WASHINGTON, 27 March 2006 — Two of America’s leading scholars have published a scathing critique on the role and power of Washington’s pro-Israel lobbies in a British journal, warning their “decisive” role in fomenting the Iraq war is now being repeated with the threat of action against Iran. And they say the lobbies are so strong that they doubt their article would be accepted in any US-based publication. [To date, it seems largely ignored by the mainstream US press, Editor].
Professor John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, and Professor Stephen Walt of Harvard’s Kenney School, are considered leading figures in American academic life, and they insist pro-Israel lobbies in the US have manipulated Washington’s policies in the Middle East to the point where it is the US that does most of the fighting, dying and rebuilding while Israel reaps most of the security benefits.
The authors say the Israel lobbies haves distorted American policy and operated against American interests, organized the funneling of more than $140 billion dollars to Israel since World War II, and “have a stranglehold” on the US Congress. Their ability to raise large campaign funds gives them vast influence over Republican and Democratic Administrations, while their role in Washington think tanks on the Middle East dominates the policy debate.
“This situation has no equal in American political history,” says the 83-page study, “The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy.”
“Why has the United States been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another state?” ask the authors. The answer, according to the paper — which is already stirring debate in academic circles and rage among pro-Israel groups — is the influence of the pro-Israel lobbies which include the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, the Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy and, more recently, Christian Zionist organizations.
Walt and Mearsheimer say the most powerful force of the Lobby is AIPAC, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, “a de facto agent for a foreign government,” and which they say has now forged an important alliance with evangelical Christian groups.
“Given the neo-conservatives’ devotion to Israel, their obsession with Iraq, and their influence in the Bush Administration, it isn’t surprising that many Americans suspected that the war was designed to further Israeli interests.”
Based on sources that include Israeli scholars and journalists, international human-rights organizations, and testimony from the lobby itself and politicians that support it, the study examines how the pro-Israel lobby built up its influence in Washington and says its intimidation of the press, think tanks and academia has led to a deceptive picture of Israel.
“The inability of Congress to conduct a genuine debate on these important issues paralyzes the entire process of democratic deliberation. Israel’s backers should be free to make their case and to challenge those who disagree with them, but efforts to stifle debate by intimidation must be roundly condemned,” they add, in the 12,800-word article published in the latest issue of The London Review of Books.
They argue that far from being a strategic asset to the United States, Israel “is becoming a strategic burden” and “does not behave like a loyal ally.”
They also suggest that Israel is also now “a liability in the war on terror and the broader effort to deal with rogue states.
The bulk of the article is a detailed analysis of the way they claim the Lobby managed to change the Bush Administration’s policy from “halting Israel’s expansionist policies in the Occupied Territories and advocating the creation of a Palestinian state” and divert it to the war on Iraq instead. They write “Pressure from Israel and the Lobby was not the only factor behind the decision to attack Iraq in March 2003, but it was critical.” “Thanks to the lobby, the United States has become the de facto enabler of Israeli expansion in the Occupied Territories, making it complicit in the crimes perpetrated against the Palestinians.”
US backing has emboldened extremists to reject a number of opportunities for peace deals with such Arab countries as Syria and with the Palestinians and the implementation of the Oslo Accords, the study says. “Saying that Israel and the United States are united by a shared terrorist threat has the causal relationship backwards: Rather, the United States has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel, not the other way around,” the authors argue.
The study was immediately attacked by a number of pro-Israel organizations. The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, for example, said in a statement that it had many errors, and that “a student who submitted such a paper would fail.” Mearsheimer said he and co-author Walt were prompted to write the piece after many years of studying US foreign policy in the Middle East. “It was clear to us that many people understood the problem that we describe in the piece but were afraid to talk about it... because we knew the Lobby would retaliate,” he said.
