By Gerard Baker, March 30, 2007
America’s prejudices are a barrier to Middle East peace

The blowtorch of media scrutiny is steadily taking layers of gaudy paint off the happy caravan that is Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Last week his hometown newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, subjected some of the claims made in his compelling autobiography, Dreams from my Father, to the unforgiving audit of the fact-checker. It turns out that the title might have been even more appropriate than it seemed, since some of the incidents Mr Obama eloquently relates about his early life may have been more the stuff of idealised reverie than reality.

But all politicians embellish their life story a bit. No election can be won without an appealing “personal narrative”. If George Washington didn’t really cut down that cherry tree, then surely Mr Obama can be forgiven for misplacing his role in some of his earliest recollections of the civil rights movement.

Of much more interest is the flak that the Democratic senator is taking for some remarks he made about the Middle East. Hillary Clinton, his main opponent for the Democratic presidential nomination in next year’s election, has seized upon them as proof that the senator cannot be trusted with US national security nor as a true friend of Israel.

What exactly, was the young senator’s offence? Did he, in an unguarded moment of adolescent radicalism, say something nice about Yassir Arafat? Did he call on Israel to give back the occupied territories?

Here, for the record, is precisely what he said, in a speech in Iowa a few weeks ago: “Nobody is suffering more than the Palestinian people.”

The response to this little aside, the shower of invective heaped on Mr Obama from all sides of the political arena, is instructive and depressing. In American political debate, saying something sympathetic about the Palestinians is evidently now deemed unsayable. Even as mild and neutral an observation as noting that Palestinians are “suffering” is considered a gaffe somewhat akin to expressing a kindly word for KGB pensioners.

The potential political penalties for such dangerous talk are well demonstrated by Mr Obama’s own rather pitiful response to the incident. Under pressure for his remarks, his spokesman “clarified” them, saying that what Mr Obama meant was that Palestinians were suffering because of the cruelties of their own, Hamas-dominated leadership. Phew! Thank goodness he cleared that one up. We thought for a horrible moment he might have been offering just the minutest criticism of Israeli policy.

It is sadly true, as America’s critics contend, that US debate about the Middle East is constrained within an impossibly narrow field of discussion. In fact it is striking that it is much easier for an Israeli to say things critical of the Israeli Government than it is for an American to offer the same critique. No one questions the anti-terrorist bona fides of those who express concern for the plight of the Palestinians there.

A popular view outside America, occasionally expressed inside the US, is that the limits to debate about the Middle East are set by some powerful group called the Israel Lobby. This shadowy bunch, depending on your favoured conspiracy theory, either bankrolls all American politicians or plants its own members in critical positions inside the US Government. No politician dare step out of line from what is decreed acceptable by the Lobby. Last year two academics gave public voice to this view in a paper that quickly earned notoriety.

But fixation on the Israel lobby is not only misplaced and, with its evocation of wealthy bankers and unscrupulous political consultants, just a tiny bit antiSemitic. It also misses the real reasons that the US can’t seem to have a sensible discussion now about the Middle East.

That there is an Israel lobby in American politics is not really in dispute. In a political system as vast and complex as America’s, all kinds of groups seek to influence the outcome of the policy debate. There is also an Ireland lobby, a Taiwan lobby, and for all I know a Liechtenstein lobby. The Israel lobby is certainly among the more influential, but its influence is still much less than its critics think, and much, much less important than a range of factors that keep politicians on the straight and narrow with regard to the Middle East.

Some of these reasons are to do with internal political developments long in the making. The rise of evangelical Christianity as a political force, especially within the Republican Party, has something to do with it. The belief that the Jews must be returned to the Biblical lands of Judaea and Samaria before the world can end has driven up support for an aggressive Israeli approach to its neighbours in the Holy Land.

Those of us who are not evangelical Zionists will feel a little queasy about that idea. But there are two good reasons why Americans are sensitive about criticism of Israel that have nothing to do either with the power of the mysterious lobby or with the millennarian theology of certain protestant groups.

Most Americans, whatever their religious or political views, feel a special solidarity with Israel. Part of it is to do with strong similarities in national consciousness, a sense that both America and Israel were founded as refuges for persecuted national Americans believe — rightly, as it happens — that if it hadn’t been for US intervention, the Holocaust might have succeeded in annihilating every last Jew from the earth. They feel — again, correctly — that without staunch US support for the past 40 years, Israel would almost certainly have ceased to exist. Since September 11, 2001, this sense of solidarity has only deepened. The same jihadism that wants to destroy Israel, and has murdered thousands of Jews over the decades, now targets America and its people.

But none of this should be allowed to prevent a proper debate in America about the Middle East. The lesson of Mr Obama’s “gaffe” is that the rules of American politics mean it is impossible for politicians to express sympathy for Palestinians in their plight or to argue that Israel must bear at least some responsibility for alleviating it. Playing by those rules might pave the way to the White House. It will never smooth the way to Middle East peace.