Dictating foreign policy

The Australian Government should now be in the middle of some serious foreign policy re-evaluation as to how this nation should respond to the ongoing crisis in Lebanon and Israel’s continued widening of the war there. Just out is an excellent analysis of the state of the war by Paul Rogers of Bradford University, UK, on the Open Democracy website - it is well worth a read.

Rogers shows Israel’s war aims are far from succeeding yet, and asks whether they can succeed at all. Israeli forces are now bogged down in what could be a long war. All Lebanese, both Muslim and Christian, are now fiercely angry with Israel for the destruction and misery its invasion is wreaking. Israel has finally alienated the Lebanese Christians.

Hezbollah missiles go on reaching Israeli home territory. If Hezbollah missiles keep on penetrating Israel, there is a risk the inexperienced Olmert Government may seek to widen the war, both as a diversion from its failure so far to achieve its war aims in Lebanon and because of the disastrous international PR it is now getting. This is a real and serious prospect, argues Rogers.

Meanwhile, the Australian Government publicly flirts with the foolish idea of participating in an Israeli-US vetted UN peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon. Australian soldiers in such a force would be sitting ducks for hostile Lebanese militants, who would see the force as being there only to suit Israel’s convenience and extricate it from potential failure in Lebanon. In terms of Australian interest, we would be mad to go into such a force now.

It only took a second on television for John Howard to repudiate any idea of Australia talking to Hezbollah. That was a foolish, short-sighted response. Hezbollah is a player now. Australia, with our large Jewish and Lebanese origin populations, should be talking to Hezbollah as well as to the Israeli and Lebanese Governments. That is what diplomats do in a crisis - talk to all the parties.

But that is not the Australian Government’s way: it prefers to remain in the rock-solid Tel Aviv-Washington-Canberra hawks’ club, as one of the only two countries in the world that fully supports the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Of course, for Howard, any idea of contact with Hezbollah would be anathema.

And just when responsible Western media were beginning to think it might be alright to criticise Israeli actions without being accused of anti-Semitism, along came Mel Gibson with the real thing, reminding us that Jews really do face ugly prejudices in this world. This is the reality, but it should not condition how we think about Israeli conduct in Lebanon, which is unacceptably opportunistic and grossly disproportionate to the provocation.

Australians really do need to focus serious attention on where our national interest lies in the current Israeli escalation of fighting in Lebanon.

The now famous Mearsheimer and Walt article, The Israel Lobby, is a good place to start.

The eminent authors - certainly not anti-Semitic, the very idea is ridiculous - asked serious questions earlier this year, about the success of rightwing Israel lobbyists in the United States. Over several decades these lobbyists have maintained a majority consensus view among the US political elite - both Democrat and Republican - that Israeli and US interests in the Middle East are pretty much identical. Anyone who questions that mindset risks being wedged as an anti-Semite.

Much the same is true of Australia since at least the time of the 1968 Arab-Israeli War.

AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and its much smaller Australian counterpart AIJAC, are among the most professionally skilled and successful political lobbying organisations in the world. They are not, as far as I know, representative elected bodies of the Jewish communities in these countries. We don’t know where most of their funding comes from: although I am sure they could if pressed produce long lists of generous local donors. More significantly we don’t know to whom they are accountable for policy direction.

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.