By Mitchell Bard
Harper Collins, 432 pages
n The Arab Lobby, Mitchell Bard has assembled an exhaustive history of Arab (and Arabist) attempts to influence American foreign policy over the past nine decades, with the explicit intention of rebutting the thesis offered in Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer’s bestselling 2006 polemic, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. The Walt/Mearsheimer argument—that the “Israel lobby” distorts American foreign policy to serve the national interests of Israel while harming those of the United States—has been subjected to systematic refutation across the political spectrum, but the pedigrees of its authors (Harvard for Walt, the University of Chicago for Mearsheimer) contributed mightily to bringing into the mainstream an idea that formerly resided on the margins of the American political discussion. Walt and Mearsheimer deserve a book-length refutation. Bard’s The Arab Lobby, though contributing considerable ammunition to the case, is, alas, not quite that book.
As Bard explains, the “Arab lobby” predates the creation of the State of Israel by decades. For example, the U.S. Department of State actively opposed the U.S. government’s decision to endorse the Balfour Declaration in 1917. Secretary of State Robert Lansing worried not about Arab but about Christian reaction to “turning the Holy Land over to the absolute control of the race credited with the death of Christ.” Seizing upon one rationale and then another, Foggy Bottom remained stubbornly antagonistic to the idea of a Jewish homeland. As the éminence grise Clark Clifford recalled about the Truman years, “officials in the State Department [did] everything in their power to prevent, thwart, or delay the president’s Palestine policy.”
Even after the United Nations voted in 1947 to divide the land into Jewish and Arab sectors, State introduced two dozen initiatives to delay or prevent the implementation of partition. Its “final gambit,” Bard writes, “was to argue that the violence in Palestine after the UN decision made it impossible to implement the partition plan, and that a temporary trusteeship should be created instead.” Though President Harry Truman explicitly rejected this course, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Warren Austin, on instructions from State, asked the Security Council to consider trusteeship.
This flagrant insubordination enraged Truman, who noted in his diary that “the State Department pulled the rug from under me today…. I am now in the position of a liar and double-crosser. I’ve never felt so low in my life. There are people in the third and fourth levels of the State Department who have always wanted to cut my throat. They’ve succeeded in doing it.” Nonetheless, Truman (and Israel) prevailed.
The Arabists were happier with the Eisenhower administration. John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s secretary of state, believed that Truman had “gone overboard in favor of Israel” and sought to right the balance. Seeking to soothe the Arab nations, the administration denied arms to Israel, withheld aid until Israel agreed to forego a hydroelectric project opposed by Jordan, and rebuffed Israel’s request to join NATO. Dulles even defended Saudi Arabia’s refusal to permit American Jewish servicemen to deploy to the U.S. military base at Dhahran. In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Dulles explained that Muslims had “a very particular animosity toward the Jews because they credited the assassination of Muhammad to a Jew.” The high-water mark of the Eisenhower administration’s chilliness toward Israel followed the 1956 Suez Campaign, when Eisenhower demanded Israeli withdrawal from Sinai, letting it be known that failure to comply would result in withdrawal of all aid, suspension of the tax-exempt status of the United Jewish Appeal, and economic sanctions.
The Eisenhower policy was, Bard notes, a test case of the Arabist view that stiff-arming Israel would improve relations with the Arab world. Yet during this frosty period in U.S.-Israel relations, Syria signed a pact with the Soviet Union, and Egypt’s Nasser expropriated Western assets and founded the so-called Non-Aligned Movement—which in practice meant that he and its members were allying with the Soviets. Nor did the Saudis moderate their bitter opposition to Israel’s existence. King Saud swore that he would sacrifice 10 million Arabs to destroy the Jewish state. A pro-Western regime in Iraq was overthrown, and nationalist forces threatened the regimes in Jordan and Lebanon.
Eisenhower came to reassess Israel’s strategic value in the wake of these crises. He had once entertained ideas of making King Saud the “pope” of the Arabs but learned all too well that was not a wise notion. In 1958, when Eisenhower decided to save the regime in Jordan by delivering strategic supplies, including petroleum, by air, the Saudis refused flyover rights to U.S. planes. The materials were flown over Israel instead.
By this time, the Eisenhower administration’s views had shifted. A National Security Council memorandum concluded: “It is doubtful whether any likely US pressure on Israel would cause Israel to make concessions which would do much to satisfy Arab demands which—in the final analysis—may not be satisfied by anything short of the destruction of Israel. Moreover, if we choose to combat radical Arab nationalism and to hold Persian Gulf oil by force if necessary, then a logical corollary would be to support Israel as the only pro-West power left in the Near East.”
Throughout Israel’s existence, Arab states have relied not only on diplomatic short-sightedness but also on business interests in the United States to put their case to the government. In 1968, for example, a delegation that included Chase Manhattan Bank president David Rockefeller, World Bank president John J. McCloy, and prominent oil executives met with President-elect Richard Nixon to suggest that the United States adopt a foreign policy more congenial to the Arabs. A similar group, again including McCloy, repeated the exercise in 1973.
In 1972, at the urging of Kuwait, Gulf Oil contributed $50,000 to a lobbying and public-relations campaign. “International Consultants Inc.” produced a pro-Arab book and magazine and also accused Israel of committing human-rights abuses in the disputed territories—an act of toadying for which Gulf later apologized.
The chairman of SoCal (later Chevron) urged the company’s 40,000 employees and 262,000 shareholders in 1973 to contact their congressmen and senators and demand that they support “the aspirations of the Arab people.” SoCal hadn’t come to this view spontaneously. Just a few weeks before, King Faisal of Saudi Arabia had warned major oil executives at a meeting in Geneva that if American policy toward Israel did not change, their corporations would “lose everything” in the Middle East. The oil executives returned home and made appointments with top officials at the White House, State Department (hardly necessary), and the Pentagon to convey the message.
Later in the year, when Israel was attacked by Egypt and Syria in the Yom Kippur War, oil executives again cautioned President Nixon that supporting Israel would lead to dire consequences. Nixon disregarded the warnings and launched a massive airlift to resupply the equipment Israel had lost in the opening days of the war. Ironically, the airlift ultimately improved relations between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. Pointing to the resupply operation, Prince Fahd (later the king) told his officers that the Americans “are the only ones capable of saving us in this manner should we ever be at risk.”
The support Arab states received through the decades from the State Department, the oil companies, business executives generally, and former presidents—most frequently Jimmy Carter but also Gerald Ford—nevertheless proved insufficient to sway public opinion. The Gulf Arab states accordingly invested heavily in public-relations campaigns to improve their image. Bard estimates that in the past decade alone, the Saudis have spent more than $100 million on American lobbyists, consultants, and public-relations firms.
Arab Americans, late to the dance, have begun to organize and have attempted to mimic the work of Jewish American pro-Israel groups. But their efforts have been disorganized and sometimes short-lived. In 1983, 17 groups came together to form the National Council of Presidents of Arab-American Organizations, but it soon faded away.
On this much, Bard and Walt and Mearsheimer agree: the Arab lobby has enjoyed far less success than the Israel lobby. But while Walt and Mearsheimer are mystified by this outcome, Bard finds it unsurprising. Americans who support Israel are expressing solidarity with a fellow democracy and victim of Islamic terror. Israel has repeatedly demonstrated her reliability as an ally, but just as important, she has proved herself to be a beacon of liberty in a benighted and dangerous region. Large majorities of the American people are accordingly more sympathetic to Israel than to her enemies.
The Arab lobby, by contrast, consists primarily not of concerned American citizens but rather of paid pitchmen, interested parties from the business world, or front groups for Arab governments. Moreover, the Saudis in particular have consistently and diligently worked against the interests of the United States, not just in the Middle East, where they have thwarted peace, but also around the globe, where they have spread extremist Islam—and here in the United States, where they are spending heavily to evangelize for their Wahhabist ideology above all other Muslim persuasions.
The Arab Lobby is extraordinarily well-researched but is, unfortunately, marred by poor organization, repetition, and sloppy syntax. Regrettably, it is not nearly as readable as The Israel Lobby. And there is a greater failing. Bard devotes a chapter to Christian anti-Zionism dating back a century and more. The Catholic Church and the World Council of Churches come in for their share of censure. But by paying scant attention to the overwhelming support for Israel among evangelical Christians, particularly in the past three decades, the treatment is ultimately misleading. Christian pro-Israel sentiment is a significant factor in the Arab lobby’s lack of purchase with the American public, and the failure to focus on it is an unfortunate omission.
Nonetheless, Bard has performed a valuable service with his book, which will be eye-opening to many, even among friends of Israel, who are not aware just how deep and long-lived is the historical animus not only to the actions of the Jewish state itself but also to the very idea of a Jewish state at all.
