Beyond Pressure Politics and Linkage:
A Self-Lobbying Interest Group
Scholars have long utilized variations of the pluralist model to explain the role of ethnic interest groups in U.S. foreign policy. Studies of Jewish political influence in the foreign policy sphere generally focus on the community’s lobbying efforts at the Congressional or White House level to affect policy.
I take a different approach by examining how the organized Jewish community lobbied itself as well as the Government of Israel in support of the U.S. approach to resolving the Arab-Israel conflict. These self-lobbying efforts were influenced by, and contributed to, changing perceptions regarding the essential nature of the conflict. Intra-communal lobbying, I argue, was facilitated by episodes of political suasion (manipulation and agenda setting).
This case study reveals the Jewish community as both a target of lobbying and a practitioner of self-lobbying. In seeking to explain why Jewish lobbying activities succeed or fail, previous case studies have tended to view the community as a homogeneous political entity. This paper will show a very different set of dynamics by illuminating inner cleavages.
This chapter describes the methodological approach and thematic framework I take in analyzing the role of the American Jewish leadership in the U.S. decision to negotiate with the PLO. I make the argument that standard approaches to the study of ethnic interest groups are not particularly revealing in this instance. But first, it is necessary to say a few words about the case study format.
CASE STUDY METHODOLOGY
The research strategy of this paper is the descriptive case study.1 The case study approach is adopted here because it is highly suitable to understanding “how” the organized Jewish community influenced U.S.-PLO dialogue policy and “why” American policymakers took Jewish involvement in the peace process seriously.
A frequent criticism of the case study approach pertains to the problem of “generalizability.” One practitioner responds that case studies, like experiments, are generalizable to theoretical propositions and not to populations or universes: “In this sense, the case study, like the experiment, does not represent a ‘sample,’ and the investigator’s goal is to expand and generalize theories (analytic generalizations) and not to enumerate frequencies (statistical generalization).”2
The features of this study’s research design were enumerated in the Introduction. They include: questions and propositions posed by the study regarding the role of the organized Jewish community in the U.S. decision to “talk” to the PLO; units of analysis specified as the Presidents Conference, internal opposition, outside elite and peace camp; and time boundaries delineated as 1967-1988. In an effort to link the data to the propositions, the narrative will present a pattern of actions by the organized Jewish leadership and posit their relationship to the propositions.
Edwin Block confronts the charge that case studies risk yielding little of political science value, ostensibly, because they report on nonrepresentative situations:
Representativeness is related to frequency, to ordinariness, to regularity. On the other hand some actions of government and politics . . . have great irreversible effects on the viability of a nation and the state of human society. Such actions are, both in life and by definition, unusual (not to say unique). . . . Even if one eliminates from consideration the value of momentousness and great impact on human society, the disciplinary implications of unqualified application of the representativeness criterion are forbiddingly severe . . .3
It is nevertheless my hope that this case study will be “generalizable” to other interest groups where (a) a controversial policy is implemented only after elements of the interest groups most affected have allowed themselves to be coopted; (b) interest groups take positions different from what might be expected; and (c) changes in perception and political manipulation may be said to have contributed to an outcome.
Among the distinctive qualities identified by Edwin A. Block that a case study should contain are: (1) A focused description of the forces, conditions, and sequences that led to, or affected, a particular outcome. (2) Accentuating dynamic sequences and relationships, as opposed to static analysis. (3) A compact time period under review. (4) A sense of how the principal characters perceived the events as they were occurring. (5) Material based on primary sources including interviews. (6) A solid portrayal of how real-world politics works, whether it fits existing theory or not, combined with an ability to “wrest significant order from the complex hurly-burly of real life.” And (7) enough data to put the reader on a plane of equal factual knowledge with the author prior to offering analysis and interpretations.4 I believe this study manages to follow Block’s criteria.
Case studies are primarily useful, according to Block, in exploring real-world politics, organizations and personalities; in allowing for the utilization of appropriate methodologies as an integral component of the research; and lastly, as having pedagogic value.5 Block points out that, “The single case by definition is not comparative, and the impossibility of using a single case to prove a hypothesis is widely accepted.”6 Still, case study data “can be additive and transferable.”7
I acknowledge what Harry Eckstein called attention to in his 1958 pressure group case study of the British Medical Association, namely, that “case studies do not ‘prove’ anything; their purpose is to illustrate generalizations . . .”8
Interest Group Theory Limitations
Why was the decision to “talk” to the PLO so very difficult and drawn out? Moreover, why did it take three Administrations some thirteen years to shift gears on this issue? Was the delay ascribable to the strength of the Jewish lobby? Was the December 1988 “talk” decision a defeat for the Jewish lobby? I argue that a standard analysis of this issue (interest group vs. government policy) and the usually helpful theoretical approaches fail to provide satisfactory answers to these questions.
To date, most scholars who focus on domestic sources of United States foreign policy have, understandably, relied upon interest group theory.9 Under the rubric of domestic sources of U.S. foreign policy, previous studies have tended to focus on how the Jewish lobby sought to influence Congress or the White House on Israel’s behalf. In these studies, a unified Jewish community confronted a determined Administration – say the Carter Administration in the case of the 1978 F-15 sale or the Reagan Administration in the 1981 AWACS battle – and lost.
One notable alternative research approach was undertaken by Etta Zablocki Bick, who studied the linkage role of the Jewish community between 1956 and 1968 as a transnational linkage group:
I found that they acted not only to assist the Israeli government’s decision makers convert their outputs or decisions into inputs into the American system, but they also acted to convert the outputs or decisions of the American government into inputs or influences on the Israeli system. The linkage actor was actually a double linkage actor and linkage activity occurred in reverse as well. . . . Specifically, my research for the years 1956-1968 indicates that American Jews acted in a dual linkage role, i.e., the Israeli government utilized its ties with American Jewish leaders and prominent private individuals to enlist them in an effort to influence American policymakers on issues of interest to Israel. The American government likewise took advantage of the relationship between Israeli leaders and American Jews and, less successfully, tried to enlist American Jewish support and assistance on matters of interest to the United States.10
By 1988 the influence equation was turned on its head. This study will demonstrate the politically crucial role Jewish leadership elements played in undermining support for Likud-led Israeli governments.
The approach I have chosen is warranted because the U.S.-PLO dialogue issue offers a number of original theoretical challenges and opportunities. In this instance, the battle did not substantively involve Congress; here the community itself was anything but determined and united about continuing a confrontation with the Administration. Here, too, the issue is one of a much higher order entirely. At stake is not a policy action but a fundamental shift in political orientation.
Because of the positions they took, in this particular instance, the interest group model does not adequately explain “how” and “why” the American Jewish leadership affected U.S.-PLO policy. A more suitable approach here is to focus on (a) political manipulation (suasion and agenda setting by several of the parties) and (b) the changing perceptual framework which influenced, and was influenced by, the Jewish leadership. Administration and Jewish leadership activities are sifted to determine whether they embody elements of political suasion. The criteria for identifying political suasion are described later in this chapter. The perceptual yardstick revolves largely around the issue of Arab and PLO intentions. Specifically, the thinking of the Jewish leadership regarding the goals and intentions of Israel’s foes can be discerned from the public statements they proffered.
While not taking the conventional approach, this study nevertheless benefits from the work done by interest group scholars. The following concise synopsis outlining the interest group approach is offered with the objective of presenting this study in an overall theoretical context.
THE STUDY OF INTEREST GROUPS
Gabriel A. Almond suggests that political science is currently experiencing its third wave of “interest group” studies.11 The first wave “was a Sociological revolt against legal formalism” and incorporates the work of Arthur F. Bentley. A continuous second wave, led by David Truman, “sought to spread the word of empirical political science research and to encourage an escape from formalism and ideologism in European and Third World studies.”12 The third wave, which began in the 1970s, was concerned with developing coherent theoretical approaches to the study of “neocorporatist” and other pursuits involving “the interaction of the major economic interest groupings” and bureaucracy, according to Almond.13
Scholars interested in understanding events which take place within the American political system have identified four broad theories: Traditional democratic theory, derived largely from the work of Robert A. Dahl in his Preface to Democratic Theory; Pluralism, or group theory, tied closely to David B. Truman’s The Governmental Process; variations of Elite and Class theory derived from the works of Max Weber and (to a lesser extent in the American sphere) Karl Marx; and more recently, Hyperpluralism, or pluralism “gone sour,” associated with the scholarship of Theodore Lowi’s The End of Liberalism.14
The political role of groups has interested scholars since the days of James Madison. In his seminal work, The Governmental Process, David B. Truman defined an interest group as “collections of people with some common characteristic,” interacting “with some frequency on the basis of their shared characteristics.” He went on further to define an “interest group” as “any group that, on the basis of one or more shared attitudes, makes certain claims upon other groups in the society for the establishment, maintenance, or enhancement of forms of behavior that are implied by the shared attitudes.”15 L. Harmon Zeigler and G. Wayne Peak note: “An interest . . . is a desire for, or concern over, either an abstract or a material political object.”16 They proceed to define “interest group” as “an organized social aggregate which seeks political goods that it is incapable of providing for itself.”17 Scholars in the Truman mold seek to explain what groups do; furthermore, they argue that one cannot really understand the continuity of the American political system without reference to groups. Truman postulated that, “The frequency, or rate, of interaction will in part determine the primacy of a particular group affiliation in the behavior of the individual.”18 A group that makes claims on the political system is transformed into an interest group. These claims are often economic through they can be ideological from the start. Government’s role is to mediate among competing groups. Internal cohesion is closely tied to a group’s effectiveness. Yet, Truman’s dictum that “complete stability within any interest group is a fiction” seems tailored to describe the Jewish polity.19 In the instance under study, the Jewish leadership made contradictory claims on the political system while jockeying for positions of influence. Government, in the final analysis, did not so much mediate among them as coopt those it thought useful.
Groups compete at all levels of government including the executive branch.20 But the executive branch is not merely the passive recipient of lobbying. Congressional Quarterly takes cognizance of an administration’s power to lobby. “No one else can organize the pressure as thoroughly or sustain it as long as the president.21 This pressure from the administration is aimed at the Congress. However, as this study will demonstrate, it can also be targeted at a domestic interest group.
Interest Groups and U.S. Foreign Policy
“American society is relentlessly pluralistic,” Charles W. Kegley, Jr. and Eugene R. Wittkopf note. Moreover, the domestic underpinnings of U.S. foreign policy have long been recognized.22 These include what Cecil V. Crabb, Jr. has called “the American ethos,” namely, that the unique American characteristics of idealism, morality and utopianism combined with shades of isolationism shape what this country does abroad.23 Equally well understood, in the words of James N. Rosenau, is that the “foreign policy of governments is more than simply a series of responses to international stimuli, that forces at work within a society can also contribute to the quality and contents of its external behavior.”24 Efforts to influence the system may be viewed as “inputs to the foreign policy-making process.” In the words of Kegley and Wittkopf, interest group inputs are converted into system outputs.
We can think of foreign policy as the goals that the nation’s officials seek to realize abroad, the values that give rise to those goals, and the means or instruments through which they are pursued. Conceptualized as the outputs of the process that converts domestic influences into goals and means, foreign policy (or, perhaps preferably, policies) is typically multifaceted, ranging from discrete behaviors linked to specific issues to recurring patterns of behavior that define the continuous efforts of the United States to cope with the environment beyond its borders. Importantly, however, neither discrete events nor broad policy patterns are likely to be accounted for adequately by reference to only one explanatory factor.25
The People
The key institutional players in the development and implementation of U.S. foreign policy are the president and his executive agencies. Though Congress plays a significant role, it is seldom in the driver’s seat in matters of foreign policy. While U.S. foreign policy is developed in the context of an open political process, most observers accept the fact that “the people” do not direct American foreign policy. At the same time, however, students of U.S. foreign policy tend to acknowledge that it is hard to sustain a particular policy in the face of persistent public opposition.26 Michael Clough argued recently that “the people” are taking control of U.S. foreign policy from the “wise men” largely because of the technology of modern communications as well as demographic changes.27 But this study found, working with a subset population group, that the opinion of “the people” is malleable.
Various groups participate in the development of U.S. foreign policy. These include business, labor, agricultural interests, the “military-industrial complex,” and ethnic minorities. While I believe it is overstated, Crabb’s description of the pro-Israel lobby is worth noting: “By many criteria, the Zionist lobby must be ranked among the most resourceful, skillful, and perhaps successful examples of pressure group activity witnessed in the annals of American diplomacy.”28
A number of scholars have addressed the limits of pressure group influence on U.S. foreign policy. After having reviewed the literature, Bernard C. Cohen suggested that: “The weight of current judgement is . . . that interest groups of all kinds, including those that are economic in nature, have little influence on issues of security policy.”29 Furthermore, Cohen asserts, to have any real chance of success, interest groups must argue convincingly that their position is in the national interest. Mitchell Bard found that, in the case of the Israel lobby, success depends largely on the locus of decision making.
The data shows that the president is more likely to support the lobby when the locus of decision was Congress (57 percent), than the White House (47 percent). . . . The case studies provided evidence that there is a difference in lobby success depending on the policy content. . . . The results showed that presidents are very supportive on economic issues (61 percent), but oppose the lobby on security issues 54 percent of the time, and split their preferences evenly on political issues. . . .30
Ethnic Interest Groups
The array of literature on ethnic interest groups and U.S. foreign policy is vast. Literature relating to the Arab-Israel struggle, scholarly and popular, is in itself voluminous. But precious little of this material illuminates the goings-on within the community. The most important exception to the general pattern of ignoring intra-group dynamics involves scholarship of the Irish American community.
In Irish-Americans in the American Foreign Policy Making Process, Robert J. Thompson and Joseph R. Rudolph, Jr. examine the relative lack of success of the Irish-American community in the foreign policy arena. They ask why Irish efforts to use as leverage the threat of blocking close British-American relations unless their concerns about Northern Ireland are addressed have been ineffectual. Thompson and Rudolph attribute this failure to a number of factors including: divisions within the Irish-American community; internal disputes among pro-Irish Republican Army supporters in the United States; assimilation among Irish-Americans into the larger population; the failure of Irish-American elected officials to champion the cause of British withdrawal from Ireland; the fact that there appears to be no clear resolution to the Irish problem; and, that their cause has no natural ally abroad.31 Perhaps my own case study can serve as a foundation for students who want to do a comparative analysis on the role intra-communal divisions play in the foreign policy activities of Irish and Jewish Americans.
Mohammed E. Ahrari, in Ethnic Groups and United States Foreign Policy, says that hyperpluralism in the American political system allows groups to be quite active without actually accomplishing very much. “At no time in the foreseeable future is any ethnic group likely to determine the American foreign policy toward its old country . . . that prerogative, despite the growing nature of hyperpluralism, is destined to stay with the president, his top national security aides, and Congress.”32 Ahrari identifies several “power characteristics” that can help gauge the impact of interest groups’ interventions on foreign policy:
Congruence of strategic interests promoted by an ethnic group and the U.S. strategic interest toward that group’s old country.
Degree of acculturation without actual assimilation on the part of the ethnic group.
The degree of group homogeneity.
With regard to American Jews, Ahrari concludes: “There is no doubt that Jewish Americans are not only likely to maintain their high pace of activities, but also most likely to sustain their power quotient.”33
In Ethnic Groups, Congress and American Foreign Policy, Paul Y. Wantanabe’s case study outlines the strategies, techniques and resources Greek Americans employed during the Cyprus crisis. Wantanabe investigated the sources, conduct and consequences of the organized Greek American community’s efforts to influence foreign policy. He found that the ability to influence the foreign policy agenda depends on a variety of factors including resources applied and tactics utilized. Ethnic groups invariably claim, among other things, that the interests of the United States are in harmony with the cause they are espousing. Ultimately, in this particular instance, he determined that Greek-American efforts to influence Congress created more tumult than tangible successes.34
“The national interest is not simply the sum of our special interests and attachments,” Senator Charles McC. Mathias, Jr. noted pointedly in his critical essay, “Ethnic Groups and Foreign Policy,” published some years ago in Foreign Affairs Quarterly. Mathias also offered a number of penetrating scholarly insights about what makes groups effective or ineffective. Groups must have a strong indigenous political base to have any hope for influence. He says that “the once formidable ‘China lobby,’ now a Taiwan lobby, failed to mount an effective campaign against the Carter Administration’s decision in late 1978 to transfer American recognition from the Republic of China to the Peoples Republic of China.” Mathias offers that “they might have been highly effective if these groups had won the united support of an aroused Chinese-American community.”35 In the Irish case he found that the high level of moderation on the part of the Irish Government as well as Irish-American elected officials removed the prospect of allowing the issue to disrupt British-American relations. From the vantage point of the early 1980s he suggested that interest groups must have reasonable goals and, therefore, the East European ethnic lobby could not succeed because the liberation of these countries “cannot be achieved without incurring the risk of World War III.”36 Turning to the Greek lobby’s efforts to embargo American weapons to Turkey, he notes that there were three million Greek-Americans compared to 45,000 Americans of Turkish origin. Still, “intensive efforts by President Ford and Secretary of State Kissinger culminated in congressional approval in October 1975 of a partial lifting of the arms embargo against Turkey.”37 Lest his criticism be misconstrued, he writes:
The point should not be overlooked: for all the technique involved, and despite frequently exaggerated claims and arguments, neither Greek nor Jewish lobbies would command the support they do in Congress and with the American people if their case did not have substantial merit.
Still, he suggests wryly that congressional support of Israel “has been measurably reinforced by the knowledge that political sanctions will be applied to any who fail to deliver.”38 Finally, and with implications for the subject of this study, he concludes:
The “secret weapon” of ethnic interest groups is neither money nor technique, which is available to other interest groups as well, but the ability to galvanize for specific political objectives the strong emotional bonds of large numbers of Americans to their cultural or ancestral homes. . . . Ethnic advocacy represents neither a lack of patriotism nor a desire to place foreign interests ahead of American interests; more often it represents a sincere belief that the two coincide.39
U.S. Jews and Foreign Policy
There is no dearth of literature detailing and analyzing efforts by the organized Jewish community to influence U.S. foreign policy on the Middle East. Doctoral dissertations and other scholarly works on the subject tend to fall into one of several broad categories. Representative of the literature are:
1.Jewish Influence – Quantitatively, this appears to be the area where most work has been done. This literature includes: Michael Reiner’s The Response of the Organized Jewish Community to American Policy in the Middle East 1957-1967;40 and Domestic Political Interests and American Policy in the Middle East: Pro-Israel, Pro-Arab and Corporate Non-Governmental Actors in the Making of American Foreign Policy, 1966-1971, where Robert H. Trice argued that interest groups have strong but by no means controlling influence on American Middle East policy.41 Richard Alan Balboni offered A Study of the Efforts by American Zionists to Influence the Formulation and Conduct of U.S. Foreign Policy During the Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower Administrations;42 David Howard Goldberg wrote on Ethnic Interest Groups as Domestic Sources of Foreign Policy: A Theoretical and Empirical Inquiry, examining this issue within the Canadian political arena.43 Then there is Steven Fred Windmueller’s American Jewish Interest Groups: Their Role in Shaping United States Foreign Policy in the Middle East. A Study of Two Time Periods: 1945-1948, 1955-1958.44
IB. American Jews as Conduits – The work of Etta Bick Zablocki, mentioned earlier, in Ethnic Linkage and Foreign Policy: A Study of the Linkage Role of American Jews in Relations Between the United States and Israel, 1956-1968, laid some of the groundwork for the present case study. Bick Zablocki is concerned with “boundary-crossing” and “transnational activities” on behalf of Israel.45 Her work applies “linkage behavior” as it is defined by Karl Deutsch, Robert Trice and James Rosenau. American Jewish leaders, she concludes, “acted not only to assist the Israeli government’s decision makers convert their outputs or decisions into inputs into the American system, but they also acted to convert the outputs or decisions of the American government into inputs or influences on the Israeli system. The linkage actor was actually a double linkage actor and linkage activity occurred in reverse as well.”46
Bick Zablocki calls for additional scholarship along similar lines, saying it “would be interesting to study the role of American Jews as linkage actors” during the more troubled post-1973 era when “negotiations between the United States and Israel on withdrawal from territories occupied by Israel and mutually acceptable conditions for peace talks have strained relations between the two countries.”47 In a sense, this work is a response to Bick Zablocki’s challenge.
2.Lobbying – Efforts by Jews to lobby Congress are studied by Marvin C. Feuerwerger’s Congress and Israel Foreign Aid Decision Making in the House of Representatives, 1969-1976.48 Mitchell Geoffrey Bard uses The Water’s Edge and Beyond: Defining the Limits to Domestic Influence on United States Middle East Policy, to develop a scheme for predicting the prospects of lobbying efforts.49 There are also works aimed at the general reader. Edward Tivnan’s The Lobby is a critical study of the America-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). A Peace Now supporter, Tivnan challenges the premises of old-style pro-Israel sentiment within the Jewish community.50
2B. Arms Sales Lobbying – Typical of this genre is the work of Marshall Hershberg who wrote on Ethnic Interest Groups and Foreign Policy; A Case Study of the Activities of the Organized Jewish Community in Regard to the 1968 Decision to Sell Phantom Jets to Israel.51
2C. Soviet Jewry Lobbying – Paula Stern, in Water’s Edge, examined Jewish efforts to deny the Soviet Union “most favored nation” status as a tactic aimed at influencing Soviet emigration policies toward Jews.52
3.Jewish Attitudes Toward Israel – Charles Liebman authored Pressure Without Sanctions.53 Kissing Through Glass: The Invisible Shield Between Americans and Israelis by Joyce Starr examines the changing nature of the relationship.54
4.Propaganda/Opinion/Media – Michael Segal wrote A Study in Persuasion: The Arab and Israeli Propaganda Campaign in America;55 Ralph Lee Savage, Israeli and American Jewish Attitudes in 1971 on the Future of Israel’s Conquered Territories: A Comparative Analysis;56 Edward Aloysius Padelford, The Regional American Press: An Analysis of Its Reporting and Commentary on the Arab-Israel Situation.57 This sub-speciality also benefited from the work of scholars in related disciplines. For example, Michael Alan Siegel and Jerry Charles Gephart wrote a joint dissertation entitled A Study in Persuasion: The Arab and Israeli Propaganda Campaigns in America.58
5.Internal Dynamics – In my estimation, the area that now deserves the most attention and has received the least involves the goings-on within the Jewish polity. To the best of my knowledge, the only post-1973 work that has as its central focus intra-communal cleavages is Marla Brettschneider’s The Liberal Roots of Group Theory: A Case Study in American Jewish Community.59 That is not to say that previous students of Jewish politics have been oblivious to the issue. Amy Jill Higer, for example, wrote her Master’s thesis on Dual-Loyalty and Public Dissent: The American Jewish Community and Israel, in which she identified areas of tension between American Jews and Israel.60 Both Higer and Brettschneider view Israeli policies as a “dilemma” and warn against “silencing” American Jewish dissent. I am more interested in understanding how the changes in the perceptual environment gradually created these “dilemmas” in the first place.
* * * * * * *
The level of analysis in this study is the American Jewish leadership as it operated across political systems. In describing non-state actors in world politics, Russett and Starr refer to “private organizations operating within a nation-state, such as interest groups,” and “transnational organizations.”61 These boundary crossing entities influence other actors in the international system.62 Since I am particularly concerned with inner factors contributing to changes in interest group behavior, my plan is to frame this study inside the American political system.
Political “Manipulation” or “Suasion”
At the very outset of the U.S. commitment, in 1975, not to negotiate with the PLO, U.S. policy makers established an agenda which limited what was actually expected of the PLO. Casting aside the PLO Covenant as a yardstick for evaluation the group’s mission, the U.S. established a more realistic goal. For the next thirteen years, the focus shifted to whether Arafat would enunciate certain “magic words.” This political strategy, in my view, embraces political manipulation or suasion. For purposes of exposition, I shall use the terms “suasion” and “manipulation” interchangeably. Suasion involves “the act of persuading by appealing to one’s sense of morality.”63 In this case, the relative virtues of Israel and the PLO underwent redefinition.
A political strategy related to decision making, both the practice and analysis of political manipulation, is, admittedly, as much art as science. So, it is no surprise that scholars who study bargaining and decision making behavior in an effort to discover whether, and to what extent, political manipulation contributed to an outcome, find themselves constrained in the first place in defining the concept and, secondly, in actually trying to document its presence. Still, it is worth recalling that science is “systematized knowledge derived from observation.”64
William H. Riker has coined the neologism “heresthetics” to explain what he means by political manipulation. “Heresthetics,” says Riker, “is about structuring the world so you can win.”
. . . if choice depends in part on the way it was chosen, then politicians can reasonably expect to change the outcome if they can change the way that questions are posed, or the considerations that influence participants’ judgement . . .65
Political players do this by strategic decision making, controlling the agenda, and manipulating the dimensions of an issue. According to Riker: “For a person who expects to lose on some decision, the fundamental heresthetical device is to divide the majority with a new alternative, one that he prefers to the alternative previously expected to win.”66 For Riker, what comes out of the decision-making process is “some unanticipated combination of the wills of participants and of the way the relevant politicians have set the machine to implement their own wills.”67
The role of political manipulation in foreign policy decision making has been raised, in another context, by Zeev Maoz:
Do reasonably smart, politically experienced leaders sometimes make national choices that go against their own best judgement, even though they have not been forced into such decisions by higher authorities or by powerful external powers? Indeed yes: it is not at all infrequent that those who make foreign policy are manipulated into choices that they would not have made otherwise.68
Figure 1. Perceptual Evolution & Political Environment
Milestone
Year
Level of
Conflict
Perceived
Arab Goal
Israel v.
Palestinians
as Crux
Solution?
PLO
perceived
Am. Jewish
solidarity with
Israel Gov’t
Am. Jewish
empathy for
Pal. Arabs
Independence War
1948
state centered
zero sum
NO
Arabs absorb
––
high
low
Sinai Campaign
1956
state centered
zero sum
NO
Arabs absorb
––
high
low
Six Day War
1967
state centered
zero sum
NO
Arabs absorb
pawns of Arabs
Israeldolatry
Negligible
War of Attrition
1969
state centered
< zero sum
NO
Arabs absorb
pawns of Arabs
Israeldolatry
Hard left
Yom Kippur War
1973
state centered
< zero sum
NO
Arabs absorb
pawns of Arabs
Israeldolatry
Hard Left
Kissinger
Disengagements
Fez Arab Summit
Appoints PLO
1974/5
state centered
Arabs absorb
WB Arabs
via Jordan
Israeldolatry
Hard Left
& Peace Camp
Likud Victory
Tacit Claims
To Judea, Samaria
1977
Israel will
have to solve
problem
< > autonomous
–– possibility of
reform
Disassociation
develops
>developing support
for homeland,
little for PLO
Operation
Peace for
Galilee
1982
elements of communal disp. elements of state centeredness
non zero sum
YES
Autonomy
Having multiple
personalities;
terror & NGO
Phoenix-like fixture
Tension
No longer
Limited to
Peace Camp
Internal Opposition
Magic
Words
1988
mostly
communal
non zero sum
YES
Homeland/State
Undergoing transition
to post terror group
Tension
Broad desire to
“solve problem”
Constraints like these are by no means uncommon. Indeed, they are part and parcel of how what journalist Hendrick Smith calls “the power game” is played inside the American political system.69
The political manipulation approach is far less theoretically developed than the standard models for analyzing ethnic interest groups and U.S. foreign policy. “Manipulativeness is a connotation-laden notion,” encompassing “strategic-mindedness, rule exploitation, situational advantage seeking, tampering with structure and context, and control of the action climate,” according to Allan W. Lerner.70 But this handicap should not deter us from working with the most appropriate tools available.
Some of the scholarly work associated with the study of decision-making, bargaining and negotiation will also be drawn upon in grappling with the problem of “political manipulation.” In this connection, Oran R. Young asserts that bargaining can be defined “as the manipulation of the information of others in the interest of improving the outcome for one’s self under conditions of strategic interaction.”71
For Young, a manipulative bargaining model includes these characteristics: (1) The presence of strategic interaction; (2) imperfect information; (3) an ability to communicate; (4) a connection between manipulative activities and reality; (5) the provision of factual information offered based on a cost-benefit calculation; (6) “manipulative bargaining can occur in situations that range all along the spectrum from purely cooperative to purely competitive interactions”; and (7) the levels of manipulation are asymmetrical.72 In a sense, the quadrilateral encounter surrounding the PLO-“talk” issue was a thirteen-year-long negotiation process (with the proviso that not all of the parties may have realized and consented to the bargaining relationship).
In my estimation, there is a relationship between suasion and perception. This connection looms large in the present study and I offer evidence of a protracted shift from a zero-sum to non-zero-sum framework. The very term non-zero-sum to describe the nature of an encounter is associated with the scholarship of game theory and bargaining. I. William Zartman defines non-zero-sum as a situation where: “Each party wants the other to be satisfied too not because they care about each other per se, but so that the other will make and keep the agreement that gives the first party its share.”73 In contrast, games “where the preferences of the players are diametrically opposed are called games of total conflict (or zero-sum games) . . .”74 It is extremely useful to think of political suasion and changing perceptions in dialectical terms; by this I mean that it is necessary to “concentrate on looking for relationships, not only between different entities but between the same one in times past, present and future.”75
Analyses delving into suasion (or manipulation) combines work rooted in bargaining analysis with research done in social and political psychology. These disciplines alert us to the human factor in any bargaining relationship. This may involve persons not always acting in their own best interest and manipulating emotions to gain advantage.76 The use of insinuation is an ingredient present in bargaining manipulation (“Some matters dare not be proposed formally”). This is also true of the appearance of flexibility.77 There is also a martial-like element to manipulation which reminds us that the political tactic of divide and conquer is hardly novel. Zartman states that favorable outcomes are easier to obtain the more you can “isolate and deal separately with component members” of the other side.78
There can be no political manipulation in the absence of a strategy.79
. . . The political world selects for people who want to win politically; that is, those who do not want to win are more likely than others to lose and thus be excluded from political decisions. . . . Most participants have the same goal, namely, to win on whatever is the point at issue. Assuming they think seriously about how to achieve their goals, they may be expected to behave in similar ways. . . . Participants . . . are motivated to win and . . . creatively adjust alternatives to arrive at minimal winning coalitions.80
Riker notes that little is known “about the way alternatives are modified in political conflicts” and urges more study of “heresthetics” (manipulation) in an effort to discover the regularities that may be common. Among other things, he suggests we pay special attention to rhetorical stances.81 As will be seen in the pages that follow, semantics played a particularly important role in framing the way alternative options were posed.
The specific characteristics of Riker’s manipulation model that are applied throughout this case study are: (1) agenda control; (2) strategic choice selection; and (3) actual manipulation of dimensions or purposely modifying the choice presented to achieve support.82
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In his work in the foreign policy sphere, Maoz has written about the theoretical background, tactics, and conditions facilitating manipulation.83 He reminds us that “political manipulation is a procedural device for influencing group choices.” In harmony with Riker, Maoz also calls attention to the importance of agenda setting and dividing the opposition. Another factor to be conscious of in analyzing individual decision making is the “salami tactic.” Maoz explains that most people and organizations abhor sharp departures from a course long followed, preferring to make decisions which only marginally deviate from previous decisions. “But if the group had known that each decision would lead to another logical extension of the policy and that these decisions, taken together, were part of a pattern whose end was undesirable, most of its members would not have supported even one decision in the chain.”84 Situational conditions facilitating manipulation are generally associated with severe time constraints and a crisis, or a threat to some basic value.85 In the course of this study, I endeavor to identify a number of instances where “salami tactics” and the use of crisis are exploited.
Next, Maoz turns to establishing the presence of manipulation in history:
. . . It is very difficult to establish whether the preferences of group discussion are genuine or whether they were altered due to strategic considerations . . . In many cases political manipulation is indistinguishable from other types of group-induced shifts.86
The key task identified by Maoz to ascertain the presence of manipulation, “is to determine who suggested what at what point of the process.” Other useful empirical indicators for which evidence can be determined, are:
agenda setting
majority-splitting alternatives
framing
salami tactics
Research, says Maoz, “should focus on ruling out the possibility of political manipulation as a plausible interpretation of group decision by determining the absence of these traces in the historical case. The presence of these traces can do no more than suggest that political manipulation may have occurred, not that it is an exclusive or even the best explanation of the observed process and the resulting choice.”87
With this outline of the political suasion approach, I now turn to the role of perceptual factors which comprises the second theoretical leg of this paper.
Perception and Image
Plainly, “how an issue is perceived will influence what action is taken.”88 Robert Jervis has made the case that decision makers tend to fit information into existing images.89 What happens when established images are called into question is an issue this case study explores.
Social psychologists define perception with regard to individuals as: “A person’s immediate experience of other persons or objects, gained through the sense organs, but somewhat modified by the perceiver’s personal characteristics and by social influences.”90 Organizations do not, of course, have perceptions. “The organization’s ‘perception’ is affected by the perceptions of” individuals and “by the relations they have with each other.”91
Yet another useful definition of perception holds it to be:
An integrative process by which stimuli become interpreted by the individual, the process taking place via the integration of the stimulus events with the prior knowledge and beliefs of the individual. This definition assumes, one, that perception and interpretation are interwoven processes and essentially cannot be separated; and two, that individuals act to provide meaning to the environment (see Allport 1955). Furthermore, it is also assumed that individuals build mental representations of the world and that such representations provide coherence and stability to their interpretation of the complexities of the environment. Mental representations have been portrayed through the use of such concepts as images (R.W. Cottam 1977), schema (Axelrod 1977; Bartlett 1932), scripts (Schank and Abelson 1977), and mental models (Johnson-Laird 1983).92
“Perception involves categorization,” Murray Edelman writes in his study of the language of poverty.93 As we shall see, the status of the Palestinian Arabs was re-categorized by the organized Jewish leadership over time. Russett and Starr add: “The study of the images held by foreign-policy decision makers – the psychological environment of foreign-policy leaders – involves the study of their belief systems and the way the images they have of other peoples, states, leaders, or situations affect their decisions and other behavior.”94 Voss and Dorsey offer a further definition of perception as “an integrative process by which stimuli become interpreted by the individual, the process taking place via the integration of the stimulus events with the prior knowledge and beliefs of the individuals.”95
A sense of how actors involved in the foreign policy process perceive their environment can be discerned by systematically studying their general belief systems as reflected in their statements.96 For instance, Nathan Leites sought to explain Soviet behavior by first attempting to establish the communist image of the political environment and “the rules which Bolsheviks believe to be necessary for effective political conduct.”97 Leites (1953), George (1969), Walker (1977) and others have used operational code content analysis to study “beliefs of a decision maker that presumably are used to interpret particular political events and influence foreign policy decisions.”98 On a more mundane level, this study pinpoints the beliefs held by the Jewish leadership, viewing them as harbingers of perceptual shifts.
A stimulus in the political environment leads to a perceptual response. Perception is, according to yet another interpretation, “a process by which an individual selects, organizes, and evaluates incoming information concerning the surrounding world.”99 The perception of the stimulus is then interpreted based on the images already in the mind of the actor. “Decision makers, like all other human beings, are also subject to the wide variety of psychological processes that affect perception – defense mechanisms, reduction of anxiety, rationalization, displacement, repression – and many other psychological processes and characteristics that go to make up our individual personalities.”100
Some actors are more able to assimilate new or contradictory information (“open image”) while others are psychologically unable to absorb data incongruent with their original images (“closed image”). A collection of images held and used to orient the individual to the environment can be understood as a “belief system.”101
Misperception really means that images are screening out important signals in some way – either ignoring them completely, interpreting them incorrectly, or changing the information to fit already existing images. Images act as intervening variables, in that they mediate between the incoming information and the behavior based on that information.102
There is also the problem of selective perceptions, or how to perceptually meld the lessons of the past with the realities of the present. For instance, to what extent can one apply the appeasement lessons taught by Munich 1938 to contemporary events?
Perceptions can also be affected by unclear messages which can be interpreted incorrectly depending on the image held by the receiver. Moreover, decision makers selectively perceive the world when they try to achieve cognitive consistency so that “the images they hold do not clash with or contradict each other.”103 In thinking about how the organized Jewish community could shift from lobbying the U.S. against dealing with the Palestinian Arabs to urging Israel to be more forthcoming on the Palestinian question, it is hard to ignore the problem of cognitive consistency. Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance offers insight into the behavior of people or organizations who take positions they know are contrary to “reality.”
Cognitive dissonance is a state of tension that occurs whenever an individual simultaneously holds two cognitions (ideas, attitudes, beliefs, opinions) that are psychologically inconsistent. Stated differently, two cognitions are dissonant if, considering these two cognitions alone, the opposite of one follows from the other. . . . The theory of cognitive dissonance does not picture man as a rational animal; rather, it pictures man as a rationalizing animal.104
The potential applicability of this theory of self-justification to a Jewish community whose break with Israeli policies is incremental but steady becomes apparent from the narrative chapters that follow. Often, once a decision is made, further objective information contrary to the decision is no longer sought out. The individual begins to spend more time with like-minded thinkers. Information which reinforces the decision is sought out while contrary data is dismissed or ignored. Once a decision becomes irrevocable, chances are greater that an actor may engage in distortion. Elliot Aronson offers this example of how individuals think after they have made a major decision such as purchasing a house: “Once you had put your money down and you knew that you couldn’t get it back, you would probably start minimizing the importance of the dampness in the basement, the cracks in the foundation, or the fact that it happened to be on the San Andreas fault.”105 Dissonance theory also helps us understand how people handle what they consider to be the inevitable. Understandably, “people attempt to make the best of things by cognitively minimizing the unpleasantness of the situation.”106
Still another way to appreciate the value of perceptual factors is to think in terms of the work done by scholars studying models which involve two enemy actors (the United States and the Soviet Union, for example). In the sense that the pronouncements of the Jewish leadership resulted as much from in-fighting as anything else and that they frequently lost sight of any “big picture,” the perspective here is a variation of Graham T. Allison’s third model of decision-making applied to non-governmental actors. Jewish critics of Israeli policies, especially in the internal opposition, knew (or thought they knew) what they opposed. Allison’s Model III is summarized as follows:
Players . . . act in terms of no consistent set of strategic objectives but rather according to various conceptions of national, organizational, and personal goals . . . decisions (are made) not by a single, rational choice but by the pulling and hauling that is politics . . . Men share power. Men differ about what must be done. The differences matter . . . different groups pulling in different directions produce a result, or better a resultant – a mixture of conflicting preferences and unequal power of various individuals – distinct from what any person or group intended . . . Politicking lacks intellectual substance . . . leaders have competitive, not homogeneous interests . . .107
Indeed, this case study demonstrates the extent to which the Jewish response to events surrounding the PLO-“talk” issue qualifies as “incremental muddling, as opposed to comprehensive choice.”108
This study emphasizes the activities of individual Jewish leaders. Harold Lasswell reminds us that “Political movements derive their vitality from the displacement of private effects upon public objects.”109 Obviously, there is a limit to the practical application of this idea. We simply do not have adequate psychological data about these actors to venture any propositions. Yet it is intriguing to ruminate about the extent their own insecurity, as Jewish emissaries to the corridors of U.S. power, led them to seek approval by ostentatiously breaking with the Likud Government. Furthermore, one might speculate that trans-national Jewish leaders, confronting one crisis after another, were subject to some of the same pressures and their consequences (hastily arrived at and ill-considered decisions) faced by government decision-makers.
* * * * * * *
To gain a fuller sense of the role played by the Jewish leadership in the US-PLO “talk” decision, I endeavor, within the limits of practicality, to describe the political environment during each major phase of the protracted process.
Political “environment” figures prominently in the work of Harold and Margaret Sprout. They explain that, “In ecological parlance, something is conceived to be surrounded, or encompassed – that is to say, environed – by something else in some sense that is deemed significant. The organizing concepts are thus milieu and environed unit, and ecological theory is concerned mainly with relationships between them.”110 For the Sprouts:
What an individual perceives and how he reacts to it (that is, the composition of his psycho-milieu) may or may not correspond closely to his operational milieu, the complex of conditions and events that will determine the outcome of whatever he decides to undertake. He may react imaginatively or stupidly, rationally or irrationally, to what he perceives. But it is his percepts and reactions thereto, not the milieu as it is, or as someone else perceives it, that determines what is to be undertaken.111
Elsewhere, the posit that: “With regard to moods, attitudes, preferences, choices, decisions, and undertakings, erroneous ideas of the milieu may be just as influential as ideas that conform to the ‘realities’ of the milieu.”112 Decision makers react psychologically to their perceptions of the environment:
If we say, for example, that insularity has influenced the foreign policy of Great Britain, we are saying no more and no less than that through some period of time those persons who have made decisions in the name of the British state have perceived that their country is an island, and have reacted psychologically in specified ways to that image.113
How is it that in the midst of a long-standing struggle, one of the contestants changes policy course? Joseph de Rivera indicates that changes in perceptions may be the result of actors seeking the positive approval of a valued other. He also reminds us that “an organization does not really perceive events or make decisions; that is done by the individuals in the organization. On the other hand, an organization does exist in its own right – it is not simply the sum total of the individuals in it – and it does act.”114
IMAGE
The image the Jewish leadership held of itself and of the PLO shifted, in part, under the influence of political suasion. Images of the enemy as acting in “bad faith” are generally self-perpetuating.115 Kenneth E. Boulding associates self-image with national myth. In the larger context, he explains:
We must recognize that the people whose decisions determine the policies and actions of nations do not respond to the ‘objective’ facts of the situation, whatever that may mean, but to their ‘image’ of the situation. It is what we think the world is like, not what it is really like, that determines our behavior. It is always the image, not the truth, that immediately determines behavior. . . . The ‘image,’ then, must be thought of as the total cognitive, affective, and evaluative structure of the behavior unit, or its internal view of itself and its universe.116
Michael P. Sullivan notes that images do change: “The image can also be an intervening variable that undergoes change, a variable that exists between the external elements that are perceived (and which themselves might account for behavior) and the behavior.”117 Of course, as Boulding has pointed out: “Images can only be compared with other images and never with reality.”118
Summary
The level of analysis of this descriptive case study is the American Jewish leadership. To understand their role it is vital to appreciate the leadership’s inner divisions. Their actions are best understood from the vantage point of political suasion and changing perceptions.119 Toward that end, this study employes theoretical underpinnings which synthesize the work done by political scientists and political psychologists whose scholarship is concerned with bargaining, decision making, political perception and manipulation. The standard interest group approach is of limited utility in this case because it does not explicitly spotlight group inner dynamics.
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