http://www.thestar.com/News/article/291139

The Israel Lobby
and U.S. Foreign Policy
By John J. Mearsheimer
and Stephen M. Walt.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Penguin, 496 pages, $34

This book is an extended version of the authors’ highly controversial article of a year ago, which appeared in The London Review of Books. Now, as then, they contend that the Israel lobby has made United States policy so lopsidedly pro-Israel that it fuels Muslim terrorism against the United States, fosters the spread of nuclear weapons in Arab states and puts at added risk America’s critical energy supplies from the Persian Gulf.

This commentary could not be more serious, and I believe that the authors are mostly wrong, as well as dangerously misleading. But Mearsheimer and Walt are raising the very same fundamental, gut-check issues about American security and who controls policy that many Middle East experts talk about mostly in private.

Mearsheimer and Walt live in the same foreign policy world I inhabit, and no one familiar with their extensive scholarship or their lives ever accused them of harbouring anti-Semitic sentiments… until their article last year.

And such charges are not unusual in this little world. But as my mother often said: “They asked for trouble” – by the way they make their arguments, by their puzzlingly shoddy scholarship, by what they emphasize and de-emphasize, by what they leave out and by writing on this sensitive topic without doing extensive interviews with the lobbyists and the lobbied.

Most tellingly, and contrary to their careful opening definitions that the lobby is not a “cabal” or “conspiracy” controlling U.S. foreign policy, the authors offer one story after another, premised on the lobby’s domination of U.S. policy toward the Middle East. But they rarely back that premise up.

It’s true, for instance, that the lobby has made America’s long-standing $3 billion annual aid program to Israel untouchable and indiscussible. By the same token, there isn’t much discussion about the $2 billion yearly aid package for Egypt. The United States regards this $5 billion as insurance against an Egyptian-Israeli war, and it’s cheap at double the price.

Instinctively and without being lobbied, American presidents don’t want to gang up on Israel, since virtually every other state does so.

While most countries hammer Israel for crackdowns on the Palestinians, they hardly ever criticize Palestinian terrorists or other Arab terrorists and say little about the misdeeds of Arab and Muslim dictators. When Israel crosses certain important lines, as when it expanded Jewish settlements into Palestinian areas like the West Bank and Gaza, Washington usually expresses displeasure in public, even more so in private. Mearsheimer and Walt just don’t mention that.

More troubling, they don’t seriously review the facts of the two most critical issues to Israel and the lobby – arms sales to Arab states and the question of a Palestinian state – matters on which the American position has consistently run counter to the so-called all-powerful Jewish lobby.

And on the policy issue that has counted most to Israel and the lobby – preventing the U.S. from accepting a Palestinian state prior to a negotiated Israel-Palestinian deal – it’s fair to say Washington has quietly sided with the Palestinians for a long time.

President George W. Bush finally said this publicly in 2001. If the lobby and Israel called the shots the way Mearsheimer and Walt and so many other Middle East experts insist, the United States would not have sold all those arms to the Arabs and never would have leaned in private toward a Palestinian state.

As part of their incomplete picture, the two authors also minimize the lobbying influence of the Saudis and the oil companies, the other major forces on Middle East policy.

The Saudis, along with the Egyptians, have been significant voices in Washington, arguing for a Palestinian state. Moreover, if Mearsheimer and Walt had asked policy participants over the years, they would have been told that the Saudis are the single most potent regional voice in American policy toward the Gulf.

In any event, the real issue is not whether the Israel lobby controls policy toward Israel and the Middle East. All strong lobbies aspire to exercise control. The real issue is whether the Jewish lobby’s power seriously undermines or damages American interests.

As it happens, America’s commitment to Israel rests far more on moral and historical grounds than on strict strategic ones. Israel does not harm American security interests to anywhere near the degree that Mearsheimer and Walt claim it does. And the major reality is that despite whatever difficulties the Israeli-American relationship might cause, the United States is helping to protect one of the few nations in the world that share American values and interests, a true democracy.

This is the greatest strategic bond between the two countries. And not to be overlooked is the fact that when push has come to shove, Israel has always defended itself.

Leslie H. Gelb is president emeritus of the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations.