Israel, this made sense from the viewpoint of defence needs, given its significant qualitative superiority in weapons and having the only major domestic arms production capability in the region that could expand its dominance still further. The proposal was to its advantage. United States, the very country most adamantly claiming its concern for Israel’s defence, effectively blocked the proposal.

The strengthening of Israeli defence beyond its legitimate defence needs has resulted in an arms race in the region which has been a bonanza for US arms manufacturers, which may be a major explanation for the inordinate amount of US military aid to Israel – Israel, on an average receives US $ 3 billion per annum in military aid.13 The benefit to the American defence contractors multiplies by the fact that every major arms transfer to Israel creates a new demand by the Arab states – most of whom can pay in hard currency from oil exports – for additional American weapons to respond to Israel’s burgeoning military might. The US has sold more arms to the Middle East than all other arms exporters combined, totalling more than US $ 90 billion, since Gulf War I.

Historically, USA has defined Israeli security primarily in terms of American arms transfer, which may be lucrative for US arms exporters and enhances US dominance in the region, but it does not address Israel’s core security concern, namely the violent reaction of a population resentful over three and a half decades of military occupation.

US strengthening of Israel’s defence and its continuous support of the latter’s aggression against Palestine has destabilized the region to an extent that it has provided frequent opportunities for battle testing American arms in actual combat. Israel has also served as a conduit for US arms to regimes and movements too unpopular in USA for openly granting direct military assistance. South Africa under apartheid, Iran’s Islamic Republic during its war with Iraq (USA directly and indirectly militarily supported both sides), Guatemala’s military juntas and Nicaraguan Contras are some of the examples.

In 1993, 78 US Senators wrote to President Clinton insisting that US military aid to Israel must be maintained despite significant advances in the peace process. They justified it on the grounds of massive arms procurement by the Arab states, conveniently neglecting to note that 80% of these arms transfer to those Arab regimes were also from USA. If these Senators and US Government were really concerned about Israel’s security, they could have blocked the US arms sale to the Arabs.16 Obviously both US Congress and its Executive Branch wanted to maintain the flow of American arms exports to both the antagonists, to the sole benefit of USA.

In late 1990’s Matti Peled, the late Israeli Major General argued that he and other military leaders saw the military aid package as little more than subsidy for American arms manufacturers.17 There are a number of saner elements in Israel who recognize that the present policies of Sharon cannot bring peace in the region no matter how militarily powerful the state of Israel becomes. A long time peace and human rights activist Gila Svirsky observes:

“For decades we in the Israeli peace movement have been struggling to get Israelis to compromise on the issue that feeds the conflict with Palestinians. And then our work for peace gets doused twice: once by a prime minister who believes brutality will convince the Palestinians to give up, and then by US President who supports him on this. Bush has become a part of the problem. He has to make up his mind, either he’s             for peace or Sharon. He can’t be both.”

Israeli commentator Gideon Samet, in his analysis of American support for Sharon gives an even more damning indictment. He complains:

“With favours like that from our friends we do not need enemies. Bush should have learnt from the superpower blitz against the Taliban that force is not enough. The trouble is that both the American administration and Sharon’s regime have mixed up cause and effect ... In the current Bush-Sharon lexicon, the source of evil is terrorism. But terror has its reasons, historical and immediate, which must be dealt wisely.”

When Egyptian President Anwar Sadat made peace overtures towards Israel in 1971, Kissinger successfully advised the Israelis to ignore it.20 As a result, Egypt along with Syria attacked Israeli forces in 1973 advancing into Israeli occupied territories in the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights before a massive US re-supply operation enabled Israel to mount a successful counter-offensive. Only after the war, USA support disengagement talks and then only under American auspices. By ensuring conditions that led to a war against Israel that could have been avoided and that nearly threatened Israel’s existence, and subsequently bailing out Israel, USA had Israel firmly in its grasp. Genuine peace in the region where continuous flow of US arms will no longer be necessary has so far not been in the American interest. US economy takes precedence over regional stability and peace.

USA has so far pursued a policy in the Middle East which ensures instability in the region. It has always either clandestinely or overtly supported hard-liner Likud Party leaders like Netanyahu or Sharon instead of the more peace inclined Labour Party leaders.

Israel has been propelled as the key component in projecting American military and economic interests. While Israel has become the dominant military power in the region because of American largess, it has also paid and continues to pay a price because the turmoil in the region has created a backlash in the form of Intifada, which refuses to die down despite all efforts by the Sharon’s government to crush it by force. The results of US policy could prove tragic not just for the Arabs but ultimately for Israel as well. Israel should remember the fate of South Vietnam and Salvador whose leaders made common cause with US global designs that ultimately lead to their countries’ self-destruction.

How influential are the American Jews in shaping US policy in the Middle East? Strangely, as the percentage of Jews in the overall population and their level of support of the Israeli governments have declined over the years, US support for the Israeli government has increased. Jews make up less than 4 percent of the US population and are hardly monolithic on the question of US policy in the Middle East. In the late 1990’s while Clinton Administration was putting pressure exclusively on PLA to compromise, polls showed that over 80 percent of the American Jews believed the USA should be willing to apply pressure on both the Palestinians and the Israelis to help bring out a peace settlement.

The strength of the lobby is often greatly exaggerated. Some of the most outspoken Congressional supporters of the Israeli government are from some of the safest districts in the country and need no support from pro-Israeli lobbies to be re-elected.

Their policies are based on what they consider the best interest of their state and USA, rather than Israel.

Joe Stork while serving as Director of the Middle East Research and Information Project argues that the ongoing arms race in the region continues for three reasons:

Arms sales are an important component of building political alliances, particularly with military leadership of the recipient countries.

There is a strategic benefit coming from interoperability, of having US manufactured systems on the ground in the event of a direct US military intervention.

Arms sales are a means of supporting military industries faced with declining demand in the Western countries.

Political scientist A.F.K Organski of University of Michigan has put it very succinctly in the following observation.

“The belief that the Jewish lobby is very powerful has permitted top US policy-makers to use “Jewish influence” or domestic politics to explain policies that US leaders see as working to US advantage, policies they would pursue regardless of Jewish opinion on the matter. When Arab leaders or officials of allies protest, US officials need give only a helpless shrug, a regretful sigh and explain how it is not the administration’s fault, but policy-makers must operate within the constraints imposed by powerful domestic pressures moulding congressional decisions.”

The reality is very different. As Organski puts it: “The US has used its relationship with Israel as a means to control its             client. When American leaders crack the whip, Israel responds and the Israeli resistance is just that – a show... There has been no question in             either of the patron or the client’s mind about who is in control. When it comes to important questions, Israel does as she is told.”

This view is not uncommon. In the Israeli press, we can find comments like these in Yediot Ahronot that describes their country as the “Godfather’s Messenger”, since Israel undertakes the dirty work of the Godfather who “always tries to appear to be the owner of some large respectable business”. Israeli satirist B. Michael describes US aid to Israel as a situation where “My master gives me food to eat and I bite those he tells me to bite. It is called strategic cooperation”.   

The powerful influence exerted by the pro-Jewish lobby in USA’s foreign and domestic policies cannot be denied but in the final analysis, US policies in the Middle East is essentially more pro-American than pro-Israel. It has made Israel the most powerful country in the region but peace remains an illusion for the Arabs and the Israelis. Israelis and the Arabs, both Semites, (kicking cousins rather than kissing cousins according to Israeli David Yarkoni) should realise that they are being used as pawns to further USA’s global designs and should modify their policies accordingly. Only then can we hope for durable peace in the region. Ironically the same logic applies to India and Pakistan.

Notes

1Stephen Zunes: Tinderbox, p.164

2Ibid

3Ibid

4Ibid p.106

5Ibid p.160

6Ibid p.161

7Ibid

8Ibid p.38

9Stephen Zunes: “The Israeli Jordan Peace Agreement”

10Stephen Zunes: “Tinderbox”

11Ibid p.39

12Ibid p.40

13Ibid p.109

14GAO Defence Trade, Sept 21, 2001

15Stephen Zunes p.161

16Ibid p.40

17Ibid  

18Kathleen Christian “Who’s Behind US Middle East Policy” – Middle East International, March 8, 2002

19Edward Said, “A New Current in Palestine” – The Nation, February 25, 2002 

20Stephen Zunes p.111

21Ibid p.105

22Ibid p.159

23Ibid

24Joe Stork, The Middle East Arm Bazaar after the Gulf War”

25Stephen Zunes,  Tinderbox   p164 -165

26Ibid    p.165

27Ibid    p.163 - 164