Yet, no other interest group is so frequently singled out for harsh scrutiny, as if somehow laboring on Israel’s behalf turns out to be working against America’s best interests. The latest manifestation of this attitude comes in The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen M. Walt of Harvard, that is an elaboration on an essay published in the London Review of Books last year.
Mearsheimer and Walt concede Israel may have been a strategic asset during the Cold War but argue that our continued support is detrimental to U.S. standing in the Middle East and helps “inspire a generation of anti-American extremists.” That’s their world view. Forget the dynamics of radical Islamism, Arab resentment of the West and other complexities of international affairs. Just change U.S. policy toward Israel and the world will be a happier place for America. Two intellectuals at two of our best universities have reduced international relations to that.
(For the record, their book describes the Sun-Times as one of the prominent newspapers in America that “regularly runs editorials that read as if they were written by the Israeli prime minister’s office.” I wrote most of the editorials on Israeli-Palestinian issues.)
The two go to lengths to try to rebut any suggestion of anti-Semitism in their criticism of the American Israeli Political Action Committee and other pro-Israel groups. But you can’t read The Israel Lobby without realizing that whenever two interpretations exist for some action by Israel or its supporters, Mearsheimer and Walt automatically default to the darker view.
For instance, a section of their book titled “Camp David Myths” cites numerous secondhand sources to disparage the Israeli peace initiative in 2000 while dismissing the account of Dennis Ross, President Bill Clinton’s chief Middle East peace negotiator, who was at the center of the Camp David effort and wrote the highly praised The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace.
But discrediting Camp David is central to advancing Israelphobia. The record is clear that in a breath-taking gamble, Israel was willing to push the envelope in offering the Palestinians the best deal they’re ever likely to get, but Yasser Arafat couldn’t abandon terrorism for a Palestinian state. That was a historically pivotal event that demonstrated to any reasonable person the clear peace aspirations of Israel.
Reading this book reminded me of something that happened in the months leading up to the Iraq war. In 2003 Mearsheimer was one of nearly 1,000 American academics signing a letter suggesting Israel would exploit the U.S. invasion to expel millions of Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip — and maybe also Arab Israelis from Israel itself!
It was a preposterous notion then and looks even more ridiculous today. Granted, the letter was adapted from one issued by some Israeli academics — proof of the adage about the ivory tower being out of touch with society. But the view embraced by Mearsheimer displayed a profound misunderstanding and ignorance not only of Israeli society but also of the moral culture of American Jews. The notion that 5 million Jews in Israel would carry out ethnic cleansing of more than 4 million Palestinians from the West Bank, Gaza and Israel, and that Americans Jews would sanction it staggers the imagination.
To believe that requires a bias against Israel so deep seated that it defies reality. Whether it spills over into anti-Semitism, I’ll leave for you to judge.
