Megan on the Israeli Lobby

An excellent, thoughtful post:

I share the discomfort with noting the obvious fact that Jewish Americans, like every other hyphenated-american, actively seek the benefit of their ethnic compatriots by influencing US policy. Other hyphenated Americans don't have the same history of accusations that they are engaged in a virulent conspiracy to run the world for their benefit, and thus we have no need to pretend that all the Turks just happen to take a different position on the Armenian genocide than all the Armenians do--nay, not even the Turks and Armenians themselves bother to claim this . . . .

But though I understand why statements like this have to be made very carefully, if at all, the strenuous efforts to avoid making them have become cancerous. The reluctance to state the obvious allows Israel's partisans to duck the undeniable fact that AIPAC and so forth do actively attempt to influence American policy, and frequently succeed. Questions about whether this is really best for America, or the world, can be countered with more-or-less sly insinuations of anti-semitism. In part because almost the only people who will state the obvious are looney-tunes anti-semites who think that there's a Jewish conspiracy, rather than . . . Jews acting boringly just like every other ethnic group to ever hit our shores. Or Arabs with tin ears who come off as mostly mad because they're way behind in the ethnic lobbying sweepstakes.

It will not do my career much good to say it, but here goes. America has an influential Israel lobby in large part because of ethnic affinity. Not just Jewish ethnic affinity, I hasten to point out. Yes, we have a large number of Jewish people--many more than we have Arabs. And those Jewish people mostly strongly identify with Israel in the conflict . . . .

But America also has an influential Israel lobby because it has a much larger group of people who identify, quasi-ethnically, with Israel: evangelical Christians who think of themselves as in some way descended from the ten tribes of Israel. [As noted in the comments, these are Mormons, not evangelicals. - Φ] (Not to mention the lunatic fringe who hopes that the Israelis can in some way hasten the End Times. [These are the evangelicals, sadly. - Φ] As if God could be influenced by a sufficiently robust foreign policy.)

And then most of the rest of us, because almost all Americans see Israelis as sharing a common European cultural heritage that the Palestinians do not. (I believe Al-Qaeda agrees.)

Such identifications are, I'd wager, rooted deeply in our genes--our selfish alleles want to advance alleles more similar to them, which is why we tend to side with our family against our nation, our nation against foreigners, and foreigners against sabre-toothed tigers. Those ties are not all-powerful, of course, which is why mothers don't let their children kill all the other children on the block. But they are often decisive in complicated situations like the one in Gaza.

So we are the Israel lobby, to a greater or a lesser extent--all Americans who think of themselves as more like the Israelis than the Palestinians.

Read the whole thing. Megan, unfortunately, is pretty sanguine about how multicultural immigration has turned our foreign policy into little more than special interest pork. But still and all the most balanced treatment I've read on this subject.

UPDATE: For the record, and in the context of the Walt thought experiment she quotes, I should acknowledge that there is more than just affinity -- the Jews are like us, their adversaries not like us -- at work here. Israel benefits from the widespread perception that we share the same enemies, going back to at least the Beirut barracks bombing if not before, and including at a minimum Achille Lauro, Berlin, Lockerbie, Aden, and 9/11. Yes, I know: different groups with different grievences, perhaps, but all Moslems. Meanwhile, it very difficult to imagine circumstances in which Jews would murder my family and me for being Christians.