Jew furious over 'Walt-Mearsheimer Study'
Arash
March 24, 2006
Israeli media condemn, discuss report on US-Israel ties
Some say Harvard report 'riddled with factual errors', others call it important
'wake-up call'.
By Tom Regan
regant[AT]csps.com
Letters: oped[AT]csps.com
While mainstream media in the United States have been largely silent, media in
Israel, and Jewish-community media in the United States, have been reporting on, and
discussing a paper by two prominent political scientists who argue that the U.S.'s
current relationship with Israel is not good for U.S. security. John J. Mearsheimer,
a professor of political science and a co-director of the Program on International
Security Policy at the University of Chicago, and Stephen M. Walt, academic dean of
the Kennedy School, also allege that the Israeli lobby in the US, particularly the
American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), has helped exaggerate the
importance of making the protection of Israel a key part of U.S. foreign policy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Israel_Public_Affairs_Committee
While much of the Israeli coverage has been very critical, some local commentators
have argued that the paper, while flawed, is a wake-up call for both Israel and the
U.S., and that avoiding a discussion of the relationship will neither advance Israeli
interests nor improve the US-Israel relationship.
The New York Jewish weekly Forward writes that Jewish organizations in the U.S.,
while furious over the paper, are "holding fire in order to avoid generating
publicity for their critics". American pro-Israel activists are also fuming, but have
also decided to work behind the scenes to counteract the report.
"The truth is that this really wouldn't be worth spending any time discussing if
not for the fact of where these people are located and what their reputations are",
said Ken Jacobson, associate national director of the Anti-Defamation League. He
pointed out that the paper contains no new revelations or insights, is riddled with
factual errors and makes arguments that the ADL is accustomed to dealing with from
extremists on the margins of America's political arena. Jacobson said that he had
prepared a rebuttal to the study, but for the time being it is only being used for
internal ADL purposes. http://www.forward.com/articles/7548
The Jewish Weekly of New York reports that Abraham Foxman, national director of the
Anti-Defamation League, is concerned that the report will promote the claim that
"Jewish and pro-Israel groups played a major role in pressing for the Iraq war in
2003".
“We have always been concerned that those opposed to the war have tried to
portray it as a Jewish war, an Israeli war”, Foxman said. “Our concern has been that
if the war went badly, and there was more public disillusionment, these kinds of
conspiracy theories could resurface and grow”. That, he said, is “exactly what’s
happening now” as the Harvard report races around the world on antiwar and
anti-Israel Web sites.
“The charge isn’t new”, said Martin Raffel, associate director of the Jewish
Council for Public Affairs. “But this is Harvard and the University of Chicago we’re
talking about; it’s the credibility of the writers. Twenty years from now, when
academics are studying these issues, they will go back to these sources. It becomes
part of the canon”. http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/newscontent.php3?artid=12229
The Jerusalem Post reported Tuesday that Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, a
prominent supporter of Israel who was mentioned in the study as an "apologist" for
Israel, told the Post that the study has to be countered because "these are two
serious scholars and you need to expose what they have done as ignorant propaganda".
Alan Dershowitz, who is now working on a paper which will refute the claims in
the Walt-Mearsheimer article, argues that there is no original material in it and
that "the challenge is to find a single idea in the piece that does not already
appear in hate websites. There is no scholarship here what so ever".
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1139395657538&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
Daniel Levy, however, writing in the Israeli paper Ha'aretz, says that the
Walt-Mearsheimer paper "should serve as a wake-up call, on both sides of the ocean"
(http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/698051.html). Mr. Levy, a former adviser in the
Israeli prime minister's office, a member of the official Israeli negotiating team at
the Oslo Accords and Taba talks, and the lead Israeli drafter of the 2003 Geneva
Initiative (http://www.brookings.edu/comm/events/20031203.htm), says the paper is
flawed in some ways – it gives too much credence to the idea of AIPAC's power in
Washington, and ignores moments when the US has taken a different opinion than the
Israeli government. And he says that it "ignores AIPAC run-ins with more dovish
Israeli administrations, most notably when it undermined Yitzhak Rabin, and how
excessive hawkishness is often out of step with mainstream American Jewish opinion,
turning many, especially young American Jews, away from taking any interest in
Israel".
But Levy also says Walt's and Mearsheimer's case is a potent one.
... that identification of American with Israeli interests can be principally
explained via the impact of the Lobby in Washington, and in limiting the parameters
of public debate, rather than by virtue of Israel being a vital strategic asset or
having a uniquely compelling moral case for support (beyond, as the authors point
out, the right to exist, which is anyway not in jeopardy). The study is at its most
devastating when it describes how the Lobby "stifles debate by intimidation" and at
its most current when it details how America's interests (and ultimately Israel's,
too) are ill-served by following the Lobby's agenda.
The bottom line might read as follows: that defending the occupation [of land
originally captured by Israel during the Six-Day War in 1967] has done to the
American pro-Israel community what living as an occupier has done to Israel – muddied
both its moral compass and its rational self-interest compass.
In an editorial, Ha'aretz also calls for a debate on the paper, saying that even with
its flaws, "it would be irresponsible to ignore the article's serious and disturbing
message".
The conclusion that Israel can draw from the anti-Israel feeling expressed in
the article is that it will not be immune for eternity. America's unhesitating
support for Israel and its willingness to restrain itself over all of Israel's
mistakes can be interpreted as conflicting with America's essential interests and are
liable to prove burdensome. The fact that Israelis view the United States' support
for and tremendous assistance to Israel as natural causes excess complacence, and it
fails to take into account currents in public opinion that run deep and are liable to
completely change American policy.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=697059&contrassID=2&subContrassID=4&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y
In an interview published Friday with Forward, Prof. John Mearsheimer alleges that
the pro-Israel lobby is so powerful that he and Stephen Walt would never have been
able to find an American publisher for their paper.
"I do not believe that we could have gotten it published in the United States",
Mearsheimer told the Forward. He said that the paper was originally commissioned in
the fall of 2002 by one of America's leading magazines, "but the publishers told us
that it was virtually impossible to get the piece published in the United States".
Most scholars, policymakers and journalists know that "the whole subject of the
Israel lobby and American foreign policy is a third-rail issue", he said. "Publishers
understand that if they publish a piece like ours it would cause them all sorts of
problems". http://www.forward.com/articles/7550
Asked if the study may have been initially rejected by the American publisher
because of poor research, Mearsheimer said that the "evidence in the piece is just
the tip of the iceberg", and that the study's observations are supported by a large
body of evidence. He did concede, however, that none of the evidence represents
original documentation or is derived from independent interviews. All the additional
supporting material — just like the references footnoted in the paper — is of a
secondary nature: citations of books and newspaper articles, Mearsheimer said.
Prof. Mearsheimer said that he and Prof. Walt expected to be accused of being
anti-Israel and anti-Semitic, so they made a point of writing in the paper that the
establishment of Israel was "morally justified", and that in principle, America's
support of Israel is also justified.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0324/dailyUpdate.html
The Lobby
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=8730
The Israel Lobby
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/mear01_.html
The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy
http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/Research/wpaper.nsf/rwp/RWP06-011/$File/rwp_06_011_walt.pdf
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