Milton Viorst on ‘The Israel
Lobby’
Posted on Oct 4, 2007
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israellobbybook.com
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RELATED LINKS
The original article that inspired the book can be found on the London
Review’s Web site.
The letters
it provoked along with Mearsheimer and Walt’s reply are
well worth reading. The essay also prompted a response by, among
others, Christopher Hitchens on Slate. Some
months later, the London Review of Books sponsored a debate at Cooper Union
in New York City, which can be viewed
here. Also, be sure to read this
interview with the authors.
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By Milton Viorst
About 30 or so years ago, when I
first began to write of my concern that Israel was embarked on a course that
would lead only to recurring wars, or perhaps worse, I received a letter from
Abraham H. Foxman, then as now the voice of the
Anti-Defamation League, admonishing me as a Jew not to wash our people’s dirty
linen in public. I still have it in my files. His point, of course,
was not whether the washing should be public or private; he did not offer an
alternative laundry. His objective was—and remains—to squelch anyone who
is critical of Israel’s
policies.
In the ensuing years, Foxman and a
legion of like-minded leaders, most but not all of them Jewish, have been
remarkably successful in suppressing an open and frank debate on Israel’s
course. In view of Israel’s
impact on America’s
place in the world, it is astonishing how little discussion its role has
generated. As a practical matter, the subject has been taboo. John
J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, professors of
political science at the University
of Chicago and Harvard’s John F.
Kennedy School of Government, respectively, have challenged this taboo in their
new book, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.” Foxman,
in an effort to discredit them, has written a rejoinder in his book “The
Deadliest Lies: The Jewish Lobby and the Myth of Jewish Control.”
The Israel
Lobby
By John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 496 pages
The Deadliest Lies
By Abraham H. Foxman
Palgrave Macmillan, 256 pages
The controversy over Mearsheimer and Walt’s
views has been going on since March of last year, when they first presented
their argument in the London Review of Books. In their essay, they
contended that support of the magnitude that the United States gives Israel
might have been justified during the Cold War but is not defensible, “on either
strategic or moral grounds,” under the conditions that currently prevail in the
Middle East. America’s
unconditional backing, they argued, is harmful to its own interests and
possibly even to Israel’s,
and it is made possible only by the influence of the Israel
lobby over U.S.
foreign policy. The article touched a sensitive chord among many of Israel’s
defenders, generating a furor. Now Mearsheimer
and Walt have written a book which, while more comprehensive at nearly 500
pages, recapitulates the original themes. Foxman
acknowledges basing his book-length reply on the article, so impatient was he
to proclaim its authors guilty of “distortions, omissions and errors.”
The late social critic Irving Howe, deeply committed to Israel
himself, used to argue that Jewish leaders like Foxman
depend for their status on ceaselessly trumpeting the dangers faced by the
Jewish people, and particularly by Israel,
from a hostile world. These leaders, Howe insisted,
exploit the scars which inquisitions, pogroms and the Holocaust have left on
the collective Jewish psyche, scars which distort Jewish political
judgment. Foxman is no doubt sincere in
agonizing over the dangers that Jews have historically faced. But Howe
argued that these dangers had become a vested interest for the leaders of
Jewish organizations, making an open and honest debate all but impossible in
American Jewish circles and in America’s
political culture generally.
Foxman does not quite accuse Mearsheimer and Walt—though other disapproving critics
do—of being anti-Semitic. But he uses intimidating language nonetheless,
pointing to a “level of quiet, subtle bigotry—an attitude that may not run to
the actual hatred of Jews but that assumes that Jews are somehow different,
less respectable, less honorable, more treacherous, more devious than other
people. ... [I]t’s only natural that people who
exhibit this kind of bias against Jews should look a little askance at the
special relationship that exists between American Jews and the nation of Israel.”
One can admit the legitimacy of Foxman’s
warnings on anti-Semitism and still ask for the evidence of “subtle bigotry” in
the Mearsheimer-Walt text. I found none, unless
the reader accepts the premise that anti-Semitism is present in any scrutiny of
relations between the U.S.
government and American Jews, or the Israel
lobby. Foxman says the authors’ objective is to
make Israel
into a “pariah” state, though nothing that they write reveals such a
goal. On the contrary, Mearsheimer and Walt
recognize lobbies—all lobbies—as a legitimate part of the American political
system, existing to shape or shift policy in the interest of the various causes
they serve. Foxman, backed by quotes from such
dubious authorities as Dennis Ross, an ex-U.S. ambassador and a vigorous
defender of official Israeli views, seeks to attribute something sinister to
their motives.
Without question, Mearsheimer and
Walt have written less a work of political science than a brief for their
position. There is nothing wrong with that, as long as they maintain the
standards of scholarship incumbent on their craft, which exhaustive footnotes
of more than a hundred pages suggest strongly that they do. Some of their
critics, ill at ease with the charge of anti-Semitism or “subtle bigotry,” have
accused them of being “unbalanced,” in omitting the sins of “the other
side.” By their nature, briefs are not balanced,
but in this case the accusation seems doubly contrived. Assuming that the
Palestinians or radical Muslims are “the other side,” the critics can scarcely
claim that the literature is not already overflowing with negative evaluations,
readily at hand in any library or bookstore. The objective of Mearsheimer and Walt is to break new scholarly ground,
which is what academics are supposed to do. Their findings will come as
no surprise to those familiar with American political institutions, but,
judging by the reverberations of the Foxman line,
they have ignited panic by daring to put so much of the available material on
the public record.
(Page 2)
That is not to say that Mearsheimer and Walt do not leave a great deal of room for
disagreement: for example, their contention, presented in a discussion of Israel’s
role in instigating the invasion of Iraq,
that “absent the lobby’s influence, there almost certainly would not have been
a war.” Surely the American decision to invade Iraq,
like most of history’s grand events, arose out of a confluence of causes, no
single one of which would have sufficed to bring it about. Here are just
a few of those causes: oil, the rebound to 9/11, President Bush’s relations
with his father, concern over free navigation in the Persian Gulf, a sense of
Christian mission, the Pentagon’s hunger for Middle East bases to provide
“forward thrust” for American power. Moreover, many in decision-making
circles swallowed Bush’s claim that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction,
and a few may even have believed that we had a moral duty to liberate Iraqis
from Saddam’s heartless tyranny. Though we know now there were no WMD,
much less plans to improve the life of the Iraqis, each of these considerations
played a part in generating the momentum to invade.
As for the Israel
lobby, no doubt it weighed in during the deliberations. Israel’s
fears of Iraq,
though exaggerated, were surely real. But the lobby’s power was only
marginal on President Bush and his entourage of neocons
who long before had made up their minds. On this matter, the authors
overstate their case. The Israel
lobby was a player in the discussion on going to war, but there is little
evidence to regard its role as decisive.
Indeed, it is not clear whether Mearsheimer
and Walt fully understand what the Israel
lobby is. At its apex, of course, is the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee, the Washington-based organization whose power strikes fear in the
executive branch and, even more so, in Congress. AIPAC is complemented by
a constellation of satellites, among them the Conference of Presidents of Major
American Jewish Organizations, the American Jewish Committee and Foxman’s own Anti-Defamation League. Their agenda
seeks not only to assure Israel’s
survival but to pursue particular partisan policies. They function, in
effect, as the U.S.
arm of Likud, serving Israel’s
right wing in rejecting the exchange of land for peace with the Arabs, in
standing up for the Jewish settlements that blanket the territories conquered
in 1967, in condoning the mistreatment of the Palestinians of the occupied
lands, whose life grows more onerous each day.
But Mearsheimer and Walt go on to
add to their taxonomic mix such groups as Americans for Peace Now, the Israel
Policy Forum and the Tikkun Community, on the grounds
that they also support Israel.
They do, of course, but their values are precisely the opposite of the AIPAC coalition’s. They argue for peace with the Arabs,
while casting doubt on the hard-line position—encouraged by the Bush
administration—that only military superiority will guarantee Israel’s
security. Their point of departure, to be sure, is not so much America’s
strategic interests as Zionism in the old-fashioned sense, i.e. the survival of
a humane, secular and democratic Jewish state. But their politics lead
them to conclusions about relations with Israel’s
U.S. patron
that are much like those of Mearsheimer and
Walt.
These groups are much smaller than the AIPAC coalition, and
have far more modest budgets, but most polls suggest their goals are consistent
with the vision held by a majority of American Jews. Despite the
ceaseless efforts of Foxman and his allies, many Jews
who have thought hard about how best to assure Israel’s
survival have rejected the call to march in lock step with Israel’s
hard-liners. I would add that Mearsheimer and
Walt, by calling the AIPAC alliance the “Israel
lobby” or the “pro-Israel lobby,” perpetuate a misnomer in all but ignoring the
peace groups. It would be more accurate to call AIPAC’s
coalition the “right-wing Israel
lobby,” which might at least provoke Israel’s
friends, Jewish and non-Jewish, to examine whether AIPAC’s
effort might not actually be harmful to Israel’s
long-term well-being.
What is impossible to dispute is that the AIPAC coalition, by
its own standards, has been hugely successful, starting with imposing a kind of
political omerta in the consideration of
Israeli policies. Its promotion of silence zeroes in heavily on Congress,
whose members seem especially vulnerable to its muscle. A prominent
senator once told me he long ago gave up arguing against AIPAC’s
orthodoxy and now signs on to anything it puts on his desk. Over the
decades, AIPAC has used the money at its disposal to influence electoral
campaigns that have defeated more than a few senators and congressmen who have
had the temerity to break the taboo. Their loss has served as a lesson
that intimidates the rest.
But money is not AIPAC’s only
weapon. Brilliantly organized, AIPAC counts on sympathizers nationwide to
deluge Congress, as well as the media, with its messages. It is an adage
of democratic politics that intensity of feeling trumps the sentiments of
passive majorities, as revealed by polls. In this, AIPAC is not
alone. The gun lobby is another example. The producer of an evening
news program in which I made a critical remark about Israeli policy informed me
that the next morning the station had received a record number of denunciatory
e-mails. He has since stopped inviting me on the show.
Today, a campaign is being waged against Rep. James Moran, an
anti-war Democrat from Virginia,
who has occasionally questioned Israel’s
course. Moran, said to hold a “safe” seat, dared in a recent interview on
Iraq to say
that “Jewish Americans as a voting bloc and as an influence on foreign policy
are overwhelmingly opposed to the war. ... But AIPAC is the most powerful
lobby and has pushed this war from the beginning. ... Their influence is
dominant in the Congress.” Then, in a zinger, he added that AIPAC’s members were often “quite wealthy,” a
characterization that makes Jews wince. Moran’s words elicited attacks by
both Republicans and Democrats, demonstrating not that he had conveyed any
falsehood but that neither political party, with an eye to the next election,
is willing to provoke AIPAC’s ire.
(Page 3)
Yet, even taking money and
organization into account, there remains something of a mystery about the
influence that AIPAC and its allies wield. In contrast to AIPAC, the gun
lobby is routinely called upon to defend itself. But AIPAC’s
task, it seems, is easier, because non-Jews, no less than Jews, unquestioningly
accept its marching orders. Why, when it comes to AIPAC, do so many
Americans abandon the skepticism they apply to other interests within the
political spectrum? Europe is much less
accommodating to Israel.
AIPAC, naturally, blames the difference on Europe’s
anti-Semitism, though—apart from Europe’s Muslims, who
start with political grievances against Israel—there
is little evidence to support its theory. Mearsheimer
and Walt credit AIPAC’s skillful manipulation of the
system, but the search for an answer needs more.
Perhaps the answer has something
to do with America’s
being the most religious, the most Christian, the most
church-going society in the Western world. Once upon a time, deeply held
Christian faith could be taken as a measure of hostility to Jews; that
certainly is the case no longer. If anything, American Christianity—led
by but not exclusive to evangelicals—seems to take the biblical promise of a
homeland for the Jews as a test of its beliefs and a commitment of its
own. This commitment goes beyond guaranteeing Israel’s
existence. It provides a body of sympathy for Israel’s
hard line, and for the economic aid and weaponry that the United
States dispatches to support it.
Unfortunately, the pro-peace
segment of the American Jewish community does not have a parallel lobby.
It has a few organizations, with dedicated adherents. Its members try to
persuade the American Jewish community that reaching out to the Arab world, and
particularly to the Palestinians, is better for Israel
than perpetual war. AIPAC does its best to de-legitimize them, but they
hang in stubbornly, though they are barely a whisper in the debate over Israel’s
course. Despite the polls suggesting that many Jews agree with them, the
influence of the peace groups is no threat to AIPAC’s
pre-eminence. It is ironic that without Foxman
and the like-minded critics who echo him, the Mearsheimer-Walt
book might well have vanished with barely a
ripple. Instead, their shrill voices have propelled it onto best-seller
lists. Whether the book’s success means, however, that the American
people and the politicians who lead them are readier than before to seriously
consider the issues that it raises is still far from clear.
Milton Viorst, a former correspondent for The New Yorker, has written six books on the Middle
East. His most recent is “Storm from the East: The
Struggle between the Arab World and the Christian West.”
Original start page: http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/20071004_milton_viorst_on_the_israel_lobby/