Whose Interests?

Michael Neumann weighs in on the Israel lobby debate. He argues that American support of Israel is an outdated Cold War relic:

The US alliance with Israel grew out of 1950s Cold War politics. America supported Egypt against England, France, and Israel in 1956. But when Nasser started buying arms from the Soviet bloc, things changed. The United States, obsessed with visions of a communist Middle East, felt the need for an ally and a base of operations from which it could intimidate the countries it most suspected of veering towards the Soviet camp: Egypt and Syria. The more Israel's military capabilities improved, the more valuable an ally it appeared to be.

With the end of the Cold War, the rationale for this alliance ceased to exist, but the alliance did not. There is a great deal in the government and conduct of nations that runs on inertia, and the US is no exception in this respect. Just as it has taken decades for European nations to outgrow their sentimental attachment to the Americans who defeated Hitler, so it is taking decades for Americans to outgrow their sentimental attachment to Israel, its ally in the fight against communism.

A fair point. Where I lose Neumann is when he suggests that this explanation is at odds with Mearsheimer and Walt:

Maybe I'm wrong and Walt and Mearsheimer are right; it really doesn't matter. What matters is that the US no longer has any reason to support Israel, and huge reason not to. Just imagine if the US stopped backing Israel and gave even moderate support to the Palestinians. Suddenly Islam and America would be on the same side. The war on terror would become a cakewalk. The credibility of American democracy would skyrocket in the Middle East. And it would all be a hell of a lot cheaper. This seems a tad more important than which Jewish neocon said what to whom.

I think Neumann's argument draws support from the Walt and Mearsheimer paper. Both authors clearly imply that while the US might have had a strategic reason for supporting Israel at one point, there's absolutely no satisfactory reason for such support to continue in a post Cold War era, unless you factor in the sway of the lobby. For me, at least, that's the part of their paper that I find most compelling.

Overall, I'm much more sympathetic to the Chomskyan analysis that American support for Israel and the construction of the Israel lobbying apparatus grew up alongside of separate strategic rationales that had less to do with the Cold War than a desire to project state-industrial power abroad in order to achieve leverage over the international economy and open up "favorable climates of investment" (Chomsky sees the Cold War largely as a propaganda tool to provide cover for US/Soviet expansionism into their own spheres of influence).

Nevertheless, I think there's a case to be made that staunch support for Israel today is a strategic liability for the United States, and the strength of the Israel lobby is a primary reason why realization -- or even discussion -- of this doesn't bubble to the surface.