It is often assumed that US policy in the Middle East would be far more "even handed" and less tied to Israeli interests if a lobby in Washington called the American Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC) didn't exist. The lobby group in Washington DC, founded in 1963 and which today boasts a nearly $70 million annual budget is said to rule US policy toward Israel with an iron hand unseating long time Congressional representatives (like Paul Findley in 1982) who "dare to speak out." A closer examination gives a very different picture.
AIPAC was formed at a time when US policy toward Israel was far different than it is today. In the first twenty five years of the State of Israel's existence, US policy toward the Jewish state was somewhat aloof. During Israel's 1948 War of Independence, Truman recognized the Jewish State immediately after David Ben Gurion, Israel's first Prime Minister, declared independence on May 14, 1948. The British withdrew the following day ending exactly thirty years of rule over Palestine as a class C mandate of the League of Nations.
Some Early History
Britain's mandate required that it set a timetable for independence handing the country over to "the internal inhabitants" to decide its political future. Irreconcilable differences between the Jewish and Arab communities led made it impossible for Britain to supervise an orderly and peaceful transition of power as the country was in a virtual state of civil war by mid-1947 when the entire problem was turned over to the UN. Between July 1947 and November of that year, the UN Special Commission on Palestine (UNSCOP) investigated conditions on the ground in Palestine deciding that the only viable solution to the conflict was to partition the country roughly according to existing demographic settlement patterns, make Jerusalem an international city under UN control and establish a procedure and a timetable for the independence of both Jewish and Arab states.
The Jews got a narrow strip along the Mediterranean Sea between the City of Acco in the western Galilee and the Arab city of Isdud just north of the Gaza Strip, the entire eastern Galilee (with a small connecting point roughly in the vicinity of Nazareth) and the entire Negev desert in the south. The Arabs got all the western Galilee, what is now a very expanded area of the West Bank (consisting of roughly a third of the country) and an expanded area of the Gaza Strip from Isdud to Rafah and then half way down the length of Israel's border with the Sinai which ends at the Gulf of Aqaba. The land was divided about 50/50 but the Jewish population was only about a third of Palestine's more than 1.8 million inhabitants so while the Arab State consisted almost completely of Arab residents, the Jewish state consisted equally of Jewish and Arab residents. A further problem was that Jerusalem had over 100,000 Jewish residents and was completely engulfed by land partitioned to the Palestinian Arab state which utterly separated it from the area partitioned to the Jews.
The partition plan was approved by a General Assembly majority (33 for, 13 against, 10 abstaining) on November 29,1947 as UNGA Resolution 181. It soon proved an unmitigated disaster as the Arabs rejected it vowing war in response. The Jewish side cynically accepted the plan fully aware of the impending armed conflct. A year and a half later, with the last armistice signed between Israel and Syria in July 1949, Israel controlled fully three quarters of British Mandatory Palestine and nearly 800,000 Palestinian Arabs had fled the fighting creating a serious and highly volatile refugee problem. The King of Jordan was assassinated by a Palestinian Arab in 1951 as he entered the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.
All during the Palestine War 1948 the US scrupulously observed an arms embargo against Palestine depriving Jewish forces of resupply while the UK broke the embargo supplying Arab combatants. The Jordanians were led by Major General, Sir John Bagot Glubb who led the Jordanian Arab Legion, the League of Arab States' most potent military force at the time. Both Glubb and King Abdullah secretly deviated from the original Arab League war plan, established under the direction of an Iraqi officer, General Ismael Safwat, who headed the Arab League effort. This allowed the Jewish forces (the Haganah) to achieve a victory and the Kingdom of Jordan to capture a maximal share of the West Bank and rule it for twenty years. Aside from leading the UN partition efforts, the US government played no role in the Haganah victory at all. It was a clandestine shipment of arms from the Soviet Union sent through Czechoslovakia during the first ceasefire in June of 1948 which many historians view as decisive in Israel's victory.
The Truman Administration was friendly to Israel sending a $135 million Export-Import Bank loan to the fledgling Jewish state just after the Palestine War ended. But the US Congress was divided over the extent to which Israel should receive US support. By 1959, modest levels of humanitarian government to government aid from the US to Israel ceased; between 1949 and 1973, Israel received a total of $3.1 billion in US assistance about a third of which were loans for military equipment immediately before and during the 1973 War when Israel faced a potent combined multinational Arab force six times the size of the IDF. This would be a turning point in US/Israeli relations mostly out of the strategic considerations prompted by cold war era competition with the Soviet Union. Israel would soon come to be seen as a US proxy in a vital area.
The Origins of the "Special Relationship"
The State of Israel was saved from certain defeat by a US military airlift code named Operation Nickel Grass which lasted for thirty two days from mid-October until November using Portugal as a forward staging area. The US supplied nearly 28,000 tones of military hardware including tanks, APCs and other military equipment to Israel. The Soviets were supplying both Egypt and Syria over the same period with about half the amount of hardware (about 15,000 tons). The 1973 War sparked serious competition between the US and the Soviets in military transport vehicle development (with the Russians modeling new cargo planes on the US C-5) but the most important long term effect of the war was political. The war turned the tide in US/Israeli relations making the US a steadfast ally of Israel making strong future commitments to Israeli security with consistent regular military aid for the first time. Israel was finally regarded as a regional strategic asset in the cold war with Russia, something the US never would have considered in 1956, when the Eisenhower Administration sided with Egypt and demanded that Israel withdraw from the Sinai during the "Suez Crisis."
The military power and effectiveness demonstrated by both Syria and Egypt drove home the point about the strategic US imperative to support Israel as a proxy in a region beginning to develop a heavy Soviet military presence. According to paper published in Air power Journal it was the growing military influence of the Soviet Union in the Middle East and the effectiveness of the USSR's two main proxies in battle against Israel that spurred the US to act. The Nixon Administration had horribly inadequate intelligence regarding the relative military strengths of Israel and the Soviet Union's Arab allies in the region. The US foreign policy establishment, including Secretary of State Kissenger, assumed Israel to be the uncontested power in the region based on its stunning victory against four invading armies in 1967. But the Soviet military buildup in the area radically changed the balance of forces. There were surprising military gains particularly by Egyptian infantry units in breaking through Israel's storied Bar Lev line in the Sinai. After a week of heavy Israeli losses, the US decided to intervene with an airlift with the first US arms shipment delivered to Israel on October 14.
In addition, the situation revealed just how weak was the US regional presence was when the US Air Force discovered it had no proximate forward staging area at the time to supply allies anywhere between the eastern Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. Portugal allowed the US to use Lajes Air base in the Azores. Most of the rest of Europe at this point risked serious disruption in their vital relations with the Arab World (much of which concerned energy supplies) if they openly aided the US airlift. As with so much history of US military competition with the Russians at the time, the complex and difficult airlift revealed certain logistical weaknesses for the US military in the region. Most of the effort and presence was in the Pacific at this time due to the Vietnam War. From this point on, the US military buildup in the Middle East would be central focus of US defense planners. The 1973 oil boycott drove home the point about US vulnerability in the region as did the reluctance of America's European allies to anger the Arab World over US regional interests. The Air force Journal report sums up,
Despite its military importance, the airlift probably had an even greater political impact because of the effects that extended beyond the immediate scope of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The political ramifications involved not only the relationship of the United States with Israel but also with the Soviet Union, the Arab countries (particularly Egypt), and NATO members...the US government found that maintaining the balance of power in the region was closely tied to the survival of Israel. Surprisingly, the United States was under no treaty obligations or formal protocols to supply Israel. Our commitments derived from a series of White House policy pronouncements issued by five successive presidents dating back to Harry S. Truman. These pronouncements indirectly linked the territorial integrity of Israel to the national security interests of the United States within the greater framework of peace and stability in the Middle East. Moreover, under the Nixon Doctrine, the United States favored support to friendly countries by providing the military equipment and supplies needed for self-defense.
Most of all, the military defeat of the regions strongest Arab power forcing it to shift its allegiance to the US, removed Egypt from the anti-Western bloc allowing the US a free hand and dramatically reducing Soviet influence in the region. Scott McConnell of the Middle East Policy Council questions the long term value of Israel to US strategic interests in the region. Nonetheless, he effectively lists those which stand out in the early years of the "special relationship" that seemed convincing enough to US policy makers to sustain that bond.
How did Israel benefit the United States? Its advocates point to the PLO-Jordanian faceoff in 1970, during which Israeli threats thwarted a possible Syrian intervention and perhaps saved the throne of Jordan’s King Hussein. They cite the success of American arms deliveries during the October 1973 war, which helped persuade Egypt to abandon its Soviet orientation for an American one and make a separate peace with Israel. They note the decisive victory of Israel’s American-supplied air force over Syria’s Soviet Migs in 1982, which demonstrated to the world the superiority not only of Israeli pilots, but of American technology. They point to the captured Soviet weaponry Israel turned over to the United States for examination. They note Israel’s permission for the U.S. Navy to port in Haifa, Israel’s technological advances in drone warfare, and myriad other matters. Proponents of the alliance make the broader argument that Israel has kept the peace in the region. As Martin Kramer, a former Israeli academic who is now a leading advocate for Israel in the United States, puts it, Israel “underpins the Pax Americana” in the Eastern Mediterranean. When the United States kept Israel at arms length (from 1948 to 1973), there were four wars; with the onset of the special relationship and with universal acknowledgement of Israeli regional military superiority, the wars have been small and easily contained. If only, Kramer concludes, the United States could be so fortunate as to have another Israel to protect its interests in the Gulf, its strategic position would be rosy indeed
Whether this is myopic, short sighted policy thinking or not (and it probably is) it better explains the early reasoning behind US decision making before the end of the cold war than does the power of a lobby in Washington whose influence can be questionable. Richard Satloff of WINIP, a pro-Israel think tank, cites Richard Nixon as saying, "I am supporting Israel because it is in the interest of the U.S. to do so.” Satloff then follows up with a quote from none other than professors Mearsheimer and Walt, the duo who published the controversial book The Israel Lobby which made the case that US Middle East policy is all but written by AIPAC. The professors claimed that;
"By serving as America’s proxy after the Six Day War, Israel helped contain Soviet expansion in the region and inflicted humiliating defeats on Soviet clients like Egypt and Syria. Israel occasionally helped protect other U.S. allies (like Jordan’s King Hussein), and its military prowess forced Moscow to spend more backing its losing clients. Israel also gave the United States useful intelligence about Soviet capabilities.”
In examining the era from the 1980s on, one might also add the strategic bombing of Iraq's Osirik Nuclear reactor which kept nuclear weapons out of the hands of one of America's staunchest enemies. And though Israel has failed since its 2006 incursion into Lebanon to downgrade Hezbollah's military capabilities, which have only increased since then, it is still the most effective counterweight to their presence in the region. The beginnings of the US decision to vastly deepen its relationship with Israel was born of military strategic thinking, not the influence of a foreign lobby. It is the reason that US relations with Israel continue as they have to the present moment.
The US, Israel and Drones
Israel is a veritable font of all manner of vital technological advances from information technology to medical diagnostic equipment, robotics and much else. But the single most successful contribution to modern technology has mostly a military application. It's officially referred to as an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) but is best known by its popular moniker, the drone. Drones have received special attention over the past five years or so since President Obama took up and accelerated George W. Bush's War on Terror in such places as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Top estimates by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism of the results of over 500 US drone strikes in four countries since 2004 are nearly five thousand killed, including more than a thousand civilians. But drones have been around for decades and much of the research and development of drone technology has been done in Israel.
Though drones have been around for a long time they really epitomize twenty first century warfare because of their highly sophisticated nature allowing unmanned, almost "robotic" aerial combat. Israel is the single biggest force behind the spread of drone technology and its use in battle. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute over sixty percent of drones exported on the world market between 1985 and 2014 came from Israel. Most of the rest comes from the US. There is big profits to be made in the export of drones. Israeli defense firms like Elbit Systems Ltd. has profited from the sudden boom in the global demand for combat and reconnaissance drones with East Asia as the fastest growing market. As of this year the Israeli defense contractor has a $6.3 billion backlog of orders to meet by years end.
Israel manufactures drones in the US as well. Stark Aerospace based in Columbus, Mississippi is a US subsidiary of Israel Aerospace Industries, one of the largest defense contractors in Israel. Stark is a good example of the extensive US/Israeli cooperation creating a join military-industrial complex that benefits both countries both in terms of profitability and technology transfer. Israel's establishment of the US subsidiary is part of the contemporary trend whereby rather than exporting its products abroad, many firms invest overseas to be close to their foreign markets. The above cited report notes;
The Israelis “set up Stark in 2006 to drum up business in America,” according to Haaretz, because the U.S. prefers “to buy armaments and other defense gear from local companies.” In 2007, Stark “inaugurated its first production outfit, which makes Hunter unmanned vehicles that it sells through Northrop Grumman. In fact, the U.S. armed forces have been using [Israeli-made] Hunter drones since the early 1990s.
Another example of military collaboration between Israeli and western defense firms is the joint development of the Watchkeeper drone by the UK and Israel. According to one 2014 report from the UK by Mary Dobbing and Chris Cole entitled, Israel and the Drone Wars: Examining Israel's Production, Use and Proliferation of UAVs;
In July 2005 the UK government announced that it was placing an £800m contract with Israel for the development of a new unmanned drone. ‘Watchkeeper’ was to be a new British drone to provide surveillance, reconnaissance and targeting for the British Army’s artillery regiment...Watchkeeper is based on Israel’s Hermes 450 drone and is being built by U-TacS Limited, a joint venture company owned by Israel’s Elbit Systems and Thales UK...In June 2007 British forces began using leased Israeli Hermes 450 drones in Iraq and then Afghanistan as a stop-gap measure until Watchkeeper was ready to enter service
Israel has been developing and building drones for over forty years. The first was built by Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) in 1974 for surveillance and later for combat. In 1982, surveillance drones were used in Lebanon to determine the locations of Syrian anti-aircraft artillery. Soon after, US/Israeli joint production would commence on a number of drone projects of mutual military benefit.
The Pioneer drone, made jointly by US AAI Corporation and Israel’s IAI and developed from IAI’s Scout and Tadiran’s Mastiff drones, was acquired for the Israeli Navy in 1985, and in 1988 IAI’s new Searcher drones also came into service. In January 1991, Pioneer surveillance drones, bought second-hand from the Israel, were used in the First Gulf War by the US Navy, to guide shells fired from battleships.
Some aerospace and defense industry market forecasters predict a nearly $90 billion global market in drones in ten years from now. Israel is well placed to profit and so are its western allies such as the US and UK whose defense industries deepen their collaborative efforts on such new, high tech weapons systems year by year. Drone technology is only one of many industrial and strategic benefits that the US derives from its special relationship with Israel. American policy makers have always thrown human rights under the bus to secure such benefits. No special interest lobby is necessary to ensure that they do so.
How Important Is AIPAC?
Adding to Israel's role as a strategic asset, its economic value involving billions annually in trade and direct investment by US corporations in Israel, one is compelled to ask why is AIPAC around at all. Aren't they just pushing on an open door. America has allies that are much less strategic or lucrative whose human rights violations and lack of democracy are gladly tolerated by policy makers simply because their leaders pledge a very credible allegiance to US interests and allow trade and investment to flourish between them and US corporations. No, the US doesn't need Israel for its survival. Is there any US ally or trade partner that the US absolutely needs to prevent a collapse? The US is the biggest game in town, about one quarter of the world economy (GDP) and with a military capability second to none! Does the US need its roughly $13 billion annual trade with Israel or the billions in direct investment it has in that country. No, but the corporations that do benefit, and there are lots of them, are always important to US policy makers. This is true of all countries with which US firms do business. For a country its size, population and annual GDP (about $200 billion) Israel delivers a lot of proverbial bang for the buck.
Another factor that makes the US so pro-Israel is public opinion. American opinion is usually very pro-Israel because of the perception that Israel is a strong, unshakable friend of the US. According to one pollster writing in 2011;
Whatever the role of lobbying groups, public opinion is clearly a major, and perhaps the primary, driver of U.S. policy toward Israel. Over the past four administrations, Israel's favorability ratings according to Gallup have never moved below 45 percent and have reached as high as 71 percent, The average gap between those holding favorable and unfavorable views of Israel over this period is 31 points
More importantly, US relations with Israel appear cost free. US relations with its Arab allies in the region are strong. Sixty five years after Israel's independence, the US has strong relations with a number of Arab states including Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and other GCC countries. The Iraq War harmed US relations with the Arab world more than did its relations with Israel which had nothing to do with that venture. Of course, Israel supported the war but only after Bush declared that he would invade Iraq. In addition, the more than $3 billion in annual foreign military assistance that goes to Israel is mostly spent in the US by law. Almost all the money is directly sent to US defense contractors like Lockheed Martin to produce combat aircraft and other weapons systems which are then sent to Israel. This is a significant annual stimulus to the US economy contributing to GDP growth and jobs. Yes, it is part of the US military-industrial complex but there is no guarantee that a cutoff of Israel's military aid would result in the same amount of money being alternatively used in a similarly stimulative manner for the US domestic economy.
Though AIPAC has an annual budget of nearly $70 million, it has only spent between $2 million and $3 million on Congressional candidates over the past several years. AIPAC has only influenced election races where the candidate it opposed was weak anyhow or had a stronger challenger. In addition, AIPAC gives more money to congressional races. Congress doesn't have much decisive impact on US foreign policy making; power in this regard is really concentrated in the executive branch. AIPAC isn't all that decisive in US electoral politics, it is essentially pushing on an already open door.
One big reason AIPAC has lost so much power is not only that it is far to the right of most American Jews who want greater pressure on Israel to reach a just peace settlement with the Palestinians but because very few actually approved of Netanyahu's recent antics in Congress. Most American Jews prefer that Obama continue negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program. AIPAC's two decade long effort to promote military strikes against Iran's nuclear sites has failed miserably. AIPAC is far out of touch with not only the Jewish community and many Jewish lawmakers in Washington but with the general direction of US policy in the Middle East. A recent opinion poll of a sample of American Jews, revealed that support for negotiations with Iran is more popular than it is with the general American public. According to the June 2015poll,
Nearly six in 10 Jewish respondents (59%) said that they supported any final agreement with Iran that would cap its nuclear program and provide for enhanced inspection of its nuclear facilities in exchange for easing economic sanctions. That was a higher percentage than the 53% of adult respondents from the general public who responded positively when CNN pollsters posed the same question in April.
It is also the case that roughly three quarters of American Jews support a two state solution with the Palestinians. If AIPAC is so out of touch with the American Jewish community and Jewish lawmakers, what chance has it to remain an important force in American politics?
AIPAC's days as a powerful lobbying group are clearly numbered. The recent episode with Netanyahu in the US Senate might ultimately seal its fate. It no longer represents most American Jews if it ever did. America's commitment to Israel isn't based on an unrepresentative reactionary lobby called AIPAC at all but on widespread support from various sectors of US civil society (and government) that strongly believe that such support is in their best interest. If we are to fight to ensure the human and political rights of the Palestinians, as we surely must, we much focus directly on the US political process through movement politics and not obsess about a moribund lobby whose influence has been shown to decline year after year. Those who believe that US support for Israel is based entirely on AIPAC are myopic at best.