This is Understanding Israel-Palestine. I'm Aiman Orbsett, your host for this week's episode.
We'll be airing today my conversation with Stephen Wall, Professor of International Affairs at Harvard University, about U.S. Foreign Policy, the War In Gaza and the Israel Lobby. This episode marks the first in a series that my co-host and I plan to devote to the role of the lobby in domestic politics and in U.S. Foreign Policy. As my guest today notes, the biggest factor that explains the continued over the past.
The continued overwhelming support in Congress for Israel's War is the Israel Lobby. The lobby operates in how over the years it's become such a key force in American politics will be the subject of subsequent episodes in this series.
First, though, news. In the State of the Union address on March 7, President Joe Biden announced the United States would build a temporary peer off Gaza to facilitate the distribution of humanitarian aid to the starving Palestinian population there. The President expressed sympathy for the plight of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, and said Israel must do more to protect innocent life.
But U.N. officials describe the humanitarian crisis in Gaza as media and dire. U.S. officials acknowledge that building a maritime port will take 30 to 60 days. A group say that far more aid can be delivered by land than by air or by sea. Today, I'm joined by Stephen Walt. Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renee Belford Professor of International Affairs.
He previously taught at Princeton University and the University of Chicago, where he served as master of the social science collegiate division and deputy dean of social sciences. His book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, co-authored with John Marishimer, was a New York Times best seller and has been translated into more than 24 languages. His most recent book is The Hell of Good Intentions, America's Foreign Policy Elite, and The Decline of U.S. Primacy.
Dr. Walt, welcome to Understanding Israel Palestine. Nice to be here. Dr. Walt, you published a paper almost 20 years ago titled The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, which you later expanded into a book. Can you briefly lay out for our listeners what is the Israel Lobby and why it doesn't matter when it comes to U.S. foreign policy? The Israel Lobby is an interest group. Like lots of interest groups we have in the United States.
It's the way our political system operates. So in broad terms, it's not that different from, say, the Farm Lobby or Big Pharma or the National Rifle Association or any number of other interest groups that form come together and then try to put pressure on the political system to get the policies they want. We say in the book that the lobby is as American as Apple Pie. There's nothing conspiratorial about it. Second, the Israel Lobby, like most interest groups, is a coalition.
It's a loose coalition of a variety of different groups that don't agree on everything, but do agree on certain things and work sometimes together. It's not defined by religion or ethnicity. So it's not just a Jewish lobby, for example, because there are Christian evangelicals that are part of it. And also because many American Jews don't support the views of groups in the lobby.
But I'm thinking here of groups like APAC and the anti-deformation League and Christians united for Israel and any number of other organizations as well. And the central thing that unites them, the thing they all agree on, is the idea of preserving a special relationship between the United States and Israel. One where the United States gives Israel lots of support in a variety of different ways and does so more or less unconditionally.
That is to say, it provides this support no matter what Israel does, no matter what its actions are. And when those actions are sometimes contrary to what American officials might want or what's in America's interest. But that the groups in the lobby work very hard to make sure that the relationship is maintained regardless of what happens. That's their central goal. Why is this important? Well, it's important because it's had a profound impact on American foreign policy in the Middle East.
Israel is the largest recipient of American economic and military assistance throughout its long history. It gets consistent support in the United Nations diplomatic protection in a variety of ways. And because the United States is so committed to Israel regardless of what its actions are, it's hamstrung American diplomacy in the region.
One of the main reasons the Oslo peace process failed, for example, is to run to the reasons if not the primary reason why the United States is in this horrible position now with the war in Gaza, where we're actively supporting what many people plausibly regard as a genocide. And as a result of the military aid we're giving to Israel, we're now forced to air drop food relief because the Israelis are not allowing the aid that we think the population should receive to get in.
So it's had a really profound impact on American policy in that region for many, many years and usually to Americans, America's detriment. It's March 6th, it's the day after Super Tuesday, we're seeing following the vote in Michigan last week in which something like 13, 14% of Michiganers voted uncommitted in the primary.
We're seeing actually numbers higher than that in Minnesota and in several other states that Biden might need to actually win reelection at the same time as a clear majority of Americans favor a ceasefire, especially a majority. A majority of Democrats, so do you think that a part of the reason that the Democratic Party given that it's the party in power has not moved its position significantly since the escalation on October 7th is due to the influence of the Israel lobby.
Yeah, I think it's probably the single most important factor and I have a certain degree of sympathy for President Biden in the sense that he's caught in a nearly impossible position. If he continues the policies that he's been following, sort of hugging Israel close, providing support, trying to get it to change its behavior, but without using any of the leverage at his disposal. He continues to do that. This is hurting him with Arab Americans and it's also hurting him with progressives.
Suddenly Biden doesn't look like a better guy than Trump, he looks heartless and ineffective. It's going to cost him and it could cost him in some critical states, but on the other hand, if he went the other way, if he said I'm going to cut off support for Israel, I'm going to vote for some UN Security Council resolutions or just abstain on the month and make it abundantly clear that we want to cease fire immediately and that the US Israeli relationship is at risk as a result of this.
Then he would face pressure from the other side, the Democratic Party would have more trouble raising money in the 2024 election. Some Democratic and certainly many Republican politicians would come after him saying he was selling Israel down the river, he was supporting terrorists, etc.
There are lots of articles written in prominent newspapers criticizing his stance, so he's damned if he does and damned if he doesn't. My view is given the political situation he's in, he should just do the right thing. Do the right thing in terms of America's broader interests, America's basic commitment to human rights and let the political chips fall where they may, but that view has not prevailed yet in the White House.
In conversation with critics of the Israeli government and its policies and US foreign policy in the region more generally, I sometimes run into the argument that Israel is a strategic asset. Some people have called Israel a giant aircraft carrier and you seem to argue that Israel, the actions of Israel, if not the US, Israel special relationship is not in the national security interest of the United States or are supposed to interest of the United States.
When you speak this way, how are you defining the interests of the United States in the region? The United States has a number of interests in the region. One is making sure that energy continues to flow out to world markets even as we're trying to do a green transition that can't happen overnight. We have an interest in reducing the potential risks from terrorism and extremism of various kinds.
We have an interest in discouraging proliferation, particularly the acquisition of nuclear weapons by other countries in the region. So those are, I think, our primary strategic interests as well. And the problem is that unconditional support for Israel doesn't help those. And again, that's not saying the United States should throw Israel over the side. I think the United States should, in fact, support Israel's existence.
And if it's survival, we're in jeopardy, we should come to its aid. But giving unconditional support has had all sorts of negative consequences for the United States. First of all, it's reinforced this very bad relationship we have with Iran, even today. If you read today's New York Times, Tom Friedman has a long column about how we're essentially in a shadow war with Iran in the Middle East. I think that's also encouraged Iran to think about getting nuclear weapons.
And it's worth noting that most of the most influential groups in the Israel lobby were dead set against the nuclear deal that Barack Obama eventually negotiated that capped Iran's nuclear program. More importantly, we are seen as complicit in the various human rights violations that Israel is guilty of for many years.
I mean, what people have to remember is there are roughly seven and a half, seven and a half million Jews living in the area in the Middle East, in Israel proper and the West Bank. And there are roughly seven and a half million Palestinian Arabs in that same territory in Israel proper in the West Bank and in Gaza.
So you have two groups of roughly equal populations. The difference is that one group is in full control of the other and is denying them all political rights and has been doing so for decades with American backing. And even though the United States has said for many years that we favored two states for two peoples, we've never been willing to put any serious pressure on Israel to actually move in that direction.
May have gotten close on a couple of occasions, but even then the United States was only offering carrots, never saying that this special relationship is in danger. And one of the consequences of this is eventually you get reactions like the first and second into Fadas on the West Bank and then Hamas's terrible attack on Israel on October 7. So that's not good. And of course it puts the United States in this very awkward, awkward position.
Finally, it's costing the United States a considerable amount of support in the global South. You know, this is a period where the United States has been trying to rally support for Ukraine yet as many countries as possible to line up with us isolate Russia. And of course when something like Gaza happens, the United States looks deeply hypocritical. We condemn one set of actions, but and we certainly condemn what Hamas did as we should because it was also a war crime.
But now we can't bring ourselves to condemn what Israel is doing even as more than 30,000 deaths pile up even as 50 to 60% of the buildings in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed. Right, when America is silent on those questions, we look deeply hypocritical and that doesn't go unnoticed around the world.
I wanted to come back to US foreign policy more broadly in this area, but especially as it regards Israel when it comes to the situation in Ukraine as well as the situation in Israel, US government seems to believe that unconditionally backing these countries is the best way forward for peace.
Now, perhaps setting aside the question of Ukraine, there's a theory in international relations that when a great power unconditionally backs a smaller power, instead of that smaller power feeling more secure and perhaps less belligerent, it actually creates the opposite effect. The smaller power feels like if it goes and gets into a war, the great power will back it.
And therefore, the smaller country has an incentive to actually go to war. You've certainly been a critic of US support for Israel, at least the unconditional support. Not you're not saying the US should withdraw all support, but what do you think would happen if the US withdrew support for Israel? Would that increase the prospects of a diplomatic solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Arab-Israeli conflict more broadly?
I think it would. I mean, the difficulty is that Israel has for many years operated with a certain sense of impunity. It was going to have the United States in its corner, no matter what it did.
So it didn't have to offer a viable state. And none of the Israeli offers in the various negotiations around the two states' solution, wherever really a fully viable Palestinian state, whether they were offering was a set of disconnected ban to stands that Israel would still be essentially in full control over. And because they knew the United States would back them up, there were no consequences, no concerns about what that might mean.
But I think if the prospect that American support might go down, that the United States would, in fact, begin to put real pressure on Israel, Israelis would have to consider the consequences of their actions. One of the other features that's been true for the last 20 or 30 years is Israeli domestic politics moving in a steadily more right wing, more hard line direction.
And one of the reasons that's been able to happen is Israelis themselves have not felt the consequences of expanding settlements, of treating the Palestinians with greater brutality, etc. Possibly even shifting their own political system in a less democratic direction. Because again, the American aid was going to flow. So if Biden now made it clear that enough was enough, and that the special relationship was at risk, some Israelis would start to rethink this.
Now, I don't know if they would rethink enough, I don't know if it would bring the Netanyahu government down and lead to a more moderate Israeli government, but it was certainly forced a serious rethinking within the Israeli body politic. And it would also send the right message, I think, to others around the world.
And then the American backing, along with the handful of European countries, Israel is isolated diplomatically, or at least Israel's diplomatic position is not supported by most of most countries in the world, especially the global south.
Some who argue that Israel's current actions are not in the Israeli national interest that continuing down the road of apartheid, and as you said, plausible genocide will ultimately alienate Israel's even Israel's strongest supporters and lead to a real crisis for the viability of the state of Israel. Now, you're not an Israeli, but what do you make of the Israeli national interest in this situation?
I think one wants to be careful here that over the past decade or more, there has been some developments that have actually improved Israel's diplomatic position, most importantly, a sort of tacit alignment between Israel and a number of Arab states who are all concerned about Iran. That has eventually led to an Trump administration, the so-called Abraham Accords, which was an effort to begin to normalize relations between Israel and the Arab world.
But the problem with the Abraham Accords, and by the way, the problem with the Biden administration's attempt to expand them to include Saudi Arabia, was it completely left the Palestinians out? I'm not going to argue that's because many Arab states were no longer that concerned about it, but as many critics pointed out, eventually this was going to lead to an explosion as indeed it has tragically for all parties concerned.
So if you look at Israel's long-term future, as I said before, you still have the problem of 7.5 million people on one side and 7.5 million people on the other, trying to figure out how to coexist within essentially the same territory. And I don't believe running in apartheid state is a long-term option for Israel. That's sustainable over the long term. I think trying to expel all of the Palestinians is a crime against humanity and would leave Israel even more isolated.
The kinds of activities for now seeing in Gaza are horrific and are, again, further isolating Israel. And by the way, making it impossible to proceed with normalization as Israel might have wanted as well. But the taproot of Israel's problems is not a large Arab army that's going to come attack Israel. It's not the problem Israel might have faced in the 1950s or in the 1960s. The problem Israel faces is coming to a reasonable solution with the Palestinians.
And what it's doing now with American support is not leading, is not advancing that goal at all. It's actually making it harder to achieve than ever. We have now, as I speak, one and a half million Palestinians practically pressed up along the Egyptian Gaza border fence. We have the Biden administration dangling the prospects of a potential six weeks cease fire with some exchange of hostages and Palestinian prisoners.
At the same time as we have the Israeli threat on the table to bombard Rafa, which would almost certainly lead to scores of more civilian casualties. If Israel goes forward with its bombardment of Rafa, how will that change the diplomatic situation? Well, if that were to happen, and I certainly hope it doesn't, that would be a further blow to the Biden administration's efforts.
It would reinforce the widespread sense that, you know, although we claim to be talking to the Israelis and claim to be putting a lot of pressure on them, it would be just another sign that the Israeli government was ignoring us. And part of the problem here is that to some degree Benjamin Netanyahu benefits politically from ignoring Biden. In fact, he doesn't want new elections. He may not want the war to come to an end because he's going to be held accountable for the original attacks.
He's going to be held accountable for this tragedy for Israel, and it may drive him ultimately from political power. But right now, the public opinion polls seem to suggest that when he stands up to the United States, when he refuses to take Biden's advice, that actually benefits him with some members of the Israeli electorate. More importantly, it's going to be a huge humanitarian disaster, and one that will be taking place in full view of the rest of the world.
It's going to weaken the Israeli case before the International Court of Justice. I think it's going to cause serious rifts between Israel and some of the people who have been long time supporters for a long time. You know, you earlier, you talked about the justifications for the special relationship that Israel was a strategic asset in various ways. There was another strand of justifications was that the United States and Israel had similar values.
They were both, you know, countries that cared about human rights. They were both democracies, things like that. That sense of shared values is eroding very rapidly, if it isn't completely gone by now. Given the possibility that Israel will move forward with an aerial bombardment of Refa, along with the potential ground invasion, and the serious possibility that the Biden administration will not pose serious enough consequences to stop this.
What will this do to this diplomatic standing of the United States in the world? We're also seeing as I speak, increasing suggestions that a settlement, or at least America, the American government may be reducing its support for Ukraine, does this signal that we're heading away from a sort of unipolar global order into something more multipolar? Well, I think the unipolar moment ended a while back. I mean, we're not in a unipolar moment any longer.
Certainly, China is although not equal to the United States on almost all dimensions of power. It's sufficiently strong now at a constant of another poll. I would probably put Russia there as well, despite all of Russia's vulnerabilities and maybe some others. So it is increasingly a multipolar world. And this, you know, entire affair is a huge setback from for the United States in its attempts to navigate this new more competitive global environment.
And in particular, if you think about this from, you know, the perspective of the United States and China, the Trump administration, the Biden administration, even back in the Obama administration, there was this growing consensus that China was really the long-term challenger, that in terms of America's broader role in the world, it was making sure China didn't supplant the United States, wasn't able to threaten American interests in key ways.
Of course, Biden has talked about how this is an era where it's sort of a struggle between democracies and autocracies to demonstrate which one is better. Well, this is a giant holiday present to China when you think about it, because what China has been trying to convince the rest of the world is that look, letting America run everything doesn't work very well.
All the Chinese have to do is say, which country has been in charge or trying to manage politics in the Middle East for the past 30 or 40 years? As it has been us, it has been Washington, DC. Let's look at the results, right? You have a failed war in Iraq, a failed war in Afghanistan, you have a failed state in Libya, you have recurring problems in Yemen, and now you have this horrific bloodletting.
First, the Israelis that died on October 7th, and now the over 30,000 Palestinians that have been killed in response. This is what happens, say, the Chinese, when you left the United States, have all the influence and let it try to run things. Maybe we ought to have a world order where power is shared more, where the United States is not as prominent.
My point is not that that's necessarily correct, my point is that's a very powerful argument, and I'm quite sure that Chinese diplomats and other officials are repeating this over and over and over when they talk to people from other countries. And from an American perspective in terms of maintaining or standing in the world, being able to elicit cooperation from other countries when we need it, this is a huge blow.
Some analysts have called this recent escalation in Israel and Palestine, a serious blow to international law, not the evisceration of international law, and at least the view that it is enforced or at least equally respected, and it have turned towards a more cynical view that international law is more selectively enforced depending on if the United States determines that this country is sort of acting in the US national interest.
You've laid out, very convincingly why, the US Israel special relationship as it's currently constituted is not in the US national interest. So I would just close our discussion today by asking you to consider that if there is to be a diplomatic de-escalation for the situation in Gaza and the US foreign policy as it relates to it, what do you think should be the first steps of the Biden administration?
Okay, first steps, let me just say two things. One is that I think most people have understood that international law is always selectively enforced, but I do think it still matters in a variety of ways. It matters whether people think Israel is running an apartheid system, which is why Israel of course has always resisted that label.
It matters that people seriously are using in a term like genocide to talk about what's happening. We'll see what the international court ultimately decides on that question. These things do matter. They don't matter immediately or directly, but over time they really do shape, I think, how people judge other countries.
Now in terms of what the Biden administration could do in the short term, I mean the goal here would be to get a ceasefire as soon as possible for humanitarian reasons also to put the United States back on on the right side here also to alleviate the suffering that is currently going on.
And then it's a question of setting things up so that you might be able to advance political solution. This is not a problem that's going to be solved by military force, which is one of the other points that I think United States needs to emphasize to its Israeli partner, but there are a variety of things we could do.
The United States could reiterate as we have begun to do that the territories occupied in 67, the West Bank Gaza are in fact occupied. We could reopen the council it in Jerusalem and have it serve as the official US embassy to the Palestinian Donald Trump closed that council it when he was president and Biden promised to reopen it.
But he is not yet done so that would be a step we could take we could support an investigation by the international court of justice into war crimes by both sides, not just Israel, but by Hamas as well, which is what we did, of course, when Russia invaded Ukraine, we've actually called for an official ICJ investigation of war crimes again by both sides as well.
We could recognize the state of Palestine, something that almost three quarters of the United Nations has already done so. So we could do a variety of things that would signal that the American position is shifting.
And that's not sort of going all the way to starting to pull the aid package away, suspend military assistance, all of the things that would be politically controversial. These are to some degree symbolic gestures, but there's symbolic gestures that would have real meaning to them as well and would be a way of starting to put real pressure on Israel to stop what it's doing.
Stephen Wall author of the book, the Israel lobby and US foreign policy along with co author John Marishheimer. Thank you for your time today. Nice talking with you.