Is the "Israel lobby" distorting America's Mideast policies?

Two leading academics have tried to break the taboo against criticizing Israel's powerful U.S. lobby. It's a worthy aim, but their clumsy argument may backfire.

By Michelle Goldberg

Read more: Palestine, Politics, Israel, Middle East, Michelle Goldberg, News, Taboo, American Israel Public Affairs Committee

April 18, 2006 | The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, may be the most powerful lobby in the country. As its Web site says, "Through more than 2,000 meetings with members of Congress -- at home and in Washington -- AIPAC activists help pass more than 100 pro-Israel legislative initiatives a year. From procuring nearly $3 billion in aid critical to Israel's security, to funding joint U.S.-Israeli efforts to build a defense against unconventional weapons, AIPAC members are involved in the most crucial issues facing Israel." At its conferences, a parade of politicians from both parties pay homage -- this year, speakers included Vice President Dick Cheney, House Majority Leader John Boehner and former Sen. John Edwards.

All successful lobbies flaunt their power. But unlike, say, the Cuban lobby or the AARP, there's a taboo against outsiders discussing the influence of AIPAC or the Israel lobby more generally, or criticizing the way it shapes American policy. To do so raises the specter of poisonous old narratives about mysterious cabals and dual loyalties, of hateful tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and "The International Jew." So a strange, dim silence surrounds the Israel lobby, and the hushed atmosphere nurtures conspiracy theories about a power so great and so secret that you can't even talk about it in public. Those conspiracy theories make the issue even more fraught, because respectable people don't want to provide fodder for the likes of former Klan leader David Duke, who writes on his Web site, "Just as Jewish Israel-Firsters dominate the mass media, so Congress and the President are afflicted by the Israeli Lobby. "

Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, political science professors at Harvard and the University of Chicago, respectively, apparently hoped to break through the taboos with their baldly titled paper "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy." It was published last month in the London Review of Books and, in an expanded version, on the Web site of the Kennedy School of Government, where Walt is academic dean. The article argues that the United States' close relationship with Israel is not in America's national interest -- that it is, indeed, counterproductive -- and that it is sustained largely through the work of the Israel lobby (Walt and Mearsheimer refer to it, simply and ominously, as "the Lobby.") Walt and Mearsheimer also argue that the lobby was a major force pushing for war in Iraq, a war they vocally opposed.

"In our piece, we argued that when people are critical of Israeli policy or the U.S.-Israeli relationship, the arguments are not taken on their merits," Mearsheimer says when reached by phone. "What happens instead is that the great silencer -- the charge of anti-Semitism -- is leveled at the critics."

In this case, that's just what has happened. Democratic Rep. Eliot Engel called the paper "the same old anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist drivel," adding, "Given what happened in the Holocaust, it's shameful that people would write reports like this." In a response to Walt and Mearsheimer published on the Kennedy School Web site last week, law professor Alan Dershowitz asked, "What would motivate two recognized academics to issue a compilation of previously made assertions that they must know will be used by overt anti-Semites to argue that Jews have too much influence, that will give an academic imprimatur to crass bigotry, and that will place all Jews in government and the media under suspicion of disloyalty to America?" Neoconservative Johns Hopkins professor Eliot A. Cohen penned a column about the paper in the Washington Post titled, "Yes, It's Anti-Semitic."

On the surface, the whole imbroglio seemed like the latest version of a story that has replayed itself countless times in the last few years. A public figure strays outside the boundaries of acceptable opinion about Israel, or calls attention to the disproportionate influence wielded by supporters of Israel's right-wing political factions, and is immediately attacked as a bigot or a paranoid. It happened to Howard Dean during the Democratic primary, when he said that the United States should be "evenhanded" in its approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Abraham Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League, admonished him; an Israeli newspaper suggested that his Jewish backing would dry up; and Nancy Pelosi wrote him an angry open letter. All this despite the fact that Dean's campaign was being co-chaired by a former president of AIPAC, and there was little daylight between his position on Israel and that of President Bush.

Not even such a famous friend of Israel as Steven Spielberg is immune to this kind of mau-mauing. When his movie "Munich," about the Israeli response to the Palestinian massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics, was released last year, various commentators berated him for being insufficiently Manichean in his treatment of the conflict. As Leon Wieseltier wrote in the staunchly pro-Israel New Republic, "Palestinians murder, Israelis murder. Palestinians show evidence of a conscience, Israelis show evidence of a conscience ... All these analogies begin to look ominously like the sin of equivalence, and so it is worth pointing out that the death of innocents was an Israeli mistake but a Palestinian objective."

At first glance, it seemed as if Walt and Mearsheimer were being run through a familiar wringer. Indeed, many of the charges against them have been grossly unfair. To their chagrin, David Duke has enthusiastically embraced the paper, calling it "a modern American declaration of independence." Some critics have used this to associate the authors with the former Klansman. "Walt, Mearsheimer, and Duke happen to have reached the same conclusions, and share the same interest in vilifying Jewish leaders and spouting conspiracy theories about Zionist plots against American interests," wrote Dershowitz. Stretching in a different direction, the Israeli historian Michael Oren, writing in the New Republic, blamed the affair on the malign influence of the late Edward Said and a postmodern coterie "infused with the nihilism of postmodern French philosophers." This charge was especially odd, since Walt and Mearsheimer are known as two of the foremost exponents of political realism, a hardheaded school of thought that owes far more to Henry Kissinger than to Michel Foucault.

On one level, then, the attacks on Walt and Mearsheimer are examples of the very phenomenon the writers describe. Yet for anyone who hopes for a more open and critical discussion of the Israel lobby, their paper presents profound problems. This is not just a case of brave academics telling taboo truths. In taking on a sensitive, fraught subject, one might expect such eminent scholars to make their case airtight. Instead, they've blundered forth with an article that has several factual mistakes and baffling omissions, one that seems expressly designed to elicit exactly the reaction it has received. The power of the Israel lobby is something that deserves a full and fearless airing, but this paper could make such an airing less, not more likely.

Walt and Mearsheimer's paper began as an article commissioned by the Atlantic Monthly in 2002 on the subject of Israel and the U.S. National Interest. The magazine turned down the piece they submitted -- editor Cullen Murphy wrote them a letter explaining why, though none of them will comment on what it said. According to Mearsheimer, he and Walt thought the piece was dead, but then a scholar who'd read it put them in touch with the editor of the London Review of Books, who agreed to publish a rewritten version. They posted the expanded essay on the Harvard Web site to coincide with the London publication.

The authors waste no time stating their case. "The U.S. national interest should be the primary object of American foreign policy," they write on the first page. "For the past several decades, however, and especially since the Six Day War in 1967, 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."

Even one sympathetic to Walt and Mearsheimer's criticism of the Israel lobby should be struck by this assertion. After all, there's a very strong case to be made that the centerpiece of U.S. Middle East policy for the past several decades has been oil. Walt and Mearsheimer barely address oil, or the American relationship with Saudi Arabia. Similarly, in their view, the Iraq war had little to do with oil and much to do with Zionism.

"There is virtually no evidence that oil was an important cause of the Iraq war," Mearsheimer says. "It is an intuitively plausible argument, but when you look for evidence that the oil companies were pushing for war, or that Paul Wolfowitz was thinking in terms of oil as a geopolitical weapon, you cannot find it. Instead, you find lots of evidence that the neoconservatives and the leaders of the Lobby were pushing hard for war against Iraq."

Next page: Walt and Mearsheimer's arguments are too often clumsy and crude