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The Jewish Journal of greater L.A, CA
2007-09-21
How Walt and Mearsheimer's book got the pro-Israel lobby wrong
By Ron Kampeas, Jewish Telegraphic Agency
Covering Israel, its relationship with the United States and the
influential lobby that straddles the two often requires the basic
skills and instincts of a cub reporter on the neighborhood beat.
With that in mind, I approached "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign
Policy," the new book by scholars John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt,
as I would a map of my neighborhood drawn up by an urban planning
critic who has a known bias against gentrification. You know it will
emphasize blight and ignore greenery to the point of unfairness, but
you're interested anyway because you might learn something, confront a
discomfiting truth or two and get an idea of how to make things
better.
Imagine the surprise, then, with the map laid out on the table, when
you see unrecognizable quadrants describing nonexistent dungeons and
moonscapes. You might wonder: Is this guy on drugs?
Sitting across from Mearsheimer, a political science professor at the
University of Chicago, and Walt, an international affairs professor at
the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, in the
lobby of the Madison Hotel in Washington, it was obvious these guys
were not on drugs. But why did they make up stuff?
Clearly this was not going to be a routine book tour interview, and I
tried to make that known from the outset. I explained that I was not
going to settle for the usual "How did you get your ideas?" sort of
questions because their ideas seemed so strikingly wrong.
Others have called the Walt-Mearsheimer writings borderline
anti-Semitic. I don't think so, but their fantastic claims --
particularly about Israel, the lobby's role in the lead-up to the Iraq
War and the creation of the Bush administration hostility to Syria --
demand answers.
First let me emphasize that just as "The Israel Lobby" is severely
flawed on many counts, the book has its strong points and weak points
that merit less than a tidal wave of condemnation. For starters, the
chapter outlining who and what constitutes the pro-Israel lobby and
how these combined forces exercise their influence in Washington is a
useful consolidation of reporting by others.
The chapters on what the authors describe as Israel's dwindling moral
standing and decreasing strategic value to the United States invite
plenty of disagreement on several fronts, but the authors do ask some
hard and helpful questions about how the lobby functions and whether
more discussion on Middle East policy matters would be useful.
The chapter on Israel's dealings with the Palestinians is certainly
one-sided, omitting or downplaying crucial information that would
provide the uninformed and unbiased readers with a balanced picture,
but at least the arguments put forth by Mearsheimer and Walt are
grounded in an existing Palestinian and pro-Palestinian narrative.
It is on the subject of the Iraq War -- specifically the effort to
assign blame to Jerusalem and Jewish organizations -- that the authors
go off the rails. On this question, I asked Mearsheimer and Walt
particularly about their focus on Paul Wolfowitz, the former deputy
defense secretary, who was an architect of the war.
Why, I wondered, no mention of Wolfowitz's many writings on the
general idea of pre-emptive action, his efforts as the lead
U.S. official shepherding democracy into the Philippines and Indonesia
in the 1980s?
And what about his 2003 endorsement of the Geneva agreements positing
Israel's return to pre-1967 lines, made explicitly because he believed
the Israel-Palestinian issue had to be solved if Iraq was to succeed?
(To say the lobby was less than enthusiastic about the Geneva
agreements would be an understatement.) Were these not more germane to
understanding his commitment to war with Iraq than rumors of his
commitment to Israel?
Mearsheimer responded: "We're not making the argument that they were
monomaniacal, that the United States had to invade Iraq for Israeli
benefits."
Yet absent other evidence of the Bush administration's commitment to
invade Iraq, that is exactly how their book comes across. The writers
assemble quotes from leaders in Jerusalem to show that while Israel
"did not initiate the campaign for war against Iraq," it "did join
forces with the neoconservatives to help sell the war to the Bush
administration and the American people."
The idea that Israel joined with neoconservatives to "sell" Bush on
Iraq posits an inversion of how Washington operates -- especially
under this administration. Bush's proxies made it clear to Jewish
leaders -- and just about everyone else -- in the first days of the
administration that the tradition of joining forces on areas of
agreement and agreeing to disagree on all else was null: You either
signed on with the whole Bush agenda or you were frozen out.
And so, as 2002 wore into 2003, every interest group in Washington
that needed access to an immensely popular president -- the media, the
Democrats and, yes, Jewish and pro-Israel groups -- signed on more or
less to the White House policy that arched over all others: invading
Iraq.
The authors weren't buying.
"Never mind" also characterizes the authors' response to my questions
about the recent revelation by Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's
planning chief at the State Department and a fierce critic of the
Pentagon neoconservatives who pushed for war, that Israeli leaders
prior to the invasion made it clear that they thought Iran was the
real threat and Iraq was a distraction.
"Once it became clear that the United States intended to do Iran and
Syria after it handled Iraq, the Israelis quickly bought into the
enterprise and pushed us very hard," Mearsheimer said.
But who was the "us" being pushed, if the Israelis were being pushed
by the Bush administration?
It is one thing for the authors to omit telling details that would
undermine their theory. When it comes to America's Syrian policy,
however, they omit whole trends.
Mearsheimer and Walt ignore Israel's panic -- reported by many news
sources -- in late 2005, when it became clear that elements in the
Bush administration were seeking regime change in Syria as
"transformative." Israeli officials strove to make clear that they
had outlined all post-regime scenarios and none of them were good.
Bush's fury with the Syrians for undermining the single Middle Eastern
success of his pro-democracy policy, Lebanon's "Cedar Revolution" --
repeated in dozens of White House statements -- receives no mention in
the Mearsheimer-Walt book. In fact, the only time the authors cite the
successful ouster of Syrian occupation forces is when arguing that
Israel's policies are inviting their return.
The authors forcefully rejected complaints that their book suffers
from a lack of original research.
"The critical issue is whether or not we would tell a different story
or someone else would tell a different story if they did more
extensive interviewing than we did," Mearsheimer said. "And we're
confident that would not be the case. We regard the story as basically
correct, and doing more interviewing would not alter the story line in
any way."
Yet such research would have led them to learn that it was not AIPAC
but congressional Republicans who during last year's Lebanon War
undercut the efforts by Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), then the
minority leader in the U.S. House of Representatives, to include a
line in a pro-Israel resolution urging "all sides to protect innocent
civilian life." It would have led them to report that it was White
House pressure, in part, that pushed Israel this April to distance
itself for a week or so from Pelosi's efforts to assure Syria that
Israel did not want war.
Questions about how Jews, Israel, the pro-Israel lobby and the
U.S. government interact are critically important and beg for a little
light. But "The Israel Lobby" is not the place to start. All Walt and
Mearsheimer have achieved with their massive diversion based on
unfounded accusations of overly broad Jewish influence is to help
those who want to shut down that discussion.
------------------------------------- --------------------------
Q&A with John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt
Ron Kampeas, Jewish Telegraphic Agency's Washington bureau chief,
recently sat down with scholars Stephen Walt, international affairs
professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard
University, and John Mearsheimer, political science professor at the
University of Chicago, to discuss their controversial new book, "The
Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy." What follows is an edited
transcript of the interview.
Ron Kampeas: How does one write a book about the lobby without
interviewing the lobbyists and the people lobbied?
Stephen Walt: First, we did talk to a number of people who had either
been connected with some of these organizations and who had worked on
Capitol Hill to make sure the story we were assembling was an accurate
one. Second, this is a difficult subject because lots of people won't
talk on the record if you do try to interview them and a number of the
people we do quote based on other sources were quoted anonymously in
those sources as well. Third, there are limits to what any two people
can do, and we felt there was such an abundance of evidence already
available that we could get a very accurate story of the way these
organizations operate. Based on that record, I guess the last point I
would make is that the real issue is not the precise research methods
we used but rather whether or not the story we told is an accurate
one.
John Mearsheimer: The critical issue is whether or not we would tell a
different story or someone else would tell a different story if they
did more extensive interviewing than we did -- and we're confident
that would not be the case. We regard the story as basically correct,
and doing more interviewing would not alter the story line in any way.
SW: One other point -- there is really no disagreement about whether
or not there is an influential set of pro-Israel organizations in the
United States of America. No serious person questions that. The only
question is whether their influence is beneficial to the United States
and Israel or whether it's become harmful to the United States and
Israel.
JM: And doing more interviews is not going to answer that question.
RK: What do you say to those who argue that statements from Israeli
leaders and Jewish organizations in support of the Iraq War should be
understood from the vantage point of having to deal with a Bush
administration that was insisting on support for its major
initiatives?
SW: I guess I'm not persuaded by the argument that the Bush
administration told them "you're with us or against us and that's the
way we do business." Because these organizations were not at all
bashful about taking on the Bush administration when they didn't like
his calling for a Palestinian state, when he pushed Sharon around,
when he tried to push Sharon around about the reoccupation of the West
Bank [in April 2002]. It's not to me anyway particularly credible
that, you know, Adam Goldman [Bush's first liaison to the Jewish
community] told everybody to get on board and they obediently
supported the Iraq War [to avoid] a falling-out with the Bush
administration.
RK: Last month, Larry Wilkerson, the former policy planning chief at
the U.S. State Department and a fierce critic of neoconservatives in
the Pentagon who backed the Iraq War, said that Israeli leaders
expressed concerns beforehand about the invasion.
JM: What Wilkerson is saying is that the Israelis, when they caught
wind of the fact that the United States was thinking about attacking
Iraq, in early 2002 went to Washington and told the Americans, the
Bush administration in particular, that the real threat was Iran, not
Iraq, and they made it clear that they'd prefer we went after Iran and
not Iraq. They had no problem with the United States effecting regime
change in Iraq and Syria.
Iran was more important. Once it became clear that the United States
intended to do Iran and Syria after it handled Iraq, the Israelis
quickly bought onto the enterprise and pushed us very hard.
SW: Former prime ministers wrote op-eds. [Shimon] Peres told reporters
that the invasion of Iraq is a must in the fall of 2002. If this is
something they didn't want the United States to do, they had lots of
ways to try to get the United States not to do it.
Maybe they wouldn't have succeeded, but the point is there's just no
evidence that they were ever putting the brakes on. They wanted to
make sure that we did not lose sight of the Iran problem while we were
focusing on Saddam.
RK: What is the "unifying theme" that defines the Israel lobby?
SW: Although they differ on certain policy questions such as the
desirability of a two-state solution, disagreements between the
Zionist Organization of America on one side and say the Israeli Policy
Forum on the other side or Americans for Peace Now, virtually all
these organizations believe that the United States should support
Israel by diplomatic, economic and military support almost independent
of what Israel's actions are. So Americans for Peace Now does not
advocate making U.S. aid conditioned on an end to settlements. They
say that U.S. aid shouldn't be used for settlements, but they don't
say we ought to link [it to Israel's actions]. They all want to
maintain the special relationship; that's the unifying theme.
RK: Why did you simply assert in the book that the pro-Israel lobby is
the most powerful foreign interest lobby instead of also examining the
activities of influential organizations that deal with Cuba and
Taiwan?
JM: First of all, we do acknowledge that there are other lobbies that
identify with other countries. This is a book about one of those
particular lobbies, and it's a completely legitimate enterprise to
write a book on the Israel lobby or on the China lobby or on the Irish
lobby. Why did we decide to write this book? Well, in the wake of
Sept. 11 it became clear to the vast majority of Americans that
American policy in the Middle East really mattered, and that it is
very important that all of us think very long and hard about what our
policy is and what the consequences are of that policy.
In doing research on the Middle East and thinking hard about what's
going on in the Middle East, it became readily apparent to us that the
lobby had significant influence on shaping that policy and yet no one
was willing or hardly anyone was willing to talk about that publicly
in the mainstream media. And we thought that it would be a good idea
if someone wrote an article or wrote a book that focused on the Middle
East and on the lobby's role in formulating the policy, American
policy towards that region and asking the all-important question of
whether or not that policy makes good sense for the United States of
America. So that's what drove us to focus on the Israel lobby. It
wasn't as if we had any animus to Israel.
SW: In [two separate assessments by Forbes and National Journal based
on interviews with congressional staffers] the Cuban American National
Foundation is not the one that comes in at No. 2. AIPAC comes in at
No. 2, right behind I think AARP, or maybe it's tied with AARP right
up there with the National Rifle Association. So if you go ask people
on Capitol Hill who they think the most important lobbies -- you know,
you were asking us "why didn't we go talk to people on Capitol Hill"
-- guess what, Forbes and the National Journal went and talked to
people on Capitol Hill, guess what answer they got? It wasn't the
Armenian Americans who are, for their numbers, as Abraham Foxman now
knows, a rather potent operation. But it's hard to argue that the
United States has done as much for Armenia as it has done for Israel.
RK: Allegations of anti-Semitism, which you have faced from some
critics, can be used to intimidate people from criticizing Israel. At
the same time, accusing people of conducting a smear campaign simply
because they attempt to analyze whether anti-Semitism is at work can
also be seen as a way of silencing critics.
SW: I have yet to see much evidence that some people have been shy
about playing the anti-Semitism card. We make it abundantly clear that
not only do we condemn the most virulent forms of anti-Semitism, but
we also condemn anything that is likely to limit the ability of Jews
and anybody else in the United States to participate fully and
actively in political and social life. The most mild and polite forms
of stereotyping we also condemn; we think that Jewish Americans and
all other Americans should be able to represent their views openly and
use, express and manifest them. We condemn anything that gets in the
way of that, and we certainly condemn anything that limits free speech
and the expression of views. We made it very clear when we discussed
anti-Semitism, we condemned all of its manifestations.
What we want to have is an open discussion of American interests and
American policy in the Middle East and all the different factors that
make that up. One of the nice things about writing the book is that we
can keep the attention on substance, we can have that discussion, and
we're going to learn from it, we're going to learn from our
substantive critics, they're going to explain things that might be
slightly different than what we thought they were. We're going to
learn over time. We can't learn collectively as a society if we can't
have an open discussion, and if we can't we're more likely to do
stupid things that are bad for us and bad for Israel, too.
RK: Professor Walt, do you regret that at an event in August 2006
organized by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, you said that
Jews who previously served as U.S. diplomats, including Dennis Ross
and Martin Indyk, "have attachments that shape how they think about
the Middle East and how they think about American policy in that
region?"
SW: I think many Americans of many different backgrounds have
attachments for other societies that are based on their ethnic origins
or their own personal experiences, like living overseas when they're
in high school, and those affinities or attachments are going to shape
how [they] think of different parts of the world. And I think that's
wonderful; I have no problem with that whatsoever. We are a melting
pot society, where lots of people have attachments; and, by the way,
as you know, in the United States of America you can be a dual
citizen, dual citizenship in both countries, and we don't assume that
someone who's a dual citizen has no feelings whatsoever for the other
country in which they are a citizen.
And it's perfectly OK for that person to then advocate policies that
they think are good for the United States and good for the other
society, too. This is just a fact of life in America and it's
perfectly OK. But it's also OK for us to point out that individuals
have multiple loyalties and to also argue that those multiple
loyalties may fog up their view of what's in the American
interest. It's complicated.
RK: In any way, have you purposely overstated your argument in an
effort to land a political blow against pro-Israel organizations?
SW: We actually have no animus at all toward Israel or toward the
organizations in the lobby. This is not some kind of crusade that we
launched ourselves because we want to take down a set of
organizations. We say in the conclusion, one of the things we hope
will happen is that there's more open discussion of the issue, which
would be good, and second we hope that some groups and organizations
that we think are advocating polices that are in everybody's best
interests become more influential -- not that we're trying to destroy
these groups or organizations or even suggest that what they do is
illegitimate. We just think that they have been advocating a set of
policies that are not good for us and not good for Israel, and people
can disagree with us, but it wasn't motivated by an anger or
hostility. We're scholars; we're not part of any political movement,
OK? We're just trying to write a book that's as accurate as possible.
2007-09-21
How Walt and Mearsheimer's book got the pro-Israel lobby wrong
By Ron Kampeas, Jewish Telegraphic Agency
Covering Israel, its relationship with the United States and the
influential lobby that straddles the two often requires the basic
skills and instincts of a cub reporter on the neighborhood beat.
With that in mind, I approached "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign
Policy," the new book by scholars John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt,
as I would a map of my neighborhood drawn up by an urban planning
critic who has a known bias against gentrification. You know it will
emphasize blight and ignore greenery to the point of unfairness, but
you're interested anyway because you might learn something, confront a
discomfiting truth or two and get an idea of how to make things
better.
Imagine the surprise, then, with the map laid out on the table, when
you see unrecognizable quadrants describing nonexistent dungeons and
moonscapes. You might wonder: Is this guy on drugs?
Sitting across from Mearsheimer, a political science professor at the
University of Chicago, and Walt, an international affairs professor at
the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, in the
lobby of the Madison Hotel in Washington, it was obvious these guys
were not on drugs. But why did they make up stuff?
Clearly this was not going to be a routine book tour interview, and I
tried to make that known from the outset. I explained that I was not
going to settle for the usual "How did you get your ideas?" sort of
questions because their ideas seemed so strikingly wrong.
Others have called the Walt-Mearsheimer writings borderline
anti-Semitic. I don't think so, but their fantastic claims --
particularly about Israel, the lobby's role in the lead-up to the Iraq
War and the creation of the Bush administration hostility to Syria --
demand answers.
First let me emphasize that just as "The Israel Lobby" is severely
flawed on many counts, the book has its strong points and weak points
that merit less than a tidal wave of condemnation. For starters, the
chapter outlining who and what constitutes the pro-Israel lobby and
how these combined forces exercise their influence in Washington is a
useful consolidation of reporting by others.
The chapters on what the authors describe as Israel's dwindling moral
standing and decreasing strategic value to the United States invite
plenty of disagreement on several fronts, but the authors do ask some
hard and helpful questions about how the lobby functions and whether
more discussion on Middle East policy matters would be useful.
The chapter on Israel's dealings with the Palestinians is certainly
one-sided, omitting or downplaying crucial information that would
provide the uninformed and unbiased readers with a balanced picture,
but at least the arguments put forth by Mearsheimer and Walt are
grounded in an existing Palestinian and pro-Palestinian narrative.
It is on the subject of the Iraq War -- specifically the effort to
assign blame to Jerusalem and Jewish organizations -- that the authors
go off the rails. On this question, I asked Mearsheimer and Walt
particularly about their focus on Paul Wolfowitz, the former deputy
defense secretary, who was an architect of the war.
Why, I wondered, no mention of Wolfowitz's many writings on the
general idea of pre-emptive action, his efforts as the lead
U.S. official shepherding democracy into the Philippines and Indonesia
in the 1980s?
And what about his 2003 endorsement of the Geneva agreements positing
Israel's return to pre-1967 lines, made explicitly because he believed
the Israel-Palestinian issue had to be solved if Iraq was to succeed?
(To say the lobby was less than enthusiastic about the Geneva
agreements would be an understatement.) Were these not more germane to
understanding his commitment to war with Iraq than rumors of his
commitment to Israel?
Mearsheimer responded: "We're not making the argument that they were
monomaniacal, that the United States had to invade Iraq for Israeli
benefits."
Yet absent other evidence of the Bush administration's commitment to
invade Iraq, that is exactly how their book comes across. The writers
assemble quotes from leaders in Jerusalem to show that while Israel
"did not initiate the campaign for war against Iraq," it "did join
forces with the neoconservatives to help sell the war to the Bush
administration and the American people."
The idea that Israel joined with neoconservatives to "sell" Bush on
Iraq posits an inversion of how Washington operates -- especially
under this administration. Bush's proxies made it clear to Jewish
leaders -- and just about everyone else -- in the first days of the
administration that the tradition of joining forces on areas of
agreement and agreeing to disagree on all else was null: You either
signed on with the whole Bush agenda or you were frozen out.
And so, as 2002 wore into 2003, every interest group in Washington
that needed access to an immensely popular president -- the media, the
Democrats and, yes, Jewish and pro-Israel groups -- signed on more or
less to the White House policy that arched over all others: invading
Iraq.
The authors weren't buying.
"Never mind" also characterizes the authors' response to my questions
about the recent revelation by Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's
planning chief at the State Department and a fierce critic of the
Pentagon neoconservatives who pushed for war, that Israeli leaders
prior to the invasion made it clear that they thought Iran was the
real threat and Iraq was a distraction.
"Once it became clear that the United States intended to do Iran and
Syria after it handled Iraq, the Israelis quickly bought into the
enterprise and pushed us very hard," Mearsheimer said.
But who was the "us" being pushed, if the Israelis were being pushed
by the Bush administration?
It is one thing for the authors to omit telling details that would
undermine their theory. When it comes to America's Syrian policy,
however, they omit whole trends.
Mearsheimer and Walt ignore Israel's panic -- reported by many news
sources -- in late 2005, when it became clear that elements in the
Bush administration were seeking regime change in Syria as
"transformative." Israeli officials strove to make clear that they
had outlined all post-regime scenarios and none of them were good.
Bush's fury with the Syrians for undermining the single Middle Eastern
success of his pro-democracy policy, Lebanon's "Cedar Revolution" --
repeated in dozens of White House statements -- receives no mention in
the Mearsheimer-Walt book. In fact, the only time the authors cite the
successful ouster of Syrian occupation forces is when arguing that
Israel's policies are inviting their return.
The authors forcefully rejected complaints that their book suffers
from a lack of original research.
"The critical issue is whether or not we would tell a different story
or someone else would tell a different story if they did more
extensive interviewing than we did," Mearsheimer said. "And we're
confident that would not be the case. We regard the story as basically
correct, and doing more interviewing would not alter the story line in
any way."
Yet such research would have led them to learn that it was not AIPAC
but congressional Republicans who during last year's Lebanon War
undercut the efforts by Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), then the
minority leader in the U.S. House of Representatives, to include a
line in a pro-Israel resolution urging "all sides to protect innocent
civilian life." It would have led them to report that it was White
House pressure, in part, that pushed Israel this April to distance
itself for a week or so from Pelosi's efforts to assure Syria that
Israel did not want war.
Questions about how Jews, Israel, the pro-Israel lobby and the
U.S. government interact are critically important and beg for a little
light. But "The Israel Lobby" is not the place to start. All Walt and
Mearsheimer have achieved with their massive diversion based on
unfounded accusations of overly broad Jewish influence is to help
those who want to shut down that discussion.
------------------------------------- --------------------------
Q&A with John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt
Ron Kampeas, Jewish Telegraphic Agency's Washington bureau chief,
recently sat down with scholars Stephen Walt, international affairs
professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard
University, and John Mearsheimer, political science professor at the
University of Chicago, to discuss their controversial new book, "The
Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy." What follows is an edited
transcript of the interview.
Ron Kampeas: How does one write a book about the lobby without
interviewing the lobbyists and the people lobbied?
Stephen Walt: First, we did talk to a number of people who had either
been connected with some of these organizations and who had worked on
Capitol Hill to make sure the story we were assembling was an accurate
one. Second, this is a difficult subject because lots of people won't
talk on the record if you do try to interview them and a number of the
people we do quote based on other sources were quoted anonymously in
those sources as well. Third, there are limits to what any two people
can do, and we felt there was such an abundance of evidence already
available that we could get a very accurate story of the way these
organizations operate. Based on that record, I guess the last point I
would make is that the real issue is not the precise research methods
we used but rather whether or not the story we told is an accurate
one.
John Mearsheimer: The critical issue is whether or not we would tell a
different story or someone else would tell a different story if they
did more extensive interviewing than we did -- and we're confident
that would not be the case. We regard the story as basically correct,
and doing more interviewing would not alter the story line in any way.
SW: One other point -- there is really no disagreement about whether
or not there is an influential set of pro-Israel organizations in the
United States of America. No serious person questions that. The only
question is whether their influence is beneficial to the United States
and Israel or whether it's become harmful to the United States and
Israel.
JM: And doing more interviews is not going to answer that question.
RK: What do you say to those who argue that statements from Israeli
leaders and Jewish organizations in support of the Iraq War should be
understood from the vantage point of having to deal with a Bush
administration that was insisting on support for its major
initiatives?
SW: I guess I'm not persuaded by the argument that the Bush
administration told them "you're with us or against us and that's the
way we do business." Because these organizations were not at all
bashful about taking on the Bush administration when they didn't like
his calling for a Palestinian state, when he pushed Sharon around,
when he tried to push Sharon around about the reoccupation of the West
Bank [in April 2002]. It's not to me anyway particularly credible
that, you know, Adam Goldman [Bush's first liaison to the Jewish
community] told everybody to get on board and they obediently
supported the Iraq War [to avoid] a falling-out with the Bush
administration.
RK: Last month, Larry Wilkerson, the former policy planning chief at
the U.S. State Department and a fierce critic of neoconservatives in
the Pentagon who backed the Iraq War, said that Israeli leaders
expressed concerns beforehand about the invasion.
JM: What Wilkerson is saying is that the Israelis, when they caught
wind of the fact that the United States was thinking about attacking
Iraq, in early 2002 went to Washington and told the Americans, the
Bush administration in particular, that the real threat was Iran, not
Iraq, and they made it clear that they'd prefer we went after Iran and
not Iraq. They had no problem with the United States effecting regime
change in Iraq and Syria.
Iran was more important. Once it became clear that the United States
intended to do Iran and Syria after it handled Iraq, the Israelis
quickly bought onto the enterprise and pushed us very hard.
SW: Former prime ministers wrote op-eds. [Shimon] Peres told reporters
that the invasion of Iraq is a must in the fall of 2002. If this is
something they didn't want the United States to do, they had lots of
ways to try to get the United States not to do it.
Maybe they wouldn't have succeeded, but the point is there's just no
evidence that they were ever putting the brakes on. They wanted to
make sure that we did not lose sight of the Iran problem while we were
focusing on Saddam.
RK: What is the "unifying theme" that defines the Israel lobby?
SW: Although they differ on certain policy questions such as the
desirability of a two-state solution, disagreements between the
Zionist Organization of America on one side and say the Israeli Policy
Forum on the other side or Americans for Peace Now, virtually all
these organizations believe that the United States should support
Israel by diplomatic, economic and military support almost independent
of what Israel's actions are. So Americans for Peace Now does not
advocate making U.S. aid conditioned on an end to settlements. They
say that U.S. aid shouldn't be used for settlements, but they don't
say we ought to link [it to Israel's actions]. They all want to
maintain the special relationship; that's the unifying theme.
RK: Why did you simply assert in the book that the pro-Israel lobby is
the most powerful foreign interest lobby instead of also examining the
activities of influential organizations that deal with Cuba and
Taiwan?
JM: First of all, we do acknowledge that there are other lobbies that
identify with other countries. This is a book about one of those
particular lobbies, and it's a completely legitimate enterprise to
write a book on the Israel lobby or on the China lobby or on the Irish
lobby. Why did we decide to write this book? Well, in the wake of
Sept. 11 it became clear to the vast majority of Americans that
American policy in the Middle East really mattered, and that it is
very important that all of us think very long and hard about what our
policy is and what the consequences are of that policy.
In doing research on the Middle East and thinking hard about what's
going on in the Middle East, it became readily apparent to us that the
lobby had significant influence on shaping that policy and yet no one
was willing or hardly anyone was willing to talk about that publicly
in the mainstream media. And we thought that it would be a good idea
if someone wrote an article or wrote a book that focused on the Middle
East and on the lobby's role in formulating the policy, American
policy towards that region and asking the all-important question of
whether or not that policy makes good sense for the United States of
America. So that's what drove us to focus on the Israel lobby. It
wasn't as if we had any animus to Israel.
SW: In [two separate assessments by Forbes and National Journal based
on interviews with congressional staffers] the Cuban American National
Foundation is not the one that comes in at No. 2. AIPAC comes in at
No. 2, right behind I think AARP, or maybe it's tied with AARP right
up there with the National Rifle Association. So if you go ask people
on Capitol Hill who they think the most important lobbies -- you know,
you were asking us "why didn't we go talk to people on Capitol Hill"
-- guess what, Forbes and the National Journal went and talked to
people on Capitol Hill, guess what answer they got? It wasn't the
Armenian Americans who are, for their numbers, as Abraham Foxman now
knows, a rather potent operation. But it's hard to argue that the
United States has done as much for Armenia as it has done for Israel.
RK: Allegations of anti-Semitism, which you have faced from some
critics, can be used to intimidate people from criticizing Israel. At
the same time, accusing people of conducting a smear campaign simply
because they attempt to analyze whether anti-Semitism is at work can
also be seen as a way of silencing critics.
SW: I have yet to see much evidence that some people have been shy
about playing the anti-Semitism card. We make it abundantly clear that
not only do we condemn the most virulent forms of anti-Semitism, but
we also condemn anything that is likely to limit the ability of Jews
and anybody else in the United States to participate fully and
actively in political and social life. The most mild and polite forms
of stereotyping we also condemn; we think that Jewish Americans and
all other Americans should be able to represent their views openly and
use, express and manifest them. We condemn anything that gets in the
way of that, and we certainly condemn anything that limits free speech
and the expression of views. We made it very clear when we discussed
anti-Semitism, we condemned all of its manifestations.
What we want to have is an open discussion of American interests and
American policy in the Middle East and all the different factors that
make that up. One of the nice things about writing the book is that we
can keep the attention on substance, we can have that discussion, and
we're going to learn from it, we're going to learn from our
substantive critics, they're going to explain things that might be
slightly different than what we thought they were. We're going to
learn over time. We can't learn collectively as a society if we can't
have an open discussion, and if we can't we're more likely to do
stupid things that are bad for us and bad for Israel, too.
RK: Professor Walt, do you regret that at an event in August 2006
organized by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, you said that
Jews who previously served as U.S. diplomats, including Dennis Ross
and Martin Indyk, "have attachments that shape how they think about
the Middle East and how they think about American policy in that
region?"
SW: I think many Americans of many different backgrounds have
attachments for other societies that are based on their ethnic origins
or their own personal experiences, like living overseas when they're
in high school, and those affinities or attachments are going to shape
how [they] think of different parts of the world. And I think that's
wonderful; I have no problem with that whatsoever. We are a melting
pot society, where lots of people have attachments; and, by the way,
as you know, in the United States of America you can be a dual
citizen, dual citizenship in both countries, and we don't assume that
someone who's a dual citizen has no feelings whatsoever for the other
country in which they are a citizen.
And it's perfectly OK for that person to then advocate policies that
they think are good for the United States and good for the other
society, too. This is just a fact of life in America and it's
perfectly OK. But it's also OK for us to point out that individuals
have multiple loyalties and to also argue that those multiple
loyalties may fog up their view of what's in the American
interest. It's complicated.
RK: In any way, have you purposely overstated your argument in an
effort to land a political blow against pro-Israel organizations?
SW: We actually have no animus at all toward Israel or toward the
organizations in the lobby. This is not some kind of crusade that we
launched ourselves because we want to take down a set of
organizations. We say in the conclusion, one of the things we hope
will happen is that there's more open discussion of the issue, which
would be good, and second we hope that some groups and organizations
that we think are advocating polices that are in everybody's best
interests become more influential -- not that we're trying to destroy
these groups or organizations or even suggest that what they do is
illegitimate. We just think that they have been advocating a set of
policies that are not good for us and not good for Israel, and people
can disagree with us, but it wasn't motivated by an anger or
hostility. We're scholars; we're not part of any political movement,
OK? We're just trying to write a book that's as accurate as possible.