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THE LOBBY
by David Remnick
The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2007/ 09/03/070903taco_talk_remnick
Aug 27 2007
"The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy"; Mearsheimer, John J.;
Walt, Stephen M.; Israel; Lobbyists; Foreign Policy; Iraq War Last
year, two distinguished political scientists, John J. Mearsheimer, of
the University of Chicago, and Stephen M. Walt, of the John F. Kennedy
School of Government, at Harvard, published a thirty-four-thousand-word
article online entitled "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,"
a shorter version of which appeared in The London Review of
Books. Israel, they wrote, has become a "strategic liability" for the
United States but retains its strong support because of a wealthy,
well-organized, and bewitching lobby that has a "stranglehold" on
Congress and American elites. Moreover, Israel and its lobby bear
outsized responsibility for persuading the Bush Administration to
invade Iraq and, perhaps one day soon, to attack the nuclear facilities
of Iran. Farrar, Straus & Giroux will publish a book-length version
of Mearsheimer and Walt's arguments on September 4th.
Mearsheimer and Walt are "realists." In their view, diplomatic
decisions should be made on the basis of national interest. They
argue that in the post-Cold War era, in the absence of a superpower
struggle in the Middle East, the United States no longer has any need
for an indulgent patronage of the state of Israel. Three billion
dollars in annual foreign aid, the easy sale of advanced weaponry,
thirty-four vetoes of U.N. Security Council resolutions critical of
Israel since 1982-such support, Mearsheimer and Walt maintain, is not
in the national interest. "There is a strong moral case for supporting
Israel's existence," they write, but they deny that Israel is of
critical strategic value to the United States. The disappearance of
Israel, in their view, would jeopardize neither America's geopolitical
interests nor its core values. Such is their "realism."
The authors observe that discussion about Israel in the United
States is often circumscribed, and that the ultimate price for
criticizing Israel is to be branded an anti-Semite. They set out
to write "The Israel Lobby," they have said, to break taboos and
stimulate discussion. They anticipated some ugly attacks, and were
not disappointed. The Washington Post published a piece by the
Johns Hopkins professor Eliot Cohen under the headline "Yes, It's
Anti-Semitic." The Times reported earlier this month that several
organizations, including a Jewish community center, have decided to
withdraw speaking invitations to Mearsheimer and Walt, in violation
of good sense and the spirit of open discussion.
Mearsheimer and Walt are not anti-Semites or racists. They are serious
scholars, and there is no reason to doubt their sincerity.
They are right to describe the moral violation in Israel's occupation
of Palestinian lands. (In this, most Israelis and most American Jews
agree with them.) They were also right about Iraq. The strategic
questions they raise now, particularly about Israel's privileged
relationship with the United States, are worth debating--just as it is
worth debating whether it is a good idea to be selling arms to Saudi
Arabia. But their announced objectives have been badly undermined
by the contours of their argument-a prosecutor's brief that depicts
Israel as a singularly pernicious force in world affairs. Mearsheimer
and Walt have not entirely forgotten their professional duties, and
they periodically signal their awareness of certain complexities. But
their conclusions are unmistakable: Israel and its lobbyists bear
a great deal of blame for the loss of American direction, treasure,
and even blood.
from the issuecartoon banke-mail thisIn Mearsheimer and Walt's
cartography, the Israel lobby is not limited to AIPAC, the American
Israel Public Affairs Committee. It is a loose yet well-oiled
coalition of Jewish-American organizations, "watchdog" groups, think
tanks, Christian evangelicals, sympathetic journalists, and neocon
academics. This is not a cabal but a world in which Abraham Foxman
gives the signal, Pat Robertson describes his apocalyptic rapture,
Charles Krauthammer pumps out a column, Bernard Lewis delivers
a lecture-and the President of the United States invades another
country. Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Exxon-Mobil barely exist.
Where many accounts identify Osama bin Laden's primary grievances with
American support of "infidel" authoritarian regimes in Islamic lands,
Mearsheimer and Walt align his primary concerns with theirs: America's
unwillingness to push Israel to end the occupation of the West Bank
and Gaza. (It doesn't matter that Israel and the Palestinians were in
peace negotiations in 1993, the year of the first attack on the World
Trade Center, or that during the Camp David negotiations in 2000 bin
Laden's pilots were training in Florida.) 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 narrative
rightly points out the destructiveness of the Israeli settlements
in the occupied territories and America's reluctance to do much to
curtail them, but there is scant mention of Palestinian violence or
diplomatic bungling, only a recitation of the claim that, in 2000,
Israel offered "a disarmed set of Bantustans under de-facto Israeli
control." (Strange that, at the time, the Saudi Prince Bandar told
Yasir Arafat, "If we lose this opportunity, it is not going to be a
tragedy. This is going to be a crime.") Nor do they dwell for long
on instances when the all-powerful Israel lobby failed to sway the
White House, as when George H. W. Bush dragged Yitzhak Shamir to the
Madrid peace conference.
Lobbying is inscribed in the American system of power and influence.
Big Pharma, the A.A.R.P., the N.R.A., the N.A.A.C.P., farming
interests, the American Petroleum Institute, and hundreds of others
shuttle between K Street and Capitol Hill. Zbigniew Brzezinski,
President Carter's national-security adviser, recently praised
Mearsheimer and Walt in the pages of Foreign Policy for the service
of "initiating a much-needed public debate," but he went on to
provide a tone and a perspective that are largely missing from their
arguments. "The participation of ethnic or foreign-supported lobbies
in the American policy process is nothing new," he observes. "In
my public life, I have dealt with a number of them. I would
rank the Israeli-American, Cuban-American, and Armenian-American
lobbies as the most effective in their assertiveness. The Greek-
and Taiwanese-American lobbies also rank highly in my book. The
Polish-American lobby was at one time influential (Franklin Roosevelt
complained about it to Joseph Stalin), and I daresay that before
long we will be hearing a lot from the Mexican-, Hindu-, and
Chinese-American lobbies as well."
Taming the influence of lobbies, if that is what Mearsheimer and Walt
desire, is a matter of reforming the lobbying and campaign-finance
laws. But that is clearly not the source of the hysteria surrounding
their arguments. "The Israel Lobby" is a phenomenon of its moment.
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 Guantanamo, 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 is not so much a
diagnosis of our polarized era as a symptom of it.
by David Remnick
The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2007/ 09/03/070903taco_talk_remnick
Aug 27 2007
"The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy"; Mearsheimer, John J.;
Walt, Stephen M.; Israel; Lobbyists; Foreign Policy; Iraq War Last
year, two distinguished political scientists, John J. Mearsheimer, of
the University of Chicago, and Stephen M. Walt, of the John F. Kennedy
School of Government, at Harvard, published a thirty-four-thousand-word
article online entitled "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,"
a shorter version of which appeared in The London Review of
Books. Israel, they wrote, has become a "strategic liability" for the
United States but retains its strong support because of a wealthy,
well-organized, and bewitching lobby that has a "stranglehold" on
Congress and American elites. Moreover, Israel and its lobby bear
outsized responsibility for persuading the Bush Administration to
invade Iraq and, perhaps one day soon, to attack the nuclear facilities
of Iran. Farrar, Straus & Giroux will publish a book-length version
of Mearsheimer and Walt's arguments on September 4th.
Mearsheimer and Walt are "realists." In their view, diplomatic
decisions should be made on the basis of national interest. They
argue that in the post-Cold War era, in the absence of a superpower
struggle in the Middle East, the United States no longer has any need
for an indulgent patronage of the state of Israel. Three billion
dollars in annual foreign aid, the easy sale of advanced weaponry,
thirty-four vetoes of U.N. Security Council resolutions critical of
Israel since 1982-such support, Mearsheimer and Walt maintain, is not
in the national interest. "There is a strong moral case for supporting
Israel's existence," they write, but they deny that Israel is of
critical strategic value to the United States. The disappearance of
Israel, in their view, would jeopardize neither America's geopolitical
interests nor its core values. Such is their "realism."
The authors observe that discussion about Israel in the United
States is often circumscribed, and that the ultimate price for
criticizing Israel is to be branded an anti-Semite. They set out
to write "The Israel Lobby," they have said, to break taboos and
stimulate discussion. They anticipated some ugly attacks, and were
not disappointed. The Washington Post published a piece by the
Johns Hopkins professor Eliot Cohen under the headline "Yes, It's
Anti-Semitic." The Times reported earlier this month that several
organizations, including a Jewish community center, have decided to
withdraw speaking invitations to Mearsheimer and Walt, in violation
of good sense and the spirit of open discussion.
Mearsheimer and Walt are not anti-Semites or racists. They are serious
scholars, and there is no reason to doubt their sincerity.
They are right to describe the moral violation in Israel's occupation
of Palestinian lands. (In this, most Israelis and most American Jews
agree with them.) They were also right about Iraq. The strategic
questions they raise now, particularly about Israel's privileged
relationship with the United States, are worth debating--just as it is
worth debating whether it is a good idea to be selling arms to Saudi
Arabia. But their announced objectives have been badly undermined
by the contours of their argument-a prosecutor's brief that depicts
Israel as a singularly pernicious force in world affairs. Mearsheimer
and Walt have not entirely forgotten their professional duties, and
they periodically signal their awareness of certain complexities. But
their conclusions are unmistakable: Israel and its lobbyists bear
a great deal of blame for the loss of American direction, treasure,
and even blood.
from the issuecartoon banke-mail thisIn Mearsheimer and Walt's
cartography, the Israel lobby is not limited to AIPAC, the American
Israel Public Affairs Committee. It is a loose yet well-oiled
coalition of Jewish-American organizations, "watchdog" groups, think
tanks, Christian evangelicals, sympathetic journalists, and neocon
academics. This is not a cabal but a world in which Abraham Foxman
gives the signal, Pat Robertson describes his apocalyptic rapture,
Charles Krauthammer pumps out a column, Bernard Lewis delivers
a lecture-and the President of the United States invades another
country. Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Exxon-Mobil barely exist.
Where many accounts identify Osama bin Laden's primary grievances with
American support of "infidel" authoritarian regimes in Islamic lands,
Mearsheimer and Walt align his primary concerns with theirs: America's
unwillingness to push Israel to end the occupation of the West Bank
and Gaza. (It doesn't matter that Israel and the Palestinians were in
peace negotiations in 1993, the year of the first attack on the World
Trade Center, or that during the Camp David negotiations in 2000 bin
Laden's pilots were training in Florida.) 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 narrative
rightly points out the destructiveness of the Israeli settlements
in the occupied territories and America's reluctance to do much to
curtail them, but there is scant mention of Palestinian violence or
diplomatic bungling, only a recitation of the claim that, in 2000,
Israel offered "a disarmed set of Bantustans under de-facto Israeli
control." (Strange that, at the time, the Saudi Prince Bandar told
Yasir Arafat, "If we lose this opportunity, it is not going to be a
tragedy. This is going to be a crime.") Nor do they dwell for long
on instances when the all-powerful Israel lobby failed to sway the
White House, as when George H. W. Bush dragged Yitzhak Shamir to the
Madrid peace conference.
Lobbying is inscribed in the American system of power and influence.
Big Pharma, the A.A.R.P., the N.R.A., the N.A.A.C.P., farming
interests, the American Petroleum Institute, and hundreds of others
shuttle between K Street and Capitol Hill. Zbigniew Brzezinski,
President Carter's national-security adviser, recently praised
Mearsheimer and Walt in the pages of Foreign Policy for the service
of "initiating a much-needed public debate," but he went on to
provide a tone and a perspective that are largely missing from their
arguments. "The participation of ethnic or foreign-supported lobbies
in the American policy process is nothing new," he observes. "In
my public life, I have dealt with a number of them. I would
rank the Israeli-American, Cuban-American, and Armenian-American
lobbies as the most effective in their assertiveness. The Greek-
and Taiwanese-American lobbies also rank highly in my book. The
Polish-American lobby was at one time influential (Franklin Roosevelt
complained about it to Joseph Stalin), and I daresay that before
long we will be hearing a lot from the Mexican-, Hindu-, and
Chinese-American lobbies as well."
Taming the influence of lobbies, if that is what Mearsheimer and Walt
desire, is a matter of reforming the lobbying and campaign-finance
laws. But that is clearly not the source of the hysteria surrounding
their arguments. "The Israel Lobby" is a phenomenon of its moment.
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 Guantanamo, 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 is not so much a
diagnosis of our polarized era as a symptom of it.