Talking about the influence of the "Israel Lobby"

I've criticized Justin Raimondo here before for writing about Israel's influence on the US in language that, at the very least, lends itself to "Jewish conspiracy" interpretations.

So I want to give him credit for at least partially addressing that in this article: Israel and Moral Blackmail: The Israel lobby is bringing out the big guns Antiwar.com 04/03/06.

His topic is the controversial recent paper The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt (Mar 2006). I won't go into my own view of that paper right now. But I do want to highlight this passage from Raimondo's article, which seems to indicate that he realizes that some ways of talking about Israel and its influence on US foreign policy lend themselves to misuse more easily than others:

It is ridiculous to identify the neocons as somehow representative of Jewish opinion on matters of foreign policy: not only is this demonstrably false, but it is also indicative of real anti-Semitism. David Duke inveighs against "the Jewish neocons," and the Lobby echoes his rhetoric, albeit from the opposite perspective. Both argue that we ought to dispense with the "code words" and call a spade a spade. But this is nonsense: as Mearsheimer and Walt point out, the distortion of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East by the Lobby is no more in Israel's interest than it is in America's. Aside from that, the majority of American Jews are against this [Iraq] war, no doubt in greater proportion than the rest of the population.

The problem isn't "the Jews" – it's the Lobby. Until it is reined in by public awareness, and the appropriate legislation – which might start, for example, by requiring AIPAC to register as a foreign agent, like all the other lobbyists for foreign governments – the danger of a prolonged and widened war in the Middle East will continue unabated. Aside from that, however, what is needed is further investigation by Congress into the "faulty" intelligence that lured us into the Iraqi quagmire: I'd bet the ranch that a lot of it came directly from Tel Aviv to Washington. (my emphasis)

I don't mean to say that I've become entirely comfortable with Raimondo's approach to talking about Israel; I'm not. But I'm pleased to see him making this kind of distinction.


Factually speaking, we already know from what's in the public record that American, British and Israeli intelligence were in general agreement about prewar claims of Iraqi stockpiles of WMDs. My guess is that the bulk of the false claims will turn out to have come from the Pentagon-funded Iraqi exile groups, especially Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, and then recycled around with recipients of the same information "confirming" it for each other. But we do need a thorough investigation, preferably sooner than later.

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