James Petras and the lobby

I don’t like to recycle, but I make an exception, because it’s the AIPAC con­fer­ence this weekend and “thought” is suffusing the internet. Orig­i­nally appeared here.

James Petras has been cloned. Petras I is still reliable, if a bit creaky in his old age. He digs for infor­ma­tion in Chapare, Chiapas, and elsewhere in the Latin American coun­try­side, inter­view­ing militants from the Venezue­lan National Peasant Front Ezequiel Zamora, rural orga­niz­ers from the Brazilian Landless Worker’s Movements, syn­di­cal­ists in Uruguay, and slum-dwellers in Argentine villas de miseria. He pores through primary resources in Por­tuguese and Spanish, clat­ter­ing out endless reams of political jour­nal­ism on the struggle of the dis­pos­sessed in Latin American, situating their struggles within the political economy of global impe­ri­al­ism. Petras I’s analysis may be a little the­o­ret­i­cally fuzzy, but he gets his hands dirty and deals with facts.

Then there’s another Petras. Petras II is slightly off the rails. Still kind of coherent, he deploys Marxist soci­o­log­i­cal analysis in the pursuit of a highly idio­syn­cratic series of theses: that an inter­wo­ven complex of insti­tu­tions called the Zionist Power Con­fig­u­ra­tion has taken over the American gov­ern­ment, that the ongoing aggres­sion against Iraq emerged not out of Texaco, but out of Tel Aviv, and that the Iranian Green Movement was a bunch of Gucci rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies from the posh neigh­bor­hoods of North Tehran. Both are busy, but espe­cially the latter, who has been churning out pamphlets accusing Israel of allying with an American Fifth Column at the rate of one a year for the past half decade.

Petras II seems like he’s been stealing copy from Anthony Giddens and post-9/11 Rudolf Giuliani. He writes of the “post-colonial ethos of the American people” and is concerned that Israeli irre­den­tism is jeop­ar­diz­ing the “work and security of American busi­ness­men and officials” as they day-in and day-out construct the economic and political filigree of empire. He also offers counsel to the American fighting forces as to how to carry out our imperial wars, noting that things have gotten so bad that an American general – he means David Petraeus – commented that “Israel’s colonial dis­pos­ses­sion of the Pales­tin­ian people has prolonged the war [in Iraq]…and under­mined the capacity of the U.S. armed forces to suc­cess­fully operate on multiple fronts to promote U.S. imperial interests.”

This latter Petras poses difficult problems for the Left. Is it better that the U.S. armed forces aren’t free to carpet bomb the Boli­var­ian Rev­o­lu­tion because the Israeli Army’s carpet bombing of Gaza and trans­for­ma­tion of the West Bank into a set of cantons traversed by endless Jewish-only roads and peppered with illegal set­tle­ments inhabited by glaze-eyed khasidim from Williams­burg insistent that the Torah gives them the right to uproot olive trees, beat the crap out of Pales­tin­ian shepherds in the South Hebron Hills, and generally thrash and steal from the abo­rig­i­nal pop­u­la­tion, is slowing down the American occu­pa­tion army in Iraq? Or should the Left instead oppose Israeli settler-colonialism and seek to shatter the spine of the American Israel lobby that supports it, so the U.S. Army, having ripped Iraqi society apart, can move back to its normal safari grounds in Latin America? Petras II would have us destroy­ing the societies Petras I has been pro­tect­ing for half a century. Not on purpose – but once we remove the imperial foot soldiers from the Middle East, we know that they tend to get busy elsewhere.

The rub is that Petras I and Petras II are one. Rev­o­lu­tion­ary intel­lec­tual cohabits the same body with reac­tionary ideologue. The gist of Petras’s argument – in this case, presented in a short pamphlet entitled War Crimes in Gaza and the Zionist Fifth Column in America, about 25 percent of it devoted to reprint­ing the Executive Summary of the Goldstone Report, a valuable service to those of his readers unfa­mil­iar with the World Wide Web – is that Israel has “strategic dom­i­na­tion” of the U.S. political system, and the “Zionist Power Con­fig­u­ra­tion” controls the “mass media,” while “Americans have suffered major losses as a result of Israel’s relent­less pursuit of military-driven power in the Middle East.” Fur­ther­more, “Israel’s arrogance damages attempts by U.S. private investors to broker oil deals for multi­na­tional cor­po­ra­tions.” The problem is an abusive “relation between states,” or as Petras quickly rejiggers the argument, a rela­tion­ship between peoples in which one group, “Israeli Jews and their powerful one percent fifth column agents in the U.S.” imposes their bellicose, tribute-taking agenda on another group: “the American taxpayers, soldiers, workers and busi­ness­peo­ple.” His italics.

In the process, the Left comes in for heavy abuse. Petras attacks the “Marxist…Zionist fellow travelers” of the American Left for not printing any “critical essays on Zionist power” in such journals as the New Left Review (British), New Politics, Socialist Register, and so on, espe­cially upset that his and John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s books don’t receive leftist attention.

The reaction to Walt and Mearsheimer is simply untrue. They were reviewed and responded to, if not always con­vinc­ingly, and fre­quently far too dis­mis­sively. As for Petras, who can blame the Left? Most anyone not wearing a tinfoil hat would recoil from his con­spir­a­to­r­ial gob­bledy­gook. The Left in par­tic­u­lar would trag­i­cally but correctly accuse Petras of white­wash­ing empire. Both reactions are too easy. Some of what Petras has been issuing in an unending stream over the past six years is correct. The Israel lobby – drop the “Zionist Power con­fig­u­ra­tion” – is powerful. The mass-media does filter its news through a Zionist sieve. And it’s true that there has been a “Zionist/Israeli influence in promoting U.S. war policies.” The lobby’s power does hurt the many for the interests of the few. One can hardly find fault with Petras’s assertion that it must be countered. And Petras is enough of a leftist that parts of his political program are welcome. We should support “the class and popular struggle against finance, real estate and insurance bil­lion­aires.” But other things do not follow. Against his insis­tence, it is hard to identify “U.S. wars for Israel in the Middle East,” and Petras’s comment that the U.S. Left should organize under a banner with the legend, “ISRAEL DOESN’T TELL U.S. WORKERS WHO TO FIGHT” will not sit well with many leftists, having nothing to do with “Jewish ‘sen­si­bil­i­ties’” as he writes and every­thing to do with the political and moral basis for left orga­ni­za­tion: that workers shouldn’t be fighting in cap­i­tal­ist wars.

Petras iden­ti­fies insti­tu­tional politics oriented towards eth­ni­cally conceived interests as the knot of the problem. But the lobby, pace Petras, Walt-Mearsheimer, and others, is not a fifth column-esque force making America deviate from its “national interest,” a bit of meta­physics imported from the con­cep­tual universe of inter­na­tional relations theory. Those concerned about Pales­tin­ian lib­er­a­tion should know this more than anyone. The auto­cratic Pales­tin­ian Authority kowtows to Wash­ing­ton and Tel Aviv and promises Tzipi Livni the “biggest Yerusha­layim” ever in return for the aid inflows that construct a col­lab­o­ra­tor class willing to admin­is­ter the cantons from pent­houses in Ramallah so long as the cash keeps piling up in the PA’s coffers. The children of the col­lab­o­ra­tor layer now have the freedom to puke in front of night­clubs just like in Western Europe, while their parents create employ­ment for the under­ly­ing pop­u­la­tion in Pales­tin­ian indus­trial zones. Meanwhile Mohammed Dahlan’s Vichy torture squad tortures muqawama for fighting for their people. There are no “national interests,” merely class interests that permeate porous national borders. Money knows no flag.

Yet too much of what Petras says is correct for to be simply brushed off along with the nonsense. Noam Chomsky may not be a “liberal Zionist,” as Petras accuses, but when the latter wrote in The Fateful Triangle that “no pressure group [e.g. the lobby] will dominate access to public opinion or maintain con­sis­tent influence over policy-making elites unless its aims are close to those of elite elements with real power,” and in a later comment on the lobby wrote that what is at stake is weighing “(A) strategic-economic interests of con­cen­tra­tions of domestic power in the tight state-corporate linkage, and (B) the Lobby,” problems arose. It feels imper­ti­nent to type out the words, but Chomsky’s analysis was not entirely sound. The appro­pri­ate binary is not between “pressure groups” and “domestic power,” precisely because the lobby is not a “domestic pressure group,” but a component of class power. As Gabriel Ash comments, “the Israel Lobby should rather be a shorthand des­ig­na­tion for a segment of the elites that fully par­tic­i­pates in making U.S. impe­ri­al­ism happen” – an elite which traverses national lines.

The Israel lobby about which Petras is so pissed is precisely that: a class alliance between American and Israeli cap­i­tal­ists. It is more the outcome of Israel’s useful work as a regional Sparta and global arms merchant, dealing materiel to the terror states of Central America and the Southern Cone, to the Shah and Pretoria, than the cause of it. For that mercenary work of blood­let­ting amongst the brown people of Latin America and southern Africa, Israel got rewarded well: a couple billion dollars yearly since 1967. Given the links between the state and capital in Israel, that means Israeli elites got richly rewarded—chiefly, the ahusalim, or Ashkenazi founders of the state. While most of that money re-circulates back to the American military-industrial complex – the main role of Israeli political insti­tu­tions in the political economy of American accu­mu­la­tion is to make the rich even richer – 25 percent is con­sis­tently allowed to stay in Israel, where it has built up a sizable domestic high-technology and military-industrial complex.

The physical plant stayed there, but the ownership did not. In a world of glob­al­ized capital movements, starting in the mid-1990s the “Israeli” MIC became decreas­ingly Israeli and increas­ingly American in ownership. Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler have cal­cu­lated that the cor­re­la­tion coef­fi­cient between the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE) and the NASDAQ was .7 in the five-year span from 1996 to 2001 – meaning 70 percent of vari­a­tions in the TASE were “explained” by vari­a­tions in the NASDAQ. From 2002 to 2007, a nearly syn­chro­nous 92 percent of vari­a­tions in the TASE were explained by movements in the NASDAQ.

The Israeli economy is a misnomer. There is an Israeli state with a con­stel­la­tion of insti­tu­tions, not least among them an army, and an American state similarly poised, and between them flows of capital and flows of people with dual-passports, jet-setting from the Upper East Side to Eilat. The Israel lobby is certainly real. But it’s an expres­sion of, and a com­ple­ment to, material links. Ideology plays a role: the settlers’ American-abetted insis­tence on growing the Israeli state by nibbling away at the bits of land left for the Pales­tin­ian people, alongside the refusal to recognize the legit­i­macy of Pales­tin­ian nation­al­ism that pervades the cam­ou­flaged hawks of the Israeli “peace camp.”

Petras and the lobby theorists hyper­ven­ti­late about the set­tle­ment project endan­ger­ing American interests, and they may be correct, even once one has rein­ter­preted “American interests” to mean the uneasy com­pro­mise between the decreas­ingly autonomous political apparatus operating as the executive committee of the ruling class and whichever fragments of capital propelled that elite into office. But they still ask the wrong questions, restrict­ing their inquiries to the “fifth column.” That “fifth column” is just the American allies of the Israeli ruling class. They press on the U.S. gov­ern­ment to facil­i­tate set­tle­ment expansion because to cease or reverse set­tle­ment expansion runs the small but real risk of tearing Israeli society apart. No Israeli political leader would carry out such a task. And so Israel’s American allies, with billions of dollars in foreign invest­ment in Israel, don’t push for it either, and they all shrug as messianic payes–sporting American and European Jews build up Judea over piles of Pales­tin­ian corpses. The lobby, deeply insti­tu­tion­al­ized in American politics, ensures that America does not exert pressure on Israel, while the PA skips happily along, gorging on aid inflows that will never develop the Pales­tin­ian economy. No one par­tic­u­larly cares.

Once one has sifted through the endless pages of bureau­cratese and the self-deluded jargon of defense intel­lec­tu­als, the lobby debate as it is conducted on the right is whether or not having Israel as an American ally is the best way to secure American cap­i­tal­ist interests in the Middle East. Petras, Mearsheimer, and Walt insist not. In jux­ta­po­si­tion with the “global hegemony strategy” called for by the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion and previous Repub­li­can admin­is­tra­tions, they call for “off-shore balancing,” in which, as Walt writes, “the United States would intervene with its own forces only when regional powers are unable to uphold the balance of power on their own.” A part of this would be “giving Israel a choice: it can end its self-defeating occu­pa­tion of the West Bank and Gaza and remain a cherished partner of the United States, or it can remain an occupying power on its own.” As he astutely notes, “This policy would undoubt­edly be anathema to the different elements of the Israel lobby and would probably make some other Americans uneasy.” We get to the root of the issue: the lobby blocks the two-state set­tle­ment that would secure American regional interests.

Mis­un­der­stand­ing those interests, some claiming to be on the Left insist that any support of Israel irks the oil-rich Gulf sheikhdoms. Let Israel loose, they insist, and let’s be friends with the guys sitting on tremen­dous pools of petroleum. That analysis mis­un­der­stands the political economy of petroleum from the per­spec­tive of the oil majors and the state appa­ra­tuses they serially capture. Their sole interest is keeping prices elevated and con­trol­ling the flow of proceeds from those elevated prices. To do so, they need the sheikhdoms to be con­trolled by friendly regimes. Israel in that sense is a secondary issue, trou­ble­some only to the extent that it incites popular pressure against the col­lab­o­ra­tor regimes, espe­cially Aladdin’s cave – Saudi Arabia, capable of producing 10 million barrels of oil per day and sedulous about rein­vest­ing the proceeds from its oil profits into American financial secu­ri­ties and American weapons systems. As Robert Vitalis comments, “For the region known as the Gun Belt, the Persian Gulf rep­re­sents a critical market at a time of crisis in the arms industry,” keeping entire pro­duc­tion lines going during lulls in Pentagon procurement.

To keep weapons purchases whirring along, excuses are helpful, even if the arms them­selves sit in ware­houses in the peninsula’s deserts. Israel provides the best excuse: the U.S. government’s legally-binding com­mit­ment to Israel’s Qual­i­ta­tive Military Edge ensures that it must have the latest weapons systems at all times. When Lockheed Martin wants customers for the F-35, appar­ently an over-sophisticated under-engineered ostrich of an airplane that can barely get off the ground, it looks to Israel. Israel obliges, with American taxpayers footing the bill. Israel thus equipped with the latest gewgaws out of Bethesda, U.S. death-merchants can sell the F-15 to Saudi Arabia, this time with dollars extracted from American taxpayers not through the IRS but at the gas pump. Meanwhile Israel’s itinerant bombing runs desta­bi­lize the Middle East, part of the con­se­quence of creating what Chaim Weizmann called an “Asiatic Belgium.” Israel was envi­sioned as foreign irritant and plays precisely that role. The result is constant conflict. The Middle East has been aflame non-stop from 2001 to 2009. BP, Chevron, Cono­coPhillips, Exxon­Mo­bil, and Shell made 876 billion in profits during that span. Coin­ci­dence, surely.

Mis­un­der­stand­ing this point, Petras, like so many of Walt and Mearsheimer’s epigones, also insists on casting the Iraq War as a tremen­dous failure for America, with American oil companies now not even bothering to place winning bids for devel­op­ment of Iraqi oil fields and with Iraqi oil pro­duc­tion still trickling out at its pre-war levels, with the national interest crumpled somewhere between Fallujah and the Green Zone. Their mirror-images on the “Left” like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri vacuously rumble about the inad­e­quacy of thinking that U.S. military actions are “primarily directed at a specific economic advantage…Such specific goals are secondary…Military force must guarantee the con­di­tions for the func­tion­ing of the world market.” The dual meta­physics of capital and national interests explain every­thing – and nothing. Hardt and Negri are so scared of the accu­sa­tion of vulgar economism that they miss the basic cor­re­la­tion between war and conflict in the Middle East – 1973, 1979, 1980, 1982, 1991, 2001, 2003 – and elevated profits for the oil companies and the arms merchants that sell their wares to the petro-states seeking something to do with the freshets of capital pouring into their bank accounts, while the rightist neo-populists and realists don’t ever look at capital accu­mu­la­tion and don’t see that the oil companies do just fine while Israel mucks around with dense inert metal explo­sives in the Middle East and Gaza burns.

They benefit because when the embers of insta­bil­ity are banked, burning steadily but hotly, gas and oil prices remain elevated. Petro-dollars gush into the coffers of the oil majors as well as the Gulf States, who then spend their cash on arms—overwhelmingly, American arms. Most of the rest provides the cir­cu­la­tory flows keeping the FIRE sector flush with cash. People make money off suffering and death in the Middle East, and they can easily hide behind the Israel lobby. Something strong enough to both hide and legit­i­mate immense power, while con­tribut­ing to American mil­i­tarism in the Middle East, has a lot of power itself, and for that reason, the lobby is no pushover.

Precisely for that reason, the lobby must be con­fronted. It is a component of ruling class power, and to deny its influence will not fly. But behind and among it are blood-merchants, and none of them care about Pales­tini­ans – nor, one suspects, do Pales­tini­ans’ latest allies among the “realist” policy intel­li­gentsia. American capital barely cares enough about Israeli mil­i­tarism and occu­pa­tion to dump its money into J Street, let alone to crash the hammer down on Zionist malfea­sance in the Middle East. They do not and will not care about Pales­tini­ans until their interests are threat­ened more directly. The way to do that is simple. It’s by linking demands with others threat­ened by Israeli mil­i­tarism, by American impe­ri­al­ism, and by cap­i­tal­ism more broadly, and making the costs of main­tain­ing an Israeli client state in the Middle East higher than the costs of giving it up. Misguided fairy tales like Petras peddles simply won’t do in forging the political project that can lead to freedom in the Middle East. Perhaps at this hour it’s time for some realism. Which doesn’t mean defeatism. Just because the enemy is big does not mean we can’t bring it down.

Tech­no­rati Tags: AIPAC, Israel, Israel Lobby, Palestine, Zionism

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