The myth of the Jewish Lobby
Last month I wrote about how most members in the House of Representatives voted a for a resolution that equated anti-zionism with antisemitism. With their votes, they signaled their total support Israel’s destruction of Gaza and also entered a longstanding intra-Jewish debate about what it means to be Jewish, crudely putting their weight on the scale in favor of the Jewish nationalist idea of Jewish identity: zionism as Judaism. The resolution carried no legislative power, it was all performance — and the performance had a distinctive antisemitic tone: a bunch of braindead goyim in Congress were telling Jews like me how act in order to be considered good Jews.
This resolution has been on my mind the last few weeks.
The overwhelming support that Israel and its Jewish nationalist ideology gets from every private and public institution here — from college deans to small town mayors to the President of the United States to just about all major and minor corporations — connects to something else I’ve been thinking and writing about over the past several years: the American Empire’s weaponization of foreign nationalist movements.
If you look at the foreign policy of the United States after World War II, a time when this country really came into its own as a dominant global power, one thing you’ll notice is that it began to cultivate and support particular ethnic and cultural groups living in here whose nationalist identities and movements could be put to use projecting American power abroad. Not all foreign nationalisms that had a base here in the U.S. were useful. But the ones that were useful got full support of the government, sometimes covert and sometimes not.1
This policy, which I refer to as the weaponization of immigrants, quickly became an engrained part of this country’s foreign policy apparatus and it runs pretty much on autopilot today — so much so people barely notice it.2
It began about 80 years ago, right after the end of the war.3 I guess it was only natural that it developed.
The consolidation of the Soviet Union, the rise of communist China, and the growth communist-friendly decolonized countries around the world meant that the United States and Europe were awash with political immigrants — people who left or were kicked out of those countries, and who deeply resented the new order of things back home. Broadly speaking, these refugees they were extremely anti-left and pro-American — at least pro-American in the sense that they believed America could kick out the commies and restore them to power.
It all began, though, with the large population of people that had fled the Soviet advance into Germany: various peoples from Eastern Europe who had collaborated with Nazi Germany, including a lot of fascist Ukrainians who had been heavily invested in building a new racially pure world order. All these people were suddenly in the democratic west, hanging around, angry, looking to fight commies and overthrow the Soviet state.
The idea, cooked up by people like George Kennan, was very simple: Why not use these people and their nationalist movements and religions as a weapon against communism? If the Soviet Union was attempting to create a multiethnic society built around international socialist solidarity where various ethnicities and religions were of minor importance or not important at all, why not use that against them? The truth was that despite being pushed aside and repressed, religion and nationalist concepts of identity were still popular among many people. Why not use them as cultural crowbars that could widen the cracks and destabilize Soviet society? If the government gets paranoid and cracks down on their own people because of it, it’s all for the best. We want to turn up political pressure and increase repression inside the Soviet Union so that the whole structure pops like a bubble.
I’m paraphrasing George Kennan here. But this is what he argued for — and this was what the United States ended up doing. It supported various exiled nationalist emigre groups and built out a massive international propaganda infrastructure to try to see this strategy through, including launching several covert radio broadcasting divisions with budgets in the billions and run by the CIA — known today as Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.4
I think this plan was successful in helping destabilize the Soviet Bloc. And it worked because there were a lot of disaffected people inside the societies it was targeting. Many had given up on socialist ideology and mocked at it privately, while publicly going through the motions at work and within the Communist Party apparatus. They were looking for other identities for themselves. Old religions became attractive, so did various nationalist identities — in the 1970s and 80s Ukrainian, Jewish, Armenian, Russian nationalisms began to flourish. Capitalism was fetishized…5 America’s cultural subversion plan couldn’t have worked on its own. People in the Soviet Union lapped that stuff up. They craved it themselves.
My own life was bound up in this process because Soviet Jews were a part of it. We got swept up in a Jewish nationalist movement — a movement that got weaponized by America in this very exact way. It’s how I ended up here as a political refugee.
After Israel won the 1967 War, a Jewish nationalist awakening took hold among a small but influential group of Soviet Jews. They began to believe that they were part of an organic historic nation — that they were of the blood and soil of an ancient land of Israel. They wanted the Soviet Union to let them out so they could be reunited with their people and their nation. This awakening was stoked in a big way by Israel through a dedicated secret intelligence division, which sent agents into the Soviet Union to make contact with Soviet Jews and proselytize zionism. To early zionist leaders like David Ben-Gurion, Soviet Jews were a vital resource necessary for the longterm success of Jewish state. They had just won a war and violently cleansed big chunks of land of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. Now they needed Jewish — or at least Jewish-passing — bodies to fill all that empty land and build a big prosperous Jewish future on top of it. The campaign to inspire zionist fervor among Soviet Jews was a very calculated thing. And it worked — largely because it came at the exact moment that many Soviet people were growing increasingly disillusioned with Soviet ideology and were looking for alternatives. Nationalism fit that need.
Israel was first to nurture and back a Jewish nationalist movement among Jews in the Soviet Union. But very quickly the United States plugged into the campaign as well, using its economic and political power to push the Soviet Jewish Question to the forefront of its relations with the communist power.
Israel and most American Jews had lobbied the U.S. on this front. They wanted the U.S. to throw its weight behind the Jewish nationalist movement in the USSR — and to get the U.S. to force the Soviets into allowing free Jewish emigration.
To Jews here saving Jews over there was the most important human rights issue of their generation — human rights that touched their own community in a very direct way. They truly believed that Soviet Jews were being massively repressed and were under threat of annihilation. Many were led to believe that the Soviet Union, even under Nikita Khrushchev, was as dangerous to Jews as Nazi Germany — a belief that was in large part spread by a covert Israeli propaganda campaign designed to get American Jews emotionally involved with the Soviet Jewish issue.6
This Israeli campaign was extremely successful. But it wasn’t because the Jewish Lobby wielded some sort of mystical powers of persuasion. It was successful because at some point the American security state consensus came to the correct conclusion that supporting this Jewish nationalist cause against the Soviet Union was good for its much more important, long-grinding fight against the Soviet state and against communism.7 In short: helping Israel out was in line with the interests of the American Empire.
Looking at that House resolution, I can’t help but see an echo of this same process in play: the U.S. keeps supporting a foreign nationalist project — and the American community that supports it — in service of an imperial goal.
Why does the imperial mind meld believe that backing Israel is in the “American interest” today? That’s a big discussion and a bit beyond what I want to say here. But there are a bunch of different overlapping interests and forces at play. Some of it is cultural and basically racist: Israel is run by people like “us” (aka white, Judeo-Christian) in a region dominated by people who aren’t like “us” (aka Muslim, brown, not European) and who are generally not very happy with the way the U.S. has been throwing its weight around. Some of it is managerial: the outsourcing of regional imperial control: Israel is great destabilizing unfriendly powers like Iran and Syria and keeping Egypt and Lebanon and Jordan in check. It’s also a big weapons lab and testing ground. Then there’s Christian zionist rapture types with their eyes on the big prize: the coming of Jesus. So all sorts of things that overlap.
But the exact reasons for why the imperial census believes that backing Israel is in its interest does’t really matter. The main thing is that it clearly does. The consensus is there.
What I’m getting at is this: I think that U.S. support for Israel can’t be explained by the power of the Jewish Lobby — a lobby that supposedly pushes the government into taking positions on Israel that go against U.S. interests, whatever that means. This is a view pushed John Mearsheimer and his coauthor Stephen Walt and taken as a basic truth by a lot of critics of Israel. There is this belief that there is something uniquely powerful about this lobby. But the explanation never really sat well with me. It’s too simple, too reductionist. And, I gotta be honest, kinda antisemitic.
There’s nothing special about the lobby.
Why? Because I think that if backing Israel went against the interests of the larger empire — or what our senile imperial consensus believed was in its interests — we would never see such monolithic unflinching support for Israel and its nationalist cause. Pro-Israel Jewish Lobby power would evaporate.
The Jew makes the world spin! A poster from Nazi-occupied Serbia.
To see how this plays out you can look at other extremely powerful domestic lobbies — lobbies that you’d think would be more powerful the Jewish Lobby and yet don’t seem to enjoy the same kind of ability to enforce absolute consensus from government institutions.
For instance: Take the open split between most giant American corporations and the entire U.S. military-political-security apparatus on the China issue.
The biggest monopolistic corps in tech, pharma, energy, and finance want good relations with China, not war. But that’s not policy of the American Empire, which is constantly agitating for some sort of conflict. But the imperial consensus isn’t there. There is strife inside the house.
This was on display a few months ago when Apple, BlackRock, Boeing, Citadel, Citi, FedEx, Gilead, MasterCard, Nike, Pepsi, Pfizer, Visa, and a dozen other multinational corps sponsored a celebration of Xi Jingping during his visit to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco.8 They all lined up to kiss his hand because they want to do business with China. But anyone who pays attention to U.S. foreign policy knows it seems this country’s entire military-security apparatus, along with a big bipartisan bloc in both the Senate and Congress, is itching for conflict with China. I mean, we have people like Nancy Pelosi comically taking trips to Taiwan just to play an imperial game of chicken with China. Why is she going against the wishes of the biggest and most powerful American corporations?
To me this rift on China between corporate America and the security state hints at something important. It shows that the power of lobbies, even seemingly omnipotent ones, is not as monolithic as people assume — not when the interests of these lobbies go against other powerful factions within empire, and that’s especially true for the patriotic and cultish imperial security apparatus.
I mean, if this country’s biggest monopolies want something, the political system should be jumping to deliver. And it mostly does, but not on everything. And China is a great counterexample. It’s clear that a big and powerful wing of the empire sees China as a threat and even the largest corporations in America have to clash and largely subordinate their wishes to this faction.
So the Jewish Lobby appears to have unique political power. But there is nothing special about it. It enjoys this power because the cultural and political consensus here lets its have that power. The lobby is part of this imperial consensus, but it’s not the driver of the consensus. It’s a junior partner, no matter how self-important and central its supporters and opponents might think it is.
If this consensus began to break down and started to shift to a position where Israel is seen as liability rather than an asset, I think we’d see a lot more fractures and fights over the Israel issue. And if the consensus ever turned against Israel, I guarantee you that the power of the pro-Israel Jewish Lobby would shrink like a prune and even ardent zionists like Anthony Blinken would soften their pro-Israel tune.
Most American Jews are American first and foremost. This is where they live, where their lives our built. Only the most dedicated crazy Jewish nationalists would endanger their lives and prosperity by going against their own country’s imperial consensus. If things ever come down to making a choice between America and Israel, most Jews would choose America without a second thought.9
We’re not there yet. But things could change quickly. Seems unlikely but the consensus could shift. The gleefully genocidal way Israeli society is conducting itself and the way Israel is so brazenly drawing the U.S. into its fight could speed up this process in unexpected ways.
—Yasha
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