"Between Tel Aviv and Washington."

Where lies power?

The sound of many hands clapping. Netanyahu addressing Congress, 24 July. (Office of Speaker Mike Johnson/ Wikimedia Commons.)

13 AUGUST—That deranged speech Bibi Netanyahu delivered to a joint session of Congress last month: I cannot get it entirely out of my mind. It did not change anything—neither the Israeli prime minister nor his hosts seem to desire or intend to change anything in U.S.–Israeli relations. And in this way, there is not much to say about that weird hour the world’s No. 1 terrorist—yes, think about it and tell me I’m wrong—spent at the podium under the Capitol’s rotunda. But the speech did clarify certain things,  and then it raised an important question. Let us see about these matters.

There is, to begin with, the question of Netanyahu’s mental stability. If we consider his many outlandish assertions—Israel has minimized civilian casualties in Gaza, Israeli soldiers are to be commended for their moral conduct, those protesting in behalf of Palestinians are probably in Iran’s pay, and so on—we must conclude that the man given to such preposterous misrepresentations is, let’s say, perpendicular to reality. 

I am sure Netanyahu spoke in large measure for effect. This must be so. But I am equally confident—note the demeanor in the videos, for instance—he was certain of the truth of what he had to say. Dr. Lawrence’s diagnosis: A man consumed with resentment and hatred, who has led Israel to the brink of a cataclysmic war at the irretrievable cost of its international standing, while dragging the U.S. into it (at similar cost), suffers from severe psychosis with symptoms of paranoia and obsessive-compulsive megalomania. 

I do not say this to indulge some cheap denigration of one of the many contemptible political figures now walking around the Western world and its appendages. After Netanyahu’s notably strange performance in Congress 24 July—at times he seemed pure id—I say this diagnosis would hold in a clinical setting. We should all take note of this and brace ourselves accordingly. Never mind who’s driving the bus: It would be better in this case if no one were driving it.  

There is also the reception Netanyahu enjoyed on Capitol Hill. Seventy-two ovations by my count, 60–odd of them standing, for a war criminal, a flouter of international law, a man who commits to waging “a seven-front war” across the Middle East? Bibi’s big theme, running all through his remarks, was congruence, the perfect alignment of Israeli and American interests. Remember? “Our enemies are your enemies, our fight is your fight, and”—here the left fist pounded—“our victory is your victory.” 

The response among those in attendance tells you all you need to know about what America’s lawmakers think of this idea. Netanyahu was looking merely for reaffirmation of standing arrangements at a moment when when terrorist Israel’s conduct had begun to turn more stomachs than he had bargained for. And he got what he wanted, needless to say. 

This brings us to the question Netanyahu’s speech forces upon us. Does the U.S. control Israel or does Israel control the U.S.? Is the apartheid state another of Washington’s client regimes, albeit—let’s borrow a little from the Chinese — a client with Zionist characteristics? Or is Israel a case—rare, if not unique—of a distant outpost that dictates to the imperial center? The periphery exercises power over the metropole, this to say: This would have to be something new under the sun, surely. 

This is not a new question. A lot of people have pondered it for months, if not longer—over dining tables or on barstools or in published material on the internet. Who’s in charge, anyway? It has sometimes struck me as an absolutely classic Gordian Knot: Untie this and you will understand all. And at other times it reminds me of a Zen koan, insoluble short of a sudden satori. I haven’t, accordingly, spent much time thinking this through. To date I have concluded it is an angels-on-a-pin question and the answer does not much matter. When others bring it up, my mind drifts. But after that shocking spectacle in Congress a few weeks ago, I don’t think I can get away with this dodge any longer.

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The occasion of Netanyahu’s address, his fourth before a joint session, puts all the complexities before us. Who was, in that hour, in charge—the insane man from the periphery, consumed with rage, or his audience of adoring lawmakers at the imperial center, driven by… driven by what? I would say driven by greed, ideology, and the work of running an imperium that is failing but has not failed yet. Who controlled whom that day?

The immediate answer, perhaps obvious, is the terrorist at the podium. It cannot be lost on anyone paying attention that more or less every member of Congress in attendance—and good on the 100 or so members who boycotted—has in the past taken and continues to take money from the Israel lobby, notably but not only the profoundly antidemocratic American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the infamous AIPAC. 

Netanyahu knew this. He spoke to some people who genuinely believe in the Zionist cause and some people concerned with the imperium’s geopolitical position in the Middle East. Some and some, O.K. But everybody he addressed, allowing for exceptions, was on the take from AIPAC. Thomas Massie, the libertarian Republican from Kentucky and one of the exceptions, told us just how AIPAC works—a combination of bribes, threats, and coercion—in quite unbelievable detail when Tucker Carlson interviewed him on these subjects a couple of months ago.  

Bibi, then, knew he did not have to persuade anyone in attendance of anything. He had to pretend to persuade. “We stand together,” etc. But there was no bringing anyone over to Israel’s side: Everyone to whom he spoke was already standing there. July 24 was Netanyahu’s day. It belonged to him because his audience belonged to him.

This is the case, in tableau form, of those who make the argument that in U.S–Israel relations, the nation of 9.5 million (in all likelihood less now with all the expatriation one reads about these days) controls the nation of 333 million. It is easy to see the logic of it. Israel began lobbying Washington for support as soon as it was declared Israel in 1948; AIPAC was up and running by the mid–1950s. And now look. Last week it put $8.5 million into a Missouri primary, to defeat Cori Bush, who speaks plainly of her opposition to the Gaza genocide. AIPAC spent $15 million, and for the same reason, to defeat Jamal Bowman in New York in June. Responding to her defeat, Bush vigorously criticized AIPAC for its intrusion into the Missouri primary, while also expressing her determination to oppose the group’s insidious influence. All perfectly justified—respectful, indeed, of the American political process. But the White House—believe it—had the nerve to criticize Bush over the weekend for her “inflammatory” remarks. Does this not make Bush’s point but precisely?   

This is power.  

Joe Biden, in this same line, accepted more money from the Israeli lobby than anyone else on Capitol Hill during his decades in the Senate—$4.2 million according to Open Secrets, and I understand this is a very low estimate if we count Biden’s post–Senate political career. Code Pink, in a signature-gathering campaign, says Harris has received $5.4 million from the Israel lobby, although it does not indicate at what stage in her career she accepted this extraordinary sum.   

Harris is now wowing all the dreamy liberals in our midst with gestures here and there intended to suggest that she will be tougher on the Israelis than Joe-the-Zionist and more sympathetic to the Palestinians. Follow the bouncing ball, please, as those honorable Arab–Americans up in Michigan do: Harris makes it quite clear, on those occasions she fails to avoid the topic, that she has no intention of making any meaningful adjustment in U.S. policy toward the terrorist state. Let the murdering go on, as long as the Israelis want it to continue.

This, as I say, is power—perversely acquired and perversely exercised.

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But we must draw a distinction at this point so as to understand the U.S.–Israeli dynamic as it truly is. For want of better words, we have to distinguish between ephemeral power and structural power. 

In my view the power the Israelis assert to influence U.S. politics and policy—an influence that comes close to dictating it—is ephemeral. It is based on the aforementioned bribery, threats, and coercion on the administering side. On the receiving end, things proceed by way of greed and fear. Israel’s power depends, in other words, on human frailties. Its wellspring is our greater or lesser givenness to corruption. The difference between greater and lesser can be measured in the fates of Cori Bush and Jamal Bowman. 

The United States’ power is altogether of another kind. It rests at bottom on material advantage, as Western hegemony has done for the past 500 years. It coerces, bribes, and threatens, of course, but it can also invade and destroy—all this to state the very obvious. Reducing this to the simplest terms, while the Pentagon could invade Israel were it ordered to do so, the Israel Defense Forces could not invade the U.S. The latter, indeed, is incapable of invading even Lebanon or Iran without the assurance of American backing. 

What is at issue in all this is the question of responsibility. Israel exercises considerable power over the U.S.—yes, we all know this—but this is by dint of a corrupt abdication on America’s part. We must not miss this. Washington’s whorish elites have sold U.S. policy to the Israelis, and Congress has sold itself similarly. But these are at bottom transactions, as fungible and ephemeral as any other. They do not reflect any kind of radical shift in power balances. 

The United States is still the imperium of our time, and Israel is still among its clients, albeit one complicated by various factors—religion, ideology, cynically manipulated guilt, a shared chosen-people consciousness and a lot of money dedicated to brazenly proffered and accepted what are bribes by any other name. Scrape all this away and you find a perfectly ordinary preoccupation with the preservation and projection of American power. Do you think the Pentagon just sent immense flotillas into the eastern Mediterranean because it is worried about the Jews of Israel?

It is about power, and this the U.S. has not sold. Implicit in all the demonstrations we have seen this year, indeed, is the correct assumption that America could sink Netanyahu’s boat any time it chooses to do so. Don’t let the moment decwive you: Bibi, as history will show, is at bottom merely a passing punk.    

This, to finish the thought, is the power that matters most—imperial power. 

Here’s the important thing about the distinction I draw. The ephemeral power Israel asserts in the U.S., accumulated over the eight postwar decades, reaches an historic impasse. It is waning, in a word. 

In his final days as a public figure, Joe Biden will continue to carry on about the Zionist state as he has the whole of his political career. “Without Israel, no Jew in the world is safe,” he declared the other day, and hardly for the first time. Kamala Harris is not saying anything about Israel and the Gaza crisis in part because she has little to say about anything, but mostly because, when circumstances require her to break this silence—“weird” indeed, this—it will not be good news for those anticipating even a millimeter’s worth of change. 

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Let’s use events as a mirror, as I learned to do during my correspondent years. The disgraceful circus of conjured dread over the dangerous ubiquity of anti–Semitism spreading across the U.S.—if only one could come across a single serious incident of it —reflects nothing so much as a marked decline in sympathy for Israel among Americans. A new majority, I read the other day, would not defend the apartheid state if it started a war with Iran and they were called upon to do so. 

Yousef Munayyer, the executive director of the Campaign for Palestinian Rights, an American group, published a well-reasoned piece in The Guardian on 7 August using just my method. Under the headline, “U.S. support for Israel is collapsing. And AIPAC knows it,” Munayyer considers AIPAC’s interventions against Cori Bush and Jamal Bowman and sees in them signs of the lobby’s declining influence. He figures it this way:

How could it be that such a powerful flex by pro–Israel donors is a reflection of a weakening cause? It’s simple: It is because such power flexes were never needed before. Now, it has become routine. … 

In the immediate short term, it seems like a reflection of power, but anyone who has been following the politics around this issue in the United States for years knows this is anything but. Pro–Israel interest groups never had to overtly and heavily interject themselves into electoral politics in such a way previously precisely because their cause [has] enjoy[ed] a great degree of cultural hegemony. In the U.S., politicians kissed babies, petted dogs, loved baseball and unequivocally supported Israel. That last part isn’t quite what it used to be. The consensus around supporting Israel, especially in the Democratic Party, has collapsed.

I hope Munayyer is right, and there are indications he is, although I would go with the gerund, “collapsing.” As he points out with lots of persuasive stats, popular support for Israel beyond the Washington Beltway has actually been wobbling for a decade—indeed, since the IDF conducted an earlier terrorizing assault on Gaza in 2014. AIPAC surely knows this, too. 

In this connection, there was an interesting item at the end of last month on WAMC, the NPR station  broadcasting in Upstate New York and western New England. Kamala Harris was just then raising hundreds of millions of dollars, cashing in on the irrational exuberance by then evident among Democrats. At a typically boisterous campaign stop in Pittsfield, Mass., she also faced protesters carrying placards that read, among other things, “End the Genocide” and “All This Money Will Not Wash the Blood Off Your Hands, Kamala.” 

What are we looking at here? Pittsfield is a small postindustrial city struggling back to life after General Electric abandoned it decades ago. But this is just the point: Anger about “the Biden–Harris administration” for its participation in Israel’s genocide seems to run right down to this nation’s broken sidewalks. Harris has since gotten the same treatment at a big campaign rally in Philadelphia, and again the other day in Detroit, where she high-handedly dismissed protesters with “I am speaking.” You come away with the impression Americans are simmering—virtually everyone I know is simmering, now that I think about it—and the major media, complicit with the Harris bandwagon, are doing their part to keep this out of sight. Let us not forget: American campuses are quiet after the honorable demonstrations this past spring, but classes resume in a month. 

You can bribe some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t bribe all of the people all of the time. I think I have my Lincoln right. And I think the Israelis, who, I imagine, don’t bother much with Abe, are on the way to learning that the power they have long exerted over U.S. politics and policy will eventually, in however long, prove ephemeral. 

An earlier version of this essay appeared in ScheerPost.

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