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The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy

The very special relationship

John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt
Allen Lane, 484pp, £25,

Jonathan Mirsky

Wednesday, 26th September 2007

‘Here is a hot potato,’ The Spectator’s book review editor wrote in a note accompanying this book. Radioactive, actually. In 2006 Chicago professor John Mearsheimer and Harvard’s Stephen Walt posted a version of an article they had written on the Israel lobby for the London Review of Books on a Harvard faculty website. It was downloaded more than 275,000 times, and provoked what the authors call a firestorm of abuse.

Mearsheimer and Walt have now expanded their notorious article into a book. Here is their argument: Israel receives unique, overwhelming and usually unquestioning support from Washington; this commitment harms the United States and, in the long run, Israel as well. The book also surveys the Israel lobby in the US, ‘a loose confederation of individuals and organisations that actively works to move US foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction’. The authors state many times that the lobby is not a cabal or conspiracy, that by no means all its members are Jews, though most of them are, and that it includes groups from the American Christian Zionist Right who were also important in edging George Bush into the White House. The authors are at pains to state that the Israel lobby — which is rivalled in its influence only by lobbies representing retired people and the National Rifle Association — ‘are engaged in good old-fashioned interest group politics, which is as American as apple pie’. They also emphasise that Israel has a right to exist and that the US should support and, if genuinely necessary, defend it.

The firestorm arose from those in Israel who dislike any criticism, although, as the authors say, many Israelis are profoundly critical of their government’s policies and actions, and from Americans who also defend Israel under all circumstances. (The authors quote from polls showing that most Americans favour treating Israel like any other friendly country.) Those who hated the article, and probably will hate this book more, maintain that Israel is a special country, historically, morally, and as an American ally. Anyone who denies that this entitles it to total support, they insist, is either anti-Semitic or is a self-hating Jew.

I have had a bit of personal experience with this particular defence of Israel. During the recent Lebanese war I mentioned to an elderly close friend, who is a Holocaust survivor, that, based on my experience years ago in Vietnam, I supposed the Israeli use of American-manufactured cluster-bombs, intended to kill or wound civilians rather than well-dug-in enemy soldiers, could be termed a war crime. This was especially so, I said, now that we knew that the number of Lebanese civilians killed and wounded far outnumbered the Israeli casualties resulting from Hezbollah rockets. She replied, ‘If I didn’t know you were a Jew I would say you were anti-Semitic.’

The authors Professor Dershowitz so roundly condemned (Mearsheimer is a graduate of West Point and an Air Force veteran) belong to the ‘realist school’ of international relations; it holds that only national interest can justify the formation of foreign policy. They insist, therefore, that ‘neither strategic interests nor moral imperatives can explain why the United States continues to give Israel such generous and unconstrained support’. In fact, they contend, by doing little more than expressing mild regret at Israel’s expulsion of most of its Palestinian population and obstructing thereafter the establishment of a Palestinian state, the US has provoked the anger of even those Middle Eastern states, like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, which are normally its friends. By invading Iraq the second time, write Mearsheimer and Walt, the Americans drew not only Osama bin Laden and other foreign fighters into the fray, but provoked terrorist attacks on other members of the coalition.

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tihson

September 28th, 2007 5:22pm

The trouble with Jonathan Mirsky's thesis is that Ariel Sharon, person with unrivalled experience in the dynamics of Middle Eastern politics cautioned Bush privately prior to 1993 about the dangers of the US invading Iraq, for a number of reasons, including the unlikelihood of democracy taking root there and the danger of strengthening Iran. As to WMD, we shall probably never know the truth. They may have been transported to Syria before the invasion began in as stated in the admittedly hearsay testimony of the former Iraqi air force general, Georges Sada.

tihson

September 28th, 2007 5:23pm

israeli

September 30th, 2007 4:43pm

I would just like to make the point that the reason why Israel (and Israelis) so often seems to reject any criticism is not because we are particularly thin skinned, but because we know that our enemies are looking for any and all ways to weaken us as a means to achieving their final goal of destroying us, and weakening any source of foreign support is one way of doing this. To outsiders it may seem that we are very strong, we feel very vulnerable and know at what price this strength is achieved and the eternal vigilance it demands.