Sept. 4, 2007
BOOK REVIEW: ‘The Israel Lobby’ Expands to Book Length Controversial Mearsheimer-Walt Article Attacking Pro-Israel Lobbyists in U.S.
By David M. Kinchen
Huntington News Network Book Critic
A book-length version of a 2006 article in the London Review of Books, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” by John F. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 496 pages, $26.00) piles on facts – all of them carefully selected -- and opinions to hammer home the authors’ viewpoint that the Israel lobby harms the interests of both the U.S. and Israel.
The article was extremely controversial, garnering praise from anti-Semites like David Duke that Mearsheimer and Walt, political scientists at the University of Chicago and Harvard, respectively, certainly didn’t want and disavow. It also, they state in the introduction, opened the way for further discussion of what they call a taboo issue – and resulted in the present book.
The authors make it clear that their attack on the pro-Israel lobby -- centering on the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), but including other influential Jewish groups, Christian fundamentalists, media commentators and neoconservatives – does not mean that American Jews are on the same page with lockstep pro-Israel lobbyists. In fact they make the point that most American Jews opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq that Mearsheimer and Walt say was favored – even promoted -- by the Israel lobby – and the government of Israel.
And they vehemently deny they are anti-Semites, defending both the Israel lobby’s right to lobby as much as that of the National Rifle Association and AARP – the only two organizations considered more effective than the Israel lobby, according to a 2005 study cited by the authors -- while warning about the corrosive effect the lobby has on American foreign policy.
They even attempt to explain why American politicians – including candidates for President from both parties in next year’s election – make statements indicating their total and unquestioning support of Israel’s policies – even when they policies go against American self interest. One reason is that American Jews are active politically beyond their three percent or so of the population and can be a deciding force in states where they are a significant part of the population, including New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Florida and California.
And they wonder – as does the present reviewer – why Israel, a prosperous country, needs $3 billion or more per year in American military aid. The Jewish state, Mearsheimer and Walt say, has received $154 billion in U.S. aid since its creation in 1948, more than any other country and a startling amount for a “prosperous” nation with a strong economy and a major arms producer and supplier. This is a point worth considering and I also wonder why we send money to Egypt – about $2 billion a year -- and Jordan and Pakistan.
They pile on evidence, including citing articles from Israeli journalists, mostly from the liberal Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, but also from the conservative Jerusalem Post, that Israel favored the war. Mearsheimer and Walt repeatedly state that the oil lobby played no role in the war, even though they admit that many people – including filmmaker Michael Moore of “Fahrenheit 9/11” fame – no friend of Israel -- believe this to be true.
The war for oil argument, also advanced by Noam Chomsky, certainly no friend of the Israel lobby and Israel, states that both President Bush and Vice President Cheney are both oil men and the position taken by many observers is that the Iraq invasion was a continuation of the 1990-91 Gulf War, initiated by Bush’s father, President George H.W. Bush, another oil man and one of several U.S. Presidents considered hostile or at least indifferent to the fate of Israel. Dwight D. Eisenhower is another.
I detect the “realist” influence of older political scientist Samuel P. Huntington (born 1927 and a faculty member of Harvard since 1950) on the two baby boom-generation authors -- especially when they wonder why it’s all right for Israel to have nuclear weapons, but not Iran. They acknowledge their friendship of 25 years with Huntington, stating that he has been a role model, even though they’ve disagreed with him on “numerous occasions” over the years.
Here’s a quote from Huntington’s seminal 1996 book “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order,” itself an expansion of an earlier paper by Huntington, who is often considered the Godfather of the “realist” school of political scientists:
“Hypocrisy, double standards, and ‘but nots’ are the price of universalist pretensions. Democracy is promoted but not if it brings Islamic fundamentalists to power; nonproliferation is preached for Iran and Iraq but not for Israel; free trade is the elixir of economic growth but not for agriculture; human rights are an issue for China but not with Saudi Arabia; aggression against oil-owning Kuwaitis is massively repulsed but not against non-oil-owning Bosnians. Double standards in practice are the unavoidable price of universal standards of principle.” --'The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order', p. 184)
I’m not the only one to see Sam Huntington’s influence on Mearsheimer and Walt: Michael Massing, writing in The New York Review of Books – reproduced with the press materials that came with my review copy of their book -- declared: “Not since Foreign Affairs magazine published Samuel Huntington’s ‘The Clash of Civilizations’ in 1993 has an academic essay detonated with such force.”
Mearsheimer and Walt marshal their facts and quotes – and their opinions – to show why they believe the pro-Israel lobby serves to further the goals of the most right-wing of Israelis – all the while ignoring the many voices of dissent in the Jewish community in the U.S., Britain, Germany, Australia and Israel itself.
West Virginians will be interested in the cry in the wilderness (pages 311-312) of U.S. Rep. Nick J. Rahall, D-WV, one of the few people in Congress who voted against the July 20, 2006 House resolution condemning Hezbollah and supporting Israel in the midst of the 34-day war last summer. Rahall, whom the authors note is of Lebanese descent, is quoted as saying the House resolution made him “sick in the stomach, to put it mildly.” The vote was 410-8, and the Senate also joined what 1992 Presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan, a paleoconservative and no friend of Israel and the Israel lobby called “Israel’s amen corner” in support of Israel’s actions, right or wrong.
Mearsheimer and Walt took their 83-page 2006 article and incorporated more information about Christian Zionists and other fundamentalists, as well as the Israel-Lebanese war of 2006 to expand their arguments about the negative impact of the Israel lobby. They also suggest solutions to what they consider the problem of excess influence by the Israel lobby.
One of their more controversial arguments in a book full of them is that Israel is not the strategic ally that it is almost always portrayed, that in effect, Israel is a negative force in a tinderbox region and has been for 40 years, since the pre-emptive Six-Day War of June 1967. They try to demolish the argument that tiny Israel –- and it is tiny, with just over 8,000 square miles of area and about 6.3 million people (1.3 million of whom are Israeli Arabs) – is threatened with extinction by implacable Arab foes, as well as Persian ones in the case of Iran.
They quote former U.N. weapons inspector and author Scott Ritter (“Target Iran” and “Waging Peace”) as saying (Page 302): “Let there be no doubt: If there is an American war with Iran, it was a war made in Israel and nowhere else.” I saw Ritter on C-Span’s Book TV recently where he reminded his audience that Israel was struck with 39 Iraqi missiles during the Gulf War, making it no friend of Saddam Hussein. Ritter added, however, that by the late 1990s, Israeli intelligence officials had decided that Saddam was a foe they could live with, that if he were removed, his replacement would be an unknown, most likely dangerous factor. This weakens the argument of Mearsheimer and Walt about the role of Israel in promoting the 2003 invasion.
The unique “special relationship” between the U.S. and Israel, the two academics say, results from the political influence of a loose coalition of individuals and organizations that actively work to shape U.S. foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction.
Mearsheimer and Walt argue that the lobby has a far-reaching impact on America’s posture throughout the Middle East—in Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, and toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—and the policies it has encouraged are in neither America’s national interest nor Israel’s long-term interest. As I’ve noted, they pile on quotation after quotation – including many from Israeli commentators – about this factor in the relationship. The lobby’s influence also affects America’s relationship with important allies and increases dangers that all states face from global jihadist terror.
Echoing Vladimir I. Lenin’s famous 1902 “What is to be done?” position paper on remaking Czarist Russia, Mearsheimer and Walt use the same wording in their “Conclusion: What is to be done?” on Page 333. Readers who don’t want to slog through the whole book, those who are aware of the lockstep attitude displayed by many U.S. political leaders in support of Israel’s actions, might just want to turn to this section.
This isn’t to say that the book isn’t interesting; on the contrary, the authors constantly go out of their way to tell the reader that their attack on the Israel lobby doesn’t diminish their respect for the creation of Israel in the wake of horrible “Christian anti-Semitism” culminating in the Holocaust.
While mentioning Jewish atrocities against Palestinians, the authors conveniently neglect to mention the treatment of Jews in Muslim countries after 1948, with most of the Jews – significant numbers in Egypt, Iraq and Iran – driven out of homelands they had been in since before Islam was invented. Estimates of Jewish refugees range upwards of 800,000.
Also, I think the authors downplay the terrorism against Jews in British mandate Palestine before World War II. Even though the authors go back in time to pre-Israel Palestine, there is no mention of the Hebron massacre of 1929, nor of British philo-Semite – and Christian Zionist -- army officer Orde Wingate (1903-1944), who organized the Special Night Squads in the late 1930s to protect Palestinian Jews from attacks by Arabs.
Wingate, who died in a plane crash in the China-Burma-India theatre of war during World War II, was a devout Christian whose beliefs provide the foundation for those of John Hagee of the Texas-based Christians United for Israel, a group cited by Mearsheimer and Walt as being one of the gentile elements of the Israel lobby. Texas is the home of other gentiles who unequivocally support Israel, the authors note, citing former GOP congressmen Tom DeLay and Dick Armey, both part of the Israel lobby.
Eight years ago, I reviewed a biography of Wingate by John Bierman and Colin Smith, “Fire in the Night: Wingate of Burma, Ethiopia and Zion” (Random House, 1999) which I recommend to anyone who wants to understand the mind set of Israelis, who daily face terror seemingly without end. Wingate is a revered figure in today’s Israel, because he showed Palestinian Jews how to fight back.
I’m convinced that Mearsheimer and Walt, respected citizens of a country that until 9/11 had little experience with Islamist terrorism, fail to grasp the fears of people who are besieged --the Israelis -- and their supporters in the diaspora.
“The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” is an important book that should be read by everyone concerned with policies followed by both the U.S. and Israel.
Web sites: www.fsgbooks.com
www.israellobbybook.com
BOOK REVIEW: ‘The Israel Lobby’ Expands to Book Length Controversial Mearsheimer-Walt Article Attacking Pro-Israel Lobbyists in U.S.
By David M. Kinchen
Huntington News Network Book Critic
A book-length version of a 2006 article in the London Review of Books, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” by John F. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 496 pages, $26.00) piles on facts – all of them carefully selected -- and opinions to hammer home the authors’ viewpoint that the Israel lobby harms the interests of both the U.S. and Israel.
The article was extremely controversial, garnering praise from anti-Semites like David Duke that Mearsheimer and Walt, political scientists at the University of Chicago and Harvard, respectively, certainly didn’t want and disavow. It also, they state in the introduction, opened the way for further discussion of what they call a taboo issue – and resulted in the present book.
The authors make it clear that their attack on the pro-Israel lobby -- centering on the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), but including other influential Jewish groups, Christian fundamentalists, media commentators and neoconservatives – does not mean that American Jews are on the same page with lockstep pro-Israel lobbyists. In fact they make the point that most American Jews opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq that Mearsheimer and Walt say was favored – even promoted -- by the Israel lobby – and the government of Israel.
And they vehemently deny they are anti-Semites, defending both the Israel lobby’s right to lobby as much as that of the National Rifle Association and AARP – the only two organizations considered more effective than the Israel lobby, according to a 2005 study cited by the authors -- while warning about the corrosive effect the lobby has on American foreign policy.
They even attempt to explain why American politicians – including candidates for President from both parties in next year’s election – make statements indicating their total and unquestioning support of Israel’s policies – even when they policies go against American self interest. One reason is that American Jews are active politically beyond their three percent or so of the population and can be a deciding force in states where they are a significant part of the population, including New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Florida and California.
And they wonder – as does the present reviewer – why Israel, a prosperous country, needs $3 billion or more per year in American military aid. The Jewish state, Mearsheimer and Walt say, has received $154 billion in U.S. aid since its creation in 1948, more than any other country and a startling amount for a “prosperous” nation with a strong economy and a major arms producer and supplier. This is a point worth considering and I also wonder why we send money to Egypt – about $2 billion a year -- and Jordan and Pakistan.
They pile on evidence, including citing articles from Israeli journalists, mostly from the liberal Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, but also from the conservative Jerusalem Post, that Israel favored the war. Mearsheimer and Walt repeatedly state that the oil lobby played no role in the war, even though they admit that many people – including filmmaker Michael Moore of “Fahrenheit 9/11” fame – no friend of Israel -- believe this to be true.
The war for oil argument, also advanced by Noam Chomsky, certainly no friend of the Israel lobby and Israel, states that both President Bush and Vice President Cheney are both oil men and the position taken by many observers is that the Iraq invasion was a continuation of the 1990-91 Gulf War, initiated by Bush’s father, President George H.W. Bush, another oil man and one of several U.S. Presidents considered hostile or at least indifferent to the fate of Israel. Dwight D. Eisenhower is another.
I detect the “realist” influence of older political scientist Samuel P. Huntington (born 1927 and a faculty member of Harvard since 1950) on the two baby boom-generation authors -- especially when they wonder why it’s all right for Israel to have nuclear weapons, but not Iran. They acknowledge their friendship of 25 years with Huntington, stating that he has been a role model, even though they’ve disagreed with him on “numerous occasions” over the years.
Here’s a quote from Huntington’s seminal 1996 book “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order,” itself an expansion of an earlier paper by Huntington, who is often considered the Godfather of the “realist” school of political scientists:
“Hypocrisy, double standards, and ‘but nots’ are the price of universalist pretensions. Democracy is promoted but not if it brings Islamic fundamentalists to power; nonproliferation is preached for Iran and Iraq but not for Israel; free trade is the elixir of economic growth but not for agriculture; human rights are an issue for China but not with Saudi Arabia; aggression against oil-owning Kuwaitis is massively repulsed but not against non-oil-owning Bosnians. Double standards in practice are the unavoidable price of universal standards of principle.” --'The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order', p. 184)
I’m not the only one to see Sam Huntington’s influence on Mearsheimer and Walt: Michael Massing, writing in The New York Review of Books – reproduced with the press materials that came with my review copy of their book -- declared: “Not since Foreign Affairs magazine published Samuel Huntington’s ‘The Clash of Civilizations’ in 1993 has an academic essay detonated with such force.”
Mearsheimer and Walt marshal their facts and quotes – and their opinions – to show why they believe the pro-Israel lobby serves to further the goals of the most right-wing of Israelis – all the while ignoring the many voices of dissent in the Jewish community in the U.S., Britain, Germany, Australia and Israel itself.
West Virginians will be interested in the cry in the wilderness (pages 311-312) of U.S. Rep. Nick J. Rahall, D-WV, one of the few people in Congress who voted against the July 20, 2006 House resolution condemning Hezbollah and supporting Israel in the midst of the 34-day war last summer. Rahall, whom the authors note is of Lebanese descent, is quoted as saying the House resolution made him “sick in the stomach, to put it mildly.” The vote was 410-8, and the Senate also joined what 1992 Presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan, a paleoconservative and no friend of Israel and the Israel lobby called “Israel’s amen corner” in support of Israel’s actions, right or wrong.
Mearsheimer and Walt took their 83-page 2006 article and incorporated more information about Christian Zionists and other fundamentalists, as well as the Israel-Lebanese war of 2006 to expand their arguments about the negative impact of the Israel lobby. They also suggest solutions to what they consider the problem of excess influence by the Israel lobby.
One of their more controversial arguments in a book full of them is that Israel is not the strategic ally that it is almost always portrayed, that in effect, Israel is a negative force in a tinderbox region and has been for 40 years, since the pre-emptive Six-Day War of June 1967. They try to demolish the argument that tiny Israel –- and it is tiny, with just over 8,000 square miles of area and about 6.3 million people (1.3 million of whom are Israeli Arabs) – is threatened with extinction by implacable Arab foes, as well as Persian ones in the case of Iran.
They quote former U.N. weapons inspector and author Scott Ritter (“Target Iran” and “Waging Peace”) as saying (Page 302): “Let there be no doubt: If there is an American war with Iran, it was a war made in Israel and nowhere else.” I saw Ritter on C-Span’s Book TV recently where he reminded his audience that Israel was struck with 39 Iraqi missiles during the Gulf War, making it no friend of Saddam Hussein. Ritter added, however, that by the late 1990s, Israeli intelligence officials had decided that Saddam was a foe they could live with, that if he were removed, his replacement would be an unknown, most likely dangerous factor. This weakens the argument of Mearsheimer and Walt about the role of Israel in promoting the 2003 invasion.
The unique “special relationship” between the U.S. and Israel, the two academics say, results from the political influence of a loose coalition of individuals and organizations that actively work to shape U.S. foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction.
Mearsheimer and Walt argue that the lobby has a far-reaching impact on America’s posture throughout the Middle East—in Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, and toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—and the policies it has encouraged are in neither America’s national interest nor Israel’s long-term interest. As I’ve noted, they pile on quotation after quotation – including many from Israeli commentators – about this factor in the relationship. The lobby’s influence also affects America’s relationship with important allies and increases dangers that all states face from global jihadist terror.
Echoing Vladimir I. Lenin’s famous 1902 “What is to be done?” position paper on remaking Czarist Russia, Mearsheimer and Walt use the same wording in their “Conclusion: What is to be done?” on Page 333. Readers who don’t want to slog through the whole book, those who are aware of the lockstep attitude displayed by many U.S. political leaders in support of Israel’s actions, might just want to turn to this section.
This isn’t to say that the book isn’t interesting; on the contrary, the authors constantly go out of their way to tell the reader that their attack on the Israel lobby doesn’t diminish their respect for the creation of Israel in the wake of horrible “Christian anti-Semitism” culminating in the Holocaust.
While mentioning Jewish atrocities against Palestinians, the authors conveniently neglect to mention the treatment of Jews in Muslim countries after 1948, with most of the Jews – significant numbers in Egypt, Iraq and Iran – driven out of homelands they had been in since before Islam was invented. Estimates of Jewish refugees range upwards of 800,000.
Also, I think the authors downplay the terrorism against Jews in British mandate Palestine before World War II. Even though the authors go back in time to pre-Israel Palestine, there is no mention of the Hebron massacre of 1929, nor of British philo-Semite – and Christian Zionist -- army officer Orde Wingate (1903-1944), who organized the Special Night Squads in the late 1930s to protect Palestinian Jews from attacks by Arabs.
Wingate, who died in a plane crash in the China-Burma-India theatre of war during World War II, was a devout Christian whose beliefs provide the foundation for those of John Hagee of the Texas-based Christians United for Israel, a group cited by Mearsheimer and Walt as being one of the gentile elements of the Israel lobby. Texas is the home of other gentiles who unequivocally support Israel, the authors note, citing former GOP congressmen Tom DeLay and Dick Armey, both part of the Israel lobby.
Eight years ago, I reviewed a biography of Wingate by John Bierman and Colin Smith, “Fire in the Night: Wingate of Burma, Ethiopia and Zion” (Random House, 1999) which I recommend to anyone who wants to understand the mind set of Israelis, who daily face terror seemingly without end. Wingate is a revered figure in today’s Israel, because he showed Palestinian Jews how to fight back.
I’m convinced that Mearsheimer and Walt, respected citizens of a country that until 9/11 had little experience with Islamist terrorism, fail to grasp the fears of people who are besieged --the Israelis -- and their supporters in the diaspora.
“The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” is an important book that should be read by everyone concerned with policies followed by both the U.S. and Israel.
Web sites: www.fsgbooks.com
www.israellobbybook.com
