[WCUSP] The Lobby Strikes Back

[KATHARLOW at aol.com]

 (http://www.amconmag.com/2007/2007_12_03/print/coverprint.html) 
_http://www.amconmag.com/2007/2007_12_03/cover.html_ 
(http://www.amconmag.com/2007/2007_12_03/cover.html)    
December 3, 2007  Issue
Copyright © 2007 The American  Conservative

The Lobby Strikes  Back 
A new book riles the AIPAC crowd,  but makes it to the bestseller list 
anyway.  
by Scott McConnellOne prism through which to gauge the impact of John 
Mearsheimer and  Stephen Walt’s The Israel Lobby and American Foreign Policy is a  
September incident involving Barack Obama. His campaign had placed small ads in  
various spots around the Internet, designed to drive readers to its website. 
One  turned up on Amazon’s page for the Walt and Mearsheimer book. A vigilant  
watchdog at the New York Sun spotted it and contacted the campaign: Did  
Obama support Walt and Mearsheimer?  
The answer came within hours. The ad was  withdrawn. Its placement was “
unintentional.” The senator, his campaign made  clear, understood that key 
arguments of the book were “wrong,” but had  definitely not read the work himself. In 
short, Walt and Mearsheimer had reached  a pinnacle of notoriety. 
Though The Israel Lobby was on the way to  best-sellerdom and has become 
perhaps the most discussed policy book of the  year, the presidential candidate 
touted as the most fresh-thinking and  intellectually curious in the race 
hastened to make clear he had not been  corrupted by the toxic text. 
The episode illustrates one of the book’s central  arguments: the Israel 
lobby is powerful, and American politicians fear its  wrath. Any Democrat running 
for president—drawing on a donor stream that is  heavily Jewish, very 
interested in Israel, and perceived as hawkish—would have  reacted as Obama did. 
In their book’s introduction, Walt and  Mearsheimer summarize the 
consequences of this power. In an election year,  American politicians will differ 
radically on domestic issues, social issues,  immigration, China, Darfur, and 
virtually any other topic. But all will “go to  considerable lengths to express 
their deep personal commitment to one foreign  country—Israel—as well as their 
determination to maintain unyielding support for  the Jewish state.” The authors 
find this remarkable and deserving of analysis,  which they provided first in 
a paper, posted last year on Harvard’s Kennedy  School website and published 
in the London Review of Books, and now  expanded into a book. 
This is not the first time a prominent American  has taken on the subject. 
George Ball, undersecretary of state in the Johnson  and Kennedy administrations 
and the government official most prescient about  Vietnam, a bona fide member 
of the Wall Street and Washington establishments,  called for the 
recalibration of America’s Israel policy in a much noted  Foreign Affairs essay in 1977, 
and at the end of his life co-authored a  book on the subject with his son. 
Eleven-term congressman Paul Findley, defeated  after a former AIPAC president 
called him “a dangerous enemy of Israel,” wrote a  book that became a 
bestseller, and there are others. 
But no one with the combined skills and eminence  of Walt and Mearsheimer has 
before addressed the subject systematically. These  two are mandarins of 
American academia, having reached the top of a field that  attracts smart people. 
They have tenure, job security, and professional autonomy  most journalists 
lack. They have the institutional prestige of Harvard and the  University of 
Chicago behind them. Most importantly, they bring first-rate  skills of research, 
synthesis, and argument to their task. 
One might wish that their book had been different  in some ways—more 
literary, more discursive, more precise in some of its  definitions, deeper in some 
areas, more (my favorite, from blogger Tony Karon)  “dialectical.” But The 
Israel Lobby is an extraordinary accomplishment,  completed with great speed—a 
dense, factually based brief of an argument that is  often made but rarely made 
well. 
In public appearances discussing their book, Walt  and Mearsheimer are 
tremendously effective: measured, facts at their fingertips,  speaking with the 
fluency of men accustomed to addressing demanding audiences.  Most of all, while 
treating a subject where hyperbole is common, they are  moderate. They are 
respectful of Israel, admiring of its accomplishments, and  extremely aware that 
criticism of Israel or the Israel lobby can turn ugly and  demagogic. As might 
be expected of top scholars in America, they are fully  conscious of what Jews 
have suffered in the past and how much anti-Semitism has  been a moral blot 
on the West as a whole. So while they have none of the  excessive deference, 
guilt feelings, and reluctance to engage so typical of the  remaining WASP 
elite, they are very well-modulated. Their detractors would have  preferred 
loose-tongued adversaries, Palestinians whose words are raw with loss  and 
resentment, a left wing anti-Zionist like Noam Chomsky, or genuine  anti-Semites. 
Instead, with Walt and Mearsheimer, they are encountering  something like the 
American establishment of a vanished era at its calm,  patriotic best. 
It is obvious that The Israel Lobby, both  the article and the book, would be 
extremely unwelcome to those pleased with the  status quo. Under the current 
arrangement, the United States gives Israel $3-4  billion in aid and grants a 
year—about $500 per Israeli and several orders of  magnitude more than aid to 
citizens of any other country. Israel is the only  American aid recipient not 
required to account for how the money is spent.  Washington uses its Security 
Council veto to shield Israel from critical UN  resolutions and periodically 
issues bland statements lamenting the continued  expansion of Israeli 
settlements on the Palestinian land the Jewish state has  occupied since 1967. When 
Israel violates U.S. law, as it did in Lebanon by  using American-made cluster 
bombs against civilian targets, a low-level official  may issue a mild 
complaint. These fundamentals of the relationship go  unchallenged by 95 percent of 
American politicians holding or running for  national office. 
Walt and Mearsheimer’s goal was to ignite a  conversation about the lobby—
which they define expansively as an amorphous array  of individuals, think 
tanks, and congressional lobbying groups that advocate  Israeli perspectives—and 
its consequences, which they believe are damaging to  America’s core strategic 
interests in the Middle East. They support Israel’s  existence as a Jewish 
state, and while they readily summarize Israeli blemishes,  drawing on Israeli 
sources and the arguments of the country’s revisionist “new  historians,” they 
are fully aware that no modern state has been built without  injustices. They 
seek a more normal United States relationship with Israel,  rather like we have 
with France or Spain, and an Israeli-Palestinian peace  settlement that can 
start to drain the poison out of American relations with the  Arab world. 
At least in a preliminary sense, they have  started a discussion. The initial 
working paper on the Kennedy School website  was downloaded 275,000 times, 
throwing Israel’s most ferocious partisans into a  panic. Deploying a 
McCarthyite tactic, the New York Sun quickly sought  to link the authors to white 
supremacist David Duke. The New Republic  published a basketful of hostile pieces. 
Several pro-Israel congressmen  initiated an embarrassing effort—ignored by the 
institution’s president—to get  the Naval War College to cancel scheduled 
lectures by the two. In a column about  “the Mearsheimer-Walt fiasco,” 
neoconservative writer Daniel Pipes summed up his  dilemma: it would have been better, 
Pipes said, to have ignored the essay by  “two obscure academics” so that it 
disappeared “down the memory hole” instead of  becoming “the monument that 
it now is.” Pipes was wrong about this. Hostile  reaction to the piece hadn’t 
inspired a quarter of a million downloads. With the  United States mired in a 
quagmire in Iraq, increasingly detested in the Muslim  world, and wedded to an 
Israel policy that, beyond America’s borders, seems  bizarre to friend and 
foe alike, Walt and Mearsheimer had touched a topic that  was crying out for 
serious analysis. 
And the book could do more than the article.  Arguments could be filled out, 
footnotes could be easily read. The 2006 Lebanon  War—which saw the American 
Congress endorse the Israeli bombardment by the kind  of margin that would 
satisfy Nicolae Ceausescu, while seeming genuinely puzzled  that moderate Arab 
leaders did not join their applause —was analyzed as a test  case. A book could 
continue the discussion and deepen it. But the book’s enemies  (how odd that a 
book could have enemies, but there is no better word for it) had  time to 
prepare their ideological trenches, and within a month or two of  publication, one 
could see the shape of the defense. 
By the end of October, two months after The  Israel Lobby appeared in stores, 
there had not been a single positive review  in the mass-market media. For a 
long time it seemed that no editor dared trust  the subject to a gentile, 
causing blogger Philip Weiss to ask cheekily, “Do the  goyim get to register an 
Opinion Re Walt/Mearsheimer?” By then, the Wall  Street Journal editorial page, 
the New York Sun, and The New  Republic between them must have printed 25 
attacks on Walt and Mearsheimer,  virtually all of them designed to portray the 
authors as beyond the pale of  rational discourse. 
Anti-Semitism was not a credible charge. The  authors make clear that the 
lobby isn’t representative of the views of all or  even most American Jews, and 
they support an Israel within recognized  boundaries. Their recommendation that 
the United States treat Israel like a  normal country is hard to demonize. 
Ditto their repeated assertions that  lobbying is a perfectly normal part of the 
American system and that conflicted  or divided loyalties have become 
commonplace in the modern world. But what many  did was to discuss the book in a 
context of anti-Semitism, to convey the  impression that The Israel Lobby was a 
deeply anti-Semitic book without  explicitly saying so. Thus Jeffrey Goldberg, 
in a 6,000-word New  Republic piece, introduced Walt and Mearsheimer after a 
detour through  Osama bin Laden, Father Coughlin, Charles Lindbergh, and, of 
course, David Duke.  He eventually called the book “the most sustained attack … 
against the political  enfranchisement of American Jews since the era of 
Father Coughlin.” 
Samuel G. Freedman in the Washington  Post opened his discussion of the book 
by invoking the New Testament  concept of original sin, whose burden one can 
escape only through acceptance of  Jesus Christ. A passage from Romans, 
Freedman claims, framed the book’s  argument—“if unintentionally.” When was the 
last time the Washington  Post introduced a serious foreign affairs book with 
Bible talk that had no  bearing on the work in question? 
One of several Wall Street Journal  attacks on the work claimed, “it is 
apparently the authors’ position that ...  [in the face of Arab lobbying efforts] 
American Jews are obliged to stay  silent.” This statement is more than a 
misrepresentation of Walt and  Mearsheimer’s argument, it is a flat-out lie. Did 
the editors who assigned and  published the piece know this? Was discrediting 
the book so important that  normal American journalistic standards had to be 
waived? 
Another track of the demonization campaign was  the repeated effort to cancel 
the authors’ appearances or to demand that  opposing speakers be invited to “
rebut” their noxious views, a format hardly  typical for authors on book 
tours. Unfortunately, these initiatives sometimes  succeeded, as when the Chicago 
Council for Global Affairs cancelled an event at  a venue where the two 
professors had spoken many times before. Some efforts to  marginalize the book were 
more like parody, as when Congressman Elliot Engel  complained that Professor 
Mearsheimer had been invited to participate in a  Columbia University forum on 
academic freedom. 
It would be naïve to think that the campaign  waged against the authors had 
no impact. It managed to muddy the debate about  the book. Even on some of the 
wonkier Washington blogs, where there was manifest  interest in contending 
with the book’s arguments, the focus got shifted to  whether The Israel Lobby was 
anti-Semitic. As one frustrated commenter on  Ezra Klein’s blog wrote, “
[P]art of the theory is that the power of the ‘lobby’  is to effectively remove 
certain topics from the debate. And the closest we come  to debating those 
topics is a meta-discussion of whether debating those topics  is appropriate or 
some evidence of anti-semitism/self hating Jewry.” Klein rued  that “
marginalizing the authors as anti-semitic is more effective than arguing  back their 
viewpoint.” 
The barrage also had an intimidation effect, a  sort of “shock and awe” for 
the political journalism set. What humble  book-review editor could fail to be 
impressed by the sheer volume of rhetoric  painting the book as disreputable 
or avoid wondering what bombs might explode  under his own career if he asked 
former national security adviser Brent  Scowcroft or Palestinian-American 
professor Rashid Khalidi to review the book.  Television producers took note as 
well. While Mearsheimer managed an amiable ten  minutes on “The Colbert Report,”
 the authors got nowhere near the regular  public-affairs discussion shows. 
Scholars and writers got the message: if men as  esteemed in their field as 
Walt and Mearsheimer were subject to the  Coughlin/Duke treatment and had their 
appearances cancelled, surely those less  cushioned by tenure and eminence had 
good cause to keep silent. This probably  explained the sheer ferocity of the 
campaign against The Israel  Lobby. 
Not all the negative reviews were as egregious as  those cited above. But 
those that tried to address the substance of the book  tended to land weak blows. 
Les Gelb’s critique in the New York Times  was representative. His central 
point was that if the Israel lobby—actually, he  incorrectly claimed that Walt 
and Mearsheimer called it a “Jewish lobby” —was  indeed so powerful, why has 
every American president over the past 40 years  “privately favored” the 
return of the Palestinian territories and the  establishment of a Palestinian 
state, and why has Washington consistently  “expressed displeasure” at Israel’s 
settlement expansion? This is precisely the  question to which Walt and 
Mearsheimer provide an answer. If, as is indeed the  case, most American presidents 
have “privately” sought Israeli withdrawal, and  since Israel is 
extraordinarily dependent on American largesse, why has the  United States never seriously 
put pressure on Israel to stop the settlements and  give back the land? How did 
Israel manage to move 400,000 settlers into the West  Bank in 40 years, often 
using American funds, if this was contrary to the wishes  of every president? 
Gelb goes on to acknowledge that Walt and Mearsheimer were  prescient in 
their opposition to Bush’s Iraq folly, but asserts that the Israel  lobby had 
nothing do with the decision to go to war. Bush and Cheney needed no  lobbying on 
this point, and they don’t about Iran either. 
This last area is easily the most disputed point  between Walt and 
Mearsheimer and those reviewers who sought to answer their book  rather than smear it. 
The Israel lobby, the two assert, helped drive the United  States into Baghdad. 
It couldn’t have done it by itself—that required 9/11 and  Bush and Cheney. 
But, argue Mearsheimer and Walt, “absent the lobby’s influence,  there almost 
certainly would not have been a war. The lobby was a necessary but  not 
sufficient condition for a war that is a strategic disaster for the United  States.”
 
This is a powerful polemical charge, if only  because tens of millions of 
Americans who could care less who has sovereignty  over the West Bank recognize 
that the Iraq War has been a painful failure on  every level. But is it true? 
The Economist says the argument about Iraq  “doesn’t quite stand up,” but 
might make sense if “neoconservatives and the  Israel lobby were the same thing.” 
Leonard Fein, who writes on the dovish  Americans for Peace Now website, 
called the charge “monstrous” and accused the  authors of treating the lobby and 
neoconservatives “as if the two are  interchangeable.” Are they? 
On one aspect of the argument, the historical  record is clear. The two 
authors do valuable service by documenting the near  hysterical “attack Iraq now” 
recommendations made by various Israeli politicians  to American audiences 
during the run-up to the war. Benjamin Netanyahu, whom the  U.S. Congress 
customarily treats with the kind of deference it might reserve for  a Lincoln 
returned from the dead, warned senators and congressmen that Saddam  was developing 
nukes that could be delivered in suitcases and satchels, and  Shimon Peres told 
Americans that Saddam was as dangerous as bin Laden. The  lobbying was so 
blatant that some political consultants warned Israel to cool  it, lest Americans 
come to believe that the war in Iraq was waged “to protect  Israel rather 
than to protect America.” AIPAC, too, pushed for the invasion. It  is clear that 
the Israel lobby, as everyone understands it, was part of the  rush-to-war 
atmosphere that swept the capital in 2002. 
But the critics do have a point: AIPAC and  similar groups played a 
comparatively minor part in the frenzy. But what of the  neoconservatives, who had 
openly pushed for war against Saddam since the late  1990s and who held several 
key posts in the Bush administration? 
For Walt and Mearsheimer, neoconservatives are an  integral part of the 
lobby, and indeed, for their argument to make sense, the  lobby has to be defined 
broadly. Of course there is AIPAC, which exists to  influence Congress, and its 
myriad associated groups that raise money for  candidates. The recent 
emergence of Christian Zionism as an electoral force is  an important addition, 
adding ethnic and social diversity and increased  political weight to the lobby. 
This is a sociologically and psychologically rich  area, which the authors don’t 
explore as deeply as they might. What currents in  American Protestantism 
suddenly made Israel so compelling? It is interesting to  learn, for example, 
that in 1979, Menachem Begin gave Jerry Falwell a private  jet as a gift and soon 
after bestowed upon him the Jabotinsky Medal for  “outstanding achievement.” 
(Other recipients include Elie Wiesel and Leon Uris.)  But such facts, 
intriguing as they are, don’t entirely speak for themselves. And  whatever enhanced 
political clout Christian Zionism brought to the lobby, it did  not include 
access and influence to inner decision-making sanctums of the  Pentagon and 
White House or the ability to start a war. 
That required the neoconservatives. The path that  took the United States 
from 9/11 to Iraq has yet to be precisely documented, but  it is generally 
accepted that Bush, Cheney, and other key policymakers became  converts to 
neoconservative views after the attack, if they weren’t already  sympathetic. This is 
important because neoconservatism has a broad gravitational  pull that more 
focused lobbying groups, no matter how effective, can never  match. 
It is one thing to motivate a senator or  congressman to vote for “pro-Israel”
 legislation—and AIPAC does that well. The  recent Kyl-Lieberman bill 
labeling Iran’s military “terrorist” was reportedly  first drafted by AIPAC, and an 
AIPAC aide’s boast that he could have the  signatures of 70 senators on a 
napkin within 24 hours was altogether  believable. 
But that kind of lobbying has obvious  limitations. How many of those 70 
senators would vote the lobby’s way while  discretely rolling their eyes, 
disliking the pressure they are subjected to but  willing to go along because it is 
the course of least resistance? People don’t  start wars for such reasons. 
Neoconservatism is something far more than  advocacy of the interests of a 
foreign country. It is a full-blown ideological  system, which shapes the way 
people interpret events and view their own society  and its relation to the 
world. Yes, its foreign-policy views are strongly  pro-Israel. The main shapers of 
neoconservatism would readily argue that their  foreign-policy positions were 
good for Israel, while those they opposed  imperiled the Jewish state. No one 
who has spent time with major neocons would  doubt the centrality of Israel 
to their worldview or their attachment to the  no-compromise-with-Arabs parts 
of the Israeli political spectrum. But such  attitudes come embedded in a 
larger set of viewpoints, which are now fairly  disseminated among the American 
elite. While it is one thing for a lawmaker to  accommodate the Israel lobby over 
something like the Kyl-Lieberman bill, it is  quite another for an 
executive-branch policymaker to see the world through a  neocon perspective, to have 
fully internalized slogans like “moral clarity” and  “Islamofascism” and “the 
lessons of appeasement” and elevated them as  lodestars. 
Neoconservatives did play a crucial role in  preparing the Iraq War—in the 
press, in generating dubious intelligence  conclusions and piping them into the 
executive branch, and in framing an  argument that George Bush would be “
surrendering” to terror if he didn’t attack  Iraq. It was a performance that more 
conventional lobbying organizations like  AIPAC or the Zionist Organization of 
America couldn’t match in their wildest  dreams. Walt and Mearsheimer don’t 
go into this history deeply. (In The  Assassin’s Gate, New Yorker writer and 
author George Packer gives one of  the most nuanced portraits of the attitudes 
of the Bush administration’s  intellectuals, exploring the difficult to pin 
down matter of how intellectuals’  attitudes seep into policy choices.) But in 
view of their convictions and  pivotal positions inside the executive branch 
and ability to shape policy at the  very top, to say that neoconservatives “
overlap” with the Israel lobby hardly  does them justice: the faction might more 
properly be described as, to borrow  the well-known phrase, the highest stage 
of the Israel lobby. 
Moreover, as an ideological movement,  neoconservatism has a reach that more 
focused pro-Israel advocacy could never  duplicate. Does one call Donald 
Rumsfeld a neoconservative? Few do. While  obviously quite capable, he isn’t known 
as an intellectual, isn’t Jewish (though  of course not all neocons are 
Jewish), isn’t an ex-liberal or leftist. He is  usually described as a Republican “
nationalist,” though he pretty much delegated  Iraq policy to men—Paul 
Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, and others—who fit most classical  definitions of “
neoconservative.” But there are connections: in the 1980s  Rumsfeld was enlisted by 
Midge Decter to chair the neoconservative Committee for  the Free World, so 
certainly the neocon cast of mind was not unfamiliar to him.  In short, just as the 
boundaries of the Israel lobby are blurry, so are those of  neoconservatism. 
The revival of terms like “fellow traveler” would probably be  helpful. 
The most striking aspect of the reception of  The Israel Lobby was the 
distance between the reviews in the U.S. and  those abroad. In England, reviewers 
for the major papers (including the  Murdoch-owned Times) treated the book’s 
argument as self-evidently  true. Geoffrey Wheatcroft, author of a prize-winning 
book on Zionism, noted in  The Guardian that it must be obvious to a 12 year 
old that the Israel  alliance, “far from advancing American interests, gravely 
damages them and has  hindered every American endeavour in Arab countries or 
the whole Muslim world.”  Israel’s most influential paper, Ha’aretz, ran a 
review by Daniel Levy,  who was involved in the last serious round of 
Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.  He told his readers that Walt and Mearsheimer’s most 
shrill detractors either  had “not read the book, are emotionally incapable of 
dealing with harsh  criticism of something they hold so close, or are 
intentionally avoiding  substantive debate on the issue.” Like others, Levy draws a 
line between the  neocons and the Israel lobby proper and explains the Iraq War 
as a sort of  perfect storm: Bush and Cheney, 9/11, many neoconservatives in 
the executive  branch, and for the first time a Republican administration with 
Christian  Zionists as a substantial part of its electoral base. He regrets 
that mainstream  parts of the lobby have been co-opted by the neocons and closes 
with a plea for  moderate Israelis to take American politics seriously and 
devote as much  attention to forming American alliances as the Israeli Right 
does. This is very  welcome advice, for Americans as well, because, as Walt and 
Mearsheimer stress  (and Levy helpfully repeats), it is not Israel per se but 
Israel as an occupier  that constitutes a major strategic liability for the 
United States. 
But it should be noted that casual newspaper  readers in Israel, in Britain, 
and soon in the rest of Europe, where the book is  being translated into seven 
languages, are being treated to far more nuanced and  serious discussion of 
The Israel Lobby than Americans have  been. 
At least there has been the blogosphere. One  wouldn’t know it from the major 
American newspapers or magazine reviews, but a  fresh breeze is beginning to 
blow. The Israel Lobby did receive more  attention on the serious blogs than 
any other book this year. M.J. Rosenberg,  the director of policy analysis for 
Israel Policy Forum and a prominent  “two-state solution” advocate, describes 
the influence of the book as enormous:  “Capitol Hill staffers are talking 
about the book, everybody is arguing about  it, people are intrigued. … it has 
opened up discussion.” 
Despite, or perhaps because of, ferocious attacks  in The New Republic and 
the Wall Street Journal, The Israel  Lobby made it onto the New York Times 
bestseller list. It remained  there only a couple of weeks, soon displaced by Alan 
Greenspan’s memoir and  Laura Ingraham’s latest. But the book’s influence is 
still early in its  trajectory. International sales will be large, there will 
be paperback editions,  and the book will be assigned in course readings. The 
Israel Lobby will  be around a long time, perhaps longer than AIPAC itself. 
Israeli peace activist  Uri Avnery has already compared the work to Uncle Tom’s 
Cabin, Philip  Weiss to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. To build upon Tony Karon
’s  analogy that glasnost is breaking out in the American Jewish community, 
and that  younger Jews are questioning Israel like never before, The Gulag  
Archipelago didn’t receive good reviews in Russia when it came out  either. 
Walt and Mearsheimer haven’t written the last  word on American-Israeli 
relations. Other books, more psychologically probing  and more discursive, are in 
the works or waiting to be written. But in clearing  the first path since the 
pivotal date of 9/11, these two authors have done their  country a great 
service.  




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