The journalist, Peter Oborne, could not believe his ears when, last summer, in the aftermath of Israel’s bloody invasion of Gaza, the leader of the British Conservative Party, David Cameron, praised Israel for striving to “protect innocent lives”. Cameron was addressing the annual dinner of Conservative Friends of Israel, the pro-Israel group in his party. Last week, in a groundbreaking Dispatches documentary for Britain’s Channel 4 television, trailed by an article in the Guardian newspaper, Oborne investigated the covert influence of Britain’s “Israel lobby”.
During the last two decades, the Labour Party, which has ruled Britain since 1997, has been hugely susceptible to Zionist influence. Soon after becoming an MP in 1983, Tony Blair (right) joined Labour Friends of Israel, acutely aware of the career benefits of so doing. His elevation to the leadership of the party and subsequent election as British prime minister in 1997 owed much to the extraordinary fund-raising endeavors on behalf of Blair and “New Labour” by the Jewish pop music tycoon, Lord Michael Levy.
It was Blair’s ambition to free the Labour Party from its traditional dependency on the trade unions. That he was liberating the party from the unions and rendering it beholden instead to donors with pugnaciously pro-Israel agendas did not bother him. For all his professed commitment to justice for the Palestinians, Blair has never uttered a word that could offend Zionist opinion. And yet Britain could soon have a government still more beholden to the Israel lobby than Blair and New Labour. Oborne believes that at least half of the Cameron’s shadow Cabinet are members of Conservative Friends of Israel. That Israel can expect unconditional support from a Cameron government is plain. Witness the refusal of shadow foreign secretary, William Hague, a politician not always loath to criticize Israel, to endorse the UN Goldstone Report alleging that Israel perpetrated war crimes and crime against humanity in Gaza, not to mention his party’s agreement never to apply the term “disproportionate” to Israeli military action.
OBORNE’S case is that clandestine funding of British political parties by Zionists ought to be anathema in a political culture, which upholds transparency and democratic accountability. It is no less repugnant, he maintains, that those parts of the British media, notably the BBC and The Guardian, that seek to present a balanced picture of the Middle East conflict, should be ceaselessly vilified by the Zionist lobby. Not that “hostile” coverage of Israel has curbed Zionist influence in the highest reaches of the British political establishment. Since 1997, Oborne observes, British foreign policy has been conducted as though British interests were identical to those of Israel and the United States. It seems incredible now that in 1981 Britain’s then Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher could have condemned Israel’s bombing of the Iraqi nuclear plant, Osirak, as a “grave breach of international law”.
The most remarkable thing about Oborne’s expose was that it was broadcast at all. Not long ago, for a journalist to speak out against the Israel lobby was tantamount to committing professional suicide. When, in the mid-1970s, the sometime Guardian Middle East correspondent, Michael Adams, coauthored the pioneering book, “Publish It Not”, on the behind-the-scenes lobbying of groups like Labour Friends of Israel, he consigned himself to journalistic oblivion. The same fate is unlikely to await the ebullient Oborne. Though now assured of a special place in Zionist demonology, he has been able to start a necessary debate about the subversion of the democratic process in Britain on behalf of a foreign power. The Guardian’s online “Comment is Free” forum is this week in uproar. The truth is that there is more scope for public candor on the subject of Israel than ever before. The publication in 2005 of the American academics John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s book “The Israel Lobby”, about Zionist influence over US policy-making, was an epoch-making event. The radical Israeli historian Shlomo Sand’s new book, “The Invention of the Jewish People”, is of similarly cardinal significance. These works — like Oborne’s documentary (which has been accompanied by a trenchant pamphlet) — testify to a sea change in the climate of Western intellectual, as well as general public opinion, vis-à-vis the boundaries of debate about the Jewish state.
SAND’S book challenges what he regards as the myth of the historic mass expulsion of the Jews from Palestine: The bulk of the Jewish diaspora, he contends, consisted not of genetic heirs of Palestinian Jews but of converts. However, the book is also illuminating in relation to the power of the Israel lobby. Sand writes that Israel’s strength now depends less on demographic increase than precisely on cultivating the loyalty of overseas Jewish organizations and communities. It would be a serious setback for Israel, he remarks, if all the Zionist lobbies were to immigrate into the “Holy Land”. It is much more useful for them to remain close to the centers of Western power.
Arguing that there is no such thing as a pure nation state, Sand maintains that the notion of Jews as a unique people with a special destiny is a self-serving fantasy. Israel’s problem is that at a time when Western democracies have embraced multiethnic national identities, defining themselves in inclusive terms as states of all their citizens, it insists on being a racially exclusive polity. In other words, the Israel lobby is trying to proclaim the Jewish state’s democratic credentials to Western publics for whom Israel’s constitutional essence has become a bizarre anachronism, a relic of outmoded attitudes. Sand fears that Israel’s regressiveness, its failure fully to enfranchise even the many Arabs who live in Israel itself, is inviting the kind of cataclysmic ethnic conflict that has raged in former Yugoslavia. “The Invention of the Jewish People” has just been published in English. This brilliant polemic is an eye-opening piece of historical deconstruction and a major contribution to the debate about the Palestine-Israel conflict.
