Dictating foreign policy

The AIJAC website is quite modestly circumspect about its agenda and achievements. Not so the AIPAC website in the USA, which proudly boasts that it is “America’s pro-Israel lobby”, and “the most important organisation affecting America’s relationship with Israel”, and today has “100,000 members across all 50 states who are at the forefront of the most vexing issues facing Israel today”. It goes on:

AIPAC lobbyists meet every member of Congress and cover every hearing on Capitol Hill that touches on the U.S.-Israel relationship. AIPAC policy experts each day review hundreds of periodicals, journals, speeches and reports and meet regularly with the most innovative foreign policy thinkers in order to track and analyze events and trends. In addition, AIPAC activists and staff work with key journalists throughout the country, offering information and insight that helps ensure accuracy and context for the myriad news stories that focus on issues affecting the U.S.-Israel relationship.

It is no wonder that US and Israeli government policies are almost always in lockstep. AIPAC is a massive, skilfully directed, permanent lobbying operation in the US. Australia is a much softer target; and the AIJAC needs far less manpower and resources to achieve similarly successful results with the Howard Government and Labor opposition. Nevertheless, AIJAC is a class lobbying act too, judging by its results here.

The agenda and interests of AIPAC and AIJAC range widely: basically, anything that might be thought to touch, in the short term or long term, on the national security interests of Israel. This can include topics such as Israel’s relations with its neighbours, but also the War on Terror, the situation in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Russia, Central Asia, oil, nuclear energy, human rights abuses in Guantanamo, David Hicks, and even Kyoto. AIPAC or AIJAC staffers are prepared to offer public views on just about anything, if they can see a useful Israeli interest angle.

Any criticism of the work of these lobbies is likely to be met with personal attacks. One would either be labelled as anti-Semitic, or as a self-hating Jew. Large numbers of indignant correspondents leap to the defence of views that often originate in these bodies. And of course Australia and the US are countries where freedom of speech and association guarantee the rights of such lobbies.

It concerns me, though, how successful AIPAC and AIJAC are in suppressing real debate about Israel-related issues in the US and in Australia, now Israel’s staunchest allies in the world, and how these lobbies also influence, without us always realising it, the way we think about other important issues (see examples above) where the Israeli interest might not be immediately apparent. Read those AIPAC website quotes again, carefully.

At a policy level, we need to ask ourselves a few hard questions about the success of such lobbying efforts, especially now when the Middle East is going up in flames and Australia is being more and more sucked into the tragic mess there. Australia is now exactly where the Tel Aviv hawks want us to be.

Our global strategic and trading interests, and Israel’s own present abusive, disproportionate and internationally illegal invasion of Lebanon, might suggest the wisdom of Australia putting itself at a certain distance from the present policies of Israel. Israel’s survival is not in question now. Middle Eastern peace is.

We should be more concerned about the agendas, and capacity to influence public debates, of AIPAC and AIJAC. In whose interests is AIJAC working? Australia’s? Israel’s? Has AIJAC successfully persuaded Australian political elites that these two sets of interests (as it defines them) are, by definition, always identical? And is that a good thing for Australia?

When I worked in the Foreign Affairs and Prime Minister’s Departments, one of the things we were taught was that Australian foreign policy should not be captured by vigorous and vocal special interest groups, but should be determined on Australian national interest grounds alone: interests at that time usually defined as including a rules-based international security system that effectively deters aggressive war by one state on another state.

I continue to believe in the good sense of that principle for a country like Australia.