Debating Us Israel Relations & Frequent Charges of Anti-Semitism

Mearsheimer and Walt are so off base that even Chomsky critized their conclusions.

 

That's his opinion, and certainly no one is expecting unanimous agreement on any given topic among political scientists, but Walt and Mearsheimer published their views on US-Israeli relations, and although one might disagree with them, there is no getting around the fact that these are two of the more respected and well-established scholars in the field, so their opinion certainly carries some weight and should be respected.

A former professor of mine (who lived and worked in Israel for a while) would joke from time to time about how there's more "freedom" to be critical of Israel on Israeli college campuses than in the U.S.

I think there's a problem with throwing around accusations of anti-Semitism when it's used as a tool to stifle debate; this has been true as well in some cases when organizations such as the NAACP, LULAC, and others cry racism without any evidence or proof, seeking instead to intimidate and silence those whom they disagree with.

I think 'race-baiting' is a larger problem in our society that needs to be addressed...

 

They are getting soundly trounced by their peers for this paper, so their reputations only take them so far on this. I understand your argument about race baiting but it is equally fallacious to think there is there is an absence of anti-semitism within the criticism of Israel.

 

Editorial
In Dark Times, Blame the Jews
March 24, 2006

On the face of it, there's little that's new in the provocative research paper "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," published online last week by two leading political scientists, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. Their underlying thesis, that Israel's advocates have pressured America into an unjustified and damaging alliance with Israel, has been around for decades, flogged with little success by generations of Israel's detractors. Their more immediate argument, that Israel and its allies manipulated America into war with Iraq, has been simmering at the edges of the debate since before the invasion. By now it's part of our national background noise.

What is new and startling is the document's provenance. Its authors are not fringe gadflies but two of America's most respected foreign-affairs theorists. One, Mearsheimer, is a distinguished professor at the University of Chicago. The other, Walt, is academic dean of the nation's most prestigious center of political studies, the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Though it's tempting, they can't be dismissed as cranks outside the mainstream. They are the mainstream.

Even more startling, given who they are, is the flimsiness of their work. Countless facts are simply wrong. Long stretches of argument are implausible, at times almost comically so. Much of their research is oddly amateurish, drawn not from credible documents or primary source interviews but from newspaper clippings, including dozens from this newspaper, seemingly dug up in quick Internet word searches aimed at proving a point, not exploring the truth. Some are wildly misquoted. An undergraduate submitting work like this would be laughed out of class. A dean apparently gets to see it posted on Harvard's Web site.

Considering the authors' credentials, the paper calls for substantive rebuttal by those who disagree. But that, as we'll see, is a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. The larger, more urgent question is how things came to this pass. What could possibly have led two of the best and brightest foreign policy mandarins to compose and publish such an embarrassment?

Some of Israel's more overheated defenders were trying this week to diagnose the problem as a character flaw in the authors. Their solution is to counterattack. That's a mistake. Leaving aside the folly of trying to answer a claim that Israel is a bully by bullying the messenger, the response misses the point. Mearsheimer and Walt are products of their time.

These are dark, poisonous days we live in, and the poison is spreading. In Iraq, America has stumbled into a quagmire of historic proportions, with global consequences that are proving nothing short of catastrophic. If that weren't enough, our nation is nearly bankrupt, with a national debt nearly equal to our Gross Domestic Product. And the Arctic is melting. The miscalculations seem inexplicable. There must be someone to blame.

We shouldn't be surprised, then, at the sight of respected professors, and not only professors, coming unhinged.


The Mearsheimer-Walt paper shows how far the notion that Israel is to blame for the Iraq War has moved from the crackpot fringe to the center. Three years ago it was heard mainly from campus radicals. Two years ago it started getting picked up by a handful of Washington insiders, memorably including Senator Ernest Hollings and General Anthony Zinni. Now it's reached the heart of the academic establishment.

And the notion has grown with the telling. Compared with the professors, Hollings and Zinni now seem modest in their claims. They argued merely that the Iraq War had been fought for Israel's benefit. In this they were echoing the widespread theory that the war was foisted on the Bush administration by a cabal of mostly Jewish neoconservatives such as Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith. That was a shaky enough argument back in 2004. It was already clear by then, from the disclosures of former Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill and others, that President Bush had Saddam Hussein in his sights from the moment he entered office. It was also clear, or should have been, that Bush and Cheney had assembled an administration of known quantities, including Wolfowitz and Feith, who served their purposes. The notion that a group of Pentagon underlings could bamboozle the White House into an unintended war was ludicrous on its face. Whatever else might be said of George Bush, he knows his mind and is not easily manipulated.


Mearsheimer and Walt, however, have constructed a far more ambitious theory. They mean to indict the entire U.S.-Israel relationship, going back to the point in 1973 when American aid rose into the billions and America became the essential broker in Middle East diplomacy. Since then, they write, "the centerpiece of U.S. Middle East policy has been its relationship with Israel. The combination of unwavering U.S. support for Israel and the related effort to spread democracy throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardized U.S. security." Indeed, "the United States has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel."

But if America's ties to Israel were the main cause of America's current troubles in the Muslim world, as Mearsheimer and Walt argue, then Muslim hostility would have been rising steadily since 1973. It has not. There have been periods of conflict and periods of good will. Things were bad during the early 1980s, around the time of the Lebanon War. They picked up in the late 1980s, when America was working actively to broker Israeli-Palestinian dialogue, and improved even more in the 1990s, when Israel was working toward reconciliation with the Palestinians.

Throughout, groups of terrorists sought to attack American targets, including Hezbollah in the 1980s, Al Qaeda beginning in the 1990s. But they did not represent a groundswell of mass rage. No, the groundswell began in 2000 with the outbreak of the televised intifada. It became a firestorm after the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

If America's support for Israel has been steady since 1973, as the authors say, then it cannot explain a crisis that erupted in 2000 or 2003.

What's different, of course, is the "effort to spread democracy throughout the region." Mearsheimer and Walt present it as a natural corollary of American support for Israel, but it's nothing of the sort. Support for Israel is a broadly popular aspect of American policy that goes back decades. Spreading democracy in the Middle East — or, more precisely, imposing it — is an eccentric doctrine taken up, amid intense controversy, by the current administration. Some of its key advocates see democratization as a way of protecting Israel; others, conversely, support Israel as an outgrowth of their vision of democracy. Some elements of the pro-Israel advocacy community back this crusade enthusiastically; most do not.

Mearsheimer and Walt have no time for such subtleties. For them, the cause of Israel is inseparable from the ideological crusade of the past three years. The Israel they depict, in a relentless, selective marshaling of facts, half-truths and occasional untruths, is a moral burden and a strategic liability. It was conceived in racism and founded in "explicit acts of ethnic cleansing, including executions, massacres, and rapes by Jews." It has been bent since 1948 on expansionism and ethnic purification, and since 1967 on tightening its brutal grip on the West Bank and Gaza. The authors claim repeatedly that they do not question Israel's right to exist, but they spend page after page doing just that, with barely a hint of a counter-argument.

Then, having dismissed the case for Israel, they ask: "f neither strategic nor moral arguments can account for America's support for Israel, how are we to explain it?" Their answer is "the Israel Lobby."


Their lobby is a sprawling alliance of Jewish organizations, major newspapers, Democratic and Republican politicians, liberal and conservative think tanks and more Jewish organizations, all single-mindedly determined to help Israel achieve its goals at the expense of American interests. "The core of the Lobby," they write, "is comprised of American Jews who make a significant effort in their daily lives to bend U.S. foreign policy so that it advances Israel's interests." To be sure, they hasten to add, "not all Jewish-Americans are part of the Lobby." One 2004 survey found that "roughly 36 percent of Jewish-Americans said they were either 'not very' or 'not at all' emotionally attached to Israel." Good news: No more than 64% of American Jews are out to undermine America.

Here, again, they protest: They do not mean to impugn. There is, they say, "nothing improper about American Jews and their Christian allies attempting to sway U.S. policy towards Israel." They don't mean to suggest "the sort of conspiracy depicted in anti-Semitic tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion."

It's just that the Lobby has, well, "a stranglehold on the U.S. Congress," controls key access to the executive branch and suppresses dissent throughout society. Its "not surprising" goal, they write, is to weaken Israel's enemies to the point that "Israel gets a free hand with the Palestinians, and the United States does most of the fighting, dying, rebuilding, and paying." Nothing "improper" there.

At times their narrative is surprisingly ill-informed. They state, incorrectly, that Israel did not allow Palestinian refugees to return after 1948. They claim, incorrectly, that Israel's citizenship laws are based on something they call "blood kinship."

They state, incredibly and without substantiation, that Israel's counter-terrorism raids in the 1950s were aimed at territorial expansion. They claim that Yitzhak Rabin, who first endorsed Palestinian statehood in a Yediot Aharonot interview in 1974, was opposed to Palestinian statehood.

At a more basic level, they ignore or gloss over critical distinctions in their effort to portray "the Lobby" as a monolith. Supporters of Israel's cause are depicted as unanimous in backing territorial expansion and opposing concessions to the Palestinians; when the authors happen to notice advocates of compromise, such as Edgar Bronfman and Seymour Reich, they are presented as lonely voices of dissent rather than as leaders of major factions within the organized Jewish community.

The very term "pro-Israel" becomes, in their hands, elastic to the point of deceptiveness. One minute it describes those who are sympathetic to Israel; the next minute it denotes those whose main motivation is loyalty to Israel. By switching back and forth, they manage to make the casual sympathizers melt in among the diehards to create the appearance of a vast, terrifying octopus.

The deception is helped along by the cherry-picking of quotes. In one egregious case, they attempt to prove how deeply Paul Wolfowitz is "committed to Israel" by quoting the Forward, which "once described him as 'the most hawkishly pro-Israel voice in the Administration.'" A check of the endnotes shows that the words did appear in the Forward, but they were describing the conventional wisdom, not the Forward's view. The article was about a pro-Israel rally where Wolfowitz was booed for defending Palestinian rights. The point was that the conventional wisdom was wrong.


Some facts need repeating, though they shouldn't. Israel was founded by majority vote of the United Nations General Assembly. It has faced and continues to face powerful enemies intent on its destruction. Its citizenship is open to all races and creeds, from European Jews to South American Indians and Vietnamese boat people. Tens of thousands of Israelis are West Bank and Gaza Palestinians who gained their citizenship by marrying Israelis.

Most important, Israel has had the support of successive American administrations in large part because it enjoys the sympathy of much of the American people. In part this flows from Christian religious convictions. In part it reflects admiration for Israeli spunk. In part it stems from a perception of shared values. Israel has not always lived up to its own best ideals. But, unlike much of the world, it tries.

Mearsheimer and Walt join a long line of critics who dislike Israel so deeply that they cannot fathom the support it enjoys in America, and so they search for some malign power capable of perverting America's good sense. They find it, as others have before, in the Jews.

http://www.forward.com/articles/7532

 

So let's avoid that bait. Reading the essay, I can conclude the following:

1) Mearsheimer and Walt make a decent case of arguing that interest group lobbying is responsible for some aspects of U.S. policy towards the Greater Middle East.

Now this asssertion alone is enough to make people very uncomfortable at cocktail parties and other venues. Whenever I bring up ethnic lobbying in my American foreign policy class and mention Israel, everyone in the room tenses up. So kudos to Mearsheimer and Walt for speaking the taboo thought.

2) Shot through these papers are an awful lot of casual assertions that don't hold up to close scrutiny [Which makes it eerily similar to some of your blog posts!!--ed. True that.]. The authors assert that, "If Washington could live with a nuclear Soviet Union, a nuclear China or even a nuclear North Korea, it can live with a nuclear Iran. And that is why the Lobby must keep up constant pressure on politicians to confront Tehran." I'm pretty sure that there's more to U.S. opposition to Iran possessing nuclear weapons than the protection of Israel.

From the longer Kennedy paper, Mearsheimer and Walt make a fascinating logical assertion: "[T]he mere existence of the Lobby suggests that unconditional support for Israel is not in the American national interest. If it was, one would not need an organized special interest group to bring it about. But because Israel is a strategic and moral liability, it takes relentless political pressure to keep U.S. support intact." What's fascinating about this quote are the implicit assumptions contained within it: i) the only interest group in existence is the Lobby, and; ii) in the absence of the Lobby, a well-defined sense of national interest will always guide American foreign policy. It would be very problematic for good realists like Mearsheimer and Walt to allow for other interest groups -- oil companies, for example -- to exist. This would allow for a much greater role for domestic politics than realists ever care to admit.

Finally, they argue that the U.S. invaded Iraq only primarily because Israel and the Lobby -- in the form of neoconservatives -- wanted it. I wrote my take on this argument three years ago:

The notion that such a conspiracy exists rests on the belief that the administration's foreign policy principals--Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Dick Cheney, and Bush himself--have somehow been duped by the neoconservatives into acting in a manner contrary to their beliefs. But while critics have never lacked for accusations against these officials, being weak-willed is not among them. In the end, it's far more likely that Bush is exploiting the neoconservatives' ideological arsenal to advance his preferred set of policies than vice versa.
3) There are sins of omission as well as commission. Walt and Mearsheimer assert that Israel has been a "strategic burden." They do a good job of cataloging why that's the case -- but omit important examples of Israel being useful, such as the 1981 Osirik bombing. They also go into depth on the Bush administration's policy towards the Palestinian Authority, but never mention the arms shipment that Arafat lied to Bush about as a causal factor behind Bush's decision to freeze out Arafat.

4) The evidence is pretty thin in some sections. To demonstrate the current political power of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, they cite a 1984 election where AIPAC was allegedly curcial. They argue that the Israeli-Palestine problem is at the root of Al Qaeda's beef with the United States -- which is funny, because I was pretty sure it was the presence of U.S. forces near the holy shrines of Mecca and Medina. They claim the Lobby is responsible for U.S. policy towards Syria, but that policy amounts to little more than some empty sabre-rattling.

After finishing the article, I began to wonder whether the paper is simple a massive exercise in explaining away a data point that realism can't cover. Most realists opposed the Iraq War, and Mearsheimer and Walt were no exception. They can and should take some normative satisfaction in being proven right by what happened after the invasion. However, I suspect as positive social scientists they are bothered by the fact that the U.S. invaded Iraq anyway when realism would have predicted otherwise.

When realists are confronted with contradictory data, they tend to fall back on auxiliary hypotheses -- the cult of the offensive, the myth of empire -- that have very little to do with realism. Explaining away Iraq on The Lobby might have a whiff of the Paranoid Style, but it's certainly consistent with the literature.

http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/002636.html

 

Below is the text of a letter to the LRB from Professors Jeffrey Herf and Andrei S. Markovits, in which they respond to the article. I post their letter here with permission:

Accusations of powerful Jews behind the scenes are part of the most dangerous traditions of modern anti-Semitism. So it is with dismay that we read John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt's "The Israel Lobby."

We have known and respected John Mearsheimer for over twenty years which makes the essay all the more unsettling. A long reply to the erroneous history of recent events they present would exceed the length of a letter to the editor. The following must suffice.

First, it is not true that the American relationship with Israel has been "the centrepiece of US Middle Eastern policy." That centrepiece has been and remains access to oil for the United States and for the global economy. As it became apparent during the 1960s that Israel was not merely the only democracy in the region but also a supporter of the West in the Cold War, the American relationship intensified. At that point, support for Israel, which had been strongest among liberals who supported a Jewish state in the wake of the Holocaust, expanded to include the previously less than enthusiastic traditional military and diplomatic foreign policy establishment, some of which was deeply hostile to Israel and suspicious of Jews, to put it mildly. This was not due to the efforts of the Jewish lobby or the power of the five million Jews (in a country of almost 300 million). It was due to an assessment of American national interest made by an overwhelmingly non-Jewish political and military establishment long before Christian fundamentalism became a factor in the Republican Party. It coincided with increasingly close ties with the Saudi regime.

Second, it is not true that the United States went to war in Iraq due to the pressure of a Jewish lobby. Even if the key decision makers were Jews, this would not prove the point about the Jewish lobby. As it happens, primary advisers and war planners for Bush were Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell and Rice and the entirely non-Jewish military leadership, not the usual suspects now trotted out by those peddling stories about Jewish power behind the scenes. Whatever Israel or its supporters in the United States may or may not have wanted, American and British leaders decided to go to war for their reasons grounded in their interpretation of the respective national interest. Saddam Hussein stunned and surprised his military leaders three months before the United States and Britain invaded by revealing to them that indeed, Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction. There were many officials in London and Washington - or Berlin and Paris, for that matter - who would have been just as surprised. One need not think the decision to go to war was the correct one to remember that it was not motivated by concerns about Israel's national security. One need not agree that oil below the ground and dictatorship above it posed an immediate threat to recall that British and American (as well as other Western) leaders believed that Saddam with weapons of mass destruction in years to come would have posed a threat to the other Arab oil producing states as much as Israel. Mearsheimer and Walt's realism ignores this conventional threat on the minds of American and British policy makers.

Third, while much opinion in the Arab and Islamic world has rejected the presence of a Jewish state in its midst, anti-Americanism, hatred of Europe (including Britain) and of liberal modernity in general would exist if Israel was not there. Mearsheimer and Walt stand in a long tradition of "realist" political scientists known for naivete regarding the power and import of ideological fanaticism in international affairs. This naivete is the reason that radical Islam and the enduring crises of modernization in the region that produced it receive hardly a word in their long attack.

Fourth, American Jewish citizens have a right to express their views without being charged with placing the interests of Israel ahead of those of the United States. Mearsheimer and Walt's attack appears eight years after the terrorist war against the West declared by Osama Bin Laden; six years after Ehud Barak offered a compromise plan to end the conflict and occupation of the West Bank and Yassir Arafat responded with a terrorist campaign of his own; after countless terrorist attacks all over the world by Al Qaeda and its sympathizers, including the London underground bombings; after repeated acts of terrorist barbarism in Iraq by radical Islamists; the declaration by the Iranian President that Israel should be wiped out and that the Holocaust was a myth; and most recently after the world's first electoral victory with a solid majority won by an openly anti-Semitic terrorist organization, Hamas. Mearsheimer and Walt further ignore that all of this happened also after Israel withdrew from Lebanon; offered the Barak plan; retaliated to the terrorist campaign as any state - including Britain or the United States - would; accepted the principle of a Palestinian state and thus agreed to withdraw from over 90% of the West Bank; and then withdrew completely from Gaza. If the Palestinians had responded to these offers of a compromise peace, they would now have a functioning state perhaps before radical Islam came to dominate their politics. It was radical Islamist and secular Palestinian militants as well, not the Jewish lobby, that destroyed prospects for a compromise settlement.

Were Mearsheimer and Walt's views to win the day in Washington - and we are confident that they won't - terrorists inspired by Islamic fundamentalism would conclude that the terror campaign of recent years has paid handsome dividends among some Western academics, perhaps among some Western politicians. If the United States concluded that it no longer had a vital interest in the continued survival of the only democracy in the Middle East, those now attacking Western modernity might conclude that the Americans could be convinced that defence of Europe - and Britain as well - was also not in the American interest. Turning one's back on one's good friends when times are tough has never been, is not now and will never be a realistic, decent or wise foreign policy.

Sincerely

Jeffrey Herf, Professor, Department of History, University of Maryland

Andrei S. Markovits, Karl W. Deutsch Collegiate Professor of Comparative Politics and German Studies, Department of Political Science and Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, The University of Michigan

http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2006/03/a_reply_to_mear.html

 

it's practically impossible to have a rational debate about israel in the us, because of the us's unquestioned support of israel (no matter how many international laws they violate), the media's pro-israeli bias, and the tendency of jews to always resort to anti-semitism as a response to criticism

also, here is John Mearsheimer & Stephen Walt's response to the various 'critiques' floating around:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n09/letters.html

 

Hayes,

I recognize and respect the fact that there's two sides to this argument, and that not everyone will agree or is happy with what the two esteemed professors published; their work is not the issue here.

What IS problematic is when those who disagree with Walt and Mearsheimer resort to calling them 'anti-Semitic' or 'bigots', that's incredibly irresponsible and is definitely going overboard. Evidence MUST be provided to support such an assertion, otherwise it's not only baseless but defamatory; the burden of proof is on the party making the accusation, not for Walt and Mearsheimer to prove they are not bigots.

In fact, the very act of throwing unfounded accusations of bigotry at the authors of this publication seems to further make one of the points Walt and Mearsheimer sought to make: that there exists an 'unfriendly and hostile' environment for those who dare be critical of US-Israeli relations.

 

very good post, but the problem is that hayes is somebody who engages in quite a bit of name-calling himself so he might not see a problem with people responding to these two distinguished professors by calling them names

 

Lol, dude you are the best. Your opinion flies in the face of Mersheimer and Walt's thesis - which is that the Jewish lobby is the main determinant of US foreign policy in the Middle East. You state "My own opinion is that Bush wanted to go do the Iraq War before he came to office, due in part to prove himself to his father or to validate his cooky and unsohisticated right wing views and to control Middle East oil" whic completely denies their core claim. Good job, buddy - lol.

Not true, in fact the second post I copied above starts out as saying he's not taking that bait - even though its there - and points out flaws in the theory itself. In addition, Herf and Markovitz go point by point punching huge holes in the paper. Further, why is there an automatic conclusion that Mearsheimer's paper is NOT anti-semitic? You should at least defend the paper rather than simply declaring it to be so. That's hardly a vigorous intellectual challenge for this new perspective. And again I'll point out that decided critics of US policy such as Noam Chomsky have criticized the paper - not for being anti-semitic but because so many of its conclusions do not have a reasoned basis.

 

In 1948, when the state of Israel was created by UN Charter, who attacked who?

Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.
George W. Bush is learning that the hard way.
Same goes with the Middle East.

 

So glynch, I guess you'll retract all your comments about a connection between big oil and iraq, eh?

 

are u sure about this?

there was a un general assembly resolution that attempted to divide palestine amongst jews and arabs 50-50 with jerusalem being an international zone, but most sources say the population was anywhere from 70-30 to 90-10 percent with plaestinians the clear majority, thus, they did not accept it

moreover, un general assembly resolutions are non-binding and take on the form of recommendations...so it was just a suggestion by the un...for ex there are countless un general assembly resolutions condemning israeli actions but they're not enforced

the zionists then declared independence unilaterally

 

In 1948 just prior to Israel being created, Zionists who would help to form the first Israeli govt. had already attacked and held several Paletinian villages. Israel had attacked the Palestinians before the resolution was even signed.

In fact they occupied most of the Palestinian cities in the area that UN had partitioned for them.

It is a case of the victors writing the history to say that Israel was living in peace and then on May 15th they were all of a sudden attacked by all their Arab neighbors.

Technically that may be true because Israel wasn't in existence until then. But the attacks started prior to that.

 

The Jews control everything - politics, Hollywood, academia, the caloric content of my breakfast. It's all controlled by 5 IDF generals from an underground bunker in Tel Aviv.