The Israel Lobby as a Collective Action Problem

On the occasion of the anniversary of October 7, the Brookings Institution hosted a discussion on US policy and the future of the Middle East after the presidential election, during which Steven Cook made the following point about Washington’s leverage over Israel:

We love to talk about leverage. Analysts love to talk about it, journalists love to talk about it. I wonder if we really have any leverage.

First, you know you don't have leverage if leaders don't use it, because they're afraid it won't work, because the parties see that they're in an existential conflict.

We have no leverage. I think that the United States could say tomorrow, no more weapons for Israel, and the Israelis would scour the earth to the last bullet to put in the back of the head of Yahya Sinwar.

We just don't have that kind of leverage. We can talk about it, but it may not work, and the fact that it may not work is the reason why we don't use it, therefore we don't have it.

I think Cook is largely right, but mostly for the wrong reasons and I would like to explain why.

Cook is trying to address the puzzle of why, despite repeatedly stating their opposition to steps taken by the Israeli government since October 7, the Biden administration hasn’t used the leverage it supposedly has over Israel to force it to accept a ceasefire and end the war. One possible explanation, which is popular among critics of Israel, is that US officials actually support Israel’s effort to “reshape the Middle East” and are just pretending to oppose it for the sake of appearances. In other words, there is no puzzle, the US and Israel are just aligned and the Biden administration’s protests are nothing more than a public relations exercise. I don’t think this theory is plausible though, because Israel’s policy has few if any benefits for Washington, whereas it exposes the US a high risk of being dragged into a very costly regional war and will cause massive reputational damage to the US even if that doesn’t happen, not to mention that it has already cost the US billions of dollars in direct and indirect assistance to Israel. Protests by US officials are also consistent with standard US policy and doctrine about Israel, so to assume that in fact they fully back Israel’s rampage in Gaza and Lebanon, one would have to assume that a complete doctrinal reversal has taken place in Washington after October and that’s just not plausible. Biden and the rest of the administration have also been repeatedly been humiliated by Netanyahu and, even taking into account the fact that US officials in a Democratic administration would have political incentives to pay lip service to the importance of achieving a ceasefire even if they actually were on board with Israel’s policy, I don’t think they would publicly and clearly state their opposition to a particular step just before Israel takes it on such a regular basis, because the optics are really terrible and if anything it makes their problem with pro-Palestine Democrats even worse.

However, Cook’s solution to the puzzle is also unsatisfactory, because it’s obviously not true that if the US stopped delivering weapons to Israel it would still not agree to a ceasefire. Cook’s suggestion that, even if the US took that step, Israel would find alternative suppliers and continue the war over US opposition is magical thinking. First, there are simply no other countries that would or even could provide Israel with the weapons and ammunition it needs to carry out this rampage, especially not if the US didn’t want them to. Israel sources the vast majority of its weapons and ammunition, including the bombs and artillery shells it’s using in Gaza and Lebanon, from the US. No other country with the right kind of weapons has stockpiles deep enough and the production capacities needed to supply Israel with the weapons and ammunition it needs at the volumes required. The countries that could at least provide some of the weapons Israel needs, even if not at the required volumes and for all weapon systems, are US allies and could easily be induced not to sell them to Israel as long as it doesn’t agree to a ceasefire. The interceptors used by Israel’s air defense systems, without which it would be at the mercy of the rockets, missiles and drones fired at it by Hamas, Iran, Hezbollah and other Iranian proxies in the region, are also manufactured in the US. In general, even when the weapons and ammunition that Israel uses are manufactured domestically, they rely on components produced in the US and other Western countries that are already thinking about stopping arms deliveries to Israel.

Modern weapon systems are just too complex for a country of 9 million not to be dependent on the rest of the world and, even if we ignore the fact that now that Israel’s entire arsenal consists in Western equipment or systems that crucially rely on Western components and that it would take decades and be prohibitively expensive to switch to different suppliers (which is hardly something that Israel could do in the middle of a war), there are very few countries that are capable of producing weapons at the technology frontier or close to it. Other than the US and its allies, the only countries that can do that for a wide range of weapon systems are Russia and China (although even them are often dependent on Western components and technology), but for geopolitical reasons they would never agree to replace the US as Israel’s primary weapon suppliers. Thus, if the US really decided to cut Israel off, it would be forced to end the war pretty quickly because it would literally run out of the ammunition it needs to keep it going. Moreover, even if Israel could somehow find alternative suppliers of weapons and ammunition, unlike the US, no other country would pay for them, send entire fleets to the region to contribute to Israel's deterrence and shoot down missiles fired at it or provide the kind of diplomatic cover to Israel that Washington does. In fact, the reality is that Israel is not just dependent on the West in general and the US in particular for military supplies, it’s dependent on the West for practically everything, because again at the end of the day it’s a country of 9 million in a region where most people hate it. The idea that it wouldn’t fold if the US credibly threatened to withhold support is completely disconnected from reality.

So what is the solution to the puzzle that Cook was trying to solve? Well, in the previous sentence, the operative word is “credibly”. Cook is right that, in practice, the US only has very limited leverage over Israel, but that's not because if it stopped supplying weapons and other forms of support Israel could keep doing the same thing, which of course it could not. That's because Israel has a powerful lobby in the US that can impose a high cost on any elected or non-elected government official who is thinking about using the theoretical leverage Washington has, whereas the costs for the US of continuing to support Israel are extremely diffuse and therefore don't result in strong political incentives to withhold support to Israel, at least until and if the shit hits the fan. As a result, US officials can always threaten to withhold support from Israel, but it wouldn’t be credible unless circumstances change in a way that makes enough people in the US care more about what is happening in the Middle East. If you think about the costs for the US of continuing to support Israel, such as the direct and indirect cost of military assistance to Israel and the reputational damage, they’re distributed relatively equally over the population and spread over many years while being relatively limited in the short term. Direct and indirect military assistance to Israel, the weapons that Washington has sent to Israel free of charge and the cost of increasing the US military presence in the region to deter attacks against Israel and shooting down missiles fired at it, has already cost the US well over $20 billion. Of course, this is considerable and will increase a lot by the time it’s over, but the amount per tax payer is not large. Similarly, the anti-Americanism that support to Israel will generate is going to make it harder for US foreign policy to achieve its goals and will fuel terrorism against US targets for decades to come, but most of those consequences will be spread over a long period, the connection for US support to Israel will not be obvious in any particular case and people will not care about what caused a terrorist attack but only blame the people who carried it out anyway.

Such diffuse costs don’t generate strong political incentives to withhold support from Israel. It would be different if Americans cared about what happens in the Middle East, independently of the cost for them, but the vast majority of them evidently don’t. Nor is that specific to Americans, the truth is that most people everywhere don’t care about what happens in other parts of the world, which I think is inevitable. Thus, since on the one hand US officials face a well-funded and well-organized lobby willing and able to impose a significant cost on them should they withhold support from Israel and on the other hand they don’t face any pressure to do that because while most of the population are in favor of it they don’t really care and aren’t going to do anything to make it happen, it’s no mystery why the officials in question keep supporting Israel. Now, if Israel’s rampage turned into a regional war (in which the US would be dragged with virtual certainty), it would be a different story. This would cause a large increase in the price of oil and, while Americans don’t care much if Arabs are getting killed, they do care if they suddenly have to pay more for gas. At this point, the calculus would change for US officials, but it would be too late. That’s the tragedy of the situation in a nutshell: the incentives that US officials face are misaligned with the interests of the US and the only thing that could align them is precisely what their alignment would have been useful to prevent in the first place.

I plan to write another post specifically on how exactly the Israel lobby manage to affect policy, in which I will also present the evidence that it has in fact had a major effect on policy since the creation of Israel and even before that during the Mandate period (even if obviously it was a very different lobby back then), but in this post I would like to focus on the other side of the equation, which is usually ignored by people who talk about the role of the Israel lobby. Indeed, it’s true that the Israel lobby is very powerful and people who deny it are just delusional or lying, but at the end of the day it still couldn’t have such a large impact on US policy toward Israel were it not for the fact that most Americans just don't care about what happens in the Middle East. As I explained above, in the last analysis, the fundamental reason why the Israel lobby can be so effective is that the costs of supporting Israel for the US are very diffuse while the cost of withholding that support are significant for decision-makers. In other words, from the point of view of the US interest, the Israel lobby is best interpreted as a collective action problem. In that respect, there is nothing special about it, it’s the same story with every other lobby. In fact, that’s just a particular instance of how democracy in general works, that is to say not as a mechanism to allow people to govern themselves but as a political technology that allows elite groups to compete for power without bloodshed. In practice, policy is largely the result of compromises between special interests and not the translation of the preferences of citizens, who on most issues don’t have any. However, that’s not how democracy is sold to people and for good reasons, because if they didn’t believe in the democratic mythology to some extent that mechanism wouldn’t work anymore. This is also why people in the Israel lobby tries to hide the role it plays in the formulation of US policy, because they understand that if people understood it they would regard it as illegitimate since it contradicts their conception of democracy, even if that’s just the way it works in general.