This September has witnessed an extraordinary development in American public debate. In the wake of the publication of their controversial polemic, The Israel Lobby, the distinguished American political scientists, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt are undertaking a six-week tour of the United States to publicize their thesis that American foreign policy has increasingly been formulated not in accordance with the national interest of the United States but with that of Israel, and that it is because of the machinations of the Israel lobby that the US is now mired in a disastrous war in Iraq.
Not very long ago, it would have been impossible to conceive of a book like the Israel Lobby being published at all. Notorious for its capacity to injure, if not destroy, the careers of its critics, the Israel lobby has enjoyed a remarkable power to intimidate and few have dared to brave its wrath for fear of being forever stigmatized as anti-Semitic. Those who have had the courage to speak out about the pervasiveness of Zionist influence in US political culture have unfailingly met with systematic vilification. Consider the fate of David Hirst’s seminal work on the Palestine-Israel conflict, The Gun and the Olive Branch, which first appeared in 1977 and which was subsequently expanded to include a pioneering in-depth analysis of how Zionists buy political influence in the US. Thanks to Zionist pressure, the book received scandalously exiguous coverage in the US.
Initially, Mearsheimer and Walt had good reason to suspect that their own attempt to open up the subject of the lobby and its arguably malign influence was going to suffer a similar fate. Though it had commissioned them to write on the subject, the venerable American politico-cultural magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, ultimately declined to publish their work, offering little by way of explanation for its decision. Their voluminous 13,000-word paper (from which the new book grew) might well have remained still born had they not been encouraged to approach the editor of the London Review of Books, a journal which since its inception in 1979 has consistently championed the Palestinian cause and provided a platform for intelligent criticism of Israel. The rest is now history. The publication by the London Review in March 2006 of Mearsheimer and Walt’s anatomy of the Israel lobby as a leading article provoked one of the biggest brouhahas in the annals of periodical journalism.
It was predictable that the authors and the paper’s editor, Mary Kay-Wilmers, herself a Jew, would be smeared by Zionists as anti-Semites, and they duly were. But the publication of the article was to have groundbreaking, not to say epoch-making, consequences. For the first time, there was very widespread acknowledgement that key issues raised by the piece — the question of whether Zionist influence was subverting the US democratic process, distorting American foreign policy and helping to wreak havoc in the Middle East — merited serious discussion. At the same time, it was generally recognized that the carefully documented analysis of the Israel lobby furnished by Mearsheimer and Walt could not be simply dismissed as anti-Semitic paranoia. While no American publication had been prepared to carry Mearsheimer and Walt’s article, its appearance in a prestigious British intellectual journal rapidly produced large repercussions on the other side of the Atlantic. Even the New York Times, a newspaper that made a point of ignoring David Hirst’s discussion of the Israeli lobby, felt obliged to address Mearsheimer and Walt’s claims.
Of course, there is some distance to travel before a point is reached where there can be routine public discussion about the power of pro-Israel lobbyists in the United States, the country where such discussion is most desperately needed.
It is one of the central claims of Mearsheimer and Walt’s book that the reason why the American public is so ill informed about the Palestine-Israel conflict is because, through its pervasive influence over the US Congress and the American media, the lobby has contrived to stunt public understanding about what is really happening in the Middle East. If, thanks to Mearsheimer and Walt, public debate about the Israel lobby has at least begun, it is because the academic eminence of the two men, one an academic luminary of the University of Chicago, the other of Harvard University, has in some degree immunized them against the crude charge that they are actuated by racial hatred. Moreover, they have set out their case with such scholarly sobriety, providing a wealth of facts and figures about the stupendous scale of US economic assistance to Israel, making it hard even for their bitterest detractors to dismiss them as mere demagogues with a racist agenda.
Indeed, one may feel that the caution with which they express themselves often borders on the excessive. Take their insistence that the Israel lobby — which they define as a loose affiliation of groups and individuals, with AIPAC, the America-Israel Public Affairs Committee, its chief corporate expression — is in no sense a cabal, that its activities are as open as they are legitimate, and no different in principle from the many other lobbying groups that are an accepted feature of American democracy. Yet the question arises why, if the lobbying of Zionists is so transparent, should it be necessary to write a whole book in order to lay bare how it operates?
Mearsheimer and Walt are similarly circumspect in their handling of the thorny issue of dual national loyalties.
Yet their book furnishes abundant evidence that the neoconservatives, many of whom are Jewish Zionists, have not only behaved like a cabal, one it must be said at the very heart of US government, but that they include individuals whose feelings for the Jewish state and sense of Judaic entitlement seem to override all else, raising doubts about the extent to which they may be regarded as genuine American patriots.
They write about Elliot Abrams, long a key figure in the shaping of US policy in the Middle East, querying how he can possibly be objective about Israel when he is on record as declaring that “Jews, faithful to the covenant between God and Abraham, must stand apart — except in Israel — from the rest of the population”. Abrams, it is worth noting, currently much implicated in whipping up war fever against Iran, is the son-in-law of Norman Podhoretz, the rabid US Zionist ideologue who “prays as an American and a Jew” that President George W. Bush will make the bombing of Iran his top priority.
It is the contention of Mearsheimer and Walt’s more measured Jewish critics that, however much they may disavow anti-Semitism, they are giving aid and comfort to those who wish Jews ill. It seems not to occur to such people that if there is resurgent hostility to Jews, it is because of Israel’s own actions — not least last year’s wantonly destructive invasion of Lebanon — and the unwillingness of many Jews to condemn those actions. The prominent British Zionist Anthony Julius denounces Mearsheimer and Walt for their cold-heartedness, their indifference to Jewish pain and suffering. Many others, though, will feel that what has motivated them to protest against the Israel lobby is not hostility toward Jews but concern for the future of humanity.
