Left Wing Book Club

THE ISRAEL LOBBY
By Mearsheimer & Walt

This is one of the most controversial books of the decade. Its proponents on the Left have declared it to be a brave bit of "truth telling" that provides the intellectual argument for reappraising one of America's less fruitful strategic alliances. Conservatives have castigated it as dangerous and even anti-semitic, casting it as little more than an intellectualized "Protocols," dependent on the blood libel that Jews are not to be trusted because of their dual loyalties. The authors - both are academics whose careers have focused on international relations and Great Power politics - earnestly profess surprise that their modestly argued book has caused such a fuss.

The argument of the book is well known and easily summarized. The authors argue that Israel is a nation with whom the US has a relationship that is as much emotional as it is strategic. While Israel once had a compelling moral reason for its existence, that animating cause has been lost as Israel has become an expansionist power that oppresses the Palestinian people. The authors believe that US foreign policy is dangerously tilted in favor of Israel, and that this tilt is the result of a loosely organized subset of proponents the authors charmingly call the "Israel Lobby" (at least they don't call it Big Israel). The authors believe that, but for the Lobby's pernicious influence, US Middle East policy would be much more balanced, and less dangerous.

That's the argument. As for the presentation, it is by turns conventional, disingenuous, and almost sublimely ridiculous. However, I think it is important to say at the outset that I take the authors at their word when they say they are not anti-semitic. For one thing, they don't question Israel's right to exist, which is the dividing line between being an Israel critic, and being anti-semitic. They even admit that Israel obtained its territory fair and square through a combination of UN mandates, conquest, and negotiation (although they don't like the settlements or the Occupation).

The authors follow the conventional Leftist critique of Israel: she is a nation founded on stolen land (although the authors admit that the post-WW2 Jews can be forgiven for seeking a homeland). The settlement policy is, of course, heavily criticized. The authors also describe Israel as the Middle East's greatest military power with little to fear from its neighbors. Whatever meritorious reasons Israel may have once had for its existence, she is held to have lost her moral basis thanks to its practice of aggression and apartheid-style social structure.

Israel's hostile relations with her neighbors, and with its many critics in the UN and the international community, form the most disingenuous parts of this book. M&W are "Great Powers" scholars who believe each nation acts in rational, predictable manner according in a sort of Metternichian Waltz of Nations. This may describe the rest of the world, but it does not describe the Middle East. Israel is not just facing enemies; she is facing enemies who would destroy her if given the chance and have said so repeatedly for decades. While the IDF goes out of its way to minimize combatant deaths, the PLO, Hamas, Hezbollah, and all the others deliberately target civilians, especially children and the elderly. Iran's leaders have expressed in terms both explicit and oblique that they intend to use their nuclear weapons against Israel. Many Palestinians, Arabs, and Iranians are Holocaust-deniers and lurid anti-semites. M&W mention not a word about this.

M&W also fail to mention the media and political double standards to which Israel is subjected. The world is filled with low-level violence that goes virtually unremarked. Two permanent members of the Security Council - Russia and China - have killed hundreds in Georgia and Tibet just in the last year. Russia has also destroyed Chechnya in a chaotic series of punitive wars. Central Africa has recently emerged from a continent-wide war that led to over a million civilian deaths. Sri Lankans have been killing each other for decades, with one side using terrorist tactics later perfected by the Palestinians. These stories are usually relegated to brief mentions in most media outlets. Meanwhile, every rock throwing mob and stubbed toe in the "Occupied Territories" has warranted wall-to-wall coverage on the world's TV's. M&W repeatedly say they want Israel to be treated "like any other nation." Unfortunately, she does not have this luxury.

The sections dealing with the Lobby are the heart of the book, but are also the most ridiculous. M&W describe a loose associations of scholars, think tanks, "conservative" magazines, pundits, and "neo-con" policy makers, all knitted together by AIPAC to direct US policy toward Israel and the greater Middle East. M&W find something untoward in all this without pausing to consider that the Lobby is just that: a lobby. It is hardly unique. There are lobbies for everything in DC, including foreign nations and their American supporters. What raises this to the level of ridiculous is the power that M&W credit the Lobby with exercising. M&W honestly believe that the Lobby is so powerful and pervasive that it alone is responsible for the US's favorable treatment of Israel. You know, I remember when Pat Buchanan was practically drummed out of polite society because he complained about "Israel and its amen corner in the US Congress." How times have changed.

M&W claim that the Lobby's influence is dangerous because it convinces the US government to favor Israel in ways that are harmful to US interests in the Middle East. They are among the many people on the Left who believe that we would have Peace in the Middle East, if only Israel would behave herself. That might be the case, but it would be the peace of the grave. M&W can't imagine any other reason why the US might favor Israel. The fact that Israel is culturally European, with many US citizens maintaining close family and business ties there does not seem important. Also unimportant in M&W's eyes is the fact that Israel is the Middle East's only representative democracy. And, they don't seem to consider the fact that Americans - when forced to choose between the disciplined dignified Israelis or the caterwauling suicide bombing Palestinians - find that there really is no choice at all. No, M&W say it's all the Lobby's fault. Those W$J op-eds and think tank white papers are more influential than I realized!

According to M&W, the Lobby's primary raison d'etre is defending Israel when she acts aggressively, whether in invading Lebanon, re-occupying the Gaza Strip, or what have you. It's second goal is to make sure that the US is always aligned with - if not actively carrying out - Israel's strategic interests. M&W go as far as to blame the Lobby for the Iraq War, saying that the drumbeat for war was facilitated and often driven by the Israeli government and the Lobby. Does that mean the Iraq War isn't George Bush's fault? M&W are dead serious about this, and so are this book's supporters. They really believe that, but for some US "neo-cons" and the Lobby, acting at the direction of the Israeli government, there would not have been an Iraq War. This is the most pernicious part of the book. Did Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and John Edwards (among others) vote to approve the use of force because of the Israel Lobby? Really?? The post-9/11 atmosphere when the decision to go to war was made is barel mentioned, nor is the long history of US-Iraq enmity. The possibility that Iraq might have WMD's - easily dismissed in hindsight, but not so back then - also goes unmentioned. And, the free will of US policy makers and military leaders is also given short shrift.

This is easily the most pernicious part of the book, and also the part that makes this such a landmark in leftist thought. Elements of the Left have been growing increasingly anti-Israeli for decades. At this point, you can't go to an anti-war demonstration in SF without seeing a wide array of anti-Israeli protesters. Progressive activists have made common cause with Palestinians protesting the Occupation. But, M&W represent the moment when the anti-Israeli attitudes of the Left's foot soldiers and extremists has entered the mainstream of progressive thought. This is a pure distillation of everything progressives have said against Israel, along with a rationale for ending the special relationship between the US and Israel by blaming the US's problems in the Middle East on a shadowy Lobby (of US citizens!), rather on the dysfunctional autocrats and murderous thugs who rule Israel's neighbors. Sadly, M&W's argument has only gained currency in Dc and elsewhere. As the "cycle of violence" continues, it is easy to imagine an increasingly impatient American Left abandoning Israel as it once abandoned Indo-China. If this comes to pass, this book would have been a major stepping stone on that path