N
NOMOREWARFORISRAEL
Guest
Obama caves to pressure from Israel firsters over Mearsheimer/Walt
book
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
December 3, 2007 Issue
Copyright (c) 2007 The American Conservative
The Lobby Strikes Back
A new book riles the AIPAC crowd, but makes it to the bestseller list
anyway.
http://www.amconmag.com/2007/2007_12_03/cover.html
by Scott McConnell
One prism through which to gauge the impact of John Mearsheimer and
Stephen Walt's The Israel Lobby and American Foreign Policy is a
September incident involving Barack Obama. His campaign had placed
small ads in various spots around the Internet, designed to drive
readers to its website. One turned up on Amazon's page for the Walt
and Mearsheimer book. A vigilant watchdog at the New York Sun spotted
it and contacted the campaign: Did Obama support Walt and
Mearsheimer?
The answer came within hours. The ad was withdrawn. Its placement was
"unintentional." The senator, his campaign made clear, understood that
key arguments of the book were "wrong," but had definitely not read
the work himself. In short, Walt and Mearsheimer had reached a
pinnacle of notoriety.
Though The Israel Lobby was on the way to best-sellerdom and has
become perhaps the most discussed policy book of the year, the
presidential candidate touted as the most fresh-thinking and
intellectually curious in the race hastened to make clear he had not
been corrupted by the toxic text.
The episode illustrates one of the book's central arguments: the
Israel lobby is powerful, and American politicians fear its wrath. Any
Democrat running for president--drawing on a donor stream that is
heavily Jewish, very interested in Israel, and perceived as hawkish--
would have reacted as Obama did.
In their book's introduction, Walt and Mearsheimer summarize the
consequences of this power. In an election year, American politicians
will differ radically on domestic issues, social issues, immigration,
China, Darfur, and virtually any other topic. But all will "go to
considerable lengths to express their deep personal commitment to one
foreign country--Israel--as well as their determination to maintain
unyielding support for the Jewish state." The authors find this
remarkable and deserving of analysis, which they provided first in a
paper, posted last year on Harvard's Kennedy School website and
published in the London Review of Books, and now expanded into a
book.
This is not the first time a prominent American has taken on the
subject. George Ball, undersecretary of state in the Johnson and
Kennedy administrations and the government official most prescient
about Vietnam, a bona fide member of the Wall Street and Washington
establishments, called for the recalibration of America's Israel
policy in a much noted Foreign Affairs essay in 1977, and at the end
of his life co-authored a book on the subject with his son. Eleven-
term congressman Paul Findley, defeated after a former AIPAC president
called him "a dangerous enemy of Israel," wrote a book that became a
bestseller, and there are others.
But no one with the combined skills and eminence of Walt and
Mearsheimer has before addressed the subject systematically. These two
are mandarins of American academia, having reached the top of a field
that attracts smart people. They have tenure, job security, and
professional autonomy most journalists lack. They have the
institutional prestige of Harvard and the University of Chicago behind
them. Most importantly, they bring first-rate skills of research,
synthesis, and argument to their task.
One might wish that their book had been different in some ways--more
literary, more discursive, more precise in some of its definitions,
deeper in some areas, more (my favorite, from blogger Tony Karon)
"dialectical." But The Israel Lobby is an extraordinary
accomplishment, completed with great speed--a dense, factually based
brief of an argument that is often made but rarely made well.
In public appearances discussing their book, Walt and Mearsheimer are
tremendously effective: measured, facts at their fingertips, speaking
with the fluency of men accustomed to addressing demanding audiences.
Most of all, while treating a subject where hyperbole is common, they
are moderate. They are respectful of Israel, admiring of its
accomplishments, and extremely aware that criticism of Israel or the
Israel lobby can turn ugly and demagogic. As might be expected of top
scholars in America, they are fully conscious of what Jews have
suffered in the past and how much anti-Semitism has been a moral blot
on the West as a whole. So while they have none of the excessive
deference, guilt feelings, and reluctance to engage so typical of the
remaining WASP elite, they are very well-modulated. Their detractors
would have preferred loose-tongued adversaries, Palestinians whose
words are raw with loss and resentment, a left wing anti-Zionist like
Noam Chomsky, or genuine anti-Semites. Instead, with Walt and
Mearsheimer, they are encountering something like the American
establishment of a vanished era at its calm, patriotic best.
It is obvious that The Israel Lobby, both the article and the book,
would be extremely unwelcome to those pleased with the status quo.
Under the current arrangement, the United States gives Israel $3-4
billion in aid and grants a year--about $500 per Israeli and several
orders of magnitude more than aid to citizens of any other country.
Israel is the only American aid recipient not required to account for
how the money is spent. Washington uses its Security Council veto to
shield Israel from critical UN resolutions and periodically issues
bland statements lamenting the continued expansion of Israeli
settlements on the Palestinian land the Jewish state has occupied
since 1967. When Israel violates U.S. law, as it did in Lebanon by
using American-made cluster bombs against civilian targets, a low-
level official may issue a mild complaint. These fundamentals of the
relationship go unchallenged by 95 percent of American politicians
holding or running for national office.
Walt and Mearsheimer's goal was to ignite a conversation about the
lobby--which they define expansively as an amorphous array of
individuals, think tanks, and congressional lobbying groups that
advocate Israeli perspectives--and its consequences, which they believe
are damaging to America's core strategic interests in the Middle East.
They support Israel's existence as a Jewish state, and while they
readily summarize Israeli blemishes, drawing on Israeli sources and
the arguments of the country's revisionist "new historians," they are
fully aware that no modern state has been built without injustices.
They seek a more normal United States relationship with Israel, rather
like we have with France or Spain, and an Israeli-Palestinian peace
settlement that can start to drain the poison out of American
relations with the Arab world.
At least in a preliminary sense, they have started a discussion. The
initial working paper on the Kennedy School website was downloaded
275,000 times, throwing Israel's most ferocious partisans into a
panic. Deploying a McCarthyite tactic, the New York Sun quickly sought
to link the authors to white supremacist David Duke. The New Republic
published a basketful of hostile pieces. Several pro-Israel
congressmen initiated an embarrassing effort--ignored by the
institution's president--to get the Naval War College to cancel
scheduled lectures by the two. In a column about "the Mearsheimer-Walt
fiasco," neoconservative writer Daniel Pipes summed up his dilemma: it
would have been better, Pipes said, to have ignored the essay by "two
obscure academics" so that it disappeared "down the memory hole"
instead of becoming "the monument that it now is." Pipes was wrong
about this. Hostile reaction to the piece hadn't inspired a quarter of
a million downloads. With the United States mired in a quagmire in
Iraq, increasingly detested in the Muslim world, and wedded to an
Israel policy that, beyond America's borders, seems bizarre to friend
and foe alike, Walt and Mearsheimer had touched a topic that was
crying out for serious analysis.
And the book could do more than the article. Arguments could be filled
out, footnotes could be easily read. The 2006 Lebanon War--which saw
the American Congress endorse the Israeli bombardment by the kind of
margin that would satisfy Nicolae Ceausescu, while seeming genuinely
puzzled that moderate Arab leaders did not join their applause --was
analyzed as a test case. A book could continue the discussion and
deepen it. But the book's enemies (how odd that a book could have
enemies, but there is no better word for it) had time to prepare their
ideological trenches, and within a month or two of publication, one
could see the shape of the defense.
By the end of October, two months after The Israel Lobby appeared in
stores, there had not been a single positive review in the mass-market
media. For a long time it seemed that no editor dared trust the
subject to a gentile, causing blogger Philip Weiss to ask cheekily,
"Do the goyim get to register an Opinion Re Walt/Mearsheimer?" By
then, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, the New York Sun, and
The New Republic between them must have printed 25 attacks on Walt and
Mearsheimer, virtually all of them designed to portray the authors as
beyond the pale of rational discourse.
Anti-Semitism was not a credible charge. The authors make clear that
the lobby isn't representative of the views of all or even most
American Jews, and they support an Israel within recognized
boundaries. Their recommendation that the United States treat Israel
like a normal country is hard to demonize. Ditto their repeated
assertions that lobbying is a perfectly normal part of the American
system and that conflicted or divided loyalties have become
commonplace in the modern world. But what many did was to discuss the
book in a context of anti-Semitism, to convey the impression that The
Israel Lobby was a deeply anti-Semitic book without explicitly saying
so. Thus Jeffrey Goldberg, in a 6,000-word New Republic piece,
introduced Walt and Mearsheimer after a detour through Osama bin
Laden, Father Coughlin, Charles Lindbergh, and, of course, David Duke.
He eventually called the book "the most sustained attack ... against the
political enfranchisement of American Jews since the era of Father
Coughlin."
Samuel G. Freedman in the Washington Post opened his discussion of the
book by invoking the New Testament concept of original sin, whose
burden one can escape only through acceptance of Jesus Christ. A
passage from Romans, Freedman claims, framed the book's argument--"if
unintentionally." When was the last time the Washington Post
introduced a serious foreign affairs book with Bible talk that had no
bearing on the work in question?
One of several Wall Street Journal attacks on the work claimed, "it is
apparently the authors' position that ... [in the face of Arab
lobbying efforts] American Jews are obliged to stay silent." This
statement is more than a misrepresentation of Walt and Mearsheimer's
argument, it is a flat-out lie. Did the editors who assigned and
published the piece know this? Was discrediting the book so important
that normal American journalistic standards had to be waived?
Another track of the demonization campaign was the repeated effort to
cancel the authors' appearances or to demand that opposing speakers be
invited to "rebut" their noxious views, a format hardly typical for
authors on book tours. Unfortunately, these initiatives sometimes
succeeded, as when the Chicago Council for Global Affairs cancelled an
event at a venue where the two professors had spoken many times
before. Some efforts to marginalize the book were more like parody, as
when Congressman Elliot Engel complained that Professor Mearsheimer
had been invited to participate in a Columbia University forum on
academic freedom.
It would be na
book
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
December 3, 2007 Issue
Copyright (c) 2007 The American Conservative
The Lobby Strikes Back
A new book riles the AIPAC crowd, but makes it to the bestseller list
anyway.
http://www.amconmag.com/2007/2007_12_03/cover.html
by Scott McConnell
One prism through which to gauge the impact of John Mearsheimer and
Stephen Walt's The Israel Lobby and American Foreign Policy is a
September incident involving Barack Obama. His campaign had placed
small ads in various spots around the Internet, designed to drive
readers to its website. One turned up on Amazon's page for the Walt
and Mearsheimer book. A vigilant watchdog at the New York Sun spotted
it and contacted the campaign: Did Obama support Walt and
Mearsheimer?
The answer came within hours. The ad was withdrawn. Its placement was
"unintentional." The senator, his campaign made clear, understood that
key arguments of the book were "wrong," but had definitely not read
the work himself. In short, Walt and Mearsheimer had reached a
pinnacle of notoriety.
Though The Israel Lobby was on the way to best-sellerdom and has
become perhaps the most discussed policy book of the year, the
presidential candidate touted as the most fresh-thinking and
intellectually curious in the race hastened to make clear he had not
been corrupted by the toxic text.
The episode illustrates one of the book's central arguments: the
Israel lobby is powerful, and American politicians fear its wrath. Any
Democrat running for president--drawing on a donor stream that is
heavily Jewish, very interested in Israel, and perceived as hawkish--
would have reacted as Obama did.
In their book's introduction, Walt and Mearsheimer summarize the
consequences of this power. In an election year, American politicians
will differ radically on domestic issues, social issues, immigration,
China, Darfur, and virtually any other topic. But all will "go to
considerable lengths to express their deep personal commitment to one
foreign country--Israel--as well as their determination to maintain
unyielding support for the Jewish state." The authors find this
remarkable and deserving of analysis, which they provided first in a
paper, posted last year on Harvard's Kennedy School website and
published in the London Review of Books, and now expanded into a
book.
This is not the first time a prominent American has taken on the
subject. George Ball, undersecretary of state in the Johnson and
Kennedy administrations and the government official most prescient
about Vietnam, a bona fide member of the Wall Street and Washington
establishments, called for the recalibration of America's Israel
policy in a much noted Foreign Affairs essay in 1977, and at the end
of his life co-authored a book on the subject with his son. Eleven-
term congressman Paul Findley, defeated after a former AIPAC president
called him "a dangerous enemy of Israel," wrote a book that became a
bestseller, and there are others.
But no one with the combined skills and eminence of Walt and
Mearsheimer has before addressed the subject systematically. These two
are mandarins of American academia, having reached the top of a field
that attracts smart people. They have tenure, job security, and
professional autonomy most journalists lack. They have the
institutional prestige of Harvard and the University of Chicago behind
them. Most importantly, they bring first-rate skills of research,
synthesis, and argument to their task.
One might wish that their book had been different in some ways--more
literary, more discursive, more precise in some of its definitions,
deeper in some areas, more (my favorite, from blogger Tony Karon)
"dialectical." But The Israel Lobby is an extraordinary
accomplishment, completed with great speed--a dense, factually based
brief of an argument that is often made but rarely made well.
In public appearances discussing their book, Walt and Mearsheimer are
tremendously effective: measured, facts at their fingertips, speaking
with the fluency of men accustomed to addressing demanding audiences.
Most of all, while treating a subject where hyperbole is common, they
are moderate. They are respectful of Israel, admiring of its
accomplishments, and extremely aware that criticism of Israel or the
Israel lobby can turn ugly and demagogic. As might be expected of top
scholars in America, they are fully conscious of what Jews have
suffered in the past and how much anti-Semitism has been a moral blot
on the West as a whole. So while they have none of the excessive
deference, guilt feelings, and reluctance to engage so typical of the
remaining WASP elite, they are very well-modulated. Their detractors
would have preferred loose-tongued adversaries, Palestinians whose
words are raw with loss and resentment, a left wing anti-Zionist like
Noam Chomsky, or genuine anti-Semites. Instead, with Walt and
Mearsheimer, they are encountering something like the American
establishment of a vanished era at its calm, patriotic best.
It is obvious that The Israel Lobby, both the article and the book,
would be extremely unwelcome to those pleased with the status quo.
Under the current arrangement, the United States gives Israel $3-4
billion in aid and grants a year--about $500 per Israeli and several
orders of magnitude more than aid to citizens of any other country.
Israel is the only American aid recipient not required to account for
how the money is spent. Washington uses its Security Council veto to
shield Israel from critical UN resolutions and periodically issues
bland statements lamenting the continued expansion of Israeli
settlements on the Palestinian land the Jewish state has occupied
since 1967. When Israel violates U.S. law, as it did in Lebanon by
using American-made cluster bombs against civilian targets, a low-
level official may issue a mild complaint. These fundamentals of the
relationship go unchallenged by 95 percent of American politicians
holding or running for national office.
Walt and Mearsheimer's goal was to ignite a conversation about the
lobby--which they define expansively as an amorphous array of
individuals, think tanks, and congressional lobbying groups that
advocate Israeli perspectives--and its consequences, which they believe
are damaging to America's core strategic interests in the Middle East.
They support Israel's existence as a Jewish state, and while they
readily summarize Israeli blemishes, drawing on Israeli sources and
the arguments of the country's revisionist "new historians," they are
fully aware that no modern state has been built without injustices.
They seek a more normal United States relationship with Israel, rather
like we have with France or Spain, and an Israeli-Palestinian peace
settlement that can start to drain the poison out of American
relations with the Arab world.
At least in a preliminary sense, they have started a discussion. The
initial working paper on the Kennedy School website was downloaded
275,000 times, throwing Israel's most ferocious partisans into a
panic. Deploying a McCarthyite tactic, the New York Sun quickly sought
to link the authors to white supremacist David Duke. The New Republic
published a basketful of hostile pieces. Several pro-Israel
congressmen initiated an embarrassing effort--ignored by the
institution's president--to get the Naval War College to cancel
scheduled lectures by the two. In a column about "the Mearsheimer-Walt
fiasco," neoconservative writer Daniel Pipes summed up his dilemma: it
would have been better, Pipes said, to have ignored the essay by "two
obscure academics" so that it disappeared "down the memory hole"
instead of becoming "the monument that it now is." Pipes was wrong
about this. Hostile reaction to the piece hadn't inspired a quarter of
a million downloads. With the United States mired in a quagmire in
Iraq, increasingly detested in the Muslim world, and wedded to an
Israel policy that, beyond America's borders, seems bizarre to friend
and foe alike, Walt and Mearsheimer had touched a topic that was
crying out for serious analysis.
And the book could do more than the article. Arguments could be filled
out, footnotes could be easily read. The 2006 Lebanon War--which saw
the American Congress endorse the Israeli bombardment by the kind of
margin that would satisfy Nicolae Ceausescu, while seeming genuinely
puzzled that moderate Arab leaders did not join their applause --was
analyzed as a test case. A book could continue the discussion and
deepen it. But the book's enemies (how odd that a book could have
enemies, but there is no better word for it) had time to prepare their
ideological trenches, and within a month or two of publication, one
could see the shape of the defense.
By the end of October, two months after The Israel Lobby appeared in
stores, there had not been a single positive review in the mass-market
media. For a long time it seemed that no editor dared trust the
subject to a gentile, causing blogger Philip Weiss to ask cheekily,
"Do the goyim get to register an Opinion Re Walt/Mearsheimer?" By
then, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, the New York Sun, and
The New Republic between them must have printed 25 attacks on Walt and
Mearsheimer, virtually all of them designed to portray the authors as
beyond the pale of rational discourse.
Anti-Semitism was not a credible charge. The authors make clear that
the lobby isn't representative of the views of all or even most
American Jews, and they support an Israel within recognized
boundaries. Their recommendation that the United States treat Israel
like a normal country is hard to demonize. Ditto their repeated
assertions that lobbying is a perfectly normal part of the American
system and that conflicted or divided loyalties have become
commonplace in the modern world. But what many did was to discuss the
book in a context of anti-Semitism, to convey the impression that The
Israel Lobby was a deeply anti-Semitic book without explicitly saying
so. Thus Jeffrey Goldberg, in a 6,000-word New Republic piece,
introduced Walt and Mearsheimer after a detour through Osama bin
Laden, Father Coughlin, Charles Lindbergh, and, of course, David Duke.
He eventually called the book "the most sustained attack ... against the
political enfranchisement of American Jews since the era of Father
Coughlin."
Samuel G. Freedman in the Washington Post opened his discussion of the
book by invoking the New Testament concept of original sin, whose
burden one can escape only through acceptance of Jesus Christ. A
passage from Romans, Freedman claims, framed the book's argument--"if
unintentionally." When was the last time the Washington Post
introduced a serious foreign affairs book with Bible talk that had no
bearing on the work in question?
One of several Wall Street Journal attacks on the work claimed, "it is
apparently the authors' position that ... [in the face of Arab
lobbying efforts] American Jews are obliged to stay silent." This
statement is more than a misrepresentation of Walt and Mearsheimer's
argument, it is a flat-out lie. Did the editors who assigned and
published the piece know this? Was discrediting the book so important
that normal American journalistic standards had to be waived?
Another track of the demonization campaign was the repeated effort to
cancel the authors' appearances or to demand that opposing speakers be
invited to "rebut" their noxious views, a format hardly typical for
authors on book tours. Unfortunately, these initiatives sometimes
succeeded, as when the Chicago Council for Global Affairs cancelled an
event at a venue where the two professors had spoken many times
before. Some efforts to marginalize the book were more like parody, as
when Congressman Elliot Engel complained that Professor Mearsheimer
had been invited to participate in a Columbia University forum on
academic freedom.
It would be na