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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.

Perhaps the most ferocious denunciation, 43 pages long, came from Professor Alan Dershowitz of the Harvard Law School:

This study is so filled with distortions, so empty of originality or new evidence, so tendentious in its tone, so lacking in nuance and balance, so unscholarly in its approach, so riddled with obvious factual errors that could easily have been checked (but obviously were not), and so dependent on biased, extremist and anti-American sources, as to raise the question of motive: what would motivate two well-recognised academics to depart so grossly from their usual standards of academic writing and research in order to produce a ‘study paper’ that contributes so little to the existing scholarship while being so susceptible to misuse?

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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.