2
Anyone interested in both the benefits and the drawbacks of theory can learn from the career of Urbain Le Verrier, a distinguished French astronomer of the nineteenth century. Compared to American foreign policy, the mechanics of the solar system are relatively simple and easy to make good theories about; as early as the late seventeenth century Sir Isaac Newton had mastered many if not all of the concepts needed to explain the motion of the various planets, meteors, and comets that sweep around the sun. But every now and then some loose ends cropped up. In the 1840s, scientists observing the orbit of Uranus noted that its motion didn’t conform to the known laws of gravity. Instead of traveling around the sun in a smooth and undisturbed ellipse, Uranus’s orbit was subtly irregular. Either the laws of gravity were wrong, or something was pulling the distant planet out of place. Le Verrier, an acknowledged expert on celestial mechanics, did the math and predicted the location of an undiscovered planet perturbing the Uranian orbit. In a letter to Johann Gottfried Galle, a young German astronomer, Le Verrier included his calculations about the unknown planet, asking Galle to see whether its existence could be confirmed. Galle pointed his telescope to the predicted location and there, almost exactly at the spot Le Verrier predicted, the planet Neptune swam into view.[1]
The news caused a sensation and made celebrities out of both Galle and Le Verrier. Both men have craters on the moon and rings of Neptune named after them; Le Verrier was one of seventy-two distinguished persons to have his name engraved on the Eiffel Tower. But Le Verrier didn’t stop with Neptune. Flush with success, he took a look at another loose end in the tidy world of Newtonian cosmology: Mercury’s motion was also irregular. Unless the laws of Newtonian physics were wrong, something must be operating on Mercury to explain its mysterious shifts. Le Verrier hypothesized that a hidden planet must be responsible, and, based on its effects, he calculated the size and predicted the orbit of a mysterious planet even closer to the Sun than Mercury. Astronomers all over the world began to comb the skies, hoping for the glory and fame that would follow the new planet’s discovery.
The search did not take long. Edmond Modeste Lescarbault, a French amateur astronomer, had observed what at first appeared to be a sunspot, but on closer examination looked more like a small planet transiting the sun. Le Verrier took the train to the village of Orgères-en-Beauce, reviewed Lescarbault’s observations, and on January 2, 1860, at a meeting of the French Academy of Sciences he proclaimed the discovery of a new planet to the world. There was another sensation, and the government of Napoleon III awarded the Légion d’honneur to the newly famous Lescarbault.[2]
The new planet was named Vulcan, in honor of the Greco-Roman blacksmith god whose work kept him close to the blazing hot forge. While some thought it surprising that a planet so close to the earth had escaped the observation of astronomers for so long, Le Verrier’s allies pointed out that the very brightness of the sun made an object as small as a planet easy to miss. It was only when Vulcan crossed or transited the sun, or during an eclipse, that the small planet could be observed from the earth. Over the next few years a series of astronomers in Britain, France, and Turkey spotted transits of Vulcan. The most impressive confirmations came from the United States. Lewis Swift, an amateur astronomer from Rochester, New York, saw Vulcan from an observation post near Denver; Professor James Craig Watson of the University of Michigan, accompanied by the famous inventor Thomas Edison, traveled to the remote hamlet of Separation, Wyoming, to observe a solar eclipse. As the sun’s light dimmed, Planet Vulcan duly appeared.[3]
With so many professors and eminent observers in so many places spotting it, the existence of Vulcan seemed to be settled science. Yet there were problems. The observations of Vulcan didn’t follow predictable patterns. Different astronomers made different calculations of its size, its speed, and its path around the sun, but none of the models quite worked. Astronomers both professional and amateur continued to spot Vulcan, but the observations never quite tallied with the predicted orbits. At one point, the confusion was so great that it was suggested that one planet wasn’t enough; there had to be two planets inside the orbit of Mercury.[4]
It took Albert Einstein to sort things out. Einstein’s theory of relativity offered another, and more convincing, explanation for Mercury’s motion. Mercury’s irregularities had nothing to do with another planet, but were caused by effects of the sun’s gravity on the space-time fabric that Newtonian physics knew nothing about. The astronomers who spent decades hunting for Planet Vulcan had fallen victim to bad theory; their conviction that Planet Vulcan must exist led them to misinterpret what they saw even as it blinded them to the richer and more comprehensive worldview that lay beyond the physics they understood.
It is rare for solar astronomers to go off on wild-goose chases like the hunt for Planet Vulcan, but students of foreign policy lead less predictable lives. In the world of foreign policy, even experts go badly wrong, and history is full of examples in which very serious and thoughtful people have fundamentally mistaken the nature of the forces with which they were trying to deal. As noted earlier, a common source of often very damaging mistakes comes when foreign policy practitioners mix stripped-down and simplified assumptions about how groups of people behave—stereotypical ideas about ethnic groups, religious communities, and ideological movements, for example—with simplistic theories about the international system. The result is almost always confusion, and the consequences are often grim. As shrewd and as ruthless as Joseph Stalin was, crude Marxist ideas about how “bourgeois” and “imperialist” governments behaved often led him astray. Adolf Hitler’s foreign policy was distorted by his belief that “the Jews” were behind both the capitalist and communist governments that he faced. During the Cold War, Americans frequently missed the subtleties and complexities of important international developments because they viewed events through a simplistic “us vs. them” paradigm. Had Americans understood how estranged the Soviet Union and China had become by the early 1960s, the most tragic American misadventure of the Cold War era might have been avoided.
We’ve seen that stereotypes and illusions based on oversimplified political theories have played a significant role in American policy in the Middle East. Crude ideas about the nature of Iraqi society and its prospects for democracy led the George W. Bush administration to misread the realities of Middle Eastern politics in Iraq; just a few years later the Obama administration would make eerily similar mistakes about the Arab Spring in countries as important as Egypt. We’ve seen that orientalist stereotypes about Arabs and Muslims have frequently led Americans to miss opportunities and make false steps in the Middle East. Similarly, stereotypes about Jews, in the United States and abroad, have often confused analysts about the sources and aims of American policy.
Indeed, the way many observers have thought about America’s relationship with Israel bears an uncanny resemblance to Le Verrier’s approach to Planet Vulcan. The United States and the other states in the international system are seen to circle the sun of the national interest on steady and predictable orbits—except for a certain wobble in the American orbit when the subject of Israel comes up. The search for Planet Vulcan, the mass of dark matter whose gravitational pull is responsible for America’s deviation from the true path of the national interest, has engaged many minds.
Down through the years there has been no shortage of books and articles claiming that an “Israel lobby” that prioritizes Israel’s interests over those of the United States, composed largely of American Jews and empowered by their wealth (“It’s all about the Benjamins,” as a first-term congressional representative inelegantly but forcefully put it)[5] largely controls both the public discussion of U.S.-Israel relations and the actual policy. We can call this the Vulcan Theory of American Israel policy: it is the belief that Jewish power exerted in the interest of a foreign state is subordinating American policy to the will of another state.
There is more than one version of this modern Vulcan Theory, just as there was more than one theory about Planet Vulcan. Some observers see two planets at work: fundamentalist Christian support is also involved in the force that pulls the United States away from its true national interest. With or without the evangelical embellishment, the belief that American Jews control America’s Israel policy is an article of faith in much of the world.
Vulcan Theory is somewhat less popular in the United States than it is abroad, but over the years many Americans have accepted it. In 1974, General George S. Brown, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, bemoaned Israel’s influence in Congress and said that Jews “own, you know, the banks in this country, the newspapers.”[6] Columnist and onetime candidate for the Republican presidential nomination Pat Buchanan called Capitol Hill “Israeli occupied territory” on national television in 1990.[7] Minister Louis Farrakhan, one of America’s leading Vulcanists, told an audience that “the Israeli lobby controls the government of the United States of America.”[8] Senator J. William Fulbright, longtime chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, charged in 1973 that “the Senate is subservient to Israel,” and that the United States could not use its economic leverage to affect Israeli policy because “Israel controls the Senate.”[9]
To have an intelligent discussion about Vulcan Theory is hard. Those who accept it do not think of themselves as victims of prejudice; as they see it, they are drawing obvious conclusions from overwhelming evidence. When, after stating what they see as obvious facts about American foreign policy, they find themselves widely attacked for antisemitism, they see those attacks as confirming the truth of their original conclusions. Anybody who dares to tell the truth about Jewish power in the United States, they claim, is subjected to nonstop vituperation and driven to the margins of public life. What more proof could one want that “the Jews” dominate the media and the policy debate?
Even so, for reasons that Vulcan Theory proponents sometimes do not understand, many Americans, and not only Jewish Americans, find some of the ideas that inform Vulcan Theory—and some of the language in which its ideas are often expressed—problematic in the extreme. Any allegation that American Jews are powerful string-pullers who secretly control our political system immediately strikes many people as a form of vicious and ignorant bigotry. Similarly, the allegation that American Jews are less loyal than other Americans, that as a group they have what is known as a “dual loyalty,” preferring the interests of Israel over those of the United States, is seen by many people as an ugly smear, an expression of the kind of hate and prejudice that no honest and intelligent person should embrace.
Discussions of Israel policy often break down at this point. When charged with antisemitism after voicing what they see as perfectly reasonable ideas, Vulcan proponents become more deeply convinced that a powerful and well-organized Jewish lobby group is trying to curtail all discussion of an important topic. And the more Vulcan Theorists refer to these ideas, the more vociferous the cries of antisemitism become. This is not a cycle from which much enlightenment can come; we must find other ways to discuss these issues or we will not be able to address the subject at all.
As we think about this impasse, it is important to remember that even for someone like me who believes that Vulcan Theory is a delusional mess often if not always rooted in the intersection of ignorance and prejudice, the question it asks—why does the United States support Israel to such an unusual extent?—is a perfectly valid and legitimate one. Israel is a small country; it is a long way away; it is involved in a long-standing and highly publicized conflict; there are many people in its neighborhood and beyond who hate it; many of its policy choices at home and abroad are controversial. Not only is there nothing wrong with asking questions about American support for this controversial country; the subject of American support for Israel is one that any serious student of American policy would want to address.
Policy conversations that collapse into moral outrage and name-calling are increasingly common in American life; many Americans seem to be taking Sarah Churchill, the first Duchess of Marlborough, as a role model. “She hated easily; she hated heartily; she hated implacably,” Lord Macaulay wrote of this redoubtable woman.[10]
Whatever merits this attitude may have, it is a crippling liability for the student of foreign affairs. In this field, one cannot simply reject; one must try to understand people whose ideas one sometimes abhors. Any diplomat must be able to engage people across all kinds of political and moral divide; any historian, any student of foreign policy, must come to understand a wide variety of attitudes and opinions that, often for extremely good reasons, are largely unacceptable in polite American society today. Whether the issue is racism, misogyny, jihadi ideology, Islamophobia, homophobia, xenophobia, communism, fascism, or, yes, antisemitism, the student of foreign policy must develop the capacity to engage calmly, dispassionately, and sometimes even cooperatively with people committed to utterly revolting ideas.
No American diplomat in the Middle East or Europe can operate without encountering many people who regard Vulcan Theory as settled science. They believe as firmly as Monsieur Lescarbault that they have seen Planet Vulcan transiting the sun. That “the Jews” control American foreign policy is an article of faith for such people; it is a deeply implanted piece of their worldview that cannot be easily changed. Similarly, one cannot engage in the politics of Israel policy in the United States without encountering people who fail to perceive the intellectual gravity and in some cases the moral squalor of these errors.
There are those who try to silence all such talk because it is morally repugnant. This is both a moral and a political mistake. One must engage with ideas, even unpleasant ones, and if pro-Israel campaigners try to ban anti-Israel speech, they can hardly be surprised if others try to silence pro-Israel voices in turn.
In any case, not every Vulcanist is acting in bad faith. Nobody is born omniscient, and all of us must form hypotheses about how the world works as we develop a worldview. Sometimes our hypotheses turn out to be wrong. It is far more important to see how and why Vulcan Theory falls short as an explanation of world events than it is to analyze the morals and the motives of those who espouse it.
Vulcan Theory exists at many degrees of sophistication. In its simplest and most naive forms it is indistinguishable from Protocols of the Elders of Zion–style propaganda mixed with the kind of disinformation about the United States and liberal capitalism that the USSR and Nazi Germany once competed to produce. More intellectually elaborated forms of Vulcan Theory avoid the crudest stereotypes and caricatures but still offer radically oversimplified accounts of U.S. policy and politics.
To engage with every form of Vulcan Theory would make for a longer, duller, and less useful book than anything I am prepared to inflict on my readers, and in any case it is more interesting to learn why Einstein was right than why Le Verrier was wrong. The best way to challenge a bad theory that offers a superficial picture of the world is to offer a richer and more satisfying perspective that covers more facts, integrates more phenomena into a compelling picture, and leaves fewer loose ends. Escaping the narrow confines of Vulcan Theory is like finding a small key that opens the door to the outside world; exploring that world is what this book is about, but before we turn to that larger picture, it is worth a quick look at some of the problems and limitations associated with Vulcan Theory.
The idea that an Israel lobby composed of Jews and fundamentalist Christians dictates America’s Israel policy in ways that deliberately elevate Israeli interests over those of the United States is wrong about the history of U.S.-Israel relations, wrong about the way foreign policy works, wrong about the American political process, wrong about American Christians, and, last but by no means least, it is wrong not only about American Jews but about the political context of Zionism. This never was, and given the power relationships between gentiles and Jews, never could be an agenda that “the Jews” imposed on the gentile world. The triumph of Zionism in the Jewish community was driven less by the spontaneous appeal of Zionism to Jews than by the recognition, late and reluctant in many cases for many Jews, that unshakable gentile preferences and priorities, which all the Jewish power in the world was helpless to alter, made the odd and unlikely ideology of Zionism the only program that offered many of the world’s Jews a hope however modest for both personal and cultural survival. Israel is not a project that Jews imposed on gentiles; for better or for worse it is something that gentiles, antisemites included, and Jews made together.
The National Interest
The heart of Vulcan Theory is the idea that America’s Israel policy does not serve America’s national interest, but serves Israeli interests instead. When Israeli interests are at stake, the United States deviates from its “true orbit” around the sun of the national interest, and the quest for Planet Vulcan is the quest to identify the lump of dark matter responsible for this otherwise inexplicable behavior.
This picture is, to use Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s phrase, a great deal “clearer than truth.”[11] In the real world, as opposed to the simplified cosmos of an IR—international relations—theory textbook, the national interest is rarely clear and almost always in dispute; politicians and national leaders are often much more interested in preserving their own power than in anything so abstract and patriotic as the national interest, even if they could be sure what it was.
As soon as we begin to think seriously about the national interest, we face some very tough questions. It is difficult to define the national interest, and it is difficult to identify with any certainty the policies by which it can best be served. People come to politics with very different ideas about what the national interest is and how we can advance it. Some Americans, for example, believe that America’s national interest requires us to build a global order based on democracy, free markets, and the rule of law. Only this, they believe, can prevent the eruption of new wars between the great powers that could exterminate our species, while offering the scope for American enterprise to operate on a global scale in ways that assure American prosperity in a stable and affluent world. To achieve this goal, they believe that the United States should engage in an active, global foreign policy aimed at strengthening organizations like the United Nations and the International Criminal Court. American forces should be used, preferably in association with others but if necessary on our own, to protect human rights.
This approach has its critics. Some Americans believe that a global foreign policy of this kind leads to endless wars overseas. Others believe that the economic policies like free trade that this approach involves actually work to the detriment of American workers. Some believe that the project is unrealistic, and that the nations of the world will never create the kind of order that these Americans are hoping to build.
My book Special Providence centers on a discussion of four very different traditions of American thought about the national interest—Jeffersonians, Hamiltonians, Wilsonians, and Jacksonians all care about the American national interest—who often disagree profoundly about what that interest is or how it can best be achieved. Wilsonians believe that the United States should promote the establishment of a world order based on human rights, international law, and powerful multinational institutions. Hamiltonians believe that we must build a strong federal government that can act to support American business abroad and economic development at home. Jeffersonians believe that too much activity overseas will increase the risk of war, promote inequality in the United States, and reduce individual freedom at home. Jacksonians share Jeffersonian skepticism about Wilsonian interventions to promote human rights and Hamiltonian support of a strong central government and pro-corporate economic policies; but unlike Jeffersonians, they believe that the United States will not be safe unless other countries respect our willingness to use force to defend our honor, our interests, and our allies. These schools argue for very different foreign policies. The quarrel is more than two hundred years old; it is no closer to being settled now than it was when George Washington was president.
The political history of American foreign policy is not a struggle between patriots wanting to advance the national interest and traitors who seek to undermine it; it is a history of conflicting ideas about what the national interest means and how to pursue it under particular circumstances. When Secretary of State William H. Seward supported the annexation of Alaska and opponents denounced it as “Seward’s Folly” and “Andrew Johnson’s Polar Bear Garden,” the opponents were not a Russia lobby or a British lobby seeking to prevent American territorial expansion in order to help foreign governments. They were patriotic Americans who believed, wrongly as it turned out, that the addition of a large but largely empty expanse of territory on the far northern fringes of the American continent would not be worth the purchase price of $7.2 million.[12] Intelligent people can and frequently do disagree in good faith about what the national interest is—which means that the national interest is anything but self-evident much of the time.
Even if we could agree on what the national interest is, it is unlikely that we would often find a consensus about what policies are most likely to achieve it. The history of American foreign policy is in part a history of disappointment—when policies do not work out as planned—and partly a history of surprise, when unexpected developments catch American policymakers off guard. American officials were unable to predict the Iranian Revolution of 1979; neither did they predict the fall of the Soviet Union ten years later. The administration of George W. Bush failed to anticipate the 2008 Russian invasion of Georgia; Barack Obama’s administration failed to anticipate Russia’s intervention in Syria or the boost to Russian influence that the intervention—which the Obama administration, wrongly, predicted would fail—ultimately provided. Over thousands of years of human history we can see how great leaders and great states have been repeatedly surprised by both positive and negative events that they could not predict and did not expect.
In the Middle East, the predictions of those who supported and those who opposed closer U.S.-Israel relations have repeatedly been proven wrong. Pro-Israel observers argued in 1948 that Arab hostility to the new state would rapidly diminish. Anti-Israel observers argued that U.S. relations with Israel would frustrate our efforts to build a Cold War alliance with the Arabs against the extension of Soviet power. Both predictions were wrong. Arab bitterness over the establishment of Israel remains a powerful force in the Middle East even today; on the other hand, during the Cold War and beyond no other power has been able to develop and maintain the range of deep, cooperative, and strategic relationships the United States has built with many countries in the Arab world.
The political struggle over foreign policy is never and can never be an intellectual contest in a seminar room, where calmly rational arguments lead to a stable consensus. Many participants in the political debate have only very hazy ideas about the national interest; they are much more interested in the interests of a particular domestic constituency—sugarcane farmers and orange juice growers opposed to a free trade agreement with Brazil, Armenian Americans opposed to a deeper U.S.-Turkey relationship, gay activists opposed to close relations with African governments that criminalize homosexuality, arms manufacturers fighting to lift controls on the export of powerful weapons to unstable but well-heeled rulers abroad, politicians who only want reelection, and many others. If we add to these self-interested voices in the debate the voices of those who do care about the national interest but disagree fundamentally about how the national interest can be defined and how it should be pursued, we begin to understand how chaotic, how unpredictable, and how contingent the formation of American foreign policy actually is.
No umpire is capable of issuing an objective and infallible ruling about which of the possible courses is actually correct; historians, we can be sure, will debate the merits of important American foreign policy choices for years to come without necessarily reaching a consensus. If historians often do not agree about whether our policies in the past were effective and wise, what kind of agreement can we expect from policymakers and politicians today about whether a given policy will work?
America’s Israel policy, like our NATO policy, our trade policy, our Venezuela policy, and our human rights policy, poses a set of complicated questions, and Americans do not always or even usually agree about what we should be trying to achieve, much less the best strategy for achieving it. Lacking certain knowledge about future developments, we seek to steer our policies based on different ideas about how the world works, what America needs, and what our priorities should be. No side in these debates is always right, and no side is always wrong. This is politics, not algebra. It is art, not science.
Vulcanism assumes a clarity that does not exist: that the “correct” foreign policy in the Middle East is obvious, that this correct policy rarely if ever involves a close U.S.-Israel relationship, and that the only people who dispute this obvious truth are Jews driven by dual loyalty, evangelical Christians blinded by superstitious ideas about the end of the world, and opportunistic scoundrels who follow the Benjamins wherever they lead.
The Historical Record
One of the problems for Vulcan Theory is that American policy toward Israel has not been historically consistent. If an extremely powerful Israel lobby guided by Israeli rather than American interests was responsible for America’s policy toward the Zionist movement and the Jewish state, we would expect that America’s Israel policy would not show much change over time, and we would also expect to find that American support would be strongest when Israel needed help most.
That is not what happened. American policy toward the Zionist movement before 1948 and to the State of Israel after that date has varied widely. In 1937 Britain issued the Peel Report and sharply limited Jewish migration to Palestine even as Nazi persecution of the Jews was intensifying. The United States put no pressure on Britain to change its policy. During the 1930s and 1940s, despite vigorous efforts, American Jews were unable to mobilize America against Hitler, unable to persuade the American public to admit Jewish refugees from Nazi persecution, and unable even to persuade Franklin Roosevelt to bomb the rail tracks leading to Auschwitz. When the Jews needed the United States most, the United States was nowhere to be seen; if there was ever a time for American Jews to demonstrate their mastery of the American political process, from the standpoint of the interests of Jews around the world, that would have been the time to do it.
From ignoring Jewish powerlessness during most of the 1930s and 1940s, Vulcan Theory then highlights Jewish influence over the Truman administration. President Harry Truman’s Palestine policy between 1945 and 1948 is seen to demonstrate the irresistible power of the apparently invincible Israel lobby.
Vulcan theorists do not even attempt to describe what must have been an extraordinary process of Jewish political development that transformed the hapless Jewish leaders vainly begging Roosevelt to spare a few bombs for the rail lines to Auschwitz in 1944 into the ruthless dictators of 1948 forcing a cowed Harry Truman to follow their bidding. A revolution so complete, so astonishing in American politics as a Jewish seizure of power in the mid-1940s ought to be the object of great interest by historians. The libraries should be full of books on this fascinating subject, and the memoirs of those who brought it about would be documents of great value. Yet somehow these books do not seem to exist.
The Vulcan hypothesis leads from one monstrous historical incongruity to another. The powerless Jews begging Roosevelt for bombs may have become the supreme rulers of American foreign policy under Truman, but by 1953 they must have all died of the plague. While there is an unthinking perception among many that the United States and Israel have “always” been allied, history tells a very different story. Under presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy, the focus of American policy in the Middle East was Egypt, not Israel. In the hope of developing a relationship with Nasser, the United States worked to make Egypt its preferred partner in the Middle East at Israel’s expense.
So how did those ruthless Jewish dictators who held Truman in thrall lose their grip? Why was Eisenhower able to defy the erstwhile hidden masters of American politics? How did the Jews lose their cunning? If American policy toward Israel has varied significantly, and it has, and we are supposed to believe that the power of a shadowy Israel lobby is the most important determinant of American policy in the Middle East, then a history of American foreign policy would need to include a history of the rising and falling fortunes of this lobby, explaining why it is more influential at some moments, less influential in others.
We will look at the historical record in more detail later; it is enough for the present purpose to note that American support for Israel has been both less consistent and less tied to Israel’s needs than Vulcan Theory would have it. In the 1950s and early 1960s, when Israel was a weak regional power, the American attitude toward Israel was distant and cold. Israeli prime ministers did not visit the White House; the United States not only did not send Israel military aid but Israel was prevented from buying American weapons. It was only as Israel became a more influential and powerful country in the region that American attitudes shifted. Israel the victim never drew much American support; Israel the victor found America eager to cooperate.
Vulcan Theory does not seriously engage with the complicated actual history of American relations with the Jewish state and the Zionist movement; to do so would test the theory to destruction. There are many criticisms one can make about American Middle East policy in the last one hundred years, but the idea that the influence of American Jews—even with the help of evangelical Christians—shaped that policy to serve the interests of Zionism does not explain the historical record. If we want to understand the American Middle East policy we must dig deeper than Vulcan Theory.
Dark Planet
Vulcan Theorists are not wrong to ask why American policy is often so pro-Israel; nor are they wrong to look to politics and even to lobby politics for an answer. Foreign policy is always a political question; even in undemocratic societies foreign policy decisions reflect political calculations by rulers who worry about their hold on power at home as much as and sometimes more than they worry about defending their power abroad. The problem with the Vulcan approach to the politics of Israel policy is not that it is too focused on the political support for Israel in American society; it is that the Vulcanist analysis of American politics is too crude. Their fault isn’t that they think too much about the Israel lobby; it is that they haven’t thought about it enough.
The topic of lobbies in politics makes Americans uncomfortable today in much the same way and for much the same reasons that the topic of political parties made Americans uncomfortable in the Federalist Era. Politics is supposed to be about the general good; parties then—and lobbies now—are seen as chiefly interested in special as opposed to general interests. The sugar beet lobby cares a lot more about the financial well-being of sugar beet farmers than it does about the health of American democracy as a whole. The Founding Fathers were ashamed of being seen to act on the part of a special interest—of a “faction” in the language of the day—in much the same way an aspiring politician today would not want to be seen as the tool of a lobby.
Yet lobbies are as indispensable to the functioning of representative government now as factions were to the Federalists. Lobbies are organized groups that seek to influence the political process in a particular direction. With its large population, robust civil society, active federal government, diverse economic base, and far-reaching foreign policy, the United States leads the world in lobbies, whether one looks at commercial lobbies like the Chamber of Commerce, environmental lobbies like Greenpeace, or ideological lobbies like NARAL and Human Rights Watch. Religious organizations maintain lobbying offices in Washington; foreign governments funnel torrents of cash to public relations firms; and civil servants, elected officials, and congressional staffers toil at low-paid public-sector jobs in the sure and certain hope of a lucrative afterlife in the influence industry.
There is no other way in a complex society like ours that the various groups whose interests are directly affected by federal legislation or policy can make their views known to the officials whose actions will determine their fate, and while abuses and corruption sometimes occur, the existence and activity of lobbies are normal and necessary parts of the political process. To the extent that Vulcan Theorists believe that it is unusual or illegitimate for supporters of close U.S.-Israel relations to organize politically to advance their point of view, but they don’t object to the presence of lobbies throughout American life, they are applying a different standard to pro-Israel groups than to other political movements.
One group of Vulcan Theorists argue that the Israel lobby is different from all other lobbies. This was the argument I heard during a seminar in Amman, Jordan, as Jordanian experts analyzed the politics of American foreign policy. It was, most of them felt, “the Jews” rather than “the oil companies” who ran the United States. The Jordanians reached this conclusion because the oil companies and other corporations—who presumably value good relations with the Arab countries where many of the world’s most abundant oil resources are found—have been unable to prevent American presidents from choosing pro-Israel policies that Arabs dislike. Given the immense wealth and presumed power of the oil companies in American politics, a power that can defeat them must be awesome indeed. Planet Vulcan must be very large.
American as opposed to Jordanian academics who agree that the Israel lobby is qualitatively different from other lobbies reach this conclusion by a variety of routes. There are, for example, academics who teach that domestic politics is largely irrelevant to the foreign policy of a given state. The competitive and anarchic nature of the international system leaves governments no real choice in foreign policy. In the eat-or-be-eaten world of international politics, states—seen as rational actors whose goal is survival—do what they must. They circle the sun of the national interest on predictable orbits. Yet at the time of George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, in the minds of some analysts, America wobbled. American foreign policy appeared to diverge so far from the rational pursuit of state survival that it was necessary to seek the cause.
Only one factor appeared to be powerful enough to have pulled American policy into such a strange deviation from its expected orbit: the “Israel lobby” was playing the role of Planet Vulcan. The Iraq War might not have been in the American national interest, these analysts argued, but it was in Israel’s interest.[13] A cabal of Jewish neoconservatives and big-money donors who privileged Israel’s national interests over those of the United States must, they reasoned, somehow be controlling the Bush administration.
The claim that the pro-Israel lobby is uniquely powerful in American politics looks, on its face, antisemitic to many people. That’s not quite fair to the proponents of this line of thought, and we will look more closely at this approach when our story reaches the Bush administration.
The claim that the Israel lobby is unique is Vulcan Theory in its purest form, but there is another approach to the question. Both on the left and on the right in American politics one can find people who object to the excessive power of all economically powerful lobbies, the Israel lobby included. For such people, the problem is not that America has a powerful Israel lobby, but that American policy in general is under the control of well-organized and well-funded lobby groups. Given the power of these special interests, America’s pretensions to be a democratic government are fraudulent, and the special interests control virtually everything we do. Many people believe that this is the case: that the oil companies control our oil policy, other corporations control our policy toward Latin American producers of raw materials, and pro-Israel Jews control our Israel policy. This is a very common critique of American society and American foreign policy that informs the cynicism of Gore Vidal, the wrath of Noam Chomsky, and the disdain of Ron Paul. From this perspective, elite groups organized into powerful lobbies dominate American life. American democracy as currently practiced is essentially a sham, a theatrical performance behind which our real masters go about their business of controlling state policy. All the politicians spouting platitudes about “the issues” and “values” are simply there to make it harder for ordinary people to understand the hidden forces that in fact shape both foreign and domestic policy in our corporate and plutocratic state.
This is a classic antiliberal argument that long predates the existence of Israel and that has been used by Marxist and populist movements to attack liberal democracy since the nineteenth century. It treats foreign and domestic policy as largely interchangeable; the Israel lobby controls Middle East policy in much the same way that the employers’ lobby controls labor policy. It is not totally without merit; clearly wealth plays a role in American politics and rich lobbies often have more success than poor ones.
Whether one takes the Chomsky position that the Israel lobby is one lobby among many that successfully reduce the democratic process to a charade or the competing position that the Israel lobby is different from all the others, both positions, if true, amount to fundamental critiques of the concept of democracy as practiced in the United States. Either way, the Israel lobby argument is not just an argument about Middle East policy; it is an argument about what kind of society we live in. It is an argument about the health of American democracy.
If Chomsky is right, we need something very like a revolution in the United States to replace our current ugly regime of state-sponsored terrorism with something at least marginally less awful. If the problem is just the Israel lobby, then we need to do something about the power of evangelical Christians and Jews.
While there are flashes of truth in both lines of analysis, both take one feature of American foreign policy and blow it out of proportion. Chomsky and company are surely right that corporate lobbies and similar groups exercise significant influence in American foreign and domestic policy, and that this influence isn’t always or even often exercised in the service of a philanthropic vision of the common good. And no one in their right mind would deny that there are groups who lobby the American government on behalf of what they believe to be “pro-Israel” policies and that this lobbying is often successful.
But even so, these writers and thinkers are wrong about American politics. There are lobbies and they do have influence on matters of both domestic and, despite what some realists claim, foreign policy, but the American political system is more than the creature of powerful interest groups operating behind the scenes. Lobbies can win victories here and there, and a smart, well-financed lobby will do better than a foolishly led or poorly funded one, but American democracy is not just a slogan. To control the policy of the United States government over the long run on an issue that the public cares about, something else is needed: public support.
Take the tobacco lobby. In the middle of the last century, Big Tobacco was widely believed to be the most powerful lobby in Washington. It was political suicide to go up against it, and for years the tobacco lobby was able to get almost everything it wanted. But then the wind changed. Public opinion about smoking began to shift. The tobacco lobby had just as much money as before, and its lobbyists were just as skilled, but gradually the tobacco interests began to lose ground. Before long, it was political suicide for politicians to take money from tobacco companies. Public opinion changed and then policy changed. The tobacco lobby had to lower its sights. It could no longer fight smoking restrictions, suppress medical studies linking tobacco to cancer, or fight taxes on its products. The tobacco lobby has not disappeared, and tobacco companies continue to fund it, but it is a much less ambitious force in Washington and state capitols today.
Some of the most powerful lobbies in the United States today are powerful because they represent public opinion, rather than opposing it. The American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) with its membership of nearly 37 million[14] dues-paying people over fifty years of age has time and again brushed back well-funded attempts by Wall Street firms and their allies to privatize Social Security. Politicians fear such lobbies because they move votes. Politicians fear the National Rifle Association (NRA) less because of its money than because in much of the country being labeled “anti-gun” will end their hopes for reelection. They fear the AARP because being labeled “anti–Social Security” means political death.
Lobbies whose causes are unpopular, or to which the public is largely indifferent, are only as powerful as the money and the political skills they bring to the table. Their causes prosper best when their issues stay under the radar of public attention. The tobacco lobby was once popular and courted publicity for its defense of “smokers’ rights”; today it prefers to do its business as far from the spotlight as possible.
Israel lobbies benefit from their ability to mobilize public support. In much of the country, being labeled “anti-Israel” is political poison—often among non-Jews as much or more than among Jews. Given that, politicians generally try to avoid falling afoul of groups that the public recognizes as reliably pro-Israel. Like it or not, most of the Israel lobby’s influence comes from the popularity of its cause among the American people.
But, Vulcan hunters riposte, who makes public opinion? American policy may be pro-Israel because American public opinion is pro-Israel, but that public opinion itself, they believe, has been shaped by what they see as an American media industry dominated by Jews.
This is a very popular theory in some quarters, but it hardly fits the facts. The most pro-Israel coverage in American news today doesn’t come from mainstream news organizations like The New York Times, CNN, or the three networks. To find coverage that was broadly sympathetic to the Israeli government under the right-leaning Likud leadership, one had to turn to Fox News. This news organization has been consistently the most conservative and the most pro-Israel major news source in the twenty-first century. It is owned by the Australian Christian Rupert Murdoch, it was built by the non-Jewish Roger Ailes, and its most prominent news hosts and commentators have had names like Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and Mike Huckabee.
There is another problem with the idea that American public opinion is pro-Israel because of the powerful Jewish presence in the media. The idea that powerful Jewish cabals manipulate the public like puppets on a string thanks to their control of the American media is not just a theory about clever and ruthless Jews. It is also a theory about stupid and clueless non-Jewish Americans. If non-Jewish Americans are so easily manipulated on this subject, they are easily manipulated about almost anything, and American democratic governance is less about translating the preferences of the majority into public policy than it is about providing a veneer of legitimacy for the policies our Jewish media masters have devised for us.
No sane person will deny that Americans sometimes make foolish choices in their personal and political lives, but to believe that Jewish virtuosos play the country like a violin seems a little extreme. Are non-Jewish Americans really just sheeple, pawns of the Jews, manipulated by the clever, clannish Chosen People in ways that we simple sons and daughters of the soil can never fully comprehend? The American people have built the largest and most stable democracy in world history. We have built the world’s richest and most advanced economy. Our predecessors helped defeat or contain some of the worst monsters in human form, mass-murdering psychotics like Hitler and Stalin. Thrust into world power in the middle of the tumultuous twentieth century, the Americans were remarkably successful at building a global political and economic system that has prevented great power war for seventy years, promoted the emergence of the developing world from colonialism, and allowed billions of people worldwide to enter into undreamed of prosperity. The United States built a global coalition against the Soviet Union that held the line against communist expansion until this backward and cruel system collapsed of its own weight. Patient American leadership helped Europe overcome a legacy of generations of warfare to move toward the kind of deep peace humanity could once scarcely imagine. Domestically, the American people attacked a host of evils, wrestling with the demon of racism and restructuring family life to provide increasing freedom and opportunity to women. The Americans sent astronauts to the moon, invented the internet, and they continue to produce more scientific and technical breakthroughs than any other country on earth.[15]
Are the people who accomplished all this, 98 percent of whom aren’t Jewish,[16] really a bunch of ignorant peasants, “useful idiots” manipulated by clever and determined Jews? Is 98 percent of the American population a collection of ignorant and sniveling couch potatoes, passively accepting whatever ideas the Jewish puppet masters stuff into their feeble brains? This is a slur, not an argument, but many people lazily accept it without thinking through its implications for democracy.
Pro-Israel political groups play a significant role in American political life, but their role is both more normal and more nuanced than Vulcan Theory would have it. They operate less as a means to impose the will of a minority on the majority than as instruments through which a pro-Israel majority enacts its preferences into policy and law. They also operate in a cut-and-thrust world of lobby politics in which unexpected alliances and coalitions often form. If we want to understand the sources of the power of pro-Israel forces in American politics, it is the nature and the history of the American political process and of pro-Israel sentiment that we must examine, not the plots and machinations of “the Jews.” American policy on Israel may be right or it may be wrong, but it emerges from the same kind of political process and struggle that produces the rest of our policies.
The Planet of the Jews
Since Vulcan Theory is wrong about the history of U.S.-Israel relations, wrong about the politics of the national interest, and wrong about the role of pro-Israel lobby groups in the American political process, we should not be surprised that it is also wrong about American Jews. It is wrong not only about the amount of power “the Jews” wield in American society; it is wrong about what American Jews think and have thought about Israel policy, and wrong about the relationship of Israel policy and Jewish political commitments.
There are, of course, American Jews who support a pro-Israel foreign policy, and organizations like AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) have a significant presence in Washington. AIPAC spends just over $100 million per year[17] and has over four hundred employees.[18] Presumably they are doing something, though AIPAC’s opposition did not succeed in derailing President Obama’s Iran policies. But the belief that AIPAC and its allies play the role in American foreign policy that Le Verrier thought Vulcan played in Mercury’s orbit blinds the Vulcanologists to the existence of forces that can tell us much more about American politics and foreign policy.
The idea that “the Jews” control American policy on matters affecting Israel is absurd on its face. Throughout the twenty-first century, American Jews have consistently voted in greater numbers for candidates seen as more “dovish” on U.S. support for Israel than for the pro-Netanyahu, pro-Likud “hawks.”[19] Barack Obama received more Jewish votes and more Jewish money than either of his Republican opponents; of the $160 million donated to the presidential nominees of the two major parties in 2012, President Obama’s reelection campaign received 71 percent. The remaining 29 percent went to Mitt Romney.[20] American Jews consistently preferred George W. Bush’s Democratic opponents to the author of an Iraq war allegedly undertaken in Israel’s interest, voting heavily against Bush in both 2000 and 2004. Large majorities of American Jews voted against Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020, and the vaunted neoconservatives whose backing for Bush and the war in Iraq led some observers to conclude that the “Israel lobby” had taken over American foreign policy became leading voices in the Never Trump community. In 2016, while a small number of wealthy Jewish donors supported the Trump campaign, Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign raised substantially more money from Jewish donors than did the Trump effort, and she also received an overwhelming electoral mandate from Jewish voters.[21] Before President Trump could implement a series of policy changes ranging from repudiating President Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran to moving the American embassy to Jerusalem he had to defeat the presidential candidate that most American Jews strongly supported. It seems more than perverse to attribute these policies to the power of “the Jews,” just as it had earlier been wrong to attribute George W. Bush’s policies to a community that largely rejected him.
If the American Jewish community actually controlled American policy on Israel, the policy would be something well to the left of anything establishment Republicans like Mitt Romney and John McCain proposed; many leading Jewish donors, activists, and Obama White House staffers wanted President Obama to put more pressure on Israel over Palestinian issues. If American Jews controlled America’s Israel policy, the U.S. embassy would still be in Tel Aviv, the annexation of the Golan Heights would not be recognized, and the United States would be pressing Israel on settlement policy. To blame the Jewish community for policies it dislikes made by presidents it rejects seems, if not virulently antisemitic, at least uninformed.
Those who see the American Jewish community as monolithically united behind a hardline Israel policy do not know much about American Jewish history. In the nineteenth century, most American Jews rejected the idea that Jews were exiles longing for a restoration to the Promised Land. The idea of a Messianic redemption was seen by the modernizing, enlightened Jews of that era as one of the elements of superstition that an enlightened Jewish culture should abandon. An important early prayer book issued for the use of American Jews, the Minhag America published in 1857, scandalized many Jews because it omitted the traditional prayers for a return to the Holy Land.[22] For many years Herzlian Zionism, the idea that Jews needed a Jewish state in order to fully express their identity, was unpopular among American Jews.[23] Once immigration restrictions in 1924 ended mass Jewish immigration to the United States, more American Jews came to support (both financially and politically) Jewish immigration to British-ruled Palestine, but Jewish leaders remained deeply skeptical about the idea of a Jewish state until Hitler’s Final Solution was already under way.
American Jews were more supportive of Israel in the 1950s and 1960s. Israel was weaker than it would later become, and the slender economic resources of the state were largely taken up with the need to resettle refugees from Europe and the Middle East. For American Jews, the idea of Israel as a refuge for persecuted Jews unable to settle in the United States was a unifying force, and their uneasiness about the state of Palestinian refugees was to some degree offset by the spectacle of hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees coming into Israel from the rest of the Middle East. This united and fervent Jewish support did not have much effect on Eisenhower administration policy; U.S.-Israel relations touched their lowest point following Israel’s invasion of the Sinai in 1956.
Israel’s stunning victory in the 1967 Six-Day War led in the short term to an intensive surge in support for Israel among both Jewish and non-Jewish Americans,[24] but over the longer term many American Jews began to question Israeli policies in the territories seized from Egypt, Jordan, and Syria in the course of the conflict. As the balance in Israeli politics shifted toward right-wing, nationalist parties, older political divisions among American Jews began to reappear. The doubts that many American Jews voiced about Israeli policies in recent decades echoed concerns about Zionism that preceding generations had shared. Leaders like Judah Magnes, the founder of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and, next to Golda Meir, the most prominent American Jew to take up a new life in Israel, had called for a binational state in the 1940s and spoken of the need for a “cultural home” for Jews in Palestine rather than a sovereign state. By the Obama administration, a new generation of American Jewish writers was expressing, often in the face of stiff criticism from other members of the American Jewish community, similar doubts and qualms about the direction of the Jewish state.
Later we will return to the deep debates among American Jews over Zionism and over Israel policy, but here we must note that as Jewish support for Israel became more nuanced and in some quarters less strong, support for Israel among non-Jewish Americans continued to grow. At the same time, as Israel itself became a stronger country and therefore, at least from some perspectives, a more valuable ally, the United States increased military aid to Israel and deepened its commercial and diplomatic relations.
The most important turning point in the U.S.-Israel relationship came in 1973. The president who laid the foundations for the Israeli-American alliance was Richard Nixon, hated by most American Jews and given to the crudest antisemitic rhetoric in private conversation, as his secret White House tapes reveal.[25] Nixon’s diplomatic and material support for Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War helped save the Jewish state in an hour of crisis, but it brought him no surge of Jewish support and he did not expect that it would; the American Jewish community was viscerally and almost unanimously opposed to the best friend in the White House that Israel had ever had. Not until Donald Trump would a president appear who shifted American policy as decisively as Richard Nixon in a pro-Israel direction; not until Trump would a president appear who was as unpopular with American Jews as Nixon became.
The American Jewish community is not a dark planet that irresistibly pulls American policy in a pro-Israel direction. Insofar as the American Jewish community has an impact on American foreign policy, it is more to moderate and limit American support for Israel, and especially for Israeli governments of the right, than to press inexorably for ever greater support to Jerusalem from the United States. A political candidate whose sole goal it is to collect campaign contributions and votes from American Jews would do better running against pro-Likud policies than for them.
The relationship between Jewish support for Israel and gentile support for Israel is clearly more complicated than the caricature of Jewish manipulation that Vulcan Theorists too often put forward. This is nothing new; Zionism was never an agenda that a disciplined Jewish community imposed on the rest of the world. From the beginning of the Zionist movement, Zionism owed much of its power among Jews to its ability to attract gentile support. To see how this worked, it is worth turning away from American politics for a moment to look at how the founder of modern Zionism was able to persuade Kaiser Wilhelm II to endorse the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine. This “German Balfour Declaration” was not as long-lasting or as historically significant as the British one, but the process through which Theodor Herzl was able to get a great European power to support the Zionist project illustrates dynamics that are still at work in American politics today.