False theories about “Zionist lobby”

Submitted by AWL on 30 September, 2014 - 6:37 Author: Martin Thomas

Many of the protests against Israel’s murderous bombing of Gaza in July-August targeted, oddly, not so much the Israeli government as the BBC.

The BBC was charged with having something different here from its usual bias towards conservatism. And the charge was part of a discourse which claims that the whole of established authority in the richer parts of the world has a special pro-Israel bias.

To unravel the issues, we can best start with the case of a different established authority, the Australian government.

In a batch of votes in the UN in November 2013, Australia was one of only eight states voting against a call on Israel to stop new settlements in the West Bank. It was one of only eleven voting against or abstaining on a call on Israel to abide by the Geneva Conventions.

Most of those other states voting with Israel in the UN are tiny and impoverished states in the Pacific, or sometimes in Latin America, ultra-dependent on the USA. Among relatively large states for whom “foreign policy” has a meaning other than looking for a rich benefactor, Australia stands alone with the USA and sometimes Canada on this issue.

An article by Vashti Kenway in Marxist Left Review of winter 2013 records that: “Under the Howard government [1996-2007], Australia’s UN voting record was the most pro-Israel in the world, except only the US and three small Pacific Island countries”, and investigates why.

Kenway reviews three explanations. Rightly, I think, she rejects all three.

The first explanation is Australia’s alliance with the US. But many other states ally consistently with the US without voting with Israel in the UN on Israeli-Palestinian questions. Saudi Arabia, for example. Or Jordan. Or most European states. The second explanation is the most common: “the Zionist lobby”.

Kenway points out that historically most Australian Jews were wary of the Zionist movement for one of three disparate reasons.

They were settled conservatives, hostile to a raucous band of agitators who might spoil their standing in the British Empire. They were leftists rejecting the project of settlement in Palestine as a diversion from class struggle in the countries where Jews lived as minorities. Or they just wanted to focus on integration into Australian society.

Today, Australian Jews identify themselves as concerned for Israel, and as “Zionist” (which today, for Jews who stay in Australia, cannot mean anything other than “concerned for Israel”). Kenway reads the shift in attitude as demonstrating a drift to the right among Australian Jews, but still rejects the idea that a “Zionist lobby” shapes Australian government policy.

In fact Jews are less than 0.5% of Australia’s population (according to the Jewish Virtual Library), or only 0.3% if you count only those who ticked a box in the 2011 census to identify as Jewish. Arab-Australians are more numerous, about 1.3% to 1.4%.

On average Australian Jews are better off than Arab-Australians, and on average that will give them more clout. But only by exaggerating that factor in the style of anti-semitic myths about the mysteriously all-powerful rich Jew can you think that the Jewish 0.5%, or 0.3%, or actually a subsection even of the 0.3%, can sway the whole polity. The pro-Netanyahu types do not have the alliance with a strong pro-Israeli-government “Christian Zionist” contingent which the pro-Israeli-government group in US Jewry has.

In most countries outside Israel, Jews are much less than 0.5% today. There are four others besides Australia where Jews make about 0.5% — Hungary, Uruguay, Argentina, the UK — none of which has the same pro-Israeli stridency as Australia. There are three where the Jewish minority is a bit larger — France, 0.8%; Canada, 1.1%; the USA, 1.7%.

Pro-Israeli-government strands among Australian Jews are more mobilised than in other countries where Jews are equally concerned for Israel in general. Pro-Netanyahu people were able to rally 10,000 on the streets of Sydney on 3 August. But that is another component of what we are trying to explain, rather than an explanation.

Moreover, though Australian Jews have probably, on average, moved to the right as they have become more prosperous, the difference between their concern for Israel today and their lack of interest in the Jewish community in Palestine in the 1930s is not really a matter of becoming more right-wing.

In the 1930s, Jews who could find a fairly safe refuge, as in Australia, were inclined to dismiss those who called for a Jewish state as crazy trouble-makers. Things changed with the Holocaust. Most Australian Jews today will have relatives in Israel, and other relatives who died in the Holocaust. Concern for Israel is an almost inescapable reflex among Jews, and can be, and often is, combined with support for Palestinian rights and dislike of Israeli government policy.

The third explanation examined and rejected by Kenway is Australia’s and Israel’s common roots in settler-pioneer culture.

It is hard to see why vague historic parallels should have continuing grip. And if European settler states were bound to back Israeli government policy, why wouldn’t that apply to New Zealand, Argentina, and Uruguay?

In any case, Australian political parties’ attitude towards Palestine has varied over the long term.

Kenway records that in 1939 the Australian government was lobbying London not to be “unduly favourable to the Jews” in Palestine. It was worried about the threat to “imperial communication” (the sea route for trade between Australia and Britain) if Britain provoked revolt among the Arabs.

In the 1940s, Australian conservatives backed Britain in its war against the Jewish community in Palestine, while ALP leader H V Evatt strongly backed the creation of Israel. The Whitlam Labor government in the 1970s was less pro-Israeli-government than the conservatives had been.

Only today are the big political parties more or less united on this. Julia Gillard, as Labor prime minister, wanted Australia to oppose the Palestinian Authority even having observer status at the UN. She accepted an abstention only after heavy pressure from foreign minister Bob Carr (and from Labor MPs with large Arab-Australian populations in their electorates).

These variations in attitudes to Israel argue against the thesis that the current attitude is a product of deep historic factors long embedded in the country’s culture. And so do the available facts about Australian public opinion, as distinct from the attitude of government and some media, notably The Australian, a Murdoch publication which is Australia’s chief newspaper distributed nationally rather than primarily just in one state or another.

Polls in November 2011 found that when asked “overall, do your sympathies lie more with the Israelis or the Palestinians?”, people replied: Israelis 26%, Palestinians 27%, neither 21%, can’t say 26%.

That is a different balance from in Britain, for example, where a similar poll by YouGov in 2014 had only 14% saying their sympathies were with Israel; twice as many (28%) saying they sympathised with the Palestinians; 40% neither; 17% don’t know. (Pro-Israeli sentiment is concentrated among older people and Tories).

And in Australia as in Britain, many of those who say in general that they don’t know, or take neither side, back the Palestinians on practical questions. In the UK, only 17% thought that this year’s Israeli attacks on Gaza were justified. 54% said they were unjustified, and 29% “don’t know”. In Australia, when told in 2011 that Palestine was applying for UN membership and that Israel and the USA opposed it, 61% responded that they would back it.

Kenway’s conclusion is to explain the Australian elite’s stance as determined by the fact it “fits with Australian capitalism’s material and geopolitical interests in the Middle East and across the world”.

But she herself points out that Australian trade with Israel has “always been dwarfed by Australia’s extensive trade with various Arab states”.

There is a special “geopolitical” dimension in the USA’s attitude to Israel-Palestine. Since 1967 it has, with good cause from its own point of view, regarded all the Arab regimes as unreliable allies. Israel is a more reliable ally, and militarily competent. The USA’s backing for Israel enables it to do business in the Middle East through the vexatious but also rewarding trade of being the broker in all negotiations between Israel and the Arab states.

The USA’s long-term interest would be to push on those negotiations to get a workable settlement. But its short-term interest is often to stick with the devil it knows.

No similar “geopolitical” dimension can explain Australian government attitudes. No Arab regime thinks it has to deal with Australia in order to get terms with Israel.

As far as I can surmise, Kenway’s vague talk of “Australia’s geopolitical interests” is informed by the common, but obviously wrong, thesis that Israel is “the watchdog of imperialism in the Middle East”.

Israel has military might, but politically and economically is unable even to get ordinary dealings with most of the Arab states, let alone to dominate them. It could from its current position of strength almost certainly get those ordinary dealings, and security, from a deal which allowed the Palestinians their own really independent state alongside Israel. Criminally it choses not to. But that is another matter.

And when the US sends in troops or planes, as in Iraq in 1991 or 2003 or now, the very last thing it wants is Israeli collaboration or support. The “watchdog of imperialism” in the Middle East is Arab regimes, not Israel.

The idea that six million Israeli Jews dominate 300-plus million Arabs, seventy-plus million Iranians, and seventy-plus million Turks, is an internationalised version of the idea that Jews have demonic powers enabling a 0.3% minority of Jews within Australia secretly to dominate the whole polity.

Even if Israel did have a mysterious power to dominate its region which gave all the world’s richer countries a “geopolitical” interest in backing it, that would not explain why Australia would be more swayed by that “geopolitical” interest than many other states more invested in the Middle East.

Kenway’s “material and geopolitical” explanation is no better than the ones she rejects.

My provisional conclusion is that the pro-Israeli-right stance of John Howard, Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott (current prime minister), and Chris Mitchell (editor of The Australian) comes not from some some structural basis of Australian capitalism, but from ideological influence and lack of countervailing pressure.

Those people have attitudes picked up from the right wing of politics in the USA. On other questions they are restrained by Australian public attitudes and social structures. They are less restrained on Israel partly because Australia (unlike the European Union) really has no great “geopolitical” role in the Middle East, i.e. for the opposite reason to that given by Vashti Kenway. And partly because pro-Palestinian public opinion in Australia is overwhelmingly passive.

The BBC is not biased in the way the Australian government and The Australian are. But if many on the left demonise and wish to “boycott” the whole of Israeli society, fail to solidarise with the struggles within Israel which are vital for progress, and mutter darkly about “Zionist lobbies”, then the BBC’s characteristic search for “balance” will tilt it pro-Israel.

A rational argument for Palestinian rights, denouncing Israeli government policy but admitting that Israeli Jews are now a settled nation and have rights of national self-determination alongside a really independent Palestinian state, could mobilise a majority.

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