"The Israel Lobby" and It's Critics

Well, Egyptian customs has held up my review copy of The Israel Lobby. I've received books in Cairo with the word "Israel" in the title all the time, and the bookshops here are full of them, but this item seems to have caught somebody's attention. I've been trying to keep up with the debate about it in the U.S., which to no one's surprise has been polarized.

I wasn't quite prepared for the fierce, personal, 7,000-word-plus attack that Jeffrey Goldberg delivers in last week's New Republic. He basically calls Mearsheimer and Walt anti-Semites, inhabiting the same "inflamed universe of negative Judeocentrism" as Osama bin Laden, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, David Duke and others.

According to Goldberg:

America, too, has a history of Judeocentrism, and also of the negative kind, the essence of which has been the belief that Jews, in order to advance their own interests, are responsible for entangling America in unnecessary wars--what we now call "wars of choice," which the Jews, it is alleged, have chosen for us... It is an odious tradition, and I do not see how any thoughtful or decent individual would wish to belong to it... But the tradition has now found a couple of unexpected new tribunes. The Judeocentric understanding of America's foreign policy is now the special province of two ostensibly reputable scholars, John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen M. Walt of Harvard University...

...the book remains true to the malignant and dishonest spirit of the article [their original article, in the London Review of Books]. It represents the most sustained attack, the most mainstream attack, against the political enfranchisement of American Jews since the era of Father Coughlin...

The villains in The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy are almost entirely Jewish. Many of the chapters of the book contain extensive lists of Jews (even Rothschilds) who, the authors claim, act against the best interests of the United States...

Mearsheimer and Walt then proceed to catalog all the mistakes and the crimes for which AIPAC and the many other groups that make up the pro-Israel lobby are, in their omnipotence, responsible...

...they are alleging the existence of an open Jewish plot to control American foreign policy...

...the view...is heinous...

Mearsheimer and Walt's Judeocentric view of American policy in the Middle East is just a way of pinning the American system that they dislike on the Jews...

Each chapter contains assertions of Jewish misbehavior, or criminality. The history of the Arab-Israeli conflict recounted here is comically one-sided, even by the standards of Israel's revisionist historians...

The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy is premised on many such nasty and false ideas, but underpinning them all is the belief that America supports Israel only because the pro-Israel lobby forces it to do so...

There is only one cause for America's support for Israel, they say: the lobby, its money, its muscle, its effectiveness at suppressing dissent about its activities and about the depth of Israel's crimes and strategic uselessness... The ultimate lesson of this book is that America must free itself from the shackles of the pro-Israel lobby...

We are awfully close to the Elders of Z. here...

Why couldn't these formerly credible scholars have made their criticisms of AIPAC and of Israel without demonizing Jews and demonizing Israel?...

The assertion that the Iraq war would not have happened except for the lobbying of Jews is an echo of an ancient idea spread by anti-Jewish ideologues: that Jews, operating in the shadows, manipulate gentile leaders to unknowingly advance Jewish interests...

Author Milton Viorst, another writer who has immersed himself in the Middle East, may as well have been reviewing a different book in his piece on www.truthdig.com, in which he defends M&W from attacks by, among others, Anti-Defamation League chief Abe Foxman...

One can admit the legitimacy of Foxman's warnings on anti-Semitism and still ask for the evidence of "subtle bigotry" in the Mearsheimer-Walt text. I found none, unless the reader accepts the premise that anti-Semitism is present in any scrutiny of relations between the U.S. government and American Jews, or the Israel lobby...

Foxman says the authors' objective is to make Israel into a "pariah" state, though nothing that they write reveals such a goal. On the contrary, Mearsheimer and Walt recognize lobbies—all lobbies—as a legitimate part of the American political system, existing to shape or shift policy in the interest of the various causes they serve. Foxman, backed by quotes from such dubious authorities as Dennis Ross, an ex-U.S. ambassador and a vigorous defender of official Israeli views, seeks to attribute something sinister to their motives...

Some of their critics, ill at ease with the charge of anti-Semitism or "subtle bigotry," have accused them of being "unbalanced," in omitting the sins of "the other side." By their nature, briefs are not balanced, but in this case the accusation seems doubly contrived. Assuming that the Palestinians or radical Muslims are "the other side," the critics can scarcely claim that the literature is not already overflowing with negative evaluations, readily at hand in any library or bookstore...

The objective of Mearsheimer and Walt is to break new scholarly ground, which is what academics are supposed to do. Their findings will come as no surprise to those familiar with American political institutions, but, judging by the reverberations of the Foxman line, they have ignited panic by daring to put so much of the available material on the public record...

--By Scott MacLeod/Cairo