The Lobby: Jewish Political Power and American Foreign Policy

By Edward Tivnan. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987. 304 pages, $19.95 (cloth).

Reviewed by Andrew I. Killgore

"Yet each man kills the thing he loves...The coward does it with a kiss."—Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol

The three progressively more gripping levels of Edward Tivnan's The Lobby may be compared to three attractive women, each more fascinating than her predecessor. Or to immersion in the complex intermingling of Middle Eastern culture, religion, and history, with the insights gained from a study of each illuminating the study of the next. Tivnan's analysis of the role of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in keeping the Middle East at the focus of America's attention is equally compelling.

His intimation that AIPAC, the Israel lobby, is destroying Israel packs emotional wallop and evokes Irish playwright/poet Oscar Wilde's mournful observation that we kill what we love too much.

At the first level, Tivnan, a talented researcher and journalist, seems an innocent abroad, devoid of bias concerning organized American Zionism when he began his research, and resolutely maintaining a scholarly detachment as he continued. His dispassion in The Lobby has enabled him to produce a valuable short history of political Zionism, particularly its American manifestations.

He sorts out the ideological differences among such early Zionists as Ze'ev Jabotinsky and Chaim Weizmann and, in the US, Justice Louis Brandeis, Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, and Rabbi Stephen Wise. Tivnan also depicts AIPAC's emergence as the ruthless heart and soul of an Israel lobby willing and able to manipulate American politicians to do about anything on behalf of Israel.

As any recounting of the Arab-Israeli dispute and description of AIPAC's slavish support of Israel normally arouses a maelstrom of emotion, Tivnan's above-the-fray detachment excites admiration. This is replaced by annoyance, however, when he rather ungenerously dismisses other writings on the Jewish lobby as "not worth reading."

On a second level, Tivnan devotes 10 chapters to the relationships of Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Carter, and Reagan with AIPAC, the 1981 slugfest between the Reagan administration and AIPAC on the sale of AWACS planes to Saudi Arabia, and the millions of dollars pro-Israel political action committees (PACs) give to malleable American politicians.

Some flavor of the personal bitterness generated by Zionist machinations is found in Tivnan's AWACS chapter. For example, mild-mannered former President Gerald Ford, recruited by the Reagan administration to help in the AWACS fight, harshly demanded of a wavering senator, "Are we going to let the (expletive) Jews run American foreign policy?" Tivnan reprinted this colorful quotation from one of 43 confidential interviews among a total of nearly 200 on and off-the-record discussions. Although hostile reviewers may complain about such not-for-attribution discussions, they often elicit the whole truth—as the interviewee sees it, of course.

Another remarkable aspect of both the confidential and other interviews is that in them Zionists tear into other Zionists, their comments breaking the convention of Jewish public solidarity on the Israel issue. For example, Arthur Hertzberg, former president of the American Jewish Congress, says of the lobby: "The AIPAC people are barely Jewish. They...know nothing about Judaism, or Zionism for that matter...When it all comes crashing down, thanks to AIPAC, it'll be (us) to pick up the pieces."

At the third and genuinely exciting level, Tivnan makes a persuasive case that the lobby is destroying Israel. A measure of his artistry is that he does not appear to by trying to prove the point. Rather, he just scatters the evidence here and there throughout The Lobby.

Tivnan describes a symbiosis with a Catch-22 between AIPAC and Israel: Neither can live without the other, but in the long run, either will kill the other. Money is at the heart of the matter. Israel cannot live without three to four billion dollars a year in grant aid from the United States; AIPAC cannot raise that kind of money unless Israel seems beleaguered. Thus, Middle East peace efforts are viewed suspiciously by AIPAC. Effectively this means AIPAC supports Israeli hard-line, anti-peace forces in Israel.

Tivnan describes AIPAC Executive Director Tom Dine's unhappiness with former Prime Minister Menachem Begin's annexationist, no-negotiations posture. But Dine supported Begin just the same because opposition would have risked AIPAC's role as Israel's defender and might have cost Dine and other AIPAC staffers their prestigious and well-paid jobs. The author recalls the sad fate of BREIRA (Hebrew for "alternative"), in which a group of idealistic American Jews took a stand for peace and moderation in Israel. Slandered by Israel and its stooges in the United States as a "front for the PLO," BREIRA died aborning. Tivnan makes clear that BREIRA's fate has not been forgotten by other wavering American Zionists.

Resentment against Jewish power is already festering in Washington, Tivnan writes. Another of the author's confidential interviewees complains, "It's not that AIPAC is too powerful. The problem is that it's out of control. It is a self-stimulating machine with no corrective device. If you don't agree, you get savaged." Tivnan intimates that Israel is also being savaged in the process.

The Lobby offers its readers a lot of good new material and fresh ideas, including the most refreshing of all: that AIPAC may someday self-destruct.

Andrew I. Killgore, former US Ambassador to Qatar, is president of the American Educational Trust.