H.D.S. Greenway: The ethnic card
The Boston Globe
TUESDAY, MAY 9, 2006
BOSTON When professors John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago
and Stephen Walt of Harvard wrote their now-famous paper, “The Israel
Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” they knew there would be
controversy. Accusations of anti-Semitism came hard, fast and
unfairly.
Virtually no one who follows these matters denies that the American
Israel Public Affairs Committee has considerable influence. Some say
Aipac is Washington’s most powerful foreign policy lobby. Others, such
as Marvin Schick, president of New York’s Rabbi Jacob Joseph Yeshiva,
writing in The Jerusalem Post, call Aipac an overrated “bunch of
shvitzers [showoffs].”
The irony is, as Schick points out, “Aipac wants everyone to believe
that it is a powerhouse … [yet] we kvetch when others get the
message that is intentionally sent.”
Some lobbies are resource-driven. Think of the Saudis and oil. But
there is also a kin-country syndrome, in which nationals of one
country care deeply about the affairs of another because of ties of
blood, language or religion. Consider Russia’s pro-Serbian sentiments
when Yugoslavia fell apart, or the early recognition of Catholic
Croatia and Slovenia by Germany and Austria.
In America, diaspora politics has long played a role, and it’s not
just about Israel.
Lawrence Eagleburger, a longtime American diplomat who briefly served
as the first President Bush’s secretary of state, once told me that
“American foreign policy – more often than I think should be the case
– is affected … by ethnic politics. Some of the things we ended up
doing or not doing in Cyprus, for example, were purely and simply
because of the Greek lobby.”
Eagleburger said that there was no question that America ended up with
a Cyprus policy quite different from what Henry Kissinger wanted.
Cyprus had been an island divided between hostile Greek and Turkish
communities when a Greek faction overthrew the government of Greek
patriarch Archbishop Mikarios, setting off a chain of events that led
to a Turkish invasion and occupation of the northern part of Cyprus in
1974.
“The Greeks created the mess, not the Turks,” Eagleburger told me, and
in Kissinger’s view U.S. policy should have reflected that. But a
strong pro- Greek effort led by prominent Greek- Americans, some of
them big-time contributors to the Republican Party and Richard Nixon,
closed ranks and put up enough resistance to tilt U.S. policy toward
the Greeks. “If we were able to have been more neutral,” Eagleburger
said, “we might have been able to keep the Turks from being as
intransigent as they later became,” and the island might not have
remained divided as it is today. But “the Turks could never believe we
could have a balanced position … so the whole situation got locked
in cement.”
Northern Ireland is another example in which ethnic politics plays a
role. “Money and arms were flowing” from Irish-Americans to the Irish
Republican Army terrorists, Eagleburger said. “There is no question
that for a very long time Irish-Americans were able to keep the
U.S. from being effective in stopping weapons,” Eagleburger
said. “Legislation could have clamped down on this, but the
legislation never came.”
At the same time, however, once Britain and Ireland brought the
factions together to make peace, Irish- Americans were in the
forefront of helping to facilitate an agreement. The British
government recognizes this, and today having served in the Dublin
embassy has become almost a sine qua non for British consuls assigned
to Boston, among the most Irish cities in America.
The civil war in Sudan had resonance in the United States both among
African-Americans, who saw their kinsmen in the south being oppressed
by the Arab north, and among militant Christians who saw their
co-religionists being persecuted by Muslims.
According to Eagleburger, Armenian-Americans were very influential in
tilting American policy toward the newly independent Armenia in its
struggle against Azerbaijan in Nagorno-Karabakh in the ’90s.
Eagleburger is not alone in ranking Aipac, however, as the most
effective kin-country lobby in America. Some call it the National
Rifle Association of foreign policy. “Aipac works 24 hours a day, all
year,” says Eagleburger. He said that sometime he and his colleagues
at the State Department would go to Aipac for help on issues that had
nothing to do with Israel, simply because Aipac had such power in the
American Congress. Strong support for Israel is not limited to the
Jewish community.
In forming foreign policy, “you ignore ethnic politics at your peril,”
according to Eagleburger. And as Professor Mearsheimer says, that’s
“as American as apple pie.”
(H.D.S. Greenway’s column appears regularly in The Boston Globe.)