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When Ethnic Lobbies Collide: Jews, Arabs, and the 2008 Election

The Jewish-American lobby is going to get trounced by the Arab-American lobby, says David Forman in the Jerusalem Post. If it doesn't happen in the upcoming election, it'll happen eventually. With the next presidential election already heating up, American Jewish … Read More

By / May 11, 2007

The Jewish-American lobby is going to get trounced by the Arab-American lobby, says David Forman in the Jerusalem Post. If it doesn't happen in the upcoming election, it'll happen eventually.

With the next presidential election already heating up, American Jewish influence will be further challenged. With heavy Arab-American communities in Michigan, Illinois and California – pivotal states in any national election – it will be interesting to see whether America's next president will continue to give preferential treatment to Jewish and Israel concerns.

As the American-Arab community grows in numbers and confidence, it will increasingly be American Muslims who will influence US foreign policy vis-a-vis the Middle East.

The article reads like a heroic non-sequitur, with Forman spending the first several paragraphs explaining that the idea of “The Lobby” is “antisemitic propaganda,” and the rest of the article lamenting that our Lobby is about to get pwned by their Lobby. He also gives us plenty of dubious Islam-is-irredeemable boilerplate (“Pluralism is not part of the Islamic tradition. There is no such thing as a Reform Muslim.”). And oh yeah, intermarriage: that’s a problem!

But hidden amidst all the noise is a plausible argument, which goes like this: In the past, pro-Israel activists have succeeded in drawing attention to Israeli interests. But that increased attention only helped when Israeli interests also served American interests. So now our problem now is twofold. One: pro-Israel activists are increasingly outgunned by pro-Arab activists, both in numbers and conviction. Two: Israel no longer effectively serves American interests, as evidenced by their failure to curb Iran's Mini-Me, Hizballah. So it’s a perfect storm. The America-Israel relationship may be headed for the shitter.

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  • Michael Weiss

    I've never understood the idea of a "lobby" representing an entire nation or ethnic group. Can AIPAC really be said to stand for the interests of all Israelis, a good percentage of whom are Arab-Muslim, Christian, Druze, etc.? Can any native Israeli organization, for that matter?

    As for the Jewish Lobby's dreaded rival… Saying that you represent "Islamic" or "Arab" interests is sort of like saying you're a student of human nature — it's absolutely meaningless without an articulation of the kind of specific interests that would tear apart any organization large enough to wield such influence in the first place.

    I can't wait to see how these silly little skirmishes over institutional penis envy are going to play out among the feverish of mind. Those who think that AIPAC supposedly clamored for war in Iraq will have to explain how some prominent Iraqis in the United States and Great Britain clamored for same. Have two warring lobbies already become sinister bedfellows?

  • Joey Kurtzman

    Dan, Forman throws a sop to these things by saying, "At any rate, Arab-Americans are still considered outsiders. Particularly after 9/11, attempts on their part to blend into the American mainstream are more difficult than ever."

    But aggression and appeasement can sometimes go hand in hand, carrots and sticks wielded simultaneously. Europe's disposition towards its Muslim communities is a tangle of insult (no hijabs in public buildings, si vous plais!) and obsequiousness (but if someone insults the hijab as they explain why you should take it off, ought that to be hate speech, perhaps?).

    So I don't think it's difficult to imagine a future in which the civil liberties of Muslim-Americans are under assault, but foreign policy in the Middle East is influenced by the various grievances of Muslim-American foreign policy activists.

  • Dan Freeman

    I simply can't imagine this heroic reversal of fortune.  Right now American sentiment is so strongly stacked against Muslims that the federal government can run discriminatory immigratoin enforcement programs without anyone so much as sneezing (targeting by country of origin provides superficial cover).  The Council on American-Islamic Relations – a hybrid between AIPAC and the ADL – gets routinely lambasted as only a stone's throw away from the State Department's list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations.  I'm not saying these sentiments are right – as a matter of fact I strongly disagree with nearly all of it – but as a matterof empirical fact, America is not going to suddenly tune to the interests of Arab-American and other Muslim-American communities at the expense of so-called "Jewish Interests."  And in any case, the main interests that most Muslim-American organizations are pushing for right now is simply freedom from discrimination, a cause with which most Jews (at least those to the left of the editorial board of the NY Sun) can agree.

  • Joey Kurtzman

    Baabs, well that's one of the questions, isn't it? Will the Muslim-American lobby eventually surpass the Jewish-American lobby? He (and others) argue that it will, because Muslims will have increasingly greater numbers and already show greater commitment and ideological unanimity. Why are you so confident that he's wrong, and that AIPAC won't be surpassed "anytime soon?"