Jan 15, 2009
Applying the Obama political model to Palestine?
Juan Cole on Gaza: What to do about it?
I think people should be careful about talking about "the Israeli lobby" (or worse, "the Jewish lobby") as the sole cause of America's Middle East policy being what it is (see "Anti-semitism and U.S. Middle East policy" by Stephen Zunes, a Palestinian supporter, for more on that). Not that Cole is doing this — he writes on all sorts of aspects of this conflict — but I want to note it here because I don't want this link to be read in isolation and then perpetuate that line of thinking.
However, it is undeniable that the pro-Israel side of this issue is much more organized than the pro-Palestinian side, especially when it comes to doing sustained lobbying of U.S. Congress members. And I think Cole is right when he says this is more effective than street activism. Here, he lays out a model for organizational strategies that anti-occupation activists could apply to counter the weight of AIPAC. They are surprisingly… doable.
Give it some time. I think that as both the Arab American community and the Muslim American community (and obviously the overlap between them) become more numerous and well connected in this country, they will develop institutions that will eventually come to rival AIPAC and other Zionist lobbying instruments. The fact that a growing number of Americans (including Jewish Americans) are getting tired of one quagmire after the other in the Middle East will hopefully speed this process along.
While I agree that Palestinian activists shouldn't get too hung up on "the Israeli lobby" (and obviously there's no place for racist talk about "the Jews"), I tend to think that the amount of emphasis given to the Israeli lobby in this country is understated. We need only look at the response of Congress and the President to the Gaza crisis, or at the way the conflict is portrayed in the US media to see how well connected the lobby as a whole is. The lobby isn't the only driving force behind our ME foreign policy, but you can't deny that it plays a large role both in shaping policy and in framing the public perception of the Middle East.
In mainstream media talk about Palestine that's certainly true. But among Palestinian activists (meaning those who support Palestine, not just Palestinians themselves) it sometimes gets thrown around as the ONLY explanation for U.S. policy, making it seem much more powerful than it really is. That's what I'm referring to here.
But yes, you rarely see any of this on the news, outside activist circles. I think the media do a poor job of covering lobbying in general. For example, the role of insurance lobbies in making sure a single-payer health care plan never even got to the table — I never saw that picked up anywhere outside the alternative press.