Joseph Massad is a serious critic of Israel and Zionism. There is much to learn from his work which I admire greatly.

Among many voices on the left his critique of the power and influence of the “Israel lobby” is the strongest and best argument that we should focus our attention and ire on US (and Western) imperial power and not on the influence of the “lobby”.

Massad’s argument, first developed in response to the famous Mearsheimer and Walt essay The Israel lobby in 2006, was published in Al Ahram in Egypt.

In my view while there is much food for thought in the pieces he has written there are also some problematic elements. In this piece, I discuss Massad’s latest article published by Middle East Eye on 16 July 2024.

First there are several “straw man” elements of his argument. Here are some things that he says appear to be poor substitutions for argument and evidence.

The seduction of this argument hinges on its exoneration of the US government from all the responsibility and guilt that it deserves for its policies in the Arab world.

But arguments for the importance of the power of Zionism do not hinge on exoneration of the US government. In fact, the main argument about the power of Zionism, at least on the left - is that it co-opts the US and gains massive support from the US for its genocidal plans. This does not in any way exonerate the bloodthirsty US power establishment. If it is the case that some US commentators are “seduced” by this alleged exoneration, this is hardly the case for most critics of Zionism and US foreign policy. Who are these putative fools that criticize the “lobby” in order to leave the US blame-free? Some on the left use this idea to attribute conservative political positions to Mearsheimer and Walt for example. Thus David Wearing, citing Massad, describes them as giving a “conservative alibi for Washington’s record on this issue”.

While it is clear that they are “realist” scholars, and thus conservatives of a sort, they are also critics of neoconservatism (a project of the Zionist movement) and it can hardly have escaped most critics of US foreign policy that Mearsheimer, in particular, and at some personal cost, has been amongst the most erudite critics of the NATO-led proxy war in Ukraine. Yes, Mearsheimer and Walt defended themselves as Zionists: Prof Mearsheimer told The Guardian in 2006. "We expected to be called anti-semites, even though both of us are philo-semites and strongly support the existence of Israel." But it is also the case that they are not uncritical of US foreign policy as anyone who has heard Mearsheimer opine on the question of Ukraine knows.

Massad goes on to say that the lobby power argument:

 seeks to shift the blame for US policies from the US onto Israel and its US lobby and gives false hope to many Arabs and Palestinians who wish America would be on their side instead of on the side of their enemies.

Who is it that believes the US would/could/will/shall take the side of the Palestinians? Certainly not left critics of Zionism. In fact, it is plain that we need to defeat not just Zionism but US imperialism as well. In fact, multipolarity and the concrete resistance to US power in Ukraine, Palestine, Yemen and Lebanon (and in other places too) is rapidly accelerating the contradictions which are hastening that decline. Good.

Obviously there are things that Massad says which are true such as: "the reality [is] that the US government has never supported national liberation in the Third World. The US record is one of being the implacable enemy of all national liberation groups, including European ones, from Greece to Latin America to Africa and Asia."

But it does not follow that "Why the US would then support Palestinian national liberation absent the Israel lobby is something this argument fails to address."

We - on the left - don't make any such argument, even by implication. The US will not support Palestinian liberation. In fact, the Liberation of Palestine will not only accomplish the defeat of Zionism, which is a world historical feat of some magnitude, but will also significantly weaken the already tottering US imperial hegemon.

Massad goes on to say: 'The Israel lobby plays the same role today that the China lobby played in the 1950s in support of Taiwan against the People's Republic of China, and the Cuba lobby still plays against Cuba's revolutionary government and in support of counter-revolutionary Cuban exiles.'

But on the contrary, the real distinction between the case of Palestine on one hand and Taiwan and Cuba on the other is that in neither of these latter cases was the lobby for regime change/genocide able to spend as much or - more important - infiltrate politics, society and culture as effectively as the Zionists have been able to do. The Cuban case may be the closest comparator, but the Cuban lobby was always - and remains - a long way from the power and influence of Zionism on US politics.

Massad argues that the case of the invasion of Iraq in 2003 supports his argument:

This is not to say that the lobby did not actively support the US-led war effort (it certainly did). Still, it was ultimately pushing for a war that was already desired and planned by other American political and economic imperial interests with far superior influence.

But Massad does not say who these other political and economic imperial interests are or how they affected this policy. Is he referring to the Neocon lobby for the invasion as part of this “other” coalition of interests? There are grounds for suspecting he does.

The area where Massad comes seriously adrift, thus revealing the underlying weakness of his understanding of the Zionist movement (as opposed to the “Israel lobby”), is when he suggests that it is ‘US politicians and billionaires’ who actually push the Zionist settler regime 'to embrace a more aggressive agenda'.

But the politicians and billionaires to whom he refers are overwhelmingly - like the Neocon movement for war in Iraq - Zionist infiltrators. Here is a signal case where the idea of the Israel lobby is far too narrow to understand the real dynamics of the power of the much wider Zionist movement.

Massad cites three pieces as evidence:

* The first is a piece for AP which details how Zionist assets in the House of Representatives worked together to rebuke President Biden for imposing a temporary pause on heavy weapons shipments to Israel. The assets were not pressuring Netanyahu, but Biden, so the source does not corroborate the claim.

* Second source is an Al Jazeera piece which reports: “A billionaire real estate tycoon in the United States is rallying support for a high-dollar media crusade to boost Israel’s image and demonize the Hamas armed group amid global pro-Palestinian solidarity protests.” Again this is not “US billionaires” pressuring Netanyahu, but rather Zionist assets working together to harass and defame the Palestine solidarity movement on behalf of the settler colony.

* Massad’s third source is a piece in the New Arab which he says is evidence that US billionaires are continuing to “incite” a more “aggressive agenda”. As can be seen from the headline, what this actually shows is one of the Zionist movement's key operatives in the US pressuring a US politician (Trump) to annex the West Bank. The headline is enough to show this: “Pro-Israel billionaire Miriam Adelson backs Trump's campaign, pushes for West Bank annexation”.

Overall, what this shows is that Massad misunderstands the infiltration of the Zionist movement in the US and elsewhere and thus wrongly writes of “US politicians and billionaires”, when these are plainly Zionist assets. It would appear that this is in part a result of his acceptance of the concept of the lobby as including only those lobby groups directly involved in trying to influence policy and not understanding that the Zionist movement is a broader and larger beast.

Massad is correct to say that 'The Israel lobby could not sell its message and would not have any influence if Israel were a communist or anti-imperialist country, or if Israel opposed US policy elsewhere in the world. Indeed, this would be a laughable proposition.'

But he errs when he says: 'That the Israel lobby is more influential than any other foreign-policy lobby in the US is not because it commands some fantastical power to steer the US away from its "national interest". If anything, it only proves how important Israel is to US grand strategy.'

Here he accepts the outsize influence of the Zionists, but explains it away as somehow showing the opposite - that their influence comes from their importance to US power. This smacks of fiat not fit. This neglects all of the research and scholarship which shows the way in which such power operates in practice.

Prof Massad goes on to minimize the power of the Zionists again when he explains its power away by effectively smearing “congressional leaders, policymakers, and university administrators” as harboring “antisemitic” attitudes. How else, he reasons, could they believe in the power of the lobby than by entertaining fantasies about the power of Jews as a collective.

In such a context, it does not matter if the lobby has real or imagined power.

As long as government leaders and, more notably, university administrators believe it does based on their antisemitic bias or objective assessments, it will remain effective and powerful.

No evidence is cited of these attitudes and I doubt any could be adduced that this “underpins” their belief in the power of the lobby. We know that actual Judeophobia is rare in the US and UK now and we also know that the lobby is vicious in its bullying and intimidation, as Prof Massad knows to his own cost. I don’t for a minute imagine that dark fantasies about Jewish power underpinned the decision of the University of Bristol to cave into the bullying and intimidation of the lobby which resulted in me being sacked in October 2021.

More fundamentally, as I have alluded to, Massad’s article neglects that the Zionist movement is a much larger beast than the lobby. To be fair to Massad, most of the literature, from the earliest books conceive of the lobby narrowly. The paradigm case is Mearsheimer and Walt who discuss the lobby mainly in terms of organizations aiming to influence US foreign policy. Thus we have index entries in the book on some 54 pro-Israel groups with 266 index entries in total, including the largest in order AIPAC (47), ADL (30), the Conference of Presidents (25), WINEP (19), ZOA (15), Israel Policy Forum (13), JINSA (11), American Jewish Committee (10) and all the rest under 10 entries. Of that list only one, the ZOA, is formally part of the Zionist movement being a member of the American Zionist Movement the official affiliate of the WZO in the US. Amongst the 54 groups there are another 9 groups which are formally Zionist with some 13 index entries amongst them. For those of you who ask if this is because there are more lobby groups than there are formally Zionist groups, the answer is no. If one lists all the rest of the members of the American Zionist Movement (which has 46 members), none of the rest are referred to in the book. These include most obviously the Jewish National Fund, one of the four pillars of the global Zionist movement and indeed the American Zionist Movement the umbrella federation which is the official WZO affiliate in the US. The JNF along with two other bodies (the Jewish Agency and Keren Hayesod) were created by the WZO which is the governing body of the movement. Together the four are referred to as the “National Institutions” by the Zionists. All four have affiliates or offices in more than 40 countries in the world and are headquartered in the same building - National Institutions House - in King George Street in Jerusalem/al Quds.

These obviously pro-Israel groups which are not really “the lobby”, are more correctly conceived of as the Zionist movement and they have other functions in addition to lobbying. The most important tasks to which they devote themselves are set out in a document formally adopted in 1978 the Duties of the Individual Zionist which is incumbent on every member of every Zionist organization. They include becoming a settler, pursuing the “program” of the movement; contributing money to the movement; to “strengthening Zionist influence” in the community.

What this means in practice is radicalization of Jewish children, youth and adults into fanatical ideological Zionists with effects in Palestine (becoming settlers; financially supporting or even joining the occupation forces), as well as in the US: being recruited by Zionist and “lobby” organizations and/or, crucially, infiltration of Zionists into elite positions in society in business/finance, politics and culture.

These latter people are referred to by Massad, as we have seen, as “US politicians and billionaires” but designating them as simply US citizens who happen to be pro-Zionist rather than Zionist infiltrators is - I submit - a mistaken approach.

As a result I fear that Joseph Massad has fallen into the opposite lapse in understanding to those he critiques with his straw man arguments. He concludes as follows:

The US government and its Western allies are the ones who bear full responsibility for abetting, supplying, and defending Israel's right to commit genocide against the Palestinians.

The efforts of the Israel lobby to have the US support Israel even more than it does is a complicitous act in the ongoing genocide, but it certainly is not the principal cause of this monstrous crime.

are complicit, indeed are directly supporting 

This passage appears to absolve the Zionists from responsibility for their planning and execution of the genocide of the Palestinians. Yes, of course, the Bloodthirst US elites are complicit and indeed are directly supporting and participating in the genocide. We must bring them and indeed the other war criminals and genocidaires in the UK, Germany, France and elsewhere to The Hague. But, it is also obvious that the Zionists should be there in very significant numbers. No absolution for the imperial Western powers, but equally no absolution for the Zionist movement which must be dismantled wherever in the world it raises its ugly head.