Everything about The Israel Lobby And U S Foreign Policy totally explained
The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (a condensed version used the title
The Israel Lobby) is the title of a work by
John Mearsheimer, the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of
Political Science at the
University of Chicago, and
Stephen Walt, The Robert and Rene Belfer Professor of
International Relations at the
Kennedy School of Government at
Harvard University, that has gone through several versions from 2002 to 2007. The most recent version is
The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, a
New York Times Best Seller, published in September 2007 by Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux.
The work's thesis is that "the United States has been willing to set aside its own security in order to advance the interests of another state [Israel]", and that
U.S. Middle East policy has driven primarily by domestic politics, especially the "
Israel Lobby," defined as a "loose coalition of individuals and organizations who actively work to steer U.S. foreign policy in a pro-
Israel direction." It became available as a
working paper at the Kennedy School's website in 2006. The paper was finally published in March 2006 by the
London Review of Books.
Philip Weiss discusses some of the background to the creation of the paper in an article in
The Nation.
A third, revised version addressing some of the criticism was published in the Fall 2006 issue of
Middle East Policy. The authors state that "In terms of its core claims, however, this revised version doesn't depart from the original Working Paper." In late August 2007 an enlarged version was published as a book.
Content
Mearsheimer and Walt argue that "No lobby has managed to divert U.S.
foreign policy as far from what the American national interest would otherwise suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that U.S. and Israeli interests are essentially identical". They argue that "in its basic operations, it's no different from interest groups like the Farm Lobby, steel and textile workers, and other ethnic lobbies. What sets the Israel Lobby apart is its extraordinary effectiveness." According to Mearsheimer and Walt, the "loose coalition" that makes up the Lobby has "significant leverage over the
Executive branch," as well as the ability to make sure that the "Lobby's perspective on Israel is widely reflected in the
mainstream media." They claim that
AIPAC in particular has a "stranglehold on the
U.S. Congress," due to its "ability to reward legislators and congressional candidates who support its agenda, and to punish those who challenge it."
Mearsheimer and Walt decry what they call misuse of "the charge of anti-Semitism," and argue that pro-Israel groups place great importance on "controlling debate" in American academia; they maintain, however, that the Lobby has yet to succeed in its "campaign to eliminate criticism of Israel from college campuses" (see
Campus Watch and U.S. Congress Bill H.R. 509). The authors conclude by arguing that when the Lobby succeeds in shaping U.S. policy in the Middle East, then "Israel's enemies get weakened or overthrown, Israel gets a free hand with the Palestinians, and the United States does most of the fighting, dying, rebuilding, and paying." The essay's central controversial claim was that the Israel lobby's influence has distorted U.S. Middle East foreign policy away from what the authors referred to as "American
national interest."
The matter was further complicated, as Michelle Goldberg reported on
Salon.com, because this was "not just a case of brave academics telling
taboo truths" but that they'd "blundered forth with an article that has several factual mistakes and baffling omissions" and that seemed "expressly designed to elicit exactly the reaction it has received."
In
April 2007 the
Dutch Tegenlicht ('Backlight'),
VPRO's international 50 minute documentary program, produced a documentary as a result of the controversy created by Mearsheimer and Walt's article. The documentary was entitled
The Israel Lobby.
Praise
The paper was described as a "wake-up call" by
Daniel Levy, former advisor to
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. In a March 25 article for
Haaretz, Levy wrote, "Their case is a potent one: that identification of American with Israeli interests can be principally explained via the impact of the Lobby in Washington, and in limiting the parameters of public debate, rather than by virtue of Israel being a vital strategic asset or having a uniquely compelling moral case for support".
Former U.S. Ambassador
Edward Peck, now of the
Independent Institute and the
Council for the National Interest, an anti-Israel lobby, wrote that "The expected
tsunami of rabid responses condemned the report, vilified its authors, and denied there's such a lobby — validating both the lobby’s existence and aggressive, pervasive presence and obliging Harvard to remove its name." Peck is generally in agreement with the paper's core thesis: "Opinions differ on the long-term costs and benefits for both nations, but the lobby's views of Israel's interests have become the basis of U.S. Middle East policies."
Rupert Cornwell, writing in
The Independent, welcomed "a debate on America's support for Israel", and accused the "Jewish lobby" of "suppression of serious domestic debate on the U.S. relationship with Israel" and "conflation of Israel's conflict with the Palestinians with America's war on terror".
Tony Judt, a historian at
New York University, wrote in the
New York Times, that "[in] spite of [thepaper's] provocative title, the essay draws on a wide variety of standard sources and is mostly uncontentious." He goes on to ask "[does] the Israel Lobby affect our foreign policy choices? Of course — that's one of its goals. [...] But does pressure to support Israel distort American decisions? That's a matter of judgment." He concludes the essay by taking the perspective that "this essay, by two 'realist' political scientists with no interest whatsoever in the Palestinians, is a straw in the wind." And that "it won't be self-evident to future generations of Americans why the imperial might and international reputation of the United States are so closely aligned with one small, controversial Mediterranean client state."
Michael Scheuer, a former senior official at the
Central Intelligence Agency and now a terrorism analyst for
CBS News, said to
NPR that Mearsheimer and Walt are basically right. Israel, according to Scheuer, has engaged in one of the most successful campaigns to influence public opinion in the United States ever conducted by a foreign government. Scheuer said to NPR that "They [Mearsheimerand Walt] should be credited for the courage they've had to actually present a paper on the subject. I hope they move on and do the
Saudi lobby, which is probably more dangerous to the United States than the Israeli lobby."
Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security advisor to U.S. President Jimmy Carter, wrote: "Mearsheimer and Walt adduce a great deal of factual evidence that over the years Israel has been the beneficiary of privileged — indeed, highly preferential — financial assistance, out of all proportion to what the United States extends to any other country. The massive aid to Israel is in effect a huge entitlement that enriches the relatively prosperous Israelis at the cost of the American taxpayer. Money being fungible, that aid also pays for the very settlements that America opposes and that impede the peace process."
In his review in
The Times, journalist
Max Hastings wrote "otherwise intelligent Americans diminish themselves by hurling charges of antisemitism with such recklessness. There will be no peace in the Middle East until the United States faces its responsibilities there in a much more convincing fashion than it does today, partly for reasons given in this depressing book."
Abdulmo'em Abulfotah, a senior member of the
Muslim Brotherhood (a Sunni Islamist group that, according to U.S. Government-operated
Voice of America, was banned but tolerated by the
Egyptian government as of late 2005) said he thinks "that the people who wrote that report were working for the interest of the American people."
Political commentator
Molly Ivins, who voiced support for Mearsheimer and Walt's thesis, wrote that
"[i]n the United States, we don't have full-throated, full-throttle debate about Israel ..., but the truth is that the accusation of anti-Semitism is far too often raised in this country against anyone who criticizes the government of Israel. Being pro-Israel is no defense, as I long ago learned to my cost. Now I've gotten used to it. Jews who criticize Israel are charmingly labeled 'self-hating Jews.'"
Mixed reviews
Columnist
Christopher Hitchens agreed that "
AIPAC and other Jewish organizations exert a vast influence over Middle East policy", and stated that the paper "contains much that's true and a little that's original" and that he "would have gone further than Mearsheimer and Walt". However, he also says that "what is original isn't true and what is true isn't original", and that the notion that the "Jewish tail wags the American dog... the
United States has gone to
war in Iraq to gratify
Ariel Sharon, and... the alliance between the two countries has brought down on us the wrath of
Osama Bin Laden" is "partly misleading and partly creepy". He also stated that the authors "seriously mischaracterize the origins of the problem" and produced "an article that's redeemed from complete dullness and mediocrity only by being slightly but unmistakably smelly."
An
editorial in Israeli newspaper
Haaretz said that the paper "involved an attempt to blame the Jews for developments that are unconnected to them", and goes on to say that "the conclusion that Israel can draw from the anti-Israel feeling expressed in the article is that it won't be immune for eternity." It concludes that "it would be irresponsible to ignore the article's serious and disturbing message.... The professors' article doesn't deserve condemnation; rather, it should serve as a warning sign."
Mitchell Plitnick, Director of Education and Policy for
Jewish Voice for Peace, wrote an extensive critique of the book, while also stating firmly that "The ideas Walt and Mearsheimer present are not comfortable and, in my view, sometimes not accurate. But they're not personally anti-Semitic, nor are they motivated by animosity toward Israel." Plitnick details his view that Walt and Mearsheimer seriously overstate "The Lobby's" role in policymaking, although their influence in Congress is considerable. He also challenges the view that Israel was a prime motivator in the invasion of Iraq, saying "...it was clear that Iraq was no threat to Israel. There was simply no reason for Israel to risk alienating a large segment of the American people in order to push for this war and, in fact, they did not. It was an American misadventure, and the Israeli involvement was by American request, not on their own impetus." Plitnick sees US Mideast policy as consistent with US policy in other places and based on an analysis with which both he and Walt and Mearsheimer would disagree, but saying "The Lobby" is responsible is overstating the matter.
In describing the last of three "surprising weaknesses" of the paper,
Eric Alterman writes in
The Nation, "Third, while it's fair to call AIPAC obnoxious and even anti-democratic, the same can often be said about, say, the
NRA,
Big Pharma and other powerful
lobbies. The authors note this but often seem to forget it. This has the effect of making the Jews who read the paper feel unfairly singled out, and inspires much emotionally driven mishigas in reaction. Do these problems justify the inference that the authors are anti-Semitic? Of course not. "
Joseph Massad, professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at
Columbia University, writes, "Is the pro-Israel lobby extremely powerful in the United States? As someone who has been facing the full brunt of their power for the last three years through their formidable influence on my own university and their attempts to get me fired, I answer with a resounding yes. Are they primarily responsible for U.S. policies towards the Palestinians and the Arab world? Absolutely not." Massad then argued U.S. policy is imperialistic, and has only supported those struggling for freedom when it's politically convenient, especially in the Middle East.
Michelle Goldberg
Stephen Zunes, professor of politics at the University of San Francisco, gives a detailed point by point critique of the paper, and concludes:
"The consequences of U.S. policy regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could be tragic, not just for Palestinians and other Arabs, who are the immediate victims of the diplomatic support and largess of American aid to Israel, but ultimately for Israel as well. The fates of American client states have often not been positive. Though differing in many respects, Israel could end up like El Salvador or South Vietnam, whose leadership made common cause with U.S. global designs in ways that ultimately led to untold misery and massive destruction. Israeli leaders and their counterparts in many American Zionist organizations have been repeating the historic error of accepting short-term benefits for their people at the risk of compromising long-term security.... To blame the current morass in the Middle East on the Israel lobby only exacerbates animosities and plays into the hands of the divide-and-rule tactics of those in Congress and the administration whose primary objective is ultimately not to help Israel but to advance the American Empire."
University of Maryland professor
Shibley Telhami, a fellow at the
Brookings Institution and critic of the Iraq war, describes the professors as "incredibly bold" at stirring policy and theoretical debates, but strongly disputes the Lobby's role in pushing the U.S. into war. "There's no doubt that neocons long wanted a war. But in the end it was the decision of a president who was super-empowered after 9/11 and who could have ignored them."
In a review in
The New Yorker,
David Remnick writes, "Mearsheimer and Walt give you the sense that, if the Israelis and the Palestinians come to terms, bin Laden will return to the family construction business. It’s a narrative that recounts every lurid report of Israeli cruelty as indisputable fact but leaves out the rise of Fatah and Palestinian terrorism before 1967; the Munich Olympics; Black September; myriad cases of suicide bombings; and other spectaculars. ... The duplicitous and manipulative arguments for invading Iraq put forward by the Bush Administration, the general inability of the press to upend those duplicities, the triumphalist illusions, the miserable performance of the military strategists, the arrogance of the Pentagon, the stifling of dissent within the military and the government, the moral disaster of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, the rise of an intractable civil war, and now an incapacity to deal with the singular winner of the war, Iran—all of this has left Americans furious and demanding explanations. Mearsheimer and Walt provide one: the Israel lobby. In this respect, their account isn't so much a diagnosis of our polarized era as a symptom of it."
Princeton professor
Aaron Friedberg takes issue with the suggestion that lobby members put the interests of Israel above the interests of the United States:
"at a minimum, this is a slanderous and unfalsifiable allegation of treason leveled at individuals whose views on Middle East policy differ from the authors. At worst, it's an ugly accusation of collective disloyalty, containing the most unsavory of historical echoes."
Eliot A. Cohen, a professor at the
Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at
Johns Hopkins University, argues that the Walt and Mearsheimer paper bears all the traditional hallmarks of antisemitism:
"obsessive and irrationally hostile beliefs about Jews," accusations of Jewish "disloyalty, subversion or treachery, of having occult powers and of participating in secret combinations that manipulate institutions and governments," and systematically omits "any exculpatory information".
Daily Mail journalist
Melanie Phillips writing in her own blog called the paper a "particularly ripe example of the '
global Zionist conspiracy' libel".
Madeleine Albright acknowledged that the Israel lobby was very strong. She spoke of the resistance she encountered from the lobby over sales of airplanes to Saudi Arabia in 1978, during her tenure on the National Security Council in the Carter administration. However, she found "a genuine problem in some of the things" in the Mearsheimer-Walt paper, and found it "highly overstated". She concluded:
"I think it’s very easy to get on this tack all of a sudden that it’s some kind of an overly powerful Jewish lobby. There are other lobbies that are very strong, and Washington is full of lobbyists. So I'd not, in fact, stress that as much as I'd stress the fact that the U.S. does have an indissoluble relationship with Israel that's based on history and culture."
Stephen Zunes, professor of politics at the University of San Francisco, writes that "The authors have also been unfairly criticized for supposedly distorting the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, though their overview is generally quite accurate." and takes issue with
Joseph Massad's interpretation of Mearsheimer's and Walt's argument
"there is something quite convenient and discomfortingly familiar about the tendency to blame an allegedly powerful and wealthy group of Jews for the overall direction of an increasingly controversial U.S. policy. Indeed, like exaggerated claims of Jewish power at other times in history, such an explanation absolves the real powerbrokers and assigns blame to convenient scapegoats. This isn't to say that Mearsheimer, Walt, or anyone else who expresses concern about the power of the Israel lobby is an anti-Semite, but the way in which this exaggerated view of Jewish power parallels historic anti-Semitism should give us all pause."
Writing in
Foreign Affairs,
Walter Russell Mead applauds the authors for "admirably and courageously" initiating a conversation on a difficult subject, but criticizes many of their findings. He observes that their definition of the "Israel lobby" is amorphous to the point of being useless: anyone who supports the existence of Israel (including Mearsheimer and Walt themselves) could be considered a part of the lobby, according to Mead. He is especially critical of their analysis of domestic politics in the United States, suggesting that the authors overstate the magnitude of lobbying in favor Israel when considered relative to overall sums spent on lobbying—only 1% in a typical election cycle. Mead considers their wider geopolitical analysis "more professional" but still "simplistic and sunny" on alternatives to a U.S.-Israeli alliance; he notes, for instance, that simply threatening to cut off aid to Israel in order to influence its behavior is misguided policy, given that other powers such as
China,
Russia, and
India might well view an Israeli alliance as advantageous, should the United States withdraw. Mead rejects any anti-Semetic intent in the work, but feels that the authors left themselves open to the charge through "easily avoidable lapses in judgment and expression."
Criticism
Scholars
The paper has faced criticism, for differing reasons, from individuals with a variety of ideological perspectives:
A number of other Harvard professors have criticized the paper.
Marvin Kalb, a lecturer in public policy,
Edward R. Murrow Professor of Press and Public Policy from 1987 to 1999, and former Director and now Senior Fellow
(External Link
) at the
John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, said that the paper failed to meet basic quality standards for academic research.
Ruth Wisse, a professor of Yiddish Literature and Comparative Literature, wrote, "When the authors imply that the bipartisan support of Israel in Congress is a result of Jewish influence, they function as classic conspiracy theorists who attribute decisions to nefarious alliances rather than to the choices of a democratic electorate".
David Gergen, a professor of public service at the Kennedy School at Harvard, wrote that the charges in the paper are "wildly at variance with what I've personally witnessed in the Oval Office over the years"
Alan Dershowitz, professor of law, wrote a report challenging the factual basis of the paper, the motivations of the authors and their scholarship. Dershowitz claimed that, "The paper contains three types of major errors: quotations are wrenched out of context, important facts are misstated or omitted, and embarrassingly weak logic is employed."
Noam Chomsky, professor of linguistics at MIT, asserts that he didn't find the thesis of the paper very convincing. He said that
Stephen Zunes has rightly pointed out that "there are far more powerful interests that have a stake in what happens in the Persian Gulf region than does AIPAC [orthe Lobby generally], such as the oil companies, the arms industry and other special interests whose lobbying influence and campaign contributions far surpass that of the much-vaunted Zionist lobby and its allied donors to congressional races." He finds that the authors "have a highly selective use of evidence (and much of the evidence is assertion)", ignores historical "world affairs", and blames the Lobby for issues that are not relevant.
Benny Morris, a widely quoted scholar on the
Arab-Israeli conflict and a professor of Middle East history at
Ben-Gurion University, prefaced a very detailed analysis with the remark: "Like many pro-Arab propagandists at work today, Mearsheimer and Walt often cite my own books, sometimes quoting directly from them, in apparent corroboration of their arguments. Yet their work is a travesty of the history that I've studied and written for the past two decades. Their work is riddled with shoddiness and defiled by mendacity."
John Judis, a senior editor at
The New Republic and a visiting scholar at the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote: "I think Walt and Mearsheimer do exaggerate the influence of the Israel lobby and define the lobby in such an inclusive way as to beg the question of its influence."
Middle East historian
Michael Oren wrote: "To prove their argument, the professors don't rely on such banal sources as declassified records, presidential memoirs, or State Department documents. These would unimpeachably show that Arab oil (and not Israel) was America's persistent focus in the Middle East — and that presidents have supported Israel for strategic and moral reasons, not political ones. But, instead of citing archival sources, Walt and Mearsheimer pack their footnotes with newspaper articles and references to the polemical writings of Noam Chomsky and
Norman Finkelstein, as well as the unreservedly pro-Arab Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. The paper's slipshod quality was so evident that the Kennedy School removed its official seal from the treatise."
Other critical scholars include
Johns Hopkins University professor
Eliot A. Cohen; Columbia University journalism professor
Samuel G. Freedman;
Princeton University professor of politics and international affairs
Aaron Friedberg; and
Stanford University political science professor
Josef Joffe.
Mark LeVine, professor of modern Middle Eastern history, culture and Islamic studies at the
University of California, Irvine, wrote in the
Asia Times that "the authors' premise and conclusions are all wrong or, more precisely, backward. Mearsheimer and Walt seem to know little about the Middle East, Israel's role in US foreign policy, and what are core US goals and strategic interests in the region. The United States has been using Israel to fulfill its policy objectives for decades, from its role as a regional 'pillar' (along with Saudi Arabia and Iran) in US containment strategies against the Soviet Union in the 1970s up until last summer... One thing is for sure: aside from the 'Jewish lobby' (for whom the book is a godsend of a fundraising tool), the two groups most happy about the publication of book are the oil and arms lobbies, unquestionably the most powerful, and invisible, lobbies in the United States."
Members of organizations
The
American Jewish Committee (AJC): executive director
David A. Harris has written several responses to the paper and more recently to the book. His article in the
Jersualem Post discusses the difficulty Europeans have in understanding America's "special relationship" with Israel and the resulting eagerness of European publishers to fast track the book. "Although the book was panned by most American reviewers, it'll serve as red meat for those eager to believe the worst about American decision-making regarding Israel and the Middle East."
(External Link) AJC also published several critiques of the paper, many of which were reproduced in newspapers around the world. AJC's Anti-Semitism expert, Kenneth Stern, made the following argument against the paper: "Such a dogmatic approach blinds them from seeing what most Americans do. They seek to destroy the “moral” case for Israel by pointing at alleged Israeli misdeeds, rarely noting the terror and anti-Semitism that predicates Israeli reactions."
The
Anti-Defamation League (ADL): National Director
Abraham H. Foxman wrote a book in response to Mearsheimer and Walt's paper, entitled '
The Deadliest Lies: The Israel Lobby and the Myth of Jewish Control' where he allegedly
"demolishes a number of shibboleths . . . a rebuttal of a pernicious theory about a mythically powerful Jewish lobby." Former
Secretary of State George Shultz wrote in the Forward to the book,
"... the notion. U.S. policy on Israel and Middle East is the result of their influence is simply wrong." The ADL also published an analysis of the paper, describing it as "amateurish and biased critique of
Israel,
American Jews, and American policy" and a "sloppy diatribe".
The
Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, a media watchdog group monitoring perceived anti-Israel coverage, published a detailed critique of the paper, claiming that it was "riddled with errors of fact, logic and omission, has inaccurate citations, displays extremely poor judgement regarding sources, and, contrary to basic scholarly standards, ignores previous serious work on the subject".
A list of critiques of the paper, with links, is posted on the
Engage website.
Edward Walker, president of the
Middle East Institute and former U.S. ambassador in Egypt and Israel, told
NPR: "I lived through all the history that these gentlemen write about, and I didn't recognize it, not from the way they described it — and I was in government all this time."
Other critical organizations and affiliated individuals include the
Dore Gold from the
Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, and
Neal Sher of AIPAC.
Others
Congressman Eliot L. Engel described the authors as "dishonest so-called intellectuals" — he insisted they were "entitled to their stupidity", and had a right to publish it, but also supported "the right of the rest of us to expose them for being the
anti-Semites they are."
Shlomo Ben-Ami, foreign minister of Israel under
Ehud Barak, wrote: "Mearsheimer and Walt’s focus on the Israel lobby’s influence on America’s Middle East policy is grossly overblown. They portray U.S. politicians as being either too incompetent to understand America’s national interest, or so undutiful that they'd sell it to any pressure group for the sake of political survival. Sentiment and idealism certainly underlie America’s commitment to Israel. But so do the shared interests and considerations of realpolitik."
Others critical of the paper include
Caroline Glick of
The Jerusalem Post; columnist
Bret Stephens; editor of
Jewish Current Issues Rick Richman; and
James Taranto of the
The Wall Street Journal;
George P. Schultz, who served as the United States Secretary of Labor from 1969 to 1970, as the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury from 1972 to 1974, and as the U.S. Secretary of State from 1982 to 1989, wrote in the
U.S. News and World Report: "Anyone who thinks that Jewish groups constitute a homogeneous 'lobby' ought to spend some time dealing with them. For example, my decision to open a dialogue with
Yasser Arafat after he met certain conditions evoked a wide spectrum of responses from the government of Israel, its political parties, and American Jewish groups who weighed in on one side or the other. ... The United States supports Israel not because of favoritism based on political pressure or influence but because the American people, and their leaders, say that supporting Israel is politically sound and morally just. ... So, on every level, those who blame Israel and its Jewish supporters for U.S. policies they don't support are wrong. They are wrong because, to begin with, support for Israel is in our best interests. They are also wrong because Israel and its supporters have the right to try to influence U.S. policy. And they're wrong because the U.S. government is responsible for the policies it adopts, not any other state or any of the myriad lobbies and groups that battle daily—sometimes with lies—to win America's support."
Leslie Gelb, the former President of the
Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in the
New York Times Book Review that the scholarship was shoddy and that the authors were biased. "More troublingly, [Waltand Mearsheimer] don’t seriously review the facts of the two most critical issues to Israel and the lobby — arms sales to Arab states and the question of a Palestinian state — matters on which the American position has consistently run counter to the so-called all-powerful Jewish lobby. For several decades, administration after administration has sold Saudi Arabia and other Arab states first-rate modern weapons, against the all-out opposition of Israel and the lobby. And make no mistake, these arms have represented genuine security risks to Israel. . . And on the policy issue that has counted most to Israel and the lobby — preventing the United States from accepting a Palestinian state prior to a negotiated deal between Israel and the Palestinians — it’s fair to say Washington has quietly sided with the Palestinians for a long time."
In a review in the
Chicago Sun-Times: "It's no secret that the Israeli lobby has a record of success... Yet, no other interest group is so frequently singled out for harsh scrutiny, as if somehow laboring on Israel's behalf turns out to be working against America's best interests. ... Forget the dynamics of radical Islamism, Arab resentment of the West and other complexities of international affairs. Just change U.S. policy toward Israel and the world will be a happier place for America. Two intellectuals at two of our best universities have reduced international relations to that." Huntley said the authors' discrediting of certain sources proved "a bias against Israel so deep seated that it defies reality."
Rob Eshman, editor-in-chief of the
Jewish Journal wrote "Five years ago, before the start of the Iraq War, I wrote an editorial titled '
The Jewish War.' If the Iraq War is a disaster, I wrote, mainstream voices will start blaming the Jews... Guess what? It's time to get off the couch. ... (It isn't an exaggeration to say that in the view of the authors, the whole thing is Israel's fault, aided and abetted by the American Jewish Israel lobby and their puppets in the Congress and the White House. Five decades of Arab rejectionism and Palestinian terror, Yasser Arafat's torpedoing of the Oslo accords, a majority American and Israeli Jewish support for land-for-peace deals -- none of this matters.) ... The authors take pains -- well, four pages -- to note that Jews are loyal Americans and that their lobbying is legal, like that of other special interest groups... But these pages, which may as well have been titled, "Hey, Some of Our Best Friends Are Jewish," are contradicted time and again in the authors' selective re-telling of the events leading up the Iraq War.
In a review in
Newsday: "From a couple of prominent political scientists, you'd expect a close analysis of particular pro-Israel organizations (for example, AIPAC) and fresh research into how they exercise influence. But the footnotes, which draw heavily from books and newspaper articles, reveal that the authors have not really done interviews with people presumably belonging to the "lobby," nor gotten access to internal documents. At the same time, they're wedded to the notion that the U.S. and Israel have distinct national interests - with the American interest defined, more or less, as sustained access to Middle Eastern oil. They reject the idea that Iraq was occupied in pursuit of oil." McLemee also criticized the authors' definition of the Israel lobby and their allegation of its role in the occupation of Iraq.
In a review in the
Los Angeles Times: "Anyone familiar with the tortured history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will have a hard time recognizing the history Mearsheimer and Walt rehearse. Every hoary old Israeli atrocity tale is trotted out, and the long story of Palestinian terrorism is rendered entirely as a reaction to Israeli oppression. The failure of every peace negotiation is attributed to Israeli deviousness under the shield of the American Israel lobby. There is nothing here of Palestinian corruption, division and duplicity or even of this unhappy people's inability to provide a reliable secular partner with whom peace can be negotiated... At times, the authors simply contradict themselves, asserting -- rather remarkably -- at one point that the United States has nothing to fear from a nuclear-armed Iran and, at another, that the dangerous prospect of a nuke-equipped Tehran is the Israel lobby's fault. Similarly, they write, Al Qaeda would hammer its swords into ploughshares and Osama bin Laden would lay down with the lamb if only the United States would come out from under Israel's thrall and create by coercion a Palestinian state... (You'd never guess from the Mearsheimer-Walt analysis that many people in this country support Israel precisely because they admire it as a brave, dynamic and democratic society.) ... In fact, if you accept the analysis put forward in this book, it's impossible not to conclude that the United States was, in fact, tricked into a disastrous war in Iraq by a domestic Fifth Column and that the ranks of that subversive formation are filled with Jews, their friends and willing dupes."
In a review in the
Denver Post,
Richard Cohen writes, "By the time I put down the book, occasional critic of Israel though I be, I was ready to burst into '
Hatikvah,' the Israeli national anthem. ... Where Israel is wrong, they say so. But where Israel is right, they're somehow silent. By the time you finish the book, you almost have to wonder why anyone in their right mind could find any reason to admire or like Israel. ... They had an observation worth making and a position worth debating. But their argument is so dry, so one-sided — an Israel lobby that leads America around by the nose — they suggest that not only do they not know Israel, they don't know America, either."
Former Director of the
CIA James Woolsey also wrote a strongly negative review, remarking that "... Reading
[Waltand Mearsheimer's] version of events is like entering a completely different world."
Former Secretary of State
Henry Kissinger said that the paper hasn't had "any great impact on the general public. The American public continues to support the relations [betweenthe two countries], and resistance to any threat to the survival of Israel."
Barack Obama Amazon ad
A
New York Sun reporter alerted Democratic presidential candidate
Barack Obama that a small ad for his campaign's Web site was appearing as one of several "sponsored links" on the Amazon.com page for
The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, and on
September 10,
2007, the Obama campaign took it down. The Obama campaign says its ad probably appeared on the book's Amazon page simply because the campaign paid for its Web site to be mentioned on searches that included the word "politics," among other phrases, part of a publicity strategy being used by many 2008 candidates.
Campaign spokesman Jennifer Psaki told
The Sun that Obama hadn't read the book but knew enough about it to disagree with its authors. "The ad has been removed from the site because the views of the book don't reflect the views of Senator Obama on the U.S.- Israel relationship," she said. "Senator Obama has stated that his support for a strong U.S.- Israel relationship, which includes both a commitment to Israel's security and to helping Israel achieve peace with its neighbors, comes from his belief that it's the right policy for the United States. The idea that supporters of Israel have somehow distorted U.S. foreign policy, or that they're responsible for the debacle in Iraq, is just wrong."
The Obama campaign dismissed questions about squaring Obama's spurning of the book's authors with the strong defense of it by
Zbigniew Brzezinski, who has endorsed Obama. Another Obama supporter,
Congressman Robert Wexler (D-FL), who publicly endorsed Obama several months earlier, offered a statement in his defense, saying Obama has "been a consistent supporter of Israel and this is an unfortunate case of a fabricated controversy for political reasons." "I speak with him often on Israel policy," Wexler added, "and I can tell you firsthand that Barack Obama is opposed to the arguments presented in this book."
Reaction to the reception
Harvard's Kennedy School of Government removed its
logo, more strongly wording its disclaimer and making it more prominent, and insisting the paper reflected only the views of its authors. The Kennedy School said in a statement: "The only purpose of that removal was to end public confusion; it wasn't intended, contrary to some interpretations, to send any signal that the school was also 'distancing' itself from one of its senior professors" and stated that they're committed to academic freedom, and don't take a position on faculty conclusions and research.
Mark Mazower, a professor of history at
Columbia University, wrote that it isn't possible to openly debate the topic of the article: "What is striking is less the substance of their argument than the outraged reaction: to all intents and purposes, discussing the US-Israel special relationship still remains taboo in the U.S. media mainstream. [...] Whatever one thinks of the merits of the piece itself, it would seem all but impossible to have a sensible public discussion in the U.S. today about the country’s relationship with Israel."
Criticism of the paper has itself been called "moral blackmail" and "bullying" by an opinion piece in
The Financial Times: "Moral blackmail — the fear that any criticism of Israeli policy and U.S. support for it'll lead to charges of anti-Semitism — is a powerful disincentive to publish dissenting views...Bullying Americans into a consensus on Israeli policy is bad for Israel and makes it impossible for America to articulate its own national interest." The editorial praised the paper, remarking that "They argue powerfully that extraordinarily effective lobbying in Washington has led to a political consensus that American and Israeli interests are inseparable and identical."
Juan Cole responded to Alan Dershowitz, disputing Dershowitz's major factual criticisms, charging that Dershowitz "sets up the
straw man that the authors claim that a central "cabal" of "Jews" tightly controls the U.S. press and the U.S. government and prevents them from criticizing Israel" and claiming that Dershowitz is trying to imply that "Mearsheimer and Walt are anti-Semites in the
Henry Ford/
Protocols of the Elders of Zion tradition".
Richard Cohen responded in
The Washington Post to Eliot A. Cohen's prior editorial in the same newspaper, denying that the working paper is anti-Semitic, and calling Eliot Cohen's piece "offensive": "To associate Mearsheimer and Walt with hate groups is rank guilt by association and doesn't in any way rebut the argument made in their paper on the Israel lobby." Richard Cohen found the paper unremarkable, calling its "basic point" "inarguable", but contends that "Israel's special place in U.S. foreign policy is deserved, in my view, and not entirely the product of lobbying." He also observes that the article is "a bit sloppy and one-sided (nothing here about the
Arab oil lobby)".
Syndicated political commentator
Molly Ivins believed that it was "the sheer disproportion, the vehemence of the attacks on anyone perceived as criticizing Israel that makes them so odious. Mearsheimer and Walt are both widely respected political scientists — comparing their writing to
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is just silly." She commented that she found the arguments of the paper to be "unexceptional" and that "it seems an easy case can be made that the United States has subjugated its own interests to those of Israel in the past."
Mearsheimer and Walt's response
Mearsheimer stated, "[w]e fully recognised that the lobby would retaliate against us" and "[w]e expected the story we told in the piece would apply to us after it was published. We are not surprised that we've come under attack by the lobby." He also stated "we expected to be called anti-semites, even though both of us are
philo-semites and strongly support the existence of Israel."
To the accusation that they "see the lobby as a well-organised Jewish conspiracy" they refer to their description of the lobby "a loose coalition of individuals and organisations without a central headquarters".
To the accusation of mono-causality, they remark "we also pointed out that support for Israel is hardly the only reason America’s standing in the Middle East is so low".
To the complaint that they "'catalogue Israel's moral flaws', while paying little attention to the shortcomings of other states", they refer to the "high levels of material and diplomatic support" given by the United States especially to Israel as a reason to focus on it.
To the claim that U.S. support for Israel reflects "genuine support among the American public" they agree, but argue that "this popularity is substantially due to the lobby's success at portraying Israel in a favourable light and effectively limiting public awareness and discussion of Israel’s less savoury actions".
To the claim that there are countervailing forces "such as 'paleo-conservatives, Arab and Islamic advocacy groups... and the diplomatic establishment'", they argue that these are no match for the lobby.
To the argument that oil rather than Israel drives Middle East policy, they claim that the United States would favour the Palestinians instead of Israel, and wouldn't have gone to war in Iraq or be threatening Iran if that were so.
They accuse various critics of smearing them by linking them to racists, and dispute various claims by Alan Dershowitz and others that their facts, references or quotations are mistaken.
Ori Nir at The Forward wrote: "Asked if the study may have been initially rejected by the American publisher because of poor research, Mearsheimer said that the "evidence in the piece is just the tip of the iceberg," and that the study's observations are supported by a large body of evidence." Speaking at a forum at invitation of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Walt expresses that the Israel lobby "is not a cabal," that it's "not synonymous with American Jews" and that "there is nothing improper or illegitimate about its activities."
In answering a question at Georgetown University about David Gergen's criticism, Walt noted that Gergen, in his White House days, was primarily involved in public relations and spin, not the formation of Middle East policy.
The authors have privately circulated a 79-page rebuttal, "Setting the Record Straight: A Response to Critics of 'The Israel Lobby'" (External Link), and are working on a book on the subject.
Scott McConnell in The American Conservative commented on the different reactions the book caused inside and outside of America and noted "casual newspaper readers in Israel, in Britain, and soon in the rest of Europe, where the book is being translated into seven languages, are being treated to far more nuanced and serious discussion of The Israel Lobby than Americans have been."
Debate
The London Review of Books organised a follow-up debate on the paper, moderated by Anne-Marie Slaughter. The panelists were John Mearsheimer, Shlomo Ben-Ami, Martin Indyk, Tony Judt, Rashid Khalidi, and Dennis Ross.
Further Information
Get more info on 'The Israel Lobby And U S Foreign Policy'.
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