"Our Dysfunctional Public Discourse Regarding US Policies, the Middle East, and Israel"

Adam L. Silverman, PhD

A Social Science Advisor for the US Army’s Human Terrain System and previously served as a field social scientist in Iraq during 2008.  The views in this essay are his alone and DO NOT necessarily reflect those of the US Army, the Training and Doctrine Command, and/or the Human Terrain System.

Over the past three weeks COL (ret) Lang has either directly posted, held open threads, or had guest posting regarding the nomination and subsequent withdrawal of AMB Freeman, what this means for DNI Blair, and ultimately given the nature of American discourse pertaining to Israel, and given the state of our discourse, whether any good ever comes of these discussions.  As all of these issues are intertwined, and the resulting knot has choked off much of our public discussion on US foreign policy, our policies in the Middle East, what it means to be a faithful ally, and what can and can not be discussed.  In many ways this mirrors much of the rest of our national discourse on issues both foreign and domestic – certain ideological and political leaders, in conjunction with fellow travelers in think tanks and the media, all of whom seem to be involved in a never ending revolving door dance of nepotism, have constrained our debates in manners that they have determined to be correct.  The chickens, in regards to how well this worked on economic policy and matters, have finally and painfully come home to roost, but there still seems to be a tremendous push back/agenda setting power regarding US foreign policy, specifically those dealing with Israel and the Middle East.  The real question is, just like the real question that should exist for US economic policy discussions, is: exactly in whose best interests are these positions being asserted, debated, decided, held, and acted upon?  As someone who has taught courses on or published about the politics of the Middle East, the Arab/Israeli conflict, terrorism in the Middle East, and the effects of religion and identity on security policy between the Israelis and the Palestinians, I feel very qualified to address this issue and asked COL (ret) Lang for a guest post to do so.

The United State’s policies towards Israel and the Middle East have been moving towards disaster for the better part of the past thirty years.  Over the past eight years they have gotten tremendously worse.  The reason for that is that elites and notables have one favored set of policy approaches and have been able to limit the debate on the issue to within very narrow boundaries and they abuse and degrade and attack anyone who is willing to ask difficult questions and critically appraise the situation.  Over the past decade the US has moved from being overly permissive of Israeli behavior to being an outright enabler of some of its worst excesses.  This is not good for the US, its not good for the Israelis, and it is certainly not good for the Middle East or the rest of the world.  Friends and allies, whether personal or state to state become good friends not when they accede to every want and whim, but when they help keep each other on an even footing towards progress and resolutions.  For too long the US has been part of a relationship with Israel that is the interstate version of a codependent marriage.  Both parties need serious counseling before the disaster consumes not just them, but their extended families and neighbors as well.

US discussion and debate regarding Israel is constrained by use of the ultimate trump card: if you criticize Israel or US policies towards it, then you face being called an anti-Semite.  It was this dynamic that COL (ret) Lang wrote about on 16 and 17 March 2009 and that he rightly described as laying out rules that proscribed the debate.  Many others have also written about this issue either in response to coming under attack or in response to other’s being attacked.  With the exception of the known and notable extremists, none of the parties to this debate, several of whom are Jewish, are expressing anti-Semitic feelings or sentiments.  None of them has indicated that Jews are bad, evil, or problematic, that Israel does not have a right to self-defense, that it should not exist, that American Jews should not feel some affinity for it.  Rather they have questioned the validity of having a one size fits all policy driving the US relationship with Israel: the US will support Israel no matter what it does.  These individuals are not members or advocates of any group that the Southern Poverty Law Center or the Anti-Defamation League should be tracking, rather they are thoughtful individuals who are asking a tough and relevant policy question: does America’s currently defined relationship with Israel make any sense?

What is driving our warped debate is the near stranglehold that the neo-Conservatives, AIPAC, Christian neo-Zionists, and their fellow travelers have over our Middle East policy discussions in the US.  It needs to be made explicitly clear: the idea to invade Iraq, to remove Saddam Hussein, and to make it into a shining democratic example that would transfix and then transform the Middle East was first envisioned in a mid 1990s policy paper by prominent neo-Conservatives for a Likudnik policy center in Israel in support of Benjamin Netanyahu’s prime ministerial aspirations.  The paper, emerged from discussions among Richard Perle, James Colbert, Charles Fairbanks, Jr., Douglas Feith, Robert Loewenberg, David and Meyrav Wurmser and was Entitled “A Clean Break: Ensuring a New Way to Secure the Realm”.  Within two years those portions of the “Clean Break” ideas pertaining to Saddam Hussein became the January 1998 basis for the Project for a New American Century’s open letter to President Clinton urging him to remove Saddam Hussein from power. The signatories to this document were a veritable who’s who of neo-Conservatives – many of whom are the first to accuse critics of Israel, US policy towards Israel, or their preferred US policies in the Middle East as anti-Semitic, or Chamberlain like appeasers.  What began as a thought exercise to catapult Benjamin Netanyahu to the Prime Ministry of Israel eventually became US policy; a policy that has claimed the lives over 4,300 US service members and civilians (including one of my colleagues), at least a million Iraqis, squandered precious US fiscal resources, destabilized the Middle East, reduced the safety of Israel, and increased the regional power of Iran.

It is clear that our policies and discussions have been pushed by a very vocal minority with excellent media and political access – a minority that has staked out unflagging US support for Israel as the only acceptable policy position that can be taken regardless of political party or ideology, ethnicity, or religion.  What is missing in the conduct of and reporting about this debate is that the majority of Americans, including Jewish Americans, do not hold this position.  Data from the University of Maryland’s International Policy Attitudes, clearly demonstrates that American’s have far less in common with the accepted discourse; the results show that 71% of Americans believe that the US should not take sides in the Israeli/Palestinian dispute.  This tracks closely with data from J Street’s mid 2008 surveying.  J Street’s polling clearly indicates that 66% of American Jews firmly support the idea that the US should take an active role in helping to resolve the Arab/Israeli dispute; including publicly disagreeing with both the Arabs and the Israelis, and exerting pressure on both Arabs and Israelis to come to make compromises.  Finally, the most insane thing about our discussion of policy towards Israel and the Middle East is that the Israelis themselves actually have a much broader and robust discourse about these issues then we allow ourselves.  You would never see an article like Gideon Levy’s, referring to Israel as the neighborhood bully, published in a US newspaper. 

Recently though things have begun to change.  J Street, was created to counter, from within the Jewish community, this ideologically driven polemical positioning pertaining to US policy regarding Israel and the Middle East.  They have made it their job to point out that Jewish Americans do not all agree on these issues, that the reporting of them in the media, the commenting on them by the punditocracy, and the exposition of them by our revolving door policy experts is not greeted with the universality that is presented to us on a regular basis.  The more that conscientious people, regardless of their religious identification, are willing to speak out about these issues in a respectful and informed manner, the sooner we are likely to see positive changes in our debates over our policies, as well as the policies themselves.  When qualified men and women are hounded from the public arena because they refuse to blindly adhere to ideology, we all loose.  It is one thing to point out real anti-Semitism, racism, defeatism, xenophobia, homophobia, and all the other ills when they are truly occurring, but it is unacceptable to endure it quietly when these charges are used as weapons to silence a much needed debate about how the US, and Israel, should go forward in their relationship and how the US should proceed in the Middle East.  If thoughtfully engaging in this debate means that Col (ret) Lang is labeled an anti-Semite by people who have by and large never served, have no personal practitioner experience in regard to what they are talking and writing about, and have no personal skin in the game when US personnel, civilian or military have to be sent out to enact their preferred policies, then I will gladly wear that label as well – and proudly carry it into my families synagogue on holidays and festivals.