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Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Mari Cohen and Alex Kane ask whether activists can harness the public shift on Israel to repeal anti-BDS laws.

On the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s “Occupied Thoughts” podcast, I talked to Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick, co-authors of the new book, Israel’s Lobby.

In New York Magazine, Mohammed Mhawish details the Board of Peace’s plan to erase Gaza.

On September 10, I’ll be speaking online with Omer Bartov at the Stony Creek Forum.

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

One of the things I sometimes hear folks say is they accuse candidates like Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan, of exaggerating the role that AIPAC plays in American policy. And so, Abdul El-Sayed will sometimes talk about how America is spending money, you know, to kill Palestinians when it should be spending that money to educate kids in Michigan. And sometimes I hear the report that, you know, this is dishonest, because after all, you know, we’re only giving Israel $3 billion a year. That’s not really very much money in the larger scheme of things. It’s not really the main reason that schools in Detroit are underfunded.

And I think it is important to make clear that there can be critiques of AIPAC that are genuinely problematic or even antisemitic, if you only talk about AIPAC and don’t talk about other, you know, corrupting interests in American politics, or you basically make it sound as if all of American foreign policy, all of American imperialism, including, you know, Venezuela, Cuba, Greenland, is being done by the pro-Israel lobby. That’s very, very problematic.

But I think what candidates like Abdul El-Sayed is saying is actually something different, and actually something that does make a fair amount of sense. Which is to say, the cost to Americans of the power that AIPAC has in America’s political system isn’t limited to the $3 billion that the U.S. gives Israel every year. First of all, since October 7th, the U.S. has given Israel far, far more. I think I’ve seen the number of $20 billion.

But even that, really, I think, understates the cost, because there’s an indirect cost of the power that AIPAC and pro-Israel groups play in American politics, and in American foreign policy, and it’s on really graphic display now with the Iran war, right? I mean, there are a number of reasons that the U.S. is now in this catastrophic war with Iran.

One of them is clearly that, you know, Donald Trump had this kind of insane imperialistic hubris coming out of his success in Venezuela, where he thought he could basically just knock off governments that he didn’t like around the world, basically steal their stuff, and be feted as a hero. So, that was part of the reason.

But it’s also absolutely the case that Benjamin Netanyahu was pushing very hard for this. And Benjamin Netanyahu’s voice in Washington, as someone who was pushing for America to enter a full-scale war with Iran, would have been much weaker without AIPAC and the other pro-Israel organizations that amplify and support his voice in the media, also in Congress.

And so, they did play a significant role—not the sole role—but a significant role in bringing us to this point where we’re in this war. They also played a significant role in getting the repeal of the 2015 Obama Iran nuclear deal. And it was the repeal of that that I think put us on this path towards escalating confrontation with Iran.

And if you think about the costs of that war, you’re talking about far, far beyond just $3 billion or even $20 billion. I think the Watson Institute at Brown University is now putting the tab for the war just now at around $70 billion. And again, there’s no end in sight to this, and these wars always end up being much, much more expensive. The war has also led to an increase in energy costs, it’s led to higher interest rates. It genuinely has meant that the U.S. economy is not doing as well, and that basic things like gas and other goods are more expensive than they would be if we hadn’t gotten to this war, in which case there might have been actually an interest rate cut.

It’s also the case that the war has had a devastating strategic effect on the United States. It’s shown that we can’t defend our Gulf allies, which will have long-term implications for their foreign policy decisions. There’s just a big piece in the New York Times about basically how America’s key East Asian allies are not sure the United States could protect them because we’ve blown through so many of the key military and other kind of defense systems that we rely on as our kind of global arsenal to deter China or anybody else.

So, the war’s consequences are actually, like, pretty massive. I mean, this may ultimately go down as large a disaster for the United States, you know, in terms of its position in the world, and also in terms of public finance as the Iraq war in its own way. And AIPAC does play a pretty important role in that. So, when you’re talking about the cost of the power that AIPAC has in America’s political system, it’s really much, much larger than just looking at the amount of military aid that AIPAC lobbies for the United States to give Israel.

Now, again, it’s always important to find a way of talking about AIPAC which does not suggest that it’s the only corrupting lobby in American politics. Of course it’s not, right? There’s big pharma, there’s energy, there’s crypto, there’s lots of stuff, right? And actually, Abdul El-Sayed, and the vast majority of other kind of progressive Democrats who’ve ever heard talk about AIPAC, also tend to talk about those things as well. So, it’s important to acknowledge that AIPAC is not the only toxic force, big money force in American politics. If you only focused on AIPAC, I do think that would be a problem.

It’s also important to remember that America is certainly capable of acting in a kind of brutal and imperialist fashion on issues where AIPAC has no particular role. I mean, look at what we’re doing to Cuba. We’re literally starving the hospitals of fuel there. That’s not because of AIPAC. That’s because, again, I think of a deep history of American imperialism in the Caribbean.

But when people say that AIPAC and what AIPAC is doing is not having a significant cost to ordinary Americans, because the U.S. gives Israel only $3 billion a year, I just think that’s wrong. I actually think we’re seeing manifested right in front of us that the cost to ordinary Americans of the foreign policy that AIPAC has played a significant role in creating is actually much, much larger than that.