It isn’t that there is anything wrong with the Arabs having a lobby – on the contrary, all ethnic groups have a right to lobby for their interests – it’s just that the consequences of that particular lobby’s actions are against America’s interests.Armed with that thesis, political scientist Mitchell Bard has written The Arab Lobby: The Invisible Alliance That Undermines America’s Interests in the Middle East. In Israel recently to promote his book, published earlier this year, Bard met with The Jerusalem Post at The Menachem Begin Heritage Center to explain what the Arab lobby is and why he sees it as so harmful to the US.“There’s nothing wrong with them [the Arabs] having a lobby,” says Bard, “I’d say Arab-Americans, Saudis, as long as they’re playing by the rules and United States law are perfectly entitled to try to influence American policy. The problem is in the consequences for some of their activities, and in particular the actions of the pro- Saudi lobby are extremely dangerous for America.”Bard, who is also the executive director of the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise (AICE) and director of the Jewish Virtual Library, an online encyclopedia of Jewish history and culture, says that the Saudis, as well as holding the US over a barrel on energy dependence, also have a history of promoting terrorism and intolerance and have constantly worked to sabotage American peace efforts in the Middle East.“The Saudi lobby basically promotes policies that are contrary to American values, contrary to American interests and actually directly threaten our security,” he says. “So to break that down more specifically, in terms of values, we believe in freedom, democracy, civil rights, human rights, while Saudi Arabia is one of the most intolerant societies in the world. The second thing is the undermining of American interests. One of the main ways that they’ve undermined American interests is in terms of the peace process, where the Saudis have routinely sabotaged or tried to sabotage our peace initiatives.“They also support terrorist groups that have undermined our interests. Early at the height of PLO terror, they were very involved in supporting the PLO and for some years they were supporting Hamas, which undermined [Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud] Abbas and Fatah, which was and still is the group that America has basically put its support behind. They have also threatened American security by their support for terrorists and by their investment in mosques and schools that promote a radical version of Islam, that teach that Americans and non-Muslims are infidels, Jews are pigs, Jews are apes, Christians are pigs – and generally are contributing to future generations’ intolerance toward not just Americans but non-Muslims.“And finally, the other big way they’ve undermined our interests is in terms of energy security. That they act as basically drug pushers to try to keep us addicted to oil. They manipulate the price of oil in the hope of discouraging American investment in alternatives to oil and this has compromised our security, forced us, led us, to be more dependent on Arab oil producers.”Another area where Bard identifies a “nefarious” Arab, especially Saudi, influence, is on campus, where he sees the real problem not as anti-Semitism but the infiltration of the Arab lobby into the classroom in an attempt to shape the views of the next generation of American decision makers.“Basically,” says Bard, “for 30-some odd years, the Arab lobby has been investing over $300 million in various aspects of Arab Islamic studies, and the pro-Israel community, the Jewish community and others interested in Israel have invested very little until just the last few years.”Israel and the pro-Israel camp, he says, have failed to understand that “what goes on in the classroom is more important than what they see outside the classroom.”“The focus,” says Bard, “has mostly been on outside the classroom because they see student protests, or they see ‘apartheid walls’ or mock checkpoints or [Prime Minister Binyamin] Netanyahu or Ambassador [Michael] Oren being shouted down on campuses, and that’s given the impression that campuses are aflame with anti- Semitism, and the fire department has to go and put it out. But mostly that’s the exception and not the rule. Most campuses are not like that; the real problem is inside the class. Firstly very few people teach about Israel, and secondly those who do teach it aren’t teaching it very well.”WHEN BARD says that Israel studies aren’t being taught “very well” what he means is that some academics “are teaching it in a very biased way, and some have a very clear agenda that they’re using their classroom to promote, which tends to be anti-Israel.”Bard, who through the AICE runs a program to bring Israeli professors to teach in American universities, sees the campus battleground as one where the war can be won with money despite the huge advantage in resources enjoyed by the Saudis.“This is one of the few problems that you actually can solve with money, because by investing in good professors to teach about Israel, we can change the way Israel is perceived on college campuses and ultimately when they [students] go out into the world. The Arabs recognized early on that they couldn’t win on the merits of their arguments in Congress or even with the general public, so the idea is to try to change minds while they’re still forming their opinions.”Bard says that one of the reasons for writing the book was his desire to counter the growing credence given to theories that the Israeli lobby is all-powerful and harmful to US interests and to show that there is, in fact, a far more potent and detrimental lobby at work in the corridors of power in Washington.“I have been writing about the Arab and Israeli lobbies for more than 20 years. My PhD dissertation was on the influence of the lobbies on US-Middle East policy. But what’s happened, especially in the last few years, is that [John] Mearsheimer and [Stephen] Walt [authors of The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy], as academics, basically gave credibility also to what most people saw as crackpot theories that have been around since I wrote my original book, The Water’s Edge and Beyond, which was published in ’91 and talks about the Arab lobby.“But now, partly because of Walt and Mearsheimer, but other things as well, the demonization of the Israeli lobby has become more mainstream, and the idea that the Israeli lobby is all-powerful and having a detrimental impact on US policies has become much more accepted in some circles in the United States and I wanted people to understand (a) that’s not true, and (b) that there is this Arab lobby that nobody has paid any attention to that is in some ways more powerful and definitely much more detrimental to the US national interest.”THE TERM Arab lobby is a “misnomer,” Bard explains, elaborating that while most lobbies concentrate on one issue, the Arab lobby has two issues that occasionally overlap: one, pro-Saudi based on oil and represented primarily by the Saudi government, Arabists, defense contractors and other corporations with commercial interests in the kingdom, with the other issue of concern being the Palestinian question.“I see the Arab lobby divided into two main parts,” he says. “I see what I call the ‘domestic component’ – Arab- American, Muslim-American, anti-Zionist or non-evangelical Christians and some State Department Arabists. Their principal agenda is to promote the Palestinian issue, but they do it primarily in an anti-Israel way. If you look at much of their legislative agenda, it’s not how we can support the peace process, how we can get more money for the Palestinians, how we can support democracy- building in the Palestinian Authority, it’s how can we cut off aid to Israel, how can we condemn Israel for what the issue is of the moment.“They are relatively uninfluential in Congress for a variety of reasons. One is that there are very few Arab-Americans – about three million – and a significant portion of those are Lebanese Christians, who don’t agree with the anti-Israel agenda. The second problem is that most Americans are pro-Israel, the latest Gallup poll shows 63 percent support Israel and 15% support the Palestinians. So, in basing their arguments on an anti-Israel agenda, they don’t find a very hospitable environment.“They also historically have not been as active in politics. The pro-Israel community is very politically active in campaigns and going out to vote, and that gets the pro- Israel community engaged, and so for all those reasons, and others, they have a very limited, non-influential effect on Congress.“The other Arab influence is the oil lobby, which is driven by Saudi Arabia, with the help of State Department Arabists, the oil industry and defense contractors, and they’ve been much more successful because they’re not directly lobbying against Israel. They are focused primarily on promoting the Saudi agenda, and so only on arms sales, and even that hasn’t happened since about 1981, [have] the Israeli lobby and the pro-Saudi lobby really come at loggerheads or competed against each other. Mostly it’s not a direct competition between them. The Saudis have had a great deal of success – just look at the latest story of [Barack] Obama proposing the greatest arms sale in history, giving $60 billion to the Saudis, and they’ve gotten over $100b. in weapons up until now, and the way the Saudis operate is also different.”Bard sums up the Saudi strategy as one of “few influencing the many.”“Their whole philosophy,” he says, “is they understand that they don’t have popular support, there’s no Saudi- American lobby of Saudi-Americans. What they have said is, we’re basically going to work from the top down instead of the bottom up.“The reason I call it the invisible alliance wasn’t to convey some dark conspiracy; it really was referring to the fact that most people just aren’t aware or can’t see how the Saudis especially operate. That is unless you go and do the research I did. They don’t know that the Saudis spent $100 million on public relations and lobbying firms, hired guns. Because no one will support them here, they have hired guns to lobby for them and most people don’t go through the foreign agents registration records to see where the money’s going and how they’re using their influence.“They don’t see how the Saudis try to influence the media also through financing various activities. They don’t see how the Saudi ambassador, especially [Prince] Bandar bin Sultan [Riyadh’s ambassador to Washington from 1983 to 2005], for basically 20 years could walk into the White House whenever he wanted. And so you didn’t know he was doing it, you didn’t know what he said when he went there, and the Saudis have always operated on this very high level of they don’t bother with Congress for the most part, they go directly to the president, directly to the secretary of state.”While Bard talks extensively of the enormous influence of the Saudi lobby, he notes that thankfully, from Israel’s perspective, the Arab lobby in general is highly fractious and that is one of the reasons why on a lot of issues, especially ones involving Israel, it has been less influential than, for example, the pro-Israel lobby.“There’s no one Arab interest to represent. You have 21 Arab states that have competing agendas, so how do you represent ‘the Arabs’ or ‘the Muslims’? Whereas people who support the US-Israel relationship, it’s one country and even with all the fractiousness of Jews, and some other supporters, there’s a pretty solid consensus for most policies concerning US-Israel relations. That fractiousness that does help weaken the Arab side. Even, for example, in the domestic Arab lobby between Muslim- American groups and Arab-American groups, most of the Arab-American groups have tended to be pro-Fatah, and the Muslim-American groups have been more pro- Hamas, so that brings in the inter-Palestinian tensions, which makes them collectively weaker.”On that count, Bard has a word of warning. He sees in the emergence of the liberal advocacy group J Street a development that can weaken the pro-Israel camp in the US.“There are lots of things you can say about J Street,” he replies when probed on the issue, “but one thing is it has the impact of what divides the Arab lobby, that instead of being able to have this very unified pro-Israel position, there’s this group saying something different. And so whether what they say is good or bad, it definitely weakens the establishment position because now Congress is hearing confusing voices.“In terms of how a political scientist like me judges influence of interest groups, having dissonant voices or divided positions makes you weaker. How much weaker that’s another question, I’m not sure they’ve had much influence so far. And whatever influence they’ve had, it’s mostly this confusing people influence. But J Street also basically, fundamentally, has a view that’s similar to many of the Arabists, which is, and this was captured in the title of a famous article by one of the State Department officials, George W. Ball, ‘How to Save Israel in Spite of Itself.’“The view of the Israeli lobby traditionally is ‘Israel knows what’s best for Israel and peace and security’ and a democratically elected government should decide those issues. J Street’s position is that Israelis are too stupid, too weak, too evil, too politically constrained to do what’s good for them, therefore the US has to decide and impose a solution that we at J Street believe is best for Israel, and that’s more consistent with the views of the Arab lobby than the Israeli lobby.”
In whose interest?
Even more potent than the Israel lobby, says author Mitchell Bard, is the Arab lobby, which is far more detrimental to the US.
It isn’t that there is anything wrong with the Arabs having a lobby – on the contrary, all ethnic groups have a right to lobby for their interests – it’s just that the consequences of that particular lobby’s actions are against America’s interests.Armed with that thesis, political scientist Mitchell Bard has written The Arab Lobby: The Invisible Alliance That Undermines America’s Interests in the Middle East. In Israel recently to promote his book, published earlier this year, Bard met with The Jerusalem Post at The Menachem Begin Heritage Center to explain what the Arab lobby is and why he sees it as so harmful to the US.“There’s nothing wrong with them [the Arabs] having a lobby,” says Bard, “I’d say Arab-Americans, Saudis, as long as they’re playing by the rules and United States law are perfectly entitled to try to influence American policy. The problem is in the consequences for some of their activities, and in particular the actions of the pro- Saudi lobby are extremely dangerous for America.”Bard, who is also the executive director of the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise (AICE) and director of the Jewish Virtual Library, an online encyclopedia of Jewish history and culture, says that the Saudis, as well as holding the US over a barrel on energy dependence, also have a history of promoting terrorism and intolerance and have constantly worked to sabotage American peace efforts in the Middle East.“The Saudi lobby basically promotes policies that are contrary to American values, contrary to American interests and actually directly threaten our security,” he says. “So to break that down more specifically, in terms of values, we believe in freedom, democracy, civil rights, human rights, while Saudi Arabia is one of the most intolerant societies in the world. The second thing is the undermining of American interests. One of the main ways that they’ve undermined American interests is in terms of the peace process, where the Saudis have routinely sabotaged or tried to sabotage our peace initiatives.“They also support terrorist groups that have undermined our interests. Early at the height of PLO terror, they were very involved in supporting the PLO and for some years they were supporting Hamas, which undermined [Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud] Abbas and Fatah, which was and still is the group that America has basically put its support behind. They have also threatened American security by their support for terrorists and by their investment in mosques and schools that promote a radical version of Islam, that teach that Americans and non-Muslims are infidels, Jews are pigs, Jews are apes, Christians are pigs – and generally are contributing to future generations’ intolerance toward not just Americans but non-Muslims.“And finally, the other big way they’ve undermined our interests is in terms of energy security. That they act as basically drug pushers to try to keep us addicted to oil. They manipulate the price of oil in the hope of discouraging American investment in alternatives to oil and this has compromised our security, forced us, led us, to be more dependent on Arab oil producers.”Another area where Bard identifies a “nefarious” Arab, especially Saudi, influence, is on campus, where he sees the real problem not as anti-Semitism but the infiltration of the Arab lobby into the classroom in an attempt to shape the views of the next generation of American decision makers.“Basically,” says Bard, “for 30-some odd years, the Arab lobby has been investing over $300 million in various aspects of Arab Islamic studies, and the pro-Israel community, the Jewish community and others interested in Israel have invested very little until just the last few years.”Israel and the pro-Israel camp, he says, have failed to understand that “what goes on in the classroom is more important than what they see outside the classroom.”“The focus,” says Bard, “has mostly been on outside the classroom because they see student protests, or they see ‘apartheid walls’ or mock checkpoints or [Prime Minister Binyamin] Netanyahu or Ambassador [Michael] Oren being shouted down on campuses, and that’s given the impression that campuses are aflame with anti- Semitism, and the fire department has to go and put it out. But mostly that’s the exception and not the rule. Most campuses are not like that; the real problem is inside the class. Firstly very few people teach about Israel, and secondly those who do teach it aren’t teaching it very well.”WHEN BARD says that Israel studies aren’t being taught “very well” what he means is that some academics “are teaching it in a very biased way, and some have a very clear agenda that they’re using their classroom to promote, which tends to be anti-Israel.”Bard, who through the AICE runs a program to bring Israeli professors to teach in American universities, sees the campus battleground as one where the war can be won with money despite the huge advantage in resources enjoyed by the Saudis.“This is one of the few problems that you actually can solve with money, because by investing in good professors to teach about Israel, we can change the way Israel is perceived on college campuses and ultimately when they [students] go out into the world. The Arabs recognized early on that they couldn’t win on the merits of their arguments in Congress or even with the general public, so the idea is to try to change minds while they’re still forming their opinions.”Bard says that one of the reasons for writing the book was his desire to counter the growing credence given to theories that the Israeli lobby is all-powerful and harmful to US interests and to show that there is, in fact, a far more potent and detrimental lobby at work in the corridors of power in Washington.“I have been writing about the Arab and Israeli lobbies for more than 20 years. My PhD dissertation was on the influence of the lobbies on US-Middle East policy. But what’s happened, especially in the last few years, is that [John] Mearsheimer and [Stephen] Walt [authors of The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy], as academics, basically gave credibility also to what most people saw as crackpot theories that have been around since I wrote my original book, The Water’s Edge and Beyond, which was published in ’91 and talks about the Arab lobby.“But now, partly because of Walt and Mearsheimer, but other things as well, the demonization of the Israeli lobby has become more mainstream, and the idea that the Israeli lobby is all-powerful and having a detrimental impact on US policies has become much more accepted in some circles in the United States and I wanted people to understand (a) that’s not true, and (b) that there is this Arab lobby that nobody has paid any attention to that is in some ways more powerful and definitely much more detrimental to the US national interest.”THE TERM Arab lobby is a “misnomer,” Bard explains, elaborating that while most lobbies concentrate on one issue, the Arab lobby has two issues that occasionally overlap: one, pro-Saudi based on oil and represented primarily by the Saudi government, Arabists, defense contractors and other corporations with commercial interests in the kingdom, with the other issue of concern being the Palestinian question.“I see the Arab lobby divided into two main parts,” he says. “I see what I call the ‘domestic component’ – Arab- American, Muslim-American, anti-Zionist or non-evangelical Christians and some State Department Arabists. Their principal agenda is to promote the Palestinian issue, but they do it primarily in an anti-Israel way. If you look at much of their legislative agenda, it’s not how we can support the peace process, how we can get more money for the Palestinians, how we can support democracy- building in the Palestinian Authority, it’s how can we cut off aid to Israel, how can we condemn Israel for what the issue is of the moment.“They are relatively uninfluential in Congress for a variety of reasons. One is that there are very few Arab-Americans – about three million – and a significant portion of those are Lebanese Christians, who don’t agree with the anti-Israel agenda. The second problem is that most Americans are pro-Israel, the latest Gallup poll shows 63 percent support Israel and 15% support the Palestinians. So, in basing their arguments on an anti-Israel agenda, they don’t find a very hospitable environment.“They also historically have not been as active in politics. The pro-Israel community is very politically active in campaigns and going out to vote, and that gets the pro- Israel community engaged, and so for all those reasons, and others, they have a very limited, non-influential effect on Congress.“The other Arab influence is the oil lobby, which is driven by Saudi Arabia, with the help of State Department Arabists, the oil industry and defense contractors, and they’ve been much more successful because they’re not directly lobbying against Israel. They are focused primarily on promoting the Saudi agenda, and so only on arms sales, and even that hasn’t happened since about 1981, [have] the Israeli lobby and the pro-Saudi lobby really come at loggerheads or competed against each other. Mostly it’s not a direct competition between them. The Saudis have had a great deal of success – just look at the latest story of [Barack] Obama proposing the greatest arms sale in history, giving $60 billion to the Saudis, and they’ve gotten over $100b. in weapons up until now, and the way the Saudis operate is also different.”Bard sums up the Saudi strategy as one of “few influencing the many.”“Their whole philosophy,” he says, “is they understand that they don’t have popular support, there’s no Saudi- American lobby of Saudi-Americans. What they have said is, we’re basically going to work from the top down instead of the bottom up.“The reason I call it the invisible alliance wasn’t to convey some dark conspiracy; it really was referring to the fact that most people just aren’t aware or can’t see how the Saudis especially operate. That is unless you go and do the research I did. They don’t know that the Saudis spent $100 million on public relations and lobbying firms, hired guns. Because no one will support them here, they have hired guns to lobby for them and most people don’t go through the foreign agents registration records to see where the money’s going and how they’re using their influence.“They don’t see how the Saudis try to influence the media also through financing various activities. They don’t see how the Saudi ambassador, especially [Prince] Bandar bin Sultan [Riyadh’s ambassador to Washington from 1983 to 2005], for basically 20 years could walk into the White House whenever he wanted. And so you didn’t know he was doing it, you didn’t know what he said when he went there, and the Saudis have always operated on this very high level of they don’t bother with Congress for the most part, they go directly to the president, directly to the secretary of state.”While Bard talks extensively of the enormous influence of the Saudi lobby, he notes that thankfully, from Israel’s perspective, the Arab lobby in general is highly fractious and that is one of the reasons why on a lot of issues, especially ones involving Israel, it has been less influential than, for example, the pro-Israel lobby.“There’s no one Arab interest to represent. You have 21 Arab states that have competing agendas, so how do you represent ‘the Arabs’ or ‘the Muslims’? Whereas people who support the US-Israel relationship, it’s one country and even with all the fractiousness of Jews, and some other supporters, there’s a pretty solid consensus for most policies concerning US-Israel relations. That fractiousness that does help weaken the Arab side. Even, for example, in the domestic Arab lobby between Muslim- American groups and Arab-American groups, most of the Arab-American groups have tended to be pro-Fatah, and the Muslim-American groups have been more pro- Hamas, so that brings in the inter-Palestinian tensions, which makes them collectively weaker.”On that count, Bard has a word of warning. He sees in the emergence of the liberal advocacy group J Street a development that can weaken the pro-Israel camp in the US.“There are lots of things you can say about J Street,” he replies when probed on the issue, “but one thing is it has the impact of what divides the Arab lobby, that instead of being able to have this very unified pro-Israel position, there’s this group saying something different. And so whether what they say is good or bad, it definitely weakens the establishment position because now Congress is hearing confusing voices.“In terms of how a political scientist like me judges influence of interest groups, having dissonant voices or divided positions makes you weaker. How much weaker that’s another question, I’m not sure they’ve had much influence so far. And whatever influence they’ve had, it’s mostly this confusing people influence. But J Street also basically, fundamentally, has a view that’s similar to many of the Arabists, which is, and this was captured in the title of a famous article by one of the State Department officials, George W. Ball, ‘How to Save Israel in Spite of Itself.’“The view of the Israeli lobby traditionally is ‘Israel knows what’s best for Israel and peace and security’ and a democratically elected government should decide those issues. J Street’s position is that Israelis are too stupid, too weak, too evil, too politically constrained to do what’s good for them, therefore the US has to decide and impose a solution that we at J Street believe is best for Israel, and that’s more consistent with the views of the Arab lobby than the Israeli lobby.”