Articles of faith
Pastor Dale Morgan
*Articles of faith
*
When two eminent US scholars wrote about the 'Israel lobby' they were
vilified by colleagues and the Washington Post. This week Barack Obama
joined the attack. Ed Pilkington hears their story
Saturday September 15, 2007
The Guardian
Given the reception John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt received for their
London Review of Books essay last year on what they called the Israel
Lobby, it would have been understandable had they crawled away to a dark
corner of their respective academic institutions to lick their wounds.
Their argument that US foreign policy has been distorted by the
stultifying power of pro-Israeli groups and individuals was met with a
firestorm of protest that has smouldered ever since.
The authors were assailed with headlines such as the Washington Post's:
"Yes, it's anti-semitic." The neocon pundit William Kristol accused them
in the Wall Street Journal of "anti-Judaism" while the New York Sun
linked them with the white supremacist David Duke.
The row became a focal point of a much wider debate about the limits of
permitted criticism of the state of Israel and its American-based
supporters that has ensnared several academics and writers, including a
former president. Jimmy Carter was castigated earlier this year when he
published a plea for a renewed engagement in the Middle-East peace
process under the admittedly provocative title, Palestine: Peace Not
Apartheid. He was labelled an anti-semitic "Jew hater" and even a Nazi
sympathiser. Meanwhile, a British-born historian at New York University,
Tony Judt, has been warned off or disinvited from four academic events
in the past year. On one occasion, he was asked to promise not to
mention Israel in a speech on the Holocaust. He refused.
For Walt, the explosion of criticism after the LRB publication in March
2006 struck particularly close to home as two members of his own Harvard
faculty turned on him. Ruth Wisse, professor of Yiddish literature,
compared Walt and his University of Chicago co-author's work to that of
a notorious 19th-century German anti-semite. Alan Dershowitz, the
Harvard criminal law professor who represented OJ Simpson, charged them
with culling some of their references from neo-Nazi websites.
Given the battering he has taken, Walt is remarkably upbeat. "We were
surprised by how nasty it got," says the Harvard professor. "The David
Duke reference, the neo-Nazi websites - these were intended to smear us
and swing attention on to us rather than to what we were saying. It
wasn't pleasant, but it never made me doubt what we had written or doubt
myself." Standing tall in the face of attack is one thing; to raise your
head above the parapet for a second round is quite another. But that is
what the Mearsheimer/Walt double act are doing: they have gone on the
offensive with the publication of a book-length version of their
original treatise.
As night follows day, the dispute has started anew. The New York Sun has
dedicated a section of its website to the controversy; Dershowitz has
revved up again, calling the book "a bigoted attack on the American
Jewish community"; and Abraham Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation
League, has gone to the trouble of writing his own book in riposte - and
it's in the bookshops a week before The Israel Lobby appears.
There is one obvious question to put to Walt: why do it to yourself?
Wasn't one stoning enough? "We did ask ourselves, did we want to go
through this again?" he admits, but only to add: "It didn't take us all
that long to figure out we had more to say and it was our job to say it."
By writing a 496-page book, as opposed to the original article's mere
13,000 words, the authors hope to present a more nuanced version of
their case. They have taken in new examples to support their thesis,
notably the second Lebanon war, which broke out in the interim, and have
sought to address some of the points raised by critics.
The book follows the structure of the original article fairly
faithfully, and its argument can be summarised thus: in recent years the
US government has given Israel unconditional support, showering it with
$3bn a year irrespective of the human rights violations it inflicts on
the Palestinians. It was not always this way - think of the Suez crisis
of 1956 when America stepped in to frustrate Israel's (and Britain's)
ambitions. But from the 1960s onwards the relationship deepened to the
extent that today American and Israeli interests are deemed by many
Americans to be essentially identical.
The authors ask why this is the case, and argue that strategically there
is no reason for it. The end of the cold war removed a central
justification for the special relationship, as Israel no longer provided
the US with a barrier to communism in the region. Post 9/11, the US and
Israel are presented as partners against terrorism, but America's
vulnerability to attack partly stems from its support for Israel, which
has provoked hostility in the Muslim world. Nor is there a moral
argument for indiscriminately backing Israel - as a towering military
presence in the Middle East, Israel is no longer under existential threat.
So what explains this ongoing largesse? The authors conclude that the
answer lies with the Israel lobby, a loose coalition of individuals and
organisations that wants US leaders to treat Israel as though it were
the 51st state. The lobby stifles debate, inhibits criticism of the
Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and maintains the special
relationship despite the fact that it has become a liability both for
the US and for Israel itself.
In its transition from literary journal essay to stand-alone book, the
authors have made a few telling alterations of presentation and
emphasis. The most vivid is that in the body of the text they have
demoted lobby to lower case: the Israel Lobby has become the Israel
lobby. Walt sees that as the most minor of changes, remarking that:
"John and I don't even remember how the capital L got used in the first
place."
More substantially, perhaps, they have used the extra space to make
several robust disclaimers, insisting that they have never questioned
the right of Israel to exist or the legitimacy of the Israel lobby
itself. They have also filed down some of the more jagged edges of their
argument, such as their position on the role the lobby played in the
build-up to the Iraq war. They still maintain that the war would "almost
certainly not have occurred" were it not for the Israel lobby, but they
soften the claim by adding that America's belligerent mood in the
aftermath of the attacks on New York and Washington also had much to do
with it.
Such nuances make for a more sophisticated read, but they fall far short
of the revisions - the authors would say capitulations - that would be
needed to satisfy their detractors.
Foxman is one of the most vocal critics. His new book, timed
specifically to counteract the arrival on bookshelves of The Israel
Lobby, pulls no punches. Its title is representative of the tone of the
book: The Deadliest Lies. "This is a big lie that the Jewish people have
lived with throughout history," he tells me from his New York office.
"Up to now these anti-semitic canards have been heard on the fringes,
but to have two respected academics repeat them legitimises the debate
and penetrates the mainstream."
More measured - though still forceful - criticism of the Mearsheimer and
Walt book has come from those titans of US journalism, the New York
Times and the New Yorker. The Times' book critic William Grimes takes a
swipe at the authors' claim that it is time for the US to treat Israel
as a normal country: "But it's not. And America won't. That's realism."
David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, suggests none too flatteringly
that the book is symptomatic of a polarised era in which Americans are
searching for an explanation to the evils of the times.
In the swirl of debate, the squabbling parties keep coming back to the
core concept of an Israel lobby, case notwithstanding. The authors have
been meticulously careful in the book to stress that they see the lobby
as a loose coalition. It is not a single, unified movement and it is
certainly not a cabal or conspiracy. Yet no matter how profuse their
disclaimers, they have not assuaged those antagonists for whom any
lumping together of Jews or Jewish interest groups sets alarm bells
ringing. "Visit any anti-semitic website and you'll hear the same old
themes: the Jews have too much power; they exercise political influence
not as individual citizens but as a cabal," writes Foxman. "Walt and
Mearsheimer sound all the same notes, with a subtlety and
pseudo-scholarly style that makes their poison all the more dangerous."
In our conversation, Walt accepts the phrase "the lobby" is "an awkward
term as many of the groups and people in it don't operate on Capitol
Hill. It's shorthand - you could call it the pro-Israel movement". One
wonders why he and his co-author have stuck with it, then, when it has
allowed their detractors to smear other more credible parts of their
argument.
Take the slanging match over the causes of the Iraq war. Walt and
Mearsheimer rightly lay a large part of the blame for this disastrous
escapade on the neoconservatives within the Bush administration, but
they then go on to define those neocons as an integral part of the
Israel lobby. Books have been written about the various motivations of
the neocons. Sympathy for Israel is one, but there are many others - the
desire to spread democracy, a belief in the positive uses of military
intervention, denigration of international institutions. To suggest that
the neocons and the Israel lobby are one and the same is a conflation
too far.
But the authors have brought into the open aspects of American
intellectual life that needed airing. They cast light on the overweening
activities of specific pro-Israeli groups, most importantly the American
Israel Public Affairs Committee. Aipac is a self-avowed lobby (it calls
itself America's pro-Israel lobby) and has been ranked the second most
powerful such body in the US. With a staff of more than 150 and a budget
of $60m, it wields extensive influence among Congressmen, working to
ensure criticism of Israel is rarely aired on Capitol Hill. The Guardian
invited it to comment, but it declined.
Though Foxman insists the furore is proof that debate is alive and
kicking, Walt and Mearsheimer have also put their finger on the limits
of acceptable discourse in the US. It is notable that none of the
candidates standing for president in 2008 have a word of criticism for
Israeli state behaviour; this week Barack Obama pulled an advert for his
campaign from the Amazon page selling The Israel Lobby, denouncing the
book as "just wrong".
So what happened to America's commitment to free speech, the First
Amendment? "We knew from De Tocqueville this country is driven by
conformity," Judt says. "The law can't make people speak out - it can
only prevent people from stopping free speech. What's happened is not
censorship, but self-censorship." Judt believes that a few
well-organised groups including Aipac have succeeded in proscribing
debate. He recalls a prominent Democratic senator confiding to him that
he would never criticise Israel in public. "He told me that if he did
so, for the rest of his career he would never be able to get a majority
for what he cared about. He would be cut off at the knees."
In the final chapter of the book, Walt and Mearsheimer make a shopping
list of reforms. They call for: a two-state solution to the Middle East
crisis; greater separation of US foreign policy from Israel for both
nations' sake; and campaign finance reform to reduce the power of
pro-Israeli groups.
Nothing outlandish, or even controversial, there. Coming at the end of
such a bumpy ride of claim and counter-claim, the conclusion feels
almost disappointingly gentle. That in itself bears eloquent witness to
the state of affairs in America today, where thoughts considered
unremarkable elsewhere are deemed beyond the pale.