The Arab Lobby and US Foreign Policy

Khalil Marrar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781135970703
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

The US foreign policy stance on Israel-Palestine has shifted considerably in recent years, from a position of "Israel only" to one which embraces both Israel and Palestine in a call for peace. This volume assesses why the US stance has evolved in the way that it has, concluding that while international factors cannot be overlooked, developments within the United States itself are also crucial.

After years of vacillating on Palestinian national aspirations, the majority of Americans, the author notes, have come to favor the establishment of an independent Palestinian state on the West Bank and the Gaza strip. Considering what accounts for changes in US policy on Israel-Palestine, this volume:

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• delivers a thorough assessment of the role of international and domestic factors in shaping US policy in this area

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• considers how US policy has evolved from the Camp David negotiations of the 1970s up to the occupation of Iraq in the mid 2000s

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• explores the significance of American public opinion and the pro-Israel and Arab lobbies in the evolution of US policy

The Arab Lobby and US Foreign Policy will be of interest to students and scholars of Foreign Policy and Political Science, Current Affairs and American Studies.

Khalil M. Marrar is Professor at DePaul University, USA. He has served in editorial positions at the Arab Studies Quarterly and the Association of Arab-American University Graduates.

1 US foreign policy and the two-state solution

Introduction

When it comes to US policy toward the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, is there such a thing as a meaningful pro-Arab lobby capable of countering pro-Israel pressure? Or is it the case, as some have asserted, that in comparison to the pro-Israel lobby, “pro-Arab interest groups are weak to non-existent?”¹ The very fact that the American public and its policymakers have come to prefer the two-state solution suggests that such remarks may be overly dismissive of factors that, aside from the pro-Israel lobby, play a role in US policy concerning Israel and the Palestinians. And, given the increasingly common position that “the overall thrust of U. S. policy in the region is due almost entirely to U. S. domestic politics,”² this book makes the case that reactions to domestic and international developments by public opinion, policymakers, and the pro-Arab lobby, in addition to the pro-Israel lobby, are important to understanding the American posture toward the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, particularly as it pertains to unprecedented calls for a Palestinian state from the highest levels of the US government.

First, a brief background on the US foreign policy shift in question is in order. After the 1967 war between Israel and its Arab neighbors, American policymakers heightened their support of the Jewish state as a Cold War ally. Israel strengthened its hold over the West Bank and Gaza while the United States denied the Palestinians’ right to self-determination on those captured territories. It was widely believed that the exercise of that right posed a threat to the Jewish state’s existence.³ As the relationship between the US and Israel deepened into a “strategic alliance” under the Ronald Reagan administration and a Congress dominated by the pro-Israel lobby, American policy rejected Palestinian nationalism while acquiescing to Israel’s dominion over the occupied land.⁴ Decades later, the United States remained committed to its Jewish ally but for reasons that will be the focus of the chapters to follow, accepted Palestinian autonomy and ultimately sought a two-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. According to President George W. Bush,

the two-state vision and the roadmap for peace designed to implement it, command nearly universal support as the best means of achieving a permanent peace and an end to the Israeli occupation that began in 1967. United Nations Security Council resolutions have repeatedly spoken of the desirability of establishing two independent states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side within secure and recognized borders.⁵

The resolutions referred to by President Bush include 1397 (2002) and 1515 (2003). All concerned international actors, including Israel, the Palestinian Authority (PA), the European Union (EU), the Russian Federation, and the Arab League,⁶ have endorsed the two-state solution as articulated by the Bush administration’s “roadmap,” which outlined steps for a “permanent two-state solution.”⁷

Unofficially, the concept of granting the Palestinians independence over the West Bank and Gaza in order to secure peace went back to the Jimmy Carter presidency.⁸ After the Camp David Accords, signed on September 17, 1978, President Carter envisioned – but never made explicit – a Palestinian homeland on the territories that Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin referred to as “Judea and Samaria.”⁹ Official American support for the “limited autonomy” precursor to the two-state solution, however, only emerged in the post-Cold War era under the sponsorship of President Bill Clinton. While in principle, the US supported the peace proposals of United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolutions 242 (1967) and 338 (1973), which called for Israeli withdrawal from the territories occupied in June 1967, with the partial exception of the Carter administration, American leaders since Lyndon B. Johnson did not recognize the Palestinians as a people deserving of their own homeland.¹⁰ However, beginning with the Intifada (1987) and through the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989), the end of the first Gulf War (1991), and the subsequent collapse of Soviet communism (1991), American designs shifted toward a political solution to the Israeli– Palestinian conflict, which in the post 9/11 period was enshrined by the international consensus on the roadmap.¹¹ As will be demonstrated later, even though it is necessary to rely on international factors in order to explain the two-state plan, the monumental systemic changes of the past three decades by themselves do not account for the shift in US strategy. Instead, there were interactions between international events and domestic factors that may have corresponded to changes in American policy toward the Israeli– Palestinian conflict.

Why two states?

Therefore, this work focuses on the factors that related to US policy moving from unyielding support for its strategic ally by ignoring Palestinian national aspirations during the last decade of the Cold War to backing the two-state solution during the 2000s. Specifically, the question under examination is as follows: why has the US shifted from an “Israel only”¹² position toward the Israeli–Palestinian conflict to supporting an “Israel and Palestine” formula for peace? Currently, the two-state solution persists despite forceful arguments that its time has passed and that the only viable peace option is of a binational state solution.¹³ And while one state for both Jews and Arabs may be the ideal solution for some, the reality is that American policy and the international community preferred two states. In order to assess how this reality emerged on the US diplomatic front, three domestic factors will be examined for their roles in American foreign policy and its preference for the two-state solution. These include: (1) public opinion and its interaction with policymakers’ perceptions regarding the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, (2) the pro-Israel lobby, and most importantly for the purposes of the present work, (3) the pro-Arab lobby’s relationship to these domestic factors.¹⁴ All three will be traced out during the following periods: the late 1970s Camp David era and during the 1980s when Israel became a strategic ally of the US under Ronald Reagan; the George H. W. Bush presidency and the end of the Cold War; during the Clinton years of the Oslo peace process (1993–2001); and through the wars on terrorism and in Iraq (after 2001). Two identifiable international orders existed during those periods: Cold War bipolarity between the US and the Soviet Union during the late 1970s–1980s and post-Cold War American military, political, and economic hegemony in the 1990s and 2000s.¹⁵

Aside from it being the issue of the day, this study will conclude by partaking in the two states versus one state debate.¹⁶ It will do this for a number of reasons related to “facts on the ground” in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and because of the political situation in the US. First, before its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, Israel was already a multinational state in which Arabs were granted citizenship.¹⁷ At the time of this writing, over 20 percent of its population is non-Jewish.¹⁸ Second, after 1967, Israel populated the newly occupied territories with Jewish settlers. Presently, their number is estimated at anywhere from 300,000 to over 450,000.¹⁹ According to Rashid Khalidi, the entrenchment of the settlements makes “the creation of a viable, sovereign Palestinian state alongside Israel impossible.”²⁰ Third, if the entity principally called for by the roadmap did come into existence, the American–Israeli understanding that settlements will stay in the West Bank and that Palestinian territories including Gaza may remain under Israeli military control would create Bantustan conditions for the Arab inhabitants and thus ensure the perpetuation of violence.²¹

Despite all of that, Israel and its lobbying interlocutors in the US wish to maintain Jewish majority and have opted to keep the population of the occupied territories out of the state’s political system.²² The US supports this position and has dedicated its diplomatic energies to resolving the conflict through the two-state arrangement, something that would allay Zionist fears of losing Jewish domination. Although that solution faces many obstacles, American policy and the international consensus that rallies around its peace proposals insist on it.²³ Hence, this study will examine how the two-state solution became embedded in US policy after the end of the Cold War when it was not even an option before. To do that, it looks at the following issues surrounding the domestic factors under analysis. First, even though public opinion has tended to support Israel, a Palestinian state has enjoyed increasing popular backing.²⁴ This fact raises the following question: what was the role of public opinion in the eventual adoption of the two-state solution as a part of American policy? Second, while the pro-Israel lobby never recognized the national rights of the Palestinians, its interest in maintaining a democracy exclusively for Jews in the Middle East has meant that it had to countenance the possibility of an Arab political establishment on the West Bank and Gaza. This was particularly the case after the first Intifada when the Palestinians, through pro-Arab forces operating in the US, showed the futility and brutality of Israeli occupation. Consequently, this study will look at the impacts these developments had on the two lobbies’ approaches toward foreign policy. Third, since recognition of the Palestinians’ legitimate rights was something that may not be credited to international events alone and because that is something that groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) actively opposed, we must look at the growing strength and potential of the pro-Arab lobby and variances in the pro-Israel lobby. How did activism by both sides interact with policy regarding the two-state solution, and what are the future prospects of those interactions? While public opinion and pro-Israel pressure groups have been thoroughly discussed in the literature, the often-dismissed pro-Arab lobby remains worthy of a great deal of foreign policy analysis (FPA).²⁵ But before delving into these issues, the perspectives underlying the present analysis will be examined.

Understanding foreign policy decision-making

Ethnic lobbying and FPA

Much of the foreign policy research tends to center on the relationship between domestic organizations and the people they seek to influence on the one hand, and the ideological commitments of the actors involved in policymaking on the other.²⁶ Against this backdrop, FPA has looked at the forces shaping national interests and the actions they promote. Most analysts echo a similar grand conclusion: the traditional realist paradigm, which has maintained that rational states will act in their self-interest, does not neatly capture the decision-making reality.²⁷ Nevertheless, to say that realism no longer dominates the study of foreign policy would be a mistake. Still, numerous scholars have made it their business to analyze foreign policy through competing approaches.²⁸ For example, while Ole Holsti recognized the value of realist explanations, he argued that “ideas” are crucial to policymaking.²⁹ Likewise, even when affirming the realist logic in foreign policy decisions, scholars have to account for intrastate components, moving away from the “billiard ball” model.³⁰ Others look at the role of complex phenomena such as globalization, terrorism, and international governance in order to explain behavior.³¹

Seeking to offer alternative explanations, a growing number of scholars have focused on sub-state factors that shape motives behind policy conduct.³² There has been particular interest in domestic agents that try to push their agendas against the grain of what would otherwise be in the national interest. Flying in the face of realist doctrine, this was precisely the argument of Melvin Small, who dedicated an entire history to the influence of domestic politics on the scheme of foreign policymaking.³³ In his Democracy and Diplomacy, Small chronologically outlined the role of domestic groups in shaping international outcomes, the power struggle between the various branches and departments of government, and the impacts of diverging economic interests. This approach yielded many important contributions to FPA, most notably for the purposes of the current analysis, that ethnic groups, from Irish to Native Americans, have exhibited similar patterns of political behavior but experienced different outcomes from their attempts to lobby their government on a wide range of domestic and international affairs.

Like other communities, Arab Americans have tried their hand at influencing US policy, albeit with limited success.³⁴ Their leadership has maintained that its lack of power directly relates to the strength of groups making up the pro-Israel lobby.³⁵ Such a line of reasoning, however, according to Georges Corm, “effectively exonerate[s] the US government from moral responsibility toward the Arab world’s just claims and demands.”³⁶ Consequently, pro-Arab pressure groups have sought attention from policymakers to the region’s problems, particularly as they stem from the failure to resolve the Israeli– Palestinian conflict. Their efforts have centered on pushing American policy toward a solution, which would give Palestinians an opportunity to normalize their relations with Israel, the Arab countries, and the rest of the world. It is widely recognized that because of its support for Israel, the US is complicit in the Jewish state’s intransigence surrounding that issue. This has led foremost figures within the policymaking elite to conclude that the US must engage in “renewed and sustained commitment … to a two-state solution.”³⁷ Such a course of action, however, has to face the fact that vacillation on Palestinian statehood as outlined in the roadmap is closely related to the pro-Israel lobby’s immense endowment. Writing on American foreign policy post 9/11, Vaughn Shannon observed, “how the US Congress came to be so pro-Israel may have a lot to do with interest groups,” particularly AIPAC.³⁸ Aside from being intimately familiar with how to win policymakers and public opinion to Israel’s side, that organization is particularly good at knowing who to target in Congress, something that Marie Hojnacki and David C. Kimball have concluded is essential to lobbying efforts in Washington.³⁹ Accordingly, the pro-Israel lobby has enjoyed immeasurable weight in the Beltway establishment. This phenomenon, as Abraham Ben-Zvi reminded us, dates back to the 1960s, particularly after Israel’s crushing defeat of its foes in 1967. By adapting to growing competition from Palestinian state supporters, not to mention the changing international terrain after the end of the Cold War, pro-Israel groups continue to shape policy in the present.⁴⁰

Yet for so long, with some notable exceptions that will be looked at later, the influences of ethnic blocs such as those of Jewish and Arab Americans were largely overlooked. This led Patrick J. Haney and Walt Vanderbrush to observe, “the study of U. S. foreign policy, and foreign policy analysis more generally, has paid relatively little attention to the roles and powers of ethnic interest groups and the full range of their activities...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• List of abbreviations
• 1 US foreign policy and the two-state solution
• 2 Public opinion and foreign policy perception
• 3 The effects of the pro-Israel lobby
• 4 The effects and potential of the pro-Arab lobby
• 5 Conclusion and scenarios: two states versus one
• Appendices
• Notes
• Bibliography