Views » April 8, 2006 » Web Only

The Israel Lobby and its Discontents

By Salim Muwakkil

A working paper by John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard University, titled “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” has provoked a furious response from critics, and—in an eerie confirmation of the paper’s point—seems to have led to the demotion of one of its authors.

Released on March 13, the 83-page study, published by Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, forcefully argues that pro-Israel partisans within the U.S. government’s policymaking apparatus, including think tanks, politicians, journalists, academics and professional lobbyists, are manipulating America’s foreign policy. It also maintains that this lobby extracts billions of taxpayer dollars for the Jewish state while vigorously suppressing criticism of its pro-Israel activities.

Perhaps predictably, in the wake of the controversy, both Harvard and the Kennedy School removed their logos from the heading of the report, and co-author Stephen Walt announced he would step down from his position of dean of the Kennedy School. According to the neoconservative daily, the New York Sun, Robert Belfer, the Jewish philanthropist who endowed Walt’s Kennedy School professorship, demanded that Walt not use his title as dean when promoting the paper.

The authors specifically name the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations and the Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy as part of the system exerting partisan pressure. The study also lists prominent Christian evangelists who believe that a robust, expansionist Israel is the fulfillment of biblical prophecy, as part of the lobby.

The paper maintains that the pro-Israel lobby in this country has persuaded U.S. policymakers “to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interest of another state.” The results, they write, have not been beneficial for the United States.

Mearsheimer and Walt argue that the Israeli lobby is the primary reason the Bush administration decided to invade Iraq and is considering hostilities in Syria and Iran, writing that “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.” While Israel is portrayed as an important ally in the war against terror, the authors instead contend it is a liability.

“Saying that Israel and the U.S. are united by a shared terrorist threat has the causal relationship backwards: the U.S. has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel, not the other way around.”

These costs are seldom discussed in U.S. political culture, they write, because Israel is virtually immune from Congressional criticism. And, they note, the lobby’s perspective also prevails in the mainstream media. When reporters reveal unflattering news about Israel, “the Lobby organizes letter-writing campaigns, demonstrations and boycotts of news outlets whose content it considers anti-Israel.”

A short version of the authors’ working paper appeared in the March 23 London Review of Books in which they note how hard is to “imagine any mainstream media outlet in the United States publishing a piece like this one.”

Critics have responded to Mearsheimer and Walt with predictable overstatement. Several have blasted the two esteemed scholars as allies of David Duke, the notorious racist who frequently inveighs against Jewish influence. Others have compared their well-sourced piece to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an anti-Semitic fabrication that originated in Czarist Russia.

Many of the rebuttals feature angry ad hominem attacks and threats of financial retaliation such as boycotts and withdrawal of research support. The authors expected and even predicted such attacks would follow publication of their study.

While the controversial study offers nothing dramatically new to the critique of the Israel lobby’s warp factor, the pedigree of the authors make it a noteworthy piece. But my problem with the study is that it attributes too much power to the Israeli lobby. Sure, the lobby is extremely influential in U.S. political circles. But it would not be if its interests weren’t already in agreement with U.S. foreign policy. If the lobby disappeared tomorrow, there’s little chance the administration would alter its policy toward Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, or even Palestinians.

American foreign policy opposed most national liberation groups long before the creation of Israel and its displacement of the Palestinians. The superimposition of the Jewish state into a region rich in resources but rife with political strife has served the United States’ imperial purposes even as it benefited Israel.

As New York Times reporter Stephen Kinzer notes in his new book, Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change From Hawaii to Iraq, the United States has acted to depose more foreign leaders than any other nation in modern times. “Throughout the twentieth century, and into the beginning of the twenty-first,” Kinzer writes, “the United States repeatedly used its military power, and that of its clandestine services, to overthrow governments that refused to protect American interests.” He adds that though the United States has often cloaked its interventions in the rhetoric of national security and liberation, in most cases, “it acted mainly for economic reasons.”

If those two purposes ever fail to coincide, the power of the Israel lobby will decline rapidly.

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• Reader Comments

  Lobby or no lobby the recent Israeli elections were quite scarey!  The real difference is that the elections brought the racist transfer agenda, once considered taboo and in some extreme cases a cause for censure, out of the shadows and into the open where it has gained much respectiblity.  Several of the parties, including Avigdor Leiberman’s Israel beitaynu (Israel is our Home), a reactionary culturally Russian Jewish oriented party, openly advocate transfer—the total or near total expulsion of Palestinians from the area of British mandatory Palestine or Israel/Palestine. The entire Knesset is dominated by the far-right. The only Left party, Meretz has but five seats, and Labour, which has all but capitulated to the right in order to form a coalition has only twenty seats and will only bolt the coalition in the event of a real crisis. Israeli Palestinians have nine seats. The proportion of religious representation has increased as well as those advocating transfer. The fact that Kadima, a centrist party, has split the far-right only means greater stability, legitimation, and respectability for the right wing agenda free of the polarizing image of Ariel Sharon.  Now the suppression of the intifada will continue along with the colonization of Palestinian lands and water,  the building of the Apartheid Wall, and Israeli military repression of Palestinian political activity.  As former Sharon aide Dov Weissglass once said, the peace process is “suspended in [a kind of political] phamaldehyde allowing complete freedom of unilateral action regarding the final status of Israel/Palestine borders and security arrangements in Jerusalem. 

  
  Israel will now push ahead, free of international restraint, to utterly separate Israeli and Palestinian societies while colonizing Palestinian labor for the growing free trade zones in the area..  All this will continue to render unviable any future Palestinian state while leaving only Palestinian resistance politics as the only feasible kind.

  Posted by cabdriverinchicago on Apr 7, 2006 at 6:43 AM

  It is a sad day when In These Times embraces the latest variation on “Jewish cabel” conspiracy theory.  It would have been helpful to alert your readers that Noam Chomsky has criticized the article by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt.

  Posted by Lonsesome Sparrow on Apr 8, 2006 at 1:45 AM

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  Posted by brian28 on Apr 8, 2006 at 3:44 AM

  The Israeli elections of March 2006 were the most dangerous in its history. It is quite clear that Israeli democracy is in full retreat. Of the twelve political parties to poll the required 2% of the vote to be eligable to submit a party list to be seated in the Knesset (Parliament) only 4 were from the left and of those 3 were Parties representing primarily Israeli Palestinians. The left recieved 15 of the 120 seats, not enough to form a caucus or to swing a major vote. The one non-Palestinian-Israeli party to get to seat members in the parliament was a party called Meretz who got 5 seats.

  The Labour Party has moved so far right having lost its leading light from the Oslo period, Shimon Peres, who moved over to the Kadima (Forward) Party which is really Likud-Lite. Those who remain in the Labour Party have made serious reforms pushing the party rightward ala Tony Blair. These include massive privatization of the Israeli Parastatal companies and the trimming of state employment despite over 10% unemployment rates, full support for the security fence, opposition to the removal of further settlements beyond the few already agreed to by Sharon when he broke with Likud, and full support for continuing the occupation.  Despite this Labour still managed to garner enough votes for only 19 seats or about 15% of the national vote. 

  All the other parties were of the far-right except Kadima which is supposed to be centrist even though its platform is nearly indistinguishable from the other right-wing parties.  It broke with Likud over the Gaza disengagement which as everyone knows was not a real concession as Israel still controls the area but a mere redeployment of IDF troops.  This was absolutely necessary to avoid a global crisis of confidence in the state and a mutiny in the Israeli defense forces on the ground. As of now, nearly 1,700 IDF army and air force personel have refused service in Gaza and the West Bank on political grounds. Many of them are now serving stiff prison terms as conscientious objectors. This is unjprecedented in all Israeli history. Not even the highly controversial War in Lebanon saw dissent on this order of magnitude. The Kadima Party polled the most votes as a nod to its dogged political practicality and earned 29 seats.

  The remaining 57 parliamentary seats went to parties of the hard right and the forces of theocracy. These are parties led by individuals who openly support the forced expulsion of Arabs on either side of the 1967 “Green Line”, continued colonization of the Lands in the Palestinian Territories, an intensification of the Occupation, and the establishment of laws making the observance of Jewish Religious Law compulsory.  The retreat from democratic and progressive tendencies in both Israel and Palestine will lead ultimately to a catastrophic war causing much bloodshed and instability.

  One last observation.  George W. Bush is the only US president to fail to see the gravity of the situation and not propose an emergency diplomatic effort to resolve or head off the impending crisis.  Any other US president would recognize the need for immediate action. At this point there are precious few Israels to talk peace with and the old “Road Map” vision is off the table insufficiently pro-Israel despite its obvious cosmetic nature.  A full out war is in the offing and it bodes nothing but ill for both peoples.  If Us troops are eventually called to intervene and sustain heavy casualties, G-d help the US Jewish Community who will be fully blamed for the crisis.

  Posted by cabdriverinchicago on Apr 8, 2006 at 7:46 AM

  I guess the study by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt was a useful study when considering the climate of censorship. It is also not surprising that institutions are making radical moves to condemn those who are associated with the report. That in itself is revealing.

  Yet, I agree with Muwakkil that Jewish lobby groups are not by themselves responsible for U.S. foreign policy. If anything it reveals how Jewish lobby groups are able to increase their power and influence because the U.S. government has already taken a similar position on matters of foreign policy.

  Rarely can I recall any politician supporting the right of a group or nation’s self determination, particularly when it affects the way the militarily powerful want to rule the world. Policy always leans toward maintaining asymmetrical relationships, keeping the privileged powerful, and the weak impoverished. Weapons always get into the hands of mercernaries and subversive groups, or “The Allies” looking to overturn potentially democratic governments that want to resist dependency on other powerful nations and organizations. There is a long ugly history of that.

  As for Noam Chomsky, anyone familiar with his work can predict what he will say before he says it. He is very selective about the sources he sites and takes the same position again and again. Chomsky is Jewish. He has admitted to having a difficult time criticizing Israel. He actually takes the extreme opposite position as Mearsheimer and Walt. It is not Jewish lobby groups who have shaped American foreign policy, it is the other way around.

  Each position reveals a certain degree of bias. There are multiple groups and organizations that exist in collusion with U.S. and European global power that has led to so many shameful wars against weaker nations. If no one has gathered that from the Iraq war then I guess no one will ever know.

  Posted by Epistrophy on Apr 9, 2006 at 12:38 AM

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  Discussions with more than 5 comments are continued on our special discussion page to encourage continuity and ease of use. There are currently 57 posts.

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