“The Israel lobby”

Here is an abridged, 12,000 word version of “The Israel Lobby,” the controversial article by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. I haven’t read it yet (I intend to), but as I look through it, it seems to consist of one tendentious, anti-Israel statement after another. It’s as though the authors have collected every standard Israel-critical comment there is, but have no grasp of the larger picture, including the reasons Israel exists, its right to exist, and the world-wide campaign to destroy her.

The opening two paragraphs give a flavor of the all-out anti-Israel thrust of this document, and also help explain why it was greeted so eagerly by those who see “Zionist Jews” as the number one threat to America:

For the past several decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the centrepiece of US Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with Israel. The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread ‘democracy’ throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardised not only US security but that of much of the rest of the world. This situation has no equal in American political history. Why has the US been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another state? One might assume that the bond between the two countries was based on shared strategic interests or compelling moral imperatives, but neither explanation can account for the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the US provides.

Instead, the thrust of US policy in the region derives almost entirely from domestic politics, and especially the activities of the ‘Israel Lobby’. Other special-interest groups have managed to skew foreign policy, but no lobby has managed to divert it as far from what the national interest would suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that US interests and those of the other country – in this case, Israel – are essentially identical.

Remarkable. Walt And Mearsheimer claim that there is no moral or civilizational reason for the U.S. to support Israel against her would-be exterminators; the only reason America supports Israel is that it has been fooled or coerced into doing so by the underhanded lobbying of pro-Israel American Jews. When an article coming from an establishment institution such as Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government echoes every anti-Israel screed from the anti-Israel left and the anti-Israel right, it’s no wonder that it has come under such attack.

Even the Israeli leftist revisionist historian Benny Morris has denounced the article (see discussion at Powerline:

In their introduction, Mearsheimer and Walt tell their readers that “the facts recounted here are not in serious dispute among scholars…. The evidence on which they rest is not controversial.” This is ludicrous. I would offer their readers a contrary proposition: that the “facts” presented by Mearsheimer and Walt suggest a fundamental ignorance of the history with which they deal, and that the “evidence” they deploy is so tendentious as to be evidence only of an acute bias. That is what will be not in serious dispute among scholars.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 29, 2006 11:26 AM | Send