Dr. Michael Hudson, Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University, Washington DC

Thank you for your invitation to me to discuss the history of American involvement in the Middle East. I should make it clear from the outset that I am an academic, not a U.S. government spokesman. Although I come from Georgetown University in Washington, not very far from the State Department and the White House, I do not represent or advocate the views of the American government. In fact, I have a rather critical view of many of the policies of the US government in the Middle East.

I have divided the history of the US in the Middle East into two parts: the period before World War II, and the period that followed the war. I will carry the narrative up through the 1970s and attempt to deal with contemporary issues in our subsequent sessions. I have made this division because World War II marked a transition in the role of the US in the world. Before World War II, even though the US was becoming a major power, world politics were still determined by Europe, particularly by Britain and France. After the American victory over Germany and Japan, however, the US emerged as one of the two superpowers, and we entered into an era in which world politics were dominated by the US and the USSR and the competition between them.

In order to understand the way Americans think about the function of the US in the world, we have to go back to the American revolution of 1776 and the subsequent development of the US as an independent country. The period from the 1770s up through the early 1800s was dominated by the Founding Fathers of the US, including Alex Hamilton and James Madison who were among the authors of the Federalist Papers, which is probably the most important single philosophical document outlining the cause of American independence and its system of government.

Part of the historical logic of the creation of the US had to do with the idea of dealing more effectively with the scourge of war, conflict and rivalry that the Americans felt had plagued European politics. The new American republic was meant to have a far higher purpose than the old European system of kings and classes. Indeed, the Founding Fathers were saying in effect: ‘We will not engage in rivalries and wars between the states; our mission is to have a higher civilization and we want to set an example for the rest of the world.’ One might believe that we had no business in setting ourselves such a task; nevertheless, this is what the people that created the American republic thought they were up to. On the other hand, one of the documents that Americans still study is George Washington’s farewell address, in which he made it clear that the US should look to itself-- refrain from getting involved in world politics and engaging in entangling alliances with other parts of the world. There was a kind of a missionary quality among the Founding Fathers, and in fact if you look at an American dollar bill, it says under the picture of the pyramid ‘novus ordo seclorum’, Latin for ‘a new secular order’, which reflects the idea that the US wanted to set an example by becoming a new secular order and showing the other countries of the world what they should become. If you look at our leaders today, they are still acting in accordance with this noble but grandiose objective-- laying down rules for everybody else in order to ‘promote a better way of life’. Such idealism was a part of the historical methodology of the American revolution.

On the other hand, there is another quite contrary tendency, which goes right back to the beginning of the republic and echoes the Realpolitik--power politics--philosophy of other European thinkers like Machiavelli and Hobbes. This is the thinking that is encapsulated in realist international relations theory: the idea that in a world where there is anarchy, every state has to look after its own interests. Sometimes this means going to war to protect those interests; but sometimes it means avoiding war even if high moral principles (rather than concrete national interests) are at stake. Both traditions ñ the idealist and the realist - are bound up in the way American politicians conduct American foreign policy all over the world, including in the Middle East.

Let us return to the very beginning of the American republic when the US under President Thomas Jefferson engaged in its first overseas war. Jefferson, a famous philosopher and gentleman farmer who believed--like Candide-- in cultivating his own garden, sent the brand-new American navy all the way to the Western Mediterranean, off the coast of North Africa, where it fought the “Barbary Wars” - a series of naval engagements against the Barbary pirates from Tunis, Algiers and Tripoli, who were attacking American merchant vessels. Even then, America knew that it would always be dependent on foreign trade, and it was keen to protects its interests. It is interesting to note that our first real war, in the early 1800s, was actually against Arabs.

Another kind of contact had taken place in 1787, when the US had concluded its first foreign treaty, which was with Morocco. Yet a further kind involved the American missionaries, who were almost entirely Protestant and whose goal was to go to different parts of the world including the Middle East to try to convert the people of other religions--Muslims of course but also the indigenous Orthodox and Catholic Christians-- to “true” Christianity. They thought they could do this by means of educating the people, not only in religion, but also with regard to basic subjects such as reading, writing and arithmetic. Although the missionaries failed to convert many people to Protestantism, they succeeded in establishing educational institutes, some of which survived to this very day, such as the American University of Beirut, which was established in 1864. Here in Jerusalem, they established a school and a clinic that later became the American Colony Hotel. The involvement of the missionaries had no particular political aim and reflected the idealism of the American culture rather than of American political interests as such.

Over the remaining decades of the 19th Century, the US did not play a major political role in this part of the world. Trading American ships called here and there, and following the arrival of an Omani ship in New York in 1840, there began a longstanding relationship between the US and the people in Oman. One has to remember that during the second half of the 19th Century, the US was very much concerned with its own internal problems, not least of all the very brutal war that was fought between the North and the South in the early 1860s.

Nevertheless, there are other examples of American involvement in the Middle East during that period. In the early 1860s, for example, an American military mission went to Egypt to help train the officers of the Khedive of Egypt. This became the first example of an important aspect of American foreign policy, namely military assistance and certainly the first in this region.

We come now to World War I, which put Britain, France and Russia against Germany, Austria and Turkey. The war brought the US for the first time into a world war, whose treaties led to the redrawing of the political map in the Middle East amongst other places, and it witnessed the Americans for the first time taking a political interest in the political affairs of the Middle East. The one fact about World War I as far as the Middle East is concerned is of course that the remains of the Turkish Empire were finally destroyed: the British army and Sheriff Hussein’s forces (led by T.E. Lawrence “of Arabia”) pushed the Turkish army out of the Levant, out of Palestine, out of Syria, and back up into Anatolia. Although the US was not deeply involved in the redistribution of these territories, it clearly had an interest in the outcome.

Woodrow Wilson, who was President at the time, enunciated a document called ‘The Fourteen Points’. One of the points called for self-determination for the nations of the world that were being dominated by foreign regimes. It is not clear that President Wilson himself would have favored the establishment of an independent state in Syria and Palestine as Sheriff Hussein of Mecca was hoping to achieve, but the principle of self-determination became world-widely accepted on the popular level.

To further this principle, the US proposed to Clemenceau of France and Lloyd George of Britain, amongst other European leaders, the idea of sending a fact-finding commission to the Middle East to ask the people to decide who should now replace Turkey and rule them. The Europeans had their own interests in the former Turkish Empire territories and wanted nothing to do with this commission, so President Wilson sent the exclusively American commission--the “King-Crane Commission”--to the Middle East in 1919, just after World War I had come to an end. Mr. Crane, a wealthy and religious businessman and philanthropist from Wisconsin and Dr. King, a college president, came up with recommendations that in effect said: ‘The people in this region have been dominated by Turkey and now want to rule themselves, and we should respect that.’ They also said that the people of the region were worried about the Balfour Declaration and the Zionist movement, which meant that it might be difficult to establish a homeland for the Jews in Palestine. Moreover, they found, after interviewing what we would today call “elite public opinion,” that if the people of the region had to be ruled by any one country, they would prefer it to be America, because they felt - maybe as a result of the influence of the American missionaries - that America had no selfish intentions towards them. I should note that by the time King and Crane returned to Washington, President Wilson had suffered a stroke and was incapacitated: it is therefore very unlikely that he ever read the report, which only really came to light years later. In other words, the report came to nothing in terms of American foreign policy.

The Europeans, meanwhile, had their own plans for this region. Britain and France concluded a secret agreement called “The Sykes-Picot Agreement” in 1916 that had been signed by the Russian Tsar prior to the Russian revolution. The agreement suggested the establishment of colonies, mandates and spheres of influence in all of the former Turkish territories, which is of course what actually happened.

Prior to the agreement, there was the Hussein-MacMahon Correspondence: the letters that were exchanged in 1915 and 1916 between Sir Henry McMahon who was the British representative in Cairo and Sharif Hussein and his sons Faisal and Abdallah, which led the Hashemites to believe that Britain supported the idea of independent Arab states in the Arab territories of Turkey once the Turks were gone. Eventually the Hussein-McMahon correspondence gave way to the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which established the British mandate territories in Palestine, Trans-Jordan and Iraq and the French territories in Syria and Lebanon.

Yet another famous document is the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which called for the establishment of a national home for the Jews in Palestine. It should be noted that the document approved by the League of Nations included word per word the text of the Balfour Declaration.

It is interesting to note that one of the very first official signs of American government support for the idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine was not given upon the initiative of the US President but upon that of the American Congress. By a unanimous or mostly unanimous vote, the Congress in 1922 passed a non-binding resolution simply expressing the opinion of the US Congress that the Balfour Declaration was a very good idea and the US supported the idea of establishing a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine. One has to remember that many “fundamentalist” American Protestant Christian churches interpreted the Bible as meaning that the ingathering of the Jews to Palestine would herald the approach of the Day of Judgement. There was not at that time a strong Zionist movement in the US. The Zionists only became a force in the early 1940s when the various American Zionist organizations gathered together at the Biltmore hotel in New York city. In fact, the “Biltmore Declaration” of 1942 marks in a sense the beginning of the organizationally powerful Zionist lobby in the US, designed to push and to pressure the American government toward support of a Palestinian state for the Jews after World War II.

The Jewish population of the US back in 1922 was much smaller than it is today. Most American Jews had come from Germany and were attempting to forget their own identities and become ordinary American citizens. Certainly there was some Zionist pressure on the Congress, but there was also pressure from Christians who thought that the idea of a Jewish homeland made sense. By 1942, however, there was a growing Zionist movement within it. As the Jewish community became larger and much more influential - and particularly after the establishment of Israel in 1948 - it focused all its energies on lobbying the U.S. government to support for Israel. At the time of the Balfour Declaration American Jews had been calling only for a “homeland”. The Balfour Declaration did not call for a Jewish state in Palestine, but simply a homeland for the Jews--one indeed which was not to infringe on the civil and religious rights of the non-Jewish indigenous population. That is what the American Congress supported in 1922. But two decades later revisionist Zionists and then mainstream Zionists were demanding a Jewish state that (in more extreme versions) would include the East Bank of the Jordan River and Southern Lebanon up to and including the Litani River.

My final point about this early period has to do with oil. The first oil discoveries in the Near East were made in the early 1900s in Masjid Sulaiman in southwestern Iran, followed by finds in southern Iraq. The concessions were essentially dominated by British and French businessmen. But the biggest producers of oil in the world at the time were the Americans, who had a huge oil industry in Pennsylvania, Texas and Oklahoma. But they (and the U.S. government) also had international ambitions. An agreement made by oil concessionaires in 1928 called “The Red Line Agreement” admitted for the first time a consortium of American oil companies into the concession area surrounded by this red line, which surrounded most of the Mashriq, and so American oil companies began to have a certain interest in the new discoveries that were made in Iraq. The really big entry of the Americans into the Middle East oil arena came in the 1930s when American oil companies that later became ARAMCO discovered massive oil wells in Eastern Saudi Arabia

Now, in the early twentieth century, the development of the gasoline engine was revolutionizing the economies of the industrialized countries, and also changing the technology of warfare as battleships moved from steam-driven to oil-driven power. Oil was becoming a vital economic commodity and also a vital strategic and military commodity, so by the beginning of World War II the US had begun to perceive that it had a strong strategic and economic interest in the Middle East. We find, therefore, that this combination of idealism, trading and missionary activity, the beginnings of interest in the Zionist projects in Palestine, and the discovery of oil form the components of American preoccupation in the Middle East after World War II, when the Middle East became vital to American interests.

With regard to the post World War II period, we can say that the U.S. was driven by three key national security interests in the Middle East: the containment of Communism, support for the new Jewish state, and the protection of America’s oil interests. World War II was a watershed in many ways. First of all, the old great powers of Europe ñ Britain, France, Germany, and Italy - were replaced by the US and Russia. By 1945, the US had developed and exploded the first atomic bomb and by 1950, the Soviet Union had also developed a nuclear capacity--so the one point above oil that defined the two superpowers as being “super” was that each had a substantial nuclear capacity. Although other countries worked to develop their own nuclear capacity and military capacity in the 1950s and 60s, none of them developed that capacity to the same degree as the US and the Soviet Union.

In terms of those three principles, in the Middle East context containment of the Soviet Union was probably the most important. From the American perspective, the Soviets presented not only a military security threat because of their nuclear weapons and their huge conventional armed forces on the European and Asian land mass, but also a very serious ideological threat. American policy-makers and American public opinion became convinced that the Soviet Union was an expansionist power in terms of including and extending a sphere of interest in key parts of the world at the expense of the US and its allies in what we called the Free World.

From its understanding of the Communist threat, the US felt that the only answer was the policy of containment, which is why it organized the NATO alliance in 1949. The US was petrified that the Soviets would push down into the Middle East and gain access to the oil, especially in light of the fact that the Soviets had actually attempted to take a little piece of Iranian territory in Azerbaijan in 1946, and in the same year they were threatening Eastern Turkey. So, the US decided to try to extend the doctrine of containment that was involved in the NATO treaty and to include Turkey in order to try and protect the Middle East from Soviet expansion. As a result, in 1950, 1951, 1952 and 1953, the US, in cooperation with Britain, proposed several schemes for a Middle East defense organization. None of these fully succeeded because the people of the Middle East did not believe the Soviets to be dangerous and were extremely unhappy with the US because of its support for the creation of Israel in 1948. For example, when the US came calling on Egypt, the most important Arab country, the Egyptians were busy overturning the monarchy and establishing the nationalist government. They were in no mood to become a sort of an extension of NATO. In fact, by 1954 and 1955, the Egyptians and a number of other Arab governments, some of which had nationalist ideologies and nationalist sentiments, began to think that the Soviets might actually be a useful ally against the US and against Israel. One of the relatively viable Anglo-American security projects was the “Baghdad Pact” of 1954-1955, which came finally to involve Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Pakistan, but even it was unable to contain Soviet influence.

With regard to the Egyptian revolution, it seems likely that the CIA had a certain role in Nasser’s ascent to power because it thought that the Egyptian monarchy needed to be replaced by something more stable. The Americans were of the opinion that Nasser and his colleagues might actually work with them mainly because they were probably anti-Communists. If we look beneath the surface, we find an interesting effort to have a dialogue with what American officials thought might be a progressive anti-Communist force in the Middle East. and the Americans had some interesting exchanges with Nasser in his early years, thinking maybe that they could work out a solution to the Arab-Israeli problem. Later President John Kennedy expressed a certain sympathy for “progressive” revolutionary movements in the Arab World. Unfortunately none of these bridge-building efforts came to anything. Kennedy was advised that Nasser was really a dangerous enemy to the US and could not be trusted. Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson was a dedicated Zionist and during his term of office, America’s uncritical support to Israel was to undergo a massive increase.

In spite of the American attempts to contain the Soviet Union, Moscow eventually made arms deals with Egypt and Syria and began to exert its influence in a number of other Arab countries. The Americans became worried because they thought that if the Soviet Union had all these important friends in the neighboring Arab countries, the security of Israel would be threatened. They also worried about the fact that the Soviets were beginning to surround the places where oil existed and where the American companies had huge interests ñ i.e., Saudi Arabia; so Arabian peninsula and Gulf security became a major U.S. foreign policy priority.

Dr. Malcolm Kerr (a respected political scientist who was the President of the American University in Beirut when he was assassinated in 1984) wrote a fine little book called The Arab Cold War, which describes the alliance power in the Middle East in the 1960s and 1970s. Basically it is about how the Cold War between the US and Russia was replicated on a smaller scale in the Middle East in an “Arab Cold War”, in which some Arab states which had good relationships with the Soviet Union were opposed to other Arab states which had special relationships with the US. From the late 1950s to the 1970s, one could say (roughly speaking) that in the American camp were Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon, and to some extent small Gulf states; while the Arab “revolutionary republics” like Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Algeria, Libya and South Yemen could be classified as in the Soviet camp.

The Americans faced a major problem when it came to Soviet containment inasmuch as they were trying to contain the USSR by nurturing friendships with the countries of the Arab World whilst, at the same time, delivering increasing amounts of support to Israel. The US had enough power and influence that in spite of being unable to stop the Soviets from having influence in places like Egypt, Iraq and Syria, it was able to minimize that influence and in some cases eliminate it. This is what dramatically happened in the famous case of Egypt after Sadat came to power, threw out the Soviet advisors and threw himself into the arms of the US. Subsequently, Washington had some notable success in weakening the anti-American stance of some of the other “revolutionary republics.”

Israel, meanwhile, not only continued to exist, but also to prosper and indeed expand. In spite of the fact that the American government was not over-enthusiastic about Israel becoming a regional superpower, it managed to do so, thanks in part to the very successful efforts of the Zionists themselves and to the support they received, their skills and discipline, and also in part to the weakness of the Arab states and governments. Although the Arabs had many advantages, they did not have the ability to organize themselves in a sustained manner to confront Israel, which by then was receiving the unconditional support of one of the world’s two superpowers. I think that one has to conclude that the Arab states have failed to promote their own national and security interests, while, at the same time, the US has been able to successfully pursue the three goals that have driven American policy ever since World War II. First, Israel was not only established, but became an expansive, aggressive superpower in the region. Secondly, oil meanwhile was always available, and the governments that controlled the oil were amenable to American influence. The one exception that perhaps proves the rule occurred in 1973-74 when Saudi Arabia used the “oil weapon” ñ the oil embargo- to considerable advantage against the US and against the Netherlands. Whether one likes it or not, American officials believe that their aims in the Middle East - at least up until now - have been essentially fulfilled. Third, Soviet influence was gradually reduced from its apogee in the 1960s to a far less threatening position by the mid-1970s.

**As to how far the US is ready to defend Israel if it is seriously challenged, the actual debate in the US government over whether we should support the establishment of a Jewish state at all took place in 1947-1948. The State Department and the Defense Department were against the idea of American support for Israel, but the White house and the Congress were all for and Truman had the last word. The main reason the State Department and the Defense Department were against the idea of a Jewish state back in 1947 was that they were afraid that we could not defend it and that it would become a sickly child that would have to be constantly protected against the threat of an Arab attack. By 1973, the story was very different: the Defense and State Departments could no longer argue that Israel is a sickly child depending on American major resources; on the contrary, American officials were very impressed by the Israeli record of military might and had actually come to consider Israel a strategic asset and a very useful ally.

**When Egypt and Syria attacked Israel in 1973, would the US have waited before coming to Israelis aid? Absolutely not. In the first days of the October War the Egyptian army pushed the Israelis back across the Suez Canal and surprised everyone by using their anti-tank missiles to wipe out hundreds and hundreds of Israeli tanks; had the US not mounted an emergency airlift of ammunition and supplies, the Egyptians could have gone much further forward than they did. There was a very tough fight in the Golan and Jebel Al-Sheikh, and even though the Syrians had no intention of going very far, it is certain that the Americans almost certainly would have done whatever was necessary to protect Israel even to the point of having a confrontation with the Soviet Union. As for the oil embargo, it hurt but it did not hurt a lot, and given a choice between oil and Israel, I am sure we would have chosen Israel. The fact is that we never thought for a moment that we would have to make the choice because it was not Saudi Arabia that was a threat to Israel and the Saudis were playing a complicated game, balancing off their American connection with their Arab connection. Certainly, if there is any perceived threat to Israel, the US will do whatever needs to be done, and the American Congress sometimes allocates more aid to Israel than the White House even wants to give.

**As to the origins of the term ‘Middle East’, it is a global strategic term that was probably invented by an American geo-strategist named Halford Mackinder. Also influenced by British views of the world, Mackinder basically felt that the Middle East was in the “middle” between Britain and Europe and the Far East; it was that place in the middle between Britain and India or between Britain and its former colonies all the way to Australia. The term Middle East basically has a western geopolitical orientation to it. At an earlier stage, a further distinction had been made between the Near East and the Middle East. The Near East referred to the European remains of the Ottoman Empire, that is to say Anatolia itself although that is not strictly in Europe - Constantinople and Istanbul are part of Asia - and the Balkans, which of course were for a long time under Turkish control, which is part of the reason for the Bosnian problem today. In early maps or books on diplomatic history, there are references to the Near East which according to some referred to the Balkans, to the Antolian peninsula and to the Levant and perhaps even Egypt. The Middle East referred more broadly to the territories beyond that, but still not as far as the Indian subcontinent.

As oil became more important in the geopolitics of the region, the term Middle East became more important as well because Americans and British strategists, particularly during World War II, were not just worried about making sure the Germans did not take over Syria or Egypt, which they almost did; we were also concerned about the Arabian peninsula, about Iraq and Iran. During World War II, the allies set up an organization based in Cairo called ‘The Middle East Support Center’ and basically tried to organize the economy of the region. The organization was worried about the German efforts to shoot across North Africa and capture Egypt from the West, about German infiltration of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Iran and, above all, about the oil reserves in Saudi Arabia. Because of the aid that was given, we were able to maintain an oil lifeline up through Iran to the Soviet Union, which was our ally against Germany, throughout World War II. Being so important, it was only fitting that the Middle East had a name.

As for Arab North Africa, until the Americans began to learn about Arab nationalism, it was seen as something separate and sort of dominated by France through Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco. It was not black Africa, but it did not seem to be the Middle East either. Today, however, when Arab nationalism is much weaker, we find people generally use this sort of hyphenated term, ‘Middle East-North Africa’, to deal with the region that seems to have a certain coherence, but not a lot of coherence

**As for Israel, it is true that Israel has enormous influence over American policy in the Middle East, and it is also true that the US government of today exerts very little influence over the present Israeli government. Nevertheless, we continue to support Israel even though its behavior obviously jeopardizes U.S. interests elsewhere in the Middle East: there is a lot of pressure to support Israel simply because it is a Jewish state, a more or less democratic state, an ‘outpost’ of western civilizations, etc. Anybody who becomes a serious candidate to be nominated as President of the US, whether he is a Democrat or Republican, will support Israel, at least in principle, because all presidential candidates need the support of the American Jewish community and the pro-Israel lobby so as to win the election.

The thing that makes the pro-Israel lobby powerful -and incidentally, it is not just the Jewish lobby, there is a very powerful non-Jewish element in the Israel lobby - is that it is well-organized, it raises a lot of money and it will reward or punish any local official who is running for election in terms of whether and how much that person supports Israel. Although all American presidents are going to support Israel, there are some differences. President Eisenhower, for example, drove Israel back from its invasion of Egypt, which means that although he supported the existence of Israel, he did not support the aggression of Israel. And similarly, George Bush supported Israel, but when he was trying to start a peace process with his Secretary of State, James Baker, he got very mad at Shamir and told him, ‘I will not recommend that the American government provide long guarantees for the Israeli government because you are not taking our interests into account. We do not want Israel to be so nasty to its neighbors that those neighbors will be nasty to us.’ In fact, it is possible that the pressure that Bush put on Israel contributed to the defeat of Shamir in the 1992 elections. Clinton has been much more accommodating to Israel than Bush was and has not put any pressure on Netanyahu, even though everybody knows in Washington that Clinton thinks Netanyahu is the most awful person that he has ever had to deal with.

If there is a price for supporting Israel, it is not a high price because the Arabs basically are too weak. The Arab leaders complain saying that the US has double standards; of course there are double standards! Is Mubarak going to refuse the American aid mission to Egypt? Is Mubarak going to mobilize the Egyptian army in the Sinai? It is not very likely, unless he feels that there is so much pressure from public opinion in Egypt that he might risk losing office if he does not take such steps. In short, the Arabs do not seem to have any clout. There are, of course, the odd occasions when an Arab leader will cause us some trouble. With regard to Iraq, for example, the underlying consideration in bombing Iraq, whether in 1991 or tomorrow, is the idea that any Arab state that has real military strength is a threat to Israel and in this case a threat to oil, and I think that it is oil that led us into the war against Iraq in 1991.The point that has been debated in Washington is basically that the US as a government much prefers to deal with individual Arab countries on a bilateral basis and it does not encourage any kind of integration, let alone unity, among Arab states because it fears that if Arab states were stable and well-organized, they would be a threat to Israel and a threat to the oil.

As to the interest of the US in the security of Israel, the main interest is not a national security interest nor a foreign policy interest, but a domestic interest, it is simply a preference. A large and influential well-organized lobby inside the US thinks that Israel is a good thing in itself and it deserves our support and protection and that is why we give both. Now, it is true that pro-Israeli foreign policy experts have tried to make an additional argument. They say that Israel is a strategic asset to the US, and pro-Israeli specialists spent a great deal of time arguing this point in the ë70s and ë80s when the Soviet threat still existed. They used to say that Israel is strong, it has a good army and it will help the US in two ways, namely, by helping keep the Soviets out and Arab nationalism suppressed, and if some Arab country should develop weapons of mass destruction, the Israelis will bomb their nuclear reactor (which is what the Israelis did in Iraq in 1981). Now, in fact, this is not a strong argument in my opinion and the reasons are obvious: to begin with, the existence of Israel actually allowed the Soviets to gain influence in Egypt, Syria, Iraq and with the Arab masses because the Soviets took a pro-Arab and anti-Israel position. Moreover, now that the Soviet Union has disappeared, we do not need the Israeli military to put down a Russian invasion or something ñ it never happened and it never will happen and if it did happen, it is unlikely that we would want the Israelis helping us. When Iraq invaded Kuwait, the Bush administration had to actually pressure the Israelis not to participate because it was concerned that Israeli participation would lead to the coalition falling apart and the Arab governments going against the US. What kind of a strategic asset is that? American support to Israel, from my point of view, is certainly not based on rational national security strategic considerations.

I think it was essentially the Intifada that led to the American government opening a dialogue with the PLO. The Intifada began in December of 1987; in 1988, the US opened its first very limited and short-lived dialogue with the PLO in Tunis. And then in 1991 - of course this was after the Gulf War when the Palestinians and the Arabs in general were weakened - the US organized the Madrid Conference and the peace process really got underway. I think that the Intifada allowed, for the first time ever, the American public to get a good look at the way the Israelis oppress the Palestinians under occupation, and I believe there is now considerable sympathy for the Palestinians. At the same time, many people who supported Israel said that if the violence continues, you will see anger throughout the region toward Israel, which will lead to anger toward the US. This, incidentally, is one of the reasons, as far as I am concerned, why the US government has suggested that American nonessential diplomatic personnel and American residents in the West Bank and Gaza Strip leave now; it is not because it is afraid that they going to be hit by a Scud missile from Iraq, but because they are going to be caught up in some very anti-American protests.

As to the current situation here, some people think that a new Intifada will erupt sooner or later - I have heard this from Israelis, I have heard it from American experts, and I have heard it from Arabs. Other people insist that the situation has become so bad that the Palestinians are completely depressed, suppressed by their own authority, abandoned by their Arab friends and therefore unable to do anything except accept what any friendly Israeli government has to offer. From the point of view of the US, I think the Americans feel that the present situation is bad but bearable and it is very difficult for President Clinton, who has so many other problems to deal with apart from the Middle East, to take an unpopular step and pressure Netanyahu into returning to the peace process, even though people realize that the latter has abandoned Oslo. They realize that Netanyahu’s ‘new’ model is basically to repartition the West Bank and not allow a Palestinian state nor anything more than controlled local autonomy in the different Palestinian enclaves. If the situation explodes again here, then the repercussions of that will seriously weaken other Arab governments that are important to the US like Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia; were this to happen, the Americans would probably decide that something had to be done, but if the situation remains as it is, with one side looking like it has surrendered to the other, the attitude in the States will remain, okay, so that is history. What can we do now? We are far better off doing nothing for as long as there is no visible threat to American interests.

Dr. Michael Hudson

In order to understand the position that America adopts with regard to various Middle Eastern issues, it is important to determine what it is, exactly, that makes up the American agenda. First of all, we might mention the fashionable terms that emerged at the end of the Cold War--a “New World Order” and, a bit later for this part of the world, the “New Middle East.” Both assumed that America (“the only remaining superpower”) would--and perhaps should--dominate the world, and certainly the Middle East as well. President George Bush talked about the New World Order after the Gulf War and Israel’s Shimon Peres wrote an interesting book entitled The New Middle East--a region in which Israel would not only be a “normal” actor but a central one. But will this new Middle East survive? Does it even exist? The second item on the American policy agenda is the so-called Arab-Israeli “Peace Process.” The third issue is what we call “Gulf security”, and which addresses the problems (from Washington’s point of view) raised by Iraq and Iran with respect to friendly, oil-rich Arab governments. The fourth item on the agenda is “Political Islam” or “Islamic fundamentalism,” as it is often called. The fifth, and to Washington perhaps the least important, agenda item is democratization in the Middle East. This last matter is derivative from the general Clinton Administration policy to promote “the expansion of democracy” everywhere in the world. Let us consider these points and at the same time--for the sake of argument--raise the following question: What kind of a grade does the Clinton administration deserve in dealing with the this agenda?

My own view, unhappily, is that the performance of the Clinton administration has been a major disappointment in the Middle East, and that his second term in office (for which some of us had high hopes) is perhaps even less promising than his first term. Although the previous (Bush) administration had its drawbacks, I believe that it made some positive headway in the Middle East, especially by initiating the “Madrid” phase of the Arab-Israeli peace process; but the Clinton administration in my view has squandered this inheritance. While I believe that Clinton and Albright have a good intellectual grasp of Middle Eastern realities, I have to say that neither have handled the Middle East very well, mainly because of the unfortunate intrusion of domestic political pressures. As a result, it is not too harsh to suggest that they have mismanaged the peace process; they have mismanaged the Gulf with the policy of dual containment; they have misunderstood the question of political Islam and have in fact encouraged Islamic extremism to some extent in this region by implementing certain American policies; they have not been sincere about democratization in the Middle East and have launched a “war on terrorism,” which misunderstands terrorism and violence in the Middle East by removing it from its political context. Along the way they have seriously strained their relations with traditional friendly governments in the area.

Certainly, if we look at the Middle East from an American perspective today, we see more failures than successes and we see more question marks than answers. This is very strange considering the fact that in the “New Middle East”, indeed in the “New World Order”, the US, as they never tire of saying in Washington, is the only remaining superpower. Technically, that is quite true: the US is the only country in the world that can project massive military force anywhere in the world. Nevertheless, there are still many trouble spots, and to me, it appears that among the most troubling is the Middle East.

In trying to explain why American Middle East policy seems to be inadequate it is important to look at what we call the policymaking process. To be sure, the President is the most important element in that process, but his behavior is affected by a variety of structures and other influential actors. Under the American constitution, the Congress plays a significant role in foreign policy, especially through its power to authorize (or deny) funds for various presidential initiatives. The president is also to some extent answerable to his political party--Republican or Democratic. The parties, whose fundamental goal is to win elections to Congress and the White House, are dependent on the interest groups that help support and finance their campaigns. They are also affected by public opinion, which is usually measured through public opinion polls. The public’s opinions are in turn significantly shaped by the news media--the press and electronic media, especially television. When it comes to Middle East policy--if I may generalize broadly--the entire process (including all the above-mentioned institutions is heavily influenced by supporters of Israel. They have a strong voice in Congress, in the political parties, in public opinion and the news media. Conversely, “pro-Arab” sentiments carry relatively little weight.

Let us consider a few current aspects of U.S. Middle East policy in terms of the policymaking process.

Is it better for the peace process to have a Republican administration? I think that the answer is Yes because, generally speaking, Republican presidents have been more evenhanded than the Democrats. There are, however, some important exceptions: Ronald Reagan, a Republican, did poorly, while Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, had at least one major success.

You will recall from our previous session that President Eisenhower, a Republican, exemplified evenhandedness in the Arab-Israeli conflict. He actually opposed Israel (along with Britain and France) in its aggression in the Sinai-Suez War of 1956. Nixon and Ford, two other Republicans, were less evenhanded; they were Presidents in the early 1970s, during the October War, the 1973 War and the oil embargo. Neither were prepared to abandon Israel, though neither were thought to be emotionally Zionist. Influenced, however, by a powerful pro-Israeli national security advisor and secretary of state (Henry Kissinger), they sought to manipulate the balance of power to bring about a political solution.

President Reagan, another Republican, was unabashedly enthusiastic about Israel, which helps account for his paltry record of accomplishment. In addition, he was shockingly ignorant of this region. Served--or should we say guided--by secretaries of state who shared his pro-Israel bias, Reagan was unable to move forward on Middle East peace and, indeed, gave tacit encouragement for Israel’s disastrous invasion of Lebanon in 1982. His tenure was also marked by contradictory (and illegal) policy behavior with respect to Gulf security and the war between Iran and Iraq in the 1980s.

Like Eisenhower, President Bush was also a Republican--and more evenhanded than most Democratic presidents. He felt that Israel was obstructing the road to peace and at one point threatened to withhold American loan guarantees in order to pressure the Israeli government. He also presided over the opening of a US-PLO dialogue. Bush’s decision to organize an international coalition to expel Iraq from Kuwait in 1990-91 has been hailed by many and criticized by some in this part of the world; but the outcome created a moment of opportunity to reinvigorate the moribund diplomacy of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Notwithstanding all the subsequent criticism of the “peace process” I believe that Bush and Baker achieved something significant by inventing a formula that would bring all the parties together in a negotiating structure. Baker was able to convene the Madrid Conference by persuading Syria to participate - which nobody had been able to do before - and the team launched a very interesting and complex negotiating process. To be sure, the Washington talks that followed the Madrid conference eventually became deadlocked, partly because of the passivity of the Democratic Clinton Administration (which replaced the Republicans in 1992); yet a certain barrier had been broken. In 1993, the secret Oslo talks between Palestinians and Israelis (without American involvement) revived the peace process and led to certain gains and numerous disappointments. Nevertheless, the Bush administration deserves credit for launching the most complex and potentially successful American initiative since Camp David.

The record of Democratic presidents is not so balanced as that of the Republicans. When we look at President Truman and American policy at the time of the establishment of Israel in 1948 we can readily understand why Truman is regarded as a hero and savior among Israelis and Zionists, and reviled by Palestinians and Arabs. Against the advice of nearly all of his foreign policy and military advisors, Truman threw American support unequivocally behind the project of a Jewish state. Then, two decades later, the Democrats produced and the American people elected Lyndon Johnson, the most enthusiastic Zionist president since Truman. Johnson was president during the 1967 Six Day War and moved the U.S. into an unprecedentedly generous support relationship with Israel. Unlike Eisenhower a decade earlier, Johnson was opposed to pressuring Israel to withdraw from its newly occupied territories.

Of all the presidents who dealt with the Middle East and were Democrats, President Kennedy - had he lived - showed the greatest potential when it came to developing a more positive policy. Kennedy conducted positive correspondence with Nasser. He had supported the Algerian national struggle against French colonialism. He welcomed the republican revolution in Yemen. He sent a special emissary to try and solve the Palestine refugee problem. However, one also has to remember that it was under Kennedy that we began our first major military assistance program to Israel.

Another Democratic president who deserves some credit is Carter. Jimmy Carter of course was president at the time of the Camp David negotiations and he and his national security team worked hard to deal with the Middle East, which was at the top of his foreign policy agenda. It is interesting that while we think of Carter at Camp David, we also think of Carter at the very beginning of his administration in 1977 when he spoke for the first time about the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people and proposed the launching of a US-Soviet peace process to solve the problem. Carter was personally very sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. Unfortunately, the Camp David process had a major flaw, inasmuch as it led to a separate peace between Egypt and Israel, the initiative of President Sadat. The Camp David negotiations deadlocked over the question of the Palestinians and it was not possible for political reasons for the Palestinians to be directly represented. The Egyptians, meanwhile, were unable to serve as effective proxy-representatives for the Palestinians and Menachem Begin, the Israeli Prime Minister at that time, was adamantly against even a temporary cessation of settlement building, in spite of his promises to Carter. Carter in a sense failed, but I think one has to give him some credit for not being driven by the Zionist lobby and for giving it a good try. Of the two dozen or so diplomatic initiatives made by the US or by other countries to try to solve this problem since 1948, only Camp David was anywhere near successful. The Oslo process, despite having originally shown promise, appears to have collapsed and I am very pessimistic about a resumption of the process given the current state of Israeli and American domestic politics.

Many Americans today believe that the U.S. is widely hated in the Arab and Islamic world. Washington’s “war on terrorism” is an understandable and popular response to these feelings. Unfortunately, neither the political elite nor the public in general often asks why the U.S. engenders such hostility. People are especially unwilling to entertain the thought that the U.S. support Israel and its policies might be one of the causes. Beyond that, one sometimes senses that there is a certain racism in parts of American society towards the Arab world and a tendency to practice “guilt by association” for recent terrorist actions against Americans. In the debate in the US over striking at Iraq in February 1998, I was shocked by the opinions of some of the elites, especially those who favor the idea of a bombing campaign, occupying Iraq and changing the regime. At the elite level, there is clearly an unwillingness to consider the human dimension of all this. There are hundreds of thousands of deaths of children in Iraq that have been documented by international organizations, and yet some prominent commentators continue to talk as if the people there were scarcely human beings. Having said that, I believe that the majority of ordinary Americans are not racist and are ready to listen to reasonable arguments.

When you look at how policy is formulated in the US concerning the Middle East, it is sometimes difficult to justify it in rational terms. For example, there were no Congressional debates on the question of dealing with Iraq in February 1998; and to my knowledge there has been no sustained investigation into the collapse of the peace process. In general, the level of knowledge on the Middle East in Congress is remarkably low, and members tend to take the expedient path of following the Israel lobby rather than thinking things through for themselves. The knowledge of Americans in general pertaining to the Middle East, excluding Israel, is very limited. There is instead the popular mythology that Israel wants to bring civilization to this uncivilized part of the world, and that the Israeli people share our values, are our friends and deserve our support. Moreover, to many Americans who feel guilty that the U.S. did not do more to prevent the Holocaust Israel therefore possesses special legitimacy. Paradoxically, there is a great deal of objective information on the Middle East available both to the Congress and the general public; yet policy seems to be rooted in ignorance and myths.

***

Comments from the Discussion Period

**As to the Iraqi crisis, the Europeans, with the qualified but important exception of the French and Russians, tend to follow the leadership of the US. They feel they do not have military power, and they place greater priority on their economic interests and capabilities. With respect to Iran and Iraq, for example, the French, Russians and Germans prefer to pursue their commercial interests in the region - and so they leave what we call “the heavy lifting”--the often unpopular political-military work--to the US. On the Arab-Israeli problem, The Europeans and Japan remain deferential to the U.S. on the political side, while playing an important economic development role on the Arab-Palestinian side.

It should be noted, for example, that the European Union was more generous in providing help to Palestinians than the Americans were. It remains to be seen how vigorously the Europeans might use their trade and economic leverage with Israel to pursue political ends. The problem with the Europeans is that they do not seem to have a high degree of commitment and unity on Middle East (and several other) issues. The Americans have been blunt and rebuffed European efforts because they feel that the Europeans are always likely to be pro-Arab and more critical of Israel. The Americans certainly do not like the way the French are supposedly ‘imposing’ themselves in the Middle East, and not are not all that pleased about the fact that the French and Germans are free to do business with Iran while the Americans are unable to because of the sanctions.

**As to the US having a “hostile” policy towards the Arab states, perhaps some qualification is in order. Do the rulers of Egypt or Saudi Arabia say that America is hostile? No, they say that the US is very friendly with most Arab countries. Do the members of the Palestinian Authority think that the US is hostile? No, they will say that although the US is friendly to Israel, it is helping them to build their state. How many governments in the Arab World will say that the US is hostile? Not the government in Morocco, nor the government in Algeria.

**With regard to the question of political Islam, groups like Hamas, Hizballah, Al-Jihad, etc., and important thinkers like Dr. Hassan Al-Turabi of Sudan are all considered a part of this movement. When we use the term political Islam, we use it to refer to groups trying to activate governments on the basis of Islamic principles. In Islamist circles there is deep anger towards the US because of its support for Israel, but there is also another kind of anger that is directed toward certain Arab leaders and regimes that are accused of mocking Islam and violating Islamic rules. Most of these Arab regimes, not coincidentally, are on friendly terms with the U.S.

The debate on the U.S. on the Islamic movement began after the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979. It has taken on new prominence today as Islamist-inspired terrorist acts against Americans continue. On one side, we have certain conservatives and Zionists who make the exaggerated claim that all these organizations are part of one single Islamic movement that is hostile to the US. They go on to demand that the US make war on this “terrorist movement” by direct military means and by financially supporting Middle East governments threatened by it. Some commentators even say that political Islam has replaced Communism as our mortal, global foe. Other commentators take a more sophisticated view, saying that Islamic groups are different and not necessarily or irretrievably hostile to the US. They note that the U.S. government has sometimes supported Islamist movements, including (in the past) the Moslem brothers in Egypt and Sudan and the Taliban in Afghanistan (more recently), hoping they would become a counterweight to movements that were friendly with the Soviet Union.

**As to the question of fundamentalism, I know that the American government as well as academic specialists recognize that there are Jewish (and Christian) as well as Islamic fundamentalists. They are very concerned about certain Jewish fundamentalists and the terrorism that they sometimes engage in--most importantly the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Rabin. Moreover, I am sure that when American officials define terrorism, they try not to equate it with Islam. Americans feel that anybody who studies the politics of this region could find religious fanaticism among Jews as well as Moslems and as well as Christians (as in Lebanon during its civil war).

**With respect to the current US-Iraq crisis (February 1998), I suspect the Clinton administration will accept Kofi Anan’s deal with Baghdad and that there will not be a military strike against Iraq, but it is hard to be 100 percent sure without knowing the exact terms of the deal. The administration has made such a big thing out of this that there will be a lot of Americans, especially from the opposition, who will be extremely angry if Clinton does not strike. Whatever happens, if it obvious that the US is going to think that it won; in fact, everybody involved, including Saddam, the Russians and the French are likely to think that they have won in one way or another. Perhaps, the Americans will say that we would not have gotten Saddam Hussein to back down if we had not gathered our military forces, and maybe that is true. But Saddam Hussein might say: “Well, I have done very well indeed; I have gained a lot of time to hide my weapons, and I have gained a great deal of sympathy in the Arab World. I probably consolidated my support in Iraq, I am being visited by delegation after delegation and getting terrific coverage by CNN and I am moving forward slowly toward the end of sanctions.” I think it is true that the Iraqis can make a reasonable claim that they have gotten something out of this.

If the US attacks Iraq after the agreement, it would represent a setback and humiliation for the United Nations. It would, however, be very difficult for the US to go against such an agreement because no matter how many conditions we put, world opinion and even American opinion will say: “Look, you know, you sent Kofi Anan off and if you go ignore the agreement, it will reflect very badly on the administration.” When one thinks about the situation, it becomes clear that the Iraqis have played a very clever game here, in such a way that if the US ignores the agreement, it will have all kinds of problems. Saddam Hussein has even succeeded in making the Clinton administration’s higher-ranking officials look rather foolish. I hope that the members of the Clinton administration will accept the plan although it will be difficult for them to do due to the fact that they have built up so much support for a strike that if they turn around and say that a strike is no longer an option, it is going to be very hard for them to persuade people to accept that their decision is a good idea.

One has to always remember that the feeling in Washington is that Saddam Hussein can sign anything he wants, but he will never keep the promises. There would be people saying Saddam Hussein has tricked Kofi Anan and he has tricked us and we should not allow that to happen now that we have made all this effort to put this thing in place, especially when we know that it will be even harder to hit him next time. Besides, according to the scenario, it is very possible that in a few months something else will come up and there will be some other obstacle, which will put the US in a very difficult position. To leave forces there for several months would be very costly; it is neither easy nor cheap to keep a very large military force 8,000 miles away from home for an indefinite period. First of all, it costs a great deal of money to ship large amounts of equipment and supplies to the area. Moreover, you do not just sit there: you have to keep training, you have to keep practicing, you have to keep supplying, you have to keep maintaining and repairing the equipment and you have to face the political price as well. There is also the problem of the local population: American airmen sent to Kuwait report that the Kuwaitis do not like to see American military personnel walking around their cities.

You have to pay a price whatever happens. If there is a strike, there will be a military price and a political price. The military price is that you might actually lose some soldiers and airplanes and so forth; losing too many would be a disaster because when Americans know that many of their own airmen are dying or being captured, they are going to wonder if the issue at stake is worth that amount of sacrifice. The political price is huge. If you carried out this strike, there would be protests everywhere in the Muslim world and the Arab world: that is why the American embassies are calling for a withdrawal of personnel and so forth. But, say that there is no strike, there is still a political price. The political price that Clinton will have to pay at home is that Saddam Hussein is still there, possibly continuing to defy the UN inspectors. If this happens Clinton and his foreign policy team will have some difficult explaining to do to Congress and the media. And the military price, as I indicated, is that it is not simple to maintain a large military force there indefinitely. It will be quite awkward--not to say costly-- if in a few months the US military is called upon actually to carry out a major military campaign against Iraq.

Dr. Joseph Alpher, American-Jewish Committee, Jerusalem

I am going to talk about the US-Israeli relationship and America in the Middle East, both as an Israeli and as someone who represents a major American-Jewish organization. What are the factors that have created this relationship and made Israel and the US in effect strategic allies?

If you ask Americans today why they have a special attitude towards Israel or a special relationship with Israel, they will talk primarily about shared values. What does that mean? There are things called Judeo-Christian traditions and values and I think that most American Jews and non-Jews, in explaining what these are, would refer to the fact that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East and add that democracy is seen as a Judeo-Christian value. But there is also something deeper, which goes into the religious or ideological roots of Zionism, not only among Jews but among American Christians as well. There is a large growing segment of the American Christian population that can be described as fundamentalist, and it is very vocal in its support for Israel. American-Christian Zionism goes back to the 19th Century, and one has to remember that the founders of Zionism who obtained the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate at the end of World War I were also supported by British Christians/Christian Zionists. So, a large portion of the American educated public has a very positive attitude toward Zionism, which was obviously very helpful in obtaining American support for the creation of Israel.

A second factor is the Holocaust. While a broad public awareness of the Holocaust in America began with the Eichmann trial, I have no doubt that the feelings of guilt over the Holocaust and a desire to rescue those who survived the Holocaust and to give them a home were major factors in the decision of America’s Jews and non-Jews to support the creation of the State of Israel and have remained factors ever since; certainly once World War II was over, it became very clear that the US could have done a lot more to reduce the scope of the Holocaust. The same applies to Europe, but Churchill’s main priority was to win World War II. Nevertheless, once the war was over and the dimensions of the Holocaust became clear, there was most definitely a guilt factor involved.

It is interesting to note that today in the US among American Jews, the Holocaust is increasingly becoming the principle organizing framework for a Jewish existence and is actually competing with Israel in that respect. Every Jewish community in the US is building its own mini-Holocaust museum and Jewish educational programs now have a much larger element of the Holocaust, albeit sometimes at the expense of educating about Israel. It is a very interesting phenomenon.

Now we come to the influence of the American-Jewish community, which really began to affect American politics at the time of the creation of the State of Israel. In the 1930s, Roosevelt brought a lot of Jews to Washington who shared his adaptation of socialist ideas and ideals. At the same time, a number of Jews became increasingly prominent, particularly in judicial circles, and as 1947 approached several Jewish judges formed the first effective Jewish lobby in Washington to lobby in favor of the creation of the State of Israel. Not all American Jews or Jewish organizations approved the creation of the state; some of them thought that Jews, if not assimilating, should at least be finding their place in Western society and they were not interested in encouraging the creation of a Jewish state, but the majority were interested and they were able to influence American policy for the very first time.

During the ‘50s and ‘60s, when Israel’s pro-Western orientations were becoming very clear at the same time as the Soviet influence in the Middle East was growing, Israel was seeing and presenting itself as part of the efforts of the Free World to block the expansion of Soviet power in the Middle East. There was actually fighting between the Israeli airforce and Soviet planes piloted by Soviet pilots over the Suez Canal, and from a strategic viewpoint, this was certainly the clearest ‘drawing of the lines’, placing Israel very firmly at the forefront of the Western camp opposing Soviet expansion, which undoubtedly earned it further US support.

With regard to the Arab-American lobby in the US, that which exists discounts its influence compared to that of various American Jewish organizations and lobbies. Certainly 30 to 40 years ago, there was no Arab-American lobby to speak of while there was an extremely active Jewish- American lobby. Nevertheless, the Arab-American lobby is getting stronger and articulating itself and it could be a factor in the future, as could a Moslem-American lobby. The number of Moslems in the US is growing and probably already exceeds the number of Jews, although most Moslems in the US are not of Arab origin, but are black Americans converted to Islam or immigrants from the Indian sub-continent. Whatever their origin, the fact remains that their existence is significant.

As I would define it, Israel has had two strategic allies over the recent decades: one is the US and the other is the American-Jewish community, and the two are clearly linked. The fact that the US is seen as a strategic ally is in part attributed to the influence of the Jewish lobby, but I think it is important to differentiate between the US and its American-Jewish community.

Why is the American Jewish community a strategic ally of Israel? To find an answer we have to delve a little into the demography and the power of politics of the Jewish World. There are today approximately 12-13 million Jews in the world, of whom 80 percent live in Israel and the US; the others are scattered and are not major factors of influence. In Israel, there are today close to five million Jews and close to one million non-Jews. In the US, meanwhile, there are about 5.5 million Jews and the trend is that the American-Jewish community is getting smaller while the number of Jews in Israel is rising.

What we are seeing is a very interesting phenomenon. If we go back 50 years to the eve of Israel’s independence, we see about 600,000 Jews here and about 6.5 million Jews in the US. Jewish power in the world was concentrated in the US and the relationship between the Israeli-Jewish community and the American-Jewish community was completely lopsided. The Israelis were fighting The War of Independence in 1948, and, being outnumbered and with their backs to the wall, they were completely dependent on aid from the outside – there were times when the Israeli Finance Ministry was down to something like $30,000 dollars to pay its wartime bills - and the American-Jewish community mounted a massive aid program involving funding, the smuggling of weapons and political influence in order to create Israel and to enable the Jews here to win the war.

Today, however, the two communities are about the same size because while the Israeli Jewish community is growing, the American Jewish community is shrinking, mainly because of assimilation through intermarriage. One has to remember that there is so little anti-Semitism in America today that there is nothing preventing American Jews from assimilating into the overall fabric of the US at a very rapid rate. Twenty to 30 years from now, we will be looking at a situation where Israel will for the first time in about 2,500 years be the largest Jewish community in the world unless something really drastic happens in the meantime; remember that I am going back to before the fall of the Second Temple and to before the time of Christ because by the time of Christ, there were already more Jews in Alexandria and elsewhere on the Mediterranean than there were here. You have to go back a long time to reach a time when the largest Jewish community was here.

The American Jewish community is very interesting in terms of its structure. Here in Israel our political system has enabled a religious minority to exercise very far-reaching influence on political and personal status issues. In America, on the other hand, the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox communities make up about 10 percent of the Jewish population, but they do not in any way dominate any of the Jewish institutions or the making of American-Jewish policy toward Israel. They are, however, the most ‘Zionist’ and the most closely linked to Israel. If you ask American Jews simple factual questions about Israel, you will see that American Orthodox Jews are much more engaged and aware of what happens here than the rest of the American Jewish community. Nevertheless, the rest of the American Jewish community, whether Reform, Conservative or unaffiliated with any stream of Judaism, make up the majority and have the major organizations that lobby, make declarations with regard to Israel, and follow very closely the way their Congressmen or women vote on issues involving Israel.

Compared to 50 years ago, today we have a situation where the balance of power is changing. The number of American Jews is gradually decreasing because of the high rate of assimilation, and there are predictions that 50 years from now there will not be 5.5 million, but three million American Jews because the others will have intermarried and ceased to think of themselves as Jews. As a result, the leaders of the American Jewish community are looking for ways to improve Jewish identification in the education of young Jews in America, and they look to both the Holocaust and Israel as organizing principles. When it comes to Israel as an organizing principle they look to us here for us to tell them what being Jewish means, and this is rather a problem because being Jewish in Israel, assuming you are not Orthodox, merely means bearing Israeli nationality, whereas being Jewish in the Diaspora has more to do with belonging to Judaism, the religion of a Diaspora community that is a small minority, which wants very much to be Jewish, even in the absence of any real anti-Semitism. The problem so many Jews face today, whether they belong to the non-Orthodox majority in Israel or the non-Orthodox majority in America, is how to find the common denominator of their Judaism. If we do not want to see the number of Jews in the world cut in half in 50 years, even though Israel will then be stronger and will have more Jews living within its borders, we have to find a way to find a common denominator in our Judaism.

In contrast to the non-Orthodox, the Orthodox do not have a problem because they maintain an orthodox religious way of life that is identical in Israel and in America. Admittedly, the Orthodox in Israel are also Israelis while those in America are Americans, but they have much closer contact and they share a common language. Talking as a Zionist, if I thought that the five million American Jews would come to Israel and that would be the reason why there would be no more American Jews, I would not be concerned, but the reality is that they are not going to come here and are liable to disappear. In the long run, this could clearly have some effect on the ability of the American Jewish community to influence American policy with regard to Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict. One has to take into account that the Jewish community in America is already down from 6.5 to 5.5 million, and even though about 700,000 Russian Jews have emigrated to America in recent years, the Jewish community is still getting smaller at the same time as the American population and the Arab and Moslem lobbies are growing.

Nevertheless, the American Jewish community remains very skillful at organizing itself politically in order to exercise influence within the framework of the legitimate game of American democracy. How do interest groups influence policy? They do it through lobbying and through contributing to campaigns, including those of politicians, which is very much part of the American way of doing things and points to the fact that American Jews will continue to have a very strong influence for at least the next couple of decades, regardless of what happens demographically. But if we look further afield demographically, there is clearly the possibility of very big changes occurring.

Today, the two issues that have led to a controversial argument going on between the American Jewish mainstream and the government of Israel are the peace process and the conversion or the ‘Who is a Jew?’ issue. On the peace process, American Jews who define themselves as liberals and who are devout Democrats adopted an attitude that was in favor of the idea of land for peace following Oslo, and the majority supported the notion of Israeli negotiations with the PLO. While there is no unanimity of opinion among American Jews and there have always been those who are very dovish and those who are very hawkish when it comes to Israeli issues, I would say that over the past few years, the majority has been consistently dovish in a very generalized way with regard to support for the peace process. Certainly since Netanyahu came to power some 19 to 20 months ago, the disparity between the way American Jews see the process and the way Netanyahu sees the process has become increasingly evident.

In spite of the dovish tendencies of the majority of America’s Jews, Clinton and Albright still take their potentially negative reaction into consideration when considering the feasibility of putting pressure on Netanyahu and in deciding how much pressure to inflict. Clinton knows that if he pressures Netanyahu and the American Jewish community reacts negatively, this will affect not only his own standing but also that of Vice President Gore, who is Clinton’s candidate for the 2000 elections. Clinton knows that a lot of his own funding came from Jewish sources or sources that are influenced by the American Jewish community and if Gore loses this funding as a result of pressure being put on Israel, he will be in serious trouble. He also realizes that if Gore loses popularity as a result of American Jews turning their back on him the American administration could be in trouble, and he knows that if American Jews choose to side with the Republican dominated Congress, which tends to be more hawkish on the Israeli-Arab issue, then this could make problems for Clinton, not only with regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but with regard to other issues as well. And so, given that American Jews tend to be more dovish and tend - at least according to most of the polls - to support the notion of pressure being put not only on Arafat, but on Netanyahu as well, Clinton must constantly ask himself: How far can I go in exerting pressure?

Today, as a result of one recent poll done by the organization that represents all the Jewish federations – the American Jewish communities are organized on a city by city basis and in each city there is a federation of Jewish organizations - we know that 70 percent support the idea of putting pressure on both Netanyahu and Arafat, while only 52 percent say American Jews should support the policies of the newly elected government of Israel. Meanwhile, 47 percent say that they have the right to criticize what the government of Israel says and 60 percent say that Netanyahu unnecessarily provokes the Palestinians, etc.

There is also another survey, and I think that the differences between the two tell us quite a lot about the whole culture of surveys in America and also in Israel. A left-wing dovish American Jewish organization, the Israel Policy Forum, carried out a poll late last year and its members were very clever because they used Clinton’s own polling company to ensure that he would be convinced that the findings were reliable. They discovered that 84 percent of American Jews believed the administration should pressure both Netanyahu and Arafat. When the results came out, The Middle East Quarterly, which was founded by American Jews of the more hawkish persuasion, did its own poll and found that only 24 percent of American Jews said Clinton should pressure Netanyahu to move faster on trading land for peace. Of course, a lot depends on the phrasing of the question, but the polling was used very freely in order to try to influence the American administration’s views, particularly with regard to the peace process. It is clear to me that the Clinton administration is monitoring very closely the way the American Jewish community reacts to Netanyahu’s policies, the way it reacts to Arafat, and the way it sees issues before it takes any new step to deal with them.

I will give you one very graphic example that concerns a conversation I had with a senior American diplomat last August when Albright was contemplating making her statement about the Middle East and coming to the area. The diplomat was talking to the representatives of several American Jewish organizations in Israel and he said: “Well, how do you think the American Jewish community will react if Albright starts banging heads together?” It was instantly clear to me that this is the main question that the US administration is now asking the American Jewish community in order to try to gage how far it can go in terms of ‘banging heads together’ and putting pressure on both Arafat and Netanyahu at exactly the same time.

The second issue of great controversy is the conversion issue. With the rise of the political influence of the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox parties in Israel, they have begun to push to legislate what I have to call ‘fundamentalist’ legislation, which is not very different from what Islamist parties want in those countries where they are able to express themselves at the parliamentary level. So we have in our Knesset what I call a Jewish fundamentalist agenda. I would note at this point that my Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox friends do not like the use of the word fundamentalist, and I do not mean to imply that all Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Israelis are fundamentalist, but in the religious parties there are certain elements that are basically quite fundamentalist in their approach. These elements want Jewish Law to be the law of the land and they are trying to legislate on issues that affect not only Jews in Israel, but Jews everywhere and particularly those in the US, where the non-Orthodox movements are well developed. There appears to be a growing tendency for American Jews to look to Israel for their points of identity as Jews; add to this the fact that in Israel we have a growing extreme secularist movement while, for the past ten years, the whole concept of constitutional law and rule of law has gradually become well-enunciated, particularly by the High Court of Justice, and add to this the peace process with all its difficulties, and it becomes very clear that we need to prepare ourselves to answer the question we have managed to postpone answering for many years, namely, the question of the Jewish nature of Israel.

What is the Jewish nature of Israel? If you look at the Declaration of Independence, you will see that Israel is described as the state of the Jewish people and also as a Jewish national home; there is clearly a big difference between the two descriptions. A Jewish national home is a secular definition, while a Jewish state is a religious definition. The murder of Prime Minister Rabin by a fundamentalist Jew really brought the issue to the front of the agenda in a very big way and today, a growing number of Israeli thinkers and politicians are saying that the question of the Jewish nature of Israel is even more important than the peace process, while others are saying that it is an issue that should be left until the peace process has reached its conclusion. Naturally, there is an overflow of all of this political and intellectual activity in Israel that spills on to the American Jewish community, and if anything is capable of causing a major split between Israel and the American Jewish community, it is the conversion and the ‘Who is a Jew?’ issues. If the Israeli ultra-Orthodox have their way, we could soon be seeing a serious weakening of American Jewish support for Israel leading to untold damage to our strategic alliance with the US.

Let me turn now to talk about how I see the American national security concerns in the Middle East. I would say that the two issues that tend to stick out again and again and be repeated in one form either implicitly or explicitly are Israel’s wellbeing, survival, and security on the one hand and securing American interests in the Middle East, which really means oil and the means to support it in addition to freedom of the seas, on the other. The peace process is seen as a means not only of ensuring Israel’s wellbeing, but also of making it easier for the US to deal with its strategic interests in the Middle East and the strategic interests of the industrialized world in general, meaning oil.

But additional issues fall under this as well. One is anti-proliferation, that is, there is a growing awareness in America that the Middle East in the post-Cold War era, along with places like North Korea, is the major focus of the possible dangerous proliferation of non-conventional weapons and the means to deliver them. The peace process is seen as one means of reinforcing American policy with regard to preventing this proliferation – the Madrid Process, at least originally, contained the multilateral talks on arms control and regional security - but it is also seen as a way of cementing American influence in the region and achieving other American goals. Now, certainly when the current peace process began, it was seen then, and I think it is still seen also, as one of several instruments that the US would like to use in order to maintain its unique superpower role in the Middle East, or to put it differently, in preventing Russia from reestablishing itself as a major source of influence in the Middle East. To the extent that the peace process is weakened, I think the US perceives that its proliferation problems are more difficult and that Russia has more opportunities to return to the region and to exercise influence, whether by selling arms or by offering its own diplomatic efforts.

And finally, European security vis-à-vis the Mediterranean Southern rim and vis-à-vis resurgent Islam; when the US looks at these issues in their entirety it is aware, as are the Europeans, that there is a very important Middle Eastern element. You see this today, for example, in some of the argumentation over the question of expanding NATO. The US has decided to expand NATO and it is now trying to obtain Senate approval to revise the NATO treaty in order to get the first three Eastern European former Communist countries, which are now democratic countries, into NATO. Some people are pointing out that one of the consequences of bringing in Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary into NATO, is that you are increasing the Russians’ sense that they have lost on this front and that they are under considerable security pressure on their European front, which has resulted amongst other things in Russia improving its relationship with Iran on another front.

**With regard to where the US stands today on the two key Middle East issues, the Arab-Israeli peace process and Iraq, one can say that its overall standing in the Middle East has most certainly been damaged in recent months by the Arab perception that it is not prepared to pressure Israel on the stalled peace process issues, in addition to the fact that what it wants to do with Iraq is not popular with the Arab masses. Even when the peace process was successful, it was difficult for the US to recreate the alliances of ‘90-’91 with Egypt, Syria and the Gulf countries; it is even harder today, given the current state of the peace process. The US is aware that it is the subject of very heavy criticism and the cause of a sense of disappointment among some of the Arab leaders. On the other hand, assuming that the most recent agreement will restore the UN monitors to Iraq in the way that the US wants, it will also be seen, perhaps begrudgingly, that the US has done what no other power in the world could do in terms of compelling Iraq to obey the UN resolutions by using force very effectively; that is to say, by using the threat of force to achieve a strategic aim. It might be a very short-term achievement, because one could say that whatever Saddam Hussein agrees to today he is going to try to wiggle out of in the coming months. Nevertheless, I think the ultimate conclusion of Arab leaders has to be that there is no alternative to America in terms of getting any outside power to help them achieve their strategic aims with regard to the peace process, or for that matter any other major issue in the Middle East.

One popular misconception concerning America is that the fact that many of America’s most prominent political figures are Jewish is clearly reflected in US foreign policy here in the Middle East. One should bear in mind that Denis Ross, Sandy Berger, and Martin Indyk, for example, despite being Jews, are doves on the Arab-Israel issues. I really believe that in the Arab World today there is an increasing readiness to differentiate between this American Jew and that American Jew. The new US Ambassador in Egypt, for example, is a Jew, yet the Egyptians welcome him because they know his views. The American Jews in Congress take very different positions, with some way out on the right and others way out on the left, and one of the main reasons why you do not hear American non-Jews complaining about the Jewish influence and the Jewish lobby is because increasingly, those American Jews who fill these positions are very well integrated into American society.

Even were the Americans to elect a Jewish president, this would not necessarily be a victory for Israel, nor would it have any real significance. One has to remember that American Jews do not have the power to dictate the results of the elections; they have influence, but the same applies to the oil lobby and the American Christian fundamentalist lobby, whose support for Israel varies according to the issue under discussion. In short, we are talking about a much bigger mosaic, and the power of the Jewish lobby has to be seen in perspective.

**With regard to the possibility of Israel’s present stand having a negative effect on America’s interests, Madeleine Albright said in December that because there was no progress in the Israeli-Palestinian talks, it was more difficult for the US to get Arab support for dealing with Iraq. That was probably the closest the US has come in recent times to saying our interests are being hurt because of Israel’s position in the peace process.

What is particularly interesting to note in this context is that Clinton’s refusal a few months to meet Netanyahu was seen by the mainstream American Jewish community as nothing more than a kind of snub, a message to the Israeli public that their prime minister is persona non grata in America and that they should think about why, and although American Jews did not applaud Clinton’s decision, they did not object. On the other hand, when Albright said the absence of progress between Israel and the Palestinians makes it more difficult for us to deal with Iraq, the organized American Jewish community did object. In objecting to this linkage, it pointed out to the President and the Secretary of State, that back in 1990/’91, Saddam and Arabs who supported Saddam justified Saddam’s position, and even in some cases the invasion of Kuwait, by referring to the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and that Albright’s attempt to create this linkage was dangerous and unjustified. In other words, the majority of American Jews were saying, you want to snub Netanyahu, fine, but don’t do it by blaming him for Iraq. At the same time, although American policy makers are hearing from Arab leaders, that if they don’t get Israel to move on the peace process, it will be bad for their image in the Arab World, I do not believe that anything has happened to translate that message into a threat. There is no longer the threat of an oil boycott or of running off to Moscow to sign treaties of peace and friendship with the Soviet Union; all the old threats are gone.

At this point it is worth noting a very fundamental principle of American Jewish-Israeli relations, namely, that for the American-Jewish community, with all its support for Israel and its vital role in the creation of Israel, it has always been very important to maintain the distinction between Israel and itself. American Jews regard Israel as a sovereign, democratic state, whereas they see themselves as Americans. Moreover, they have seen as a principle the need to avoid taking sides in Israeli politics or on Israeli political issues, which would entail criticizing the elected government of Israel. The big exception in the past year or two has been on the conversion issue, because here, American Jews said wait a minute, this is not an issue of Middle East peace, this is an issue of the Knesset of Israel legislating about whether our conversions are Kosher; we have a right to protest this. But on the other hand, when the Israeli government decides upon the percentage of West Bank land it is going to offer or not offer to the Palestinians, we may think it’s a good idea, we may think it’s a bad idea, we quite often don’t know much about it - knowledge of the intricacies of Israeli issues is very superficial - and exactly because we don’t know much about it, we should avoid taking sides. One reason they want to avoid taking sides is that they feel that if the American-Jewish community is seen to be split on this major issue, then it will lose its influence with regard to Congress, the White House, the media and other institutions.

In fact, one of the things the peace process has done is to free American Jews of the sense that they have to devote a large part of their energies to supporting Israel because Israel’s survival is in danger. Of course, Saddam in ‘91 firing missiles at Israel reinforced that sense once again, but by and large in the last ten years Americans have become less preoccupied with Israel and its survival. But they see that in one way or another the peace process can have some effect on them, because they understand that there are links between the Israeli political discussion over the peace process and the Israeli political discussion over the conversion issue and other issues, which is why there has been a greater readiness to take a position. Whether we are going to see any major breakthrough here or not, I don’t know; I think it is possible, assuming that Netanyahu maintains his hard-line stand, which might lead to more American Jewish opposition expressed toward him. I really think that key Arab leaders with whom American organizations have developed good relations in recent years against the backdrop of the peace process do tend to welcome contacts today with the American Jewish community because they would like to influence it and get it to take a stronger stand on these issues, whether publicly or privately.

At this point I should emphasize that my organization, The American Jewish Committee, like any mainstream Jewish organization, does not take specific policy positions on specific issues. It will say, for example, we support the peace process, we support the idea of territory for peace, talks with the PLO, etc., but it does not go behind that, although it did actually several years ago take a position against building settlements. Nevertheless, I feel it necessary to address the claim that American Jews living in Israeli settlements are perhaps the greatest source of the troubles in the region.

I would say that about 15 percent of the settlers are American immigrants, who make up approximately 25 percent of the hard-line, ideological Gush Emunim. The American Orthodox community is the most closely interested in Israel, and in recent years, of the 2,000 or so Americans who have immigrated to Israel every year, about half of them have been from that small seven percent or so minority of American Jews who are Orthodox, many of whom have gone straight to yeshivas or the settlements with a very strong religious Zionist, hawkish orientation. I would not say, however, that American Jewish immigrants are the dominant element in Gush Emunim or in the settlement movement, although they are certainly very vocal. If you ask the elected leaders of the Council for Settlers about the Americans they will sort of smile and say, well, they haven’t really been absorbed yet, they are kind of naïve; let them yell and scream, they don’t make policy. Having said that, if and when the day comes - and I think and hope it will come - when new lines are drawn on the map and some settlements at least find themselves inside Palestine, you will see a small, violent minority, including a lot of Americans, who somehow brought with them some attitudes towards violence that are more extreme than those of most Israelis.

Another aspect of American Jewish-Israeli relations materialized in the demonstrations against Rabin in ‘94 and ‘95 when we had a situation whereby a recent American Jewish immigrant to Israel speaking broken Hebrew would be arrested by the police for demonstrating illegally, and as he was being dragged away he would pull out his mobile phone and call his father in New York, begging him to go tell their congressman in New York that he had become a victim of Israeli police brutality. In this kind of an incident, you have a very interesting dynamic of American Jewish-Israeli relations; American Jews who are prepared to organize pressure in America to achieve their very particular political ideological goals in Israel. You saw it again with the conversion issue, whereby the American Reform and Conservative movements went to their congressmen and said, “Don’t support Israel unless Israel drops this conversion law,” also very blatantly using these brutal political tools. One of the interesting aspects of American Jewish-Israeli relations has been that while broadly speaking the two communities are growing apart, the one becoming either more ultra Orthodox or secular, and the other becoming more assimilated, when they do interact they interact today in a much more dynamic manner, involving one another very closely, pressuring one another, and using money, politics, dirty tricks and everything in order to affect the policies of each other in a way that we didn’t see in the past.

**With regard to the Jewish lobby in the States, I think that the present preoccupation with the American Jewish influence on American policies, whether domestic or external, is very legitimate. The Jewish influence, however, does not encourage anti-Jewish feelings or anti-Semitism; it might have 40 or 50 years ago but it doesn’t today. Today, American Jews are very much in the mainstream, and their organizations are seen as legitimate. I am not saying that non-Jews do not resent their influence, but that there is far less resentment than there was in the past, just as there is much less anti-Semitism today. American Jews are seen to have a legitimate interest in Israel in the same way as American Armenians are seen to have a legitimate interest in Armenia. American Greeks lobby against Turkey, and although the Turks object, there are not enough American Turks to oppose them so American Greeks are a very effective lobby. Still, the fact that the Jews may be more successful than others is not something that encourages anti-Jewish feeling.

Moving on to the way in which the Palestinians can influence the American Jews and get them to agree with them, it is clear that there are some American Jews on the left wing of the spectrum who do agree with some Palestinian views, while there are others who do not and others are simply ignorant or have no opinion. I must say, one of the things I am surprised by is the fact that the PLO office in Washington does not have people who are effective in explaining Palestinian issues to Americans in general and to American Jews in particular, the majority of whom are prepared to listen.

One has to always take into account that as far as the majority of American Jews are concerned, the broad strategic agenda with regard to Israel is the welfare and strength of Israel. American Jews have traditionally backed the democratically elected government of Israel and its policies, albeit often very blindly and without understanding its policies, but theirs is a very specific, long-term position. In other words, as far as they are concerned it’s a case of even if we are not going to get involved in specific policy issues, we are going to give the government of Israel our broad support.

But again, American Jews do look upon themselves first as Americans; you can see that in the intermarriage rate. Seventy percent of young American Jews intermarry, and most of them do not raise their children as Jews, which says something about the future size of the American Jewish community. The level of knowledge of American Jews about the Middle East, Islam etc., is higher than that of most Americans, but it is still very poor, although American policy on issues like Islam is much more sophisticated than it was ten years ago, when they were making pronouncements that put the Islamic movements in Algeria, Iran, Sudan and Egypt into the same bucket. It would appear that they have learned a lesson from the consequences of generalizing.

As I have already indicated, the American Jewish community is decreasing in size while the overall American population is increasing and I believe that when American Jews number not five and a half million but three and a half million, it will make a difference to America’s support of Israel. But it will be a very slow and gradual process, and it will depend on many things. I would like to hope that the peace process will have progressed enough 20 years from now to render all the figures insignificant inasmuch as Israel’s relations with it’s neighbors will have improved while their relations with the US will be such that there will be a broad American interest to support all concerned.

Personally, I think it is a big mistake for Arabs or Israelis to say that everything depends on the US. Today, for example, the US is a mediator, but it is still not producing results. The only successful breakthroughs in the Arab-Israeli Peace Process, even going back as far as Camp David, took place without the knowledge of the US, or in some cases despite the opposition of the US. Sadat announced on 9 November 1977 that he was coming to Jerusalem and Carter refused to give the trip his blessing for an entire fortnight because it destroyed his notion of an American-Soviet brokered Geneva conference of peace; he didn’t understand that what Sadat was saying was that I want to get the Russians out, and I want an American orientation, and I am going through Jerusalem to get it.

Oslo is another good example. The US leadership was against our talking to the PLO, and Rabin went behind its back. Even the treaty with Jordan was done without the knowledge of the US. This is why I do not believe in American mediation as something that is going to produce anything of real significance. I think the American policy makers know the chances that they can facilitate any real progress are very small, because the distance between the two parties is too great and there is no trust or credibility between them. They are simply hoping to do enough to keep the process alive until something happens that enables the parties to do this themselves, and in this respect one has to remember that it impossible to impose peace. I think America is very cautious about the notion of producing its own solution to the second further re-deployment and saying to the parties, take it or leave it, because it will look like an American dictate, and if it is accepted it might not work, because it is accepted under pressure, while if it is not accepted, the US will look ridiculous. In short, if something is wrong with the way the Israeli government is dealing with the peace process, ultimately it is the Israelis, not American Jews and not Americans, who have to deal with this internally in Israel in order to make something work.