November 02, 2007

http://chronicle.com/article/Waltheimer-on-the-Hot-Seat/28122

“If you talk about an influential set of interest groups that is mostly though not exclusively comprised of Jewish Americans, some may think you are saying that there is some kind of secret conspiracy to
control U.S. foreign policy,” says Stephen M. Walt, gazing at the more than 500 people who have pressed into the narrow aisles of a Washington bookstore on this sweltering September night. “Anybody who raises this issue is virtually certain to be accused of being anti-Semitic.”

The crowd gathered at the store is the largest anyone on hand can remember, and television cameras are here to record the event. People are jostling for positions and standing on tiptoe to get a better look at the two scholars in gray suits who, for the past 20 months, have been at the center of one of the greatest intellectual dust-ups in recent memory.

“So I want to be very clear at the outset,” Walt continues, enunciating each word. “Both my co-author and I reject every one of those anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.” Those words will be repeated throughout the fall as Walt, a professor of international relations at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and John J. Mearsheimer, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, take their warning about the detrimental influence of the Israel lobby on American foreign policy to packed audiences across the country. Since a shortened version of their argument was published in the London Review of Books in March 2006, Mearsheimer and Walt have received the kind of attention most academics can only dream of – and the sort of condemnation that inspires nightmares.

The New York Review of Books declared “The Israel Lobby” the most hotly debated academic essay since Samuel P. Huntington’s 1993 article, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Within three months of publication, a footnoted version of the essay posted to the Web site of the Kennedy school had been downloaded 275,000 times. (In an effort to disassociate itself, the Kennedy school later removed its logo from the essay’s cover page online and enlarged the font of the disclaimer stating that the authors’ views do not reflect those of Harvard University or the University of Chicago. Walt says that was done with his support.) Most significantly, the hot blast of controversy attracted the attention of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, who offered the two a reported $750,000 advance to flesh out their ideas about the Israel lobby in a book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, which was published in September.

Web sites have sprouted up devoted to selling T-shirts and buttons with the slogan “Walt and Mearsheimer Rock, Fight the Israel Lobby!” And in perhaps the ultimate testament to how deeply they have embedded themselves in the zeitgeist, Mearsheimer appeared on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report, where he bantered with the satirist Stephen Colbert about the deleterious influence that pro-Israel groups have on American foreign policy.

This month, Mearsheimer and Walt depart for Europe, where they will address audiences in Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, Vienna, and Britain. In London alone, they have events scheduled at the London School of Economics and Political Science, the University of London, and the House of Lords. Next spring they plan to take their message to Israel.

While both men have been involved in many high-profile academic debates, “this is a whole new level,” says Michael C. Desch, a former student of Mearsheimer who is now a professor of international relations at Texas A&M University. “I think they knew theoretically it was possible, but to actually be the subject of that is a whole different thing.”

In essence, Mearsheimer and Walt argue that America’s uncritical and uncompromising support of Israel is not in America’s interests. It stimulates the spread of anti-American sentiment in the Muslim and Arab worlds and fuels terrorism. They charge the Israel lobby – a coalition of individuals and groups, some of them Jewish, some evangelical Christian – with playing a key role in pushing for the invasion of Iraq as well as driving a policy of confrontation with Syria and Iran.

But the most troublesome characteristic of the Israel lobby’s influence, according to Mearsheimer and Walt, is the fact that its existence goes largely unremarked on in the American media. They claim
that is the result of the lobby’s successful efforts to stifle and marginalize serious discussion about Israel in America.

Once their essay came out, it didn’t take long for critics to weigh in. Eliot A. Cohen, a professor of strategic studies at the Johns Hopkins University, accused Mearsheimer and Walt of harboring “obsessive and irrationally hostile beliefs about Jews.” Christopher Hitchens declared them “partly creepy” and “slightly but unmistakably smelly.” The Israeli historian Benny Morris described the essay as “riddled with shoddiness and defiled by mendacity” to such an extent that it is “depressing to anyone who values intellectual integrity.”

None of those rebukes stung quite as much as the white supremacist David Duke’s embrace of their essay as a “modern American declaration of independence.” That endorsement astonished both men, who say they abhor everything David Duke represents.

Friends and critics alike have been left wondering why two social scientists with scrupulous reputations for technical precision have jeopardized their careers on behalf of what many feel is a polemical book that betrays a simplistic understanding of American politics. In some quarters, their names – commonly shortened to “Waltheimer” – have become shorthand for a resurgence of anti-Semitism in American intellectual life.

“What would motivate two recognized academics to issue a compilation of previously made assertions that they must know will be used by overt anti-Semites to argue that Jews have too much influence, that will give an academic imprimatur to crass bigotry, and that will place all Jews in government and the media under suspicion of disloyalty to America?” asked Alan M. Dershowitz, a professor of law at Harvard University.

What indeed? Mearsheimer and Walt are two of America’s pre-eminent international-relations theorists. In a recent survey conducted by the Program on the Theory and Practice of International Relations at the College of William and Mary, Mearsheimer ranked fifth on a list of scholars who have had the greatest impact on the field over the past 20 years, while Walt ranked 22nd. Within the realist school of foreign policy, both professors are giants. Most often associated with the hard-nosed calculations of Henry A. Kissinger, realism stresses the inherent anarchy that underlies all state-to-state interactions and presumes that states act rationally in pursuit of their national interests. More specifically, realists believe that domestic factors like whether or not a country happens to be a democracy or whether there is a powerful ethnic lobby pushing for certain policies have minimal effect on how states behave.

Mearsheimer, 59, the more forceful personality of the two, relishes a good intellectual fight. He is probably best known for his 2001 book The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (W.W. Norton), in which he argued that large, prosperous states aspire to hegemony and will naturally act aggressively to eliminate potential rivals. He has also written major works on the irrelevance of international institutions and the potentially stabilizing consequences of nuclear proliferation. In recent years, Mearsheimer has emerged as a leading voice – along with Norman G. Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky, and Tony Judt – against the perceived threat to academic freedom posed by some pro-Israel groups
on campus.

Walt, 52, initially came to prominence as a result of his 1987 book,The Origins of Alliances (Cornell University Press), in which he modified traditional realist thinking about balance of power and why
states choose to ally with one another. About five years ago, he and Mearsheimer, who were colleagues at Chicago in the early 1990s, agreed to collaborate on an article about the role pro-Israel organizations and individuals play in shaping American policy in the Middle East. They knew such an argument would make them the focus of intense condemnation, which explains, at least in part, why they decided to write the essay together. Says Walt: “It is nice to sort of have somebody in the foxhole with you.”

According to Stephen W. Van Evera, a professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it is not out of character for Mearsheimer to find himself in the middle of controversy. “John likes to push an argument as far as he can to see how much he can explain with it,” he says. Robert A. Pape, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, agrees, noting that “there is nothing out of the norm with this topic in particular in terms of how they intellectually approach a subject.” Although their contrarianism makes them magnets for controversy, a number of scholars are bewildered that Mearsheimer and Walt are championing a case against the Israel lobby that so directly contradicts basic realist theory. “All their professional lives, they projected the idea that international politics is determined by national interests, not domestic factors,” says Shai Feldman, who directs the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University. “And now, all of a sudden, they discover after 30 years of scholarship that there is an exception to the rule, Israel.”
Josef Joffe is even more incredulous. “I am deeply puzzled that they have applied their considerable intellectual talents to such an execrable exercise,” he writes in an e-mail message. Joffe, a lecturer
in political science at Stanford University, considers The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy an “obsessive” and tendentious book, a style very much out of character for the two coolly analytical
colleagues he has known and respected for decades. Mearsheimer and Walt are quick to acknowledge that realist theory fails to explain the outsize influence of the Israel lobby. “All theories face anomalies,” Mearsheimer reasons. “There are always going to be cases that contradict a particular theory; this is true of all social-science theories.” With a mixture of defensiveness and reassurance, he adds, “And this case is an anomaly.”

That explanation has not satisfied Walt and Mearsheimer’s critics, who insist there must be a more-compelling explanation for why two scholars with deeply entrenched intellectual inclinations would push such an argument at this juncture in their careers. And so a parlor game of sorts is under way within the discipline to explain what many find so inexplicable. The theory enjoying the most credence holds that their crusading zeal against the Israel lobby is fueled by lingering resentment from the period leading up to the invasion of Iraq, when Mearsheimer and Walt were high-profile critics of the Bush administration’s policy of militarized regime change.

In addition to writing a major article in Foreign Policy decrying the 2003 invasion of Iraq as an unnecessary war,” they published a flurry of op-eds and led the effort to place an open letter in The New York Times with the headline “War With Iraq Is Not in America’s National Interest.” Yet by all accounts, those efforts barely made a ripple in the broader public conversation. “I think this flummoxed the living hell out of them,” says Daniel W. Drezner, an associate professor of international politics at Tufts University. “I think it was inconceivable to them that no one listened.” When asked about that analysis, Mearsheimer concedes that the debate over Iraq policy was “very frustrating.” As he rehashes that period, it is evident that he continues to be irritated by the uncivilized terms on which he feels the debate was conducted. “Critics of the war were called all sorts of names – you were called soft on terrorism, you were called an appeaser, you were accused of not being very smart,” he says. But both he and Walt emphatically reject the suggestion that Iraq is at the root of their recent work on the Israel lobby.

And Iraq does seem to be only part of the story. Spend some time talking with Mearsheimer and Walt, and it immediately becomes apparent that they are animated by a rather exalted belief in the critical role scholars should play in a democratic society. They use phrases like “speak truth to power” without a hint of irony or self-consciousness. “The reason we have great universities and tenured professors at those universities is to allow those individuals to enter into the marketplace of ideas and engage powerful policy makers,” says Mearsheimer. A few weeks later, he adds, “At the high end of the academic enterprise, you should be asking important questions and providing answers to those questions that challenge the conventional wisdom.”

Inside the First Congregational Church of Berkeley, in California, Mearsheimer and Walt have given their prepared talk and are standing apprehensively on a cramped platform. They are trying their best to ignore the fact that a man in the audience is pressing them to answer whether 9/11 was an inside job. “Answer my question about 9/11 Truth!” the man shouts, referring to the 9/11 Truth movement, which maintains that the September 11 attacks were orchestrated and covered up by the
U.S. government.

Moments before, Walt had sidestepped that question, and now he is grimacing. The agitated man quickly garners a chorus of support. “Answer his question,” a woman chants. After a few tense moments, another questioner steps forward, and the discord subsides.

Despite such encounters, Walt insists that it is calm at the center of the storm. “This has had much less impact on my daily life than one might think,” he says. A soft-spoken man with closely cropped hair and a subtle beard, Walt chooses his words carefully. “It’s been an up-and-down ride,” he says of the past year and a half. “There are periods when it is very discouraging, when you read commentaries that are inaccurate and misrepresent our views and call us names. That is not pleasant and can be more than a little bit frustrating.” Although he had some initial fears, Walt claims that the overwhelming majority of his colleagues at Harvard and in the discipline, even if they disagree with the substance of his views, have not questioned whether he and Mearsheimer had the right to say what they thought. Mearsheimer says that he has had much the same experience with his colleagues. Still, Walt reports that shortly after the London Review essay was published, an invitation for him to meet with a candidate for the U.S. presidency was revoked.

What price they have paid is felt most acutely in the policy world, where they claim they have become, in a word, radioactive. “I don’t think there is much question that any person in Washington who aspires to be a player is going to minimize or maybe even avoid contact with us,” Mearsheimer says. That point was emphasized at their September appearance at the World Affairs Council in Washington, when a questioner earnestly asked the two if they had received an invitation to testify before Congress about the influence of the Israel lobby. The room burst into laughter.
“There is no doubt that we have a sense that we are out there alone in terms of dealing with this issue,” says Mearsheimer.

They can claim some allies within academe, however. Robert O. Keohane, a professor of public and international affairs at Princeton University, considers Walt and Mearsheimer brave for placing the issue of what he calls pro-Zionist influence on the national agenda. “People who are involved in American politics ought to always be aware of what the forces and pressures are in American politics,” he says. “And it is bad for political science if some important forces and pressures are systematically concealed.”

Tony Judt, a professor of history at New York University, also credits them with positively changing the way Americans discuss foreign policy. “We fail in this country to discuss honestly, openly, and
seriously major foreign-policy issues by camouflaging them with a moral language of blanket denial or accusation,” he says.

Himself no stranger to courting controversy on the subject of Israel, Judt argued, in a widely debated 2003 essay in The New York Review of Books, that the notion of a Jewish state is a dysfunctional anachronism and that the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians should be solved by the creation of a bi-national state. But he is quick to point out some distinctions between himself and
Walt and Mearsheimer.

“When I got into writing about Israel, I had some sense that this is a very sensitive issue within the Jewish community, among Jewish intellectuals, and I knew there would be high tension on this,” Judt
says. “I get the feeling that, at least at first – I don’t know about Stephen so much – John was a little bit taken aback.” He recalls seeing Mearsheimer a few months after the release of the London Review
essay and thinking that he looked a bit “shell shocked.”
“In this country, 60 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, it’s still very painful for someone who is not Jewish to be accused again and again of being anti-Semitic,” says Judt. “It must be. It doesn’t
really have any impact on me whatsoever, but I can’t imagine what it’s like for someone like John and Steve.” “It doesn’t make me feel good,” Mearsheimer says about the vilification that he and Walt have received. “I think in many ways what has happened to us is antithetical to the way we are supposed to
do business in the United States.” But many within the discipline are skeptical of casting Mearsheimer or Walt as victims, citing the fact that their book was released by a major American publishing house with a generous promotional budget that has allowed the two of them to spend much of the past two months speaking their minds on the Middle East.

“All I can see is that they have benefited,” says Aaron L. Friedberg, a professor of politics and international relations at Princeton University. “There will be people who really don’t like them, but
there will also be people who think of them as brave. I don’t believe they have paid any price. And I don’t take seriously their self-pitying cries of pain at being attacked.”

The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy has been negatively reviewed in most major American publications. But among supporters and critics alike there is a widespread sense that it hardly matters. The book’s significance stems from the very fact of its existence and the conversation it has succeeded in provoking. “I am going to be very surprised if over the next 20 years, we don’t actually see an ongoing debate about this issue,” says Robert Pape. “They are putting their finger on a subject that is bigger than this moment and that is bigger than this book, and it is one serious people are going to have to come to grips with.”

If that debate continues, it may do so without Walt and Mearsheimer as its chief academic protagonists. Mearsheimer says he looks forward to returning to an abandoned paper on the role of lying in international relations. Walt, in particular, seems exhausted by the whirlwind of attention. He says he wants to turn his attention away from the Middle East and toward Asia. (Next up: The Taiwan Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy?) With a palpable sense of relief, he adds, “One of the nice
things about academia is that you always get to write your next book and see how that one gets received.”
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http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 54, Issue
10, Page B10