'The Israel Lobby' Authors 'Reply'
MER -
MiddleEast.Org - Washington - 5 May 2006:
They unleashed a most unusual political, as well as academic and
intellectual, firestory with their 'The Israel Lobby' article published
in March in The London Review of Books.
And we now know that the article was actually commissioned by and then
rejected for publication in New York by The Atlantic -- formerly The Atlantic Monthly before
the cut-back in publishing schedule. Rather hypocritically for a
magazine supposed to stand for serious journalism, open debate and
freedom of the press The Atlantic
has nevertheless clamped a 'No Comment Top Secret' stamp on this whole
episode and somehow convinced the Professors to do so as well. But the
issue and the debate, so vital actually to Americans, does non-the-less
continue in The London Review of Books where this follow-up letter appears in the current just published issue:
The Israel Lobby
From John Mearsheimer & Stephen Walt
LRB, 11 May 2006: We
wrote ‘The Israel Lobby’ in order to begin a discussion of a subject
that had become difficult to address openly in the United States (LRB, 23 March).
We knew it was likely to generate a strong reaction, and we are not
surprised that some of our critics have chosen to attack our characters
or misrepresent our arguments. We have also been gratified by the many
positive responses we have received, and by the thoughtful commentary
that has begun to emerge in the media and the blogosphere. It is clear
that many people – including Jews and Israelis – believe that it is
time to have a candid discussion of the US relationship with Israel. It
is in that spirit that we engage with the letters responding to our
article. We confine ourselves here to the most salient points of
dispute.
One of the most prominent charges against us is that we
see the lobby as a well-organised Jewish conspiracy. Jeffrey Herf and
Andrei Markovits, for example, begin by noting that ‘accusations of
powerful Jews behind the scenes are part of the most dangerous
traditions of modern anti-semitism’ (Letters, 6 April).
It is a tradition we deplore and that we explicitly rejected in our
article. Instead, we described the lobby as a loose coalition of
individuals and organisations without a central headquarters. It
includes gentiles as well as Jews, and many Jewish-Americans do not
endorse its positions on some or all issues. Most important, the Israel
lobby is not a secret, clandestine cabal; on the contrary, it is openly
engaged in interest-group politics and there is nothing conspiratorial
or illicit about its behaviour. Thus, we can easily believe that Daniel
Pipes has never ‘taken orders’ from the lobby, because the Leninist
caricature of the lobby depicted in his letter is one that we clearly
dismissed. Readers will also note that Pipes does not deny that his
organisation, Campus Watch, was created in order to monitor what
academics say, write and teach, so as to discourage them from engaging
in open discourse about the Middle East.
Several writers chide us
for making mono-causal arguments, accusing us of saying that Israel
alone is responsible for anti-Americanism in the Arab and Islamic world
(as one letter puts it, anti-Americanism ‘would exist if Israel was not
there’) or suggesting that the lobby bears sole responsibility for the
Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq. But that is not what we
said. We emphasised that US support for Israeli policy in the Occupied
Territories is a powerful source of anti-Americanism, the conclusion
reached in several scholarly studies and US government commissions
(including the 9/11 Commission). But we also pointed out that support
for Israel is hardly the only reason America’s standing in the Middle
East is so low. Similarly, we clearly stated that Osama bin Laden had
other grievances against the United States besides the Palestinian
issue, but as the 9/11 Commission documents, this matter was a major
concern for him. We also explicitly stated that the lobby, by itself,
could not convince either the Clinton or the Bush administration to
invade Iraq. Nevertheless, there is abundant evidence that the
neo-conservatives and other groups within the lobby played a central
role in making the case for war.
At least two of the letters
complain that we ‘catalogue Israel’s moral flaws’, while paying little
attention to the shortcomings of other states. We focused on Israeli
behaviour, not because we have any animus towards Israel, but because
the United States gives it such high levels of material and diplomatic
support. Our aim was to determine whether Israel merits this special
treatment either because it is a unique strategic asset or because it
behaves better than other countries do. We argued that neither argument
is convincing: Israel’s strategic value has declined since the end of
the Cold War and Israel does not behave significantly better than most
other states.
Herf and Markovits interpret us to be saying that
Israel’s ‘continued survival’ should be of little concern to the United
States. We made no such argument. In fact, we emphasised that there is
a powerful moral case for Israel’s existence, and we firmly believe
that the United States should take action to ensure its survival if it
were in danger. Our criticism was directed at Israeli policy and
America’s special relationship with Israel, not Israel’s existence.
Another
recurring theme in the letters is that the lobby ultimately matters
little because Israel’s ‘values command genuine support among the
American public’. Thus, Herf and Markovits maintain that there is
substantial support for Israel in military and diplomatic circles
within the United States. We agree that there is strong public support
for Israel in America, in part because it is seen as compatible with
America’s Judaeo-Christian culture. But we believe this popularity is
substantially due to the lobby’s success at portraying Israel in a
favourable light and effectively limiting public awareness and
discussion of Israel’s less savoury actions. Diplomats and military
officers are also affected by this distorted public discourse, but many
of them can see through the rhetoric. They keep silent, however,
because they fear that groups like AIPAC will damage their careers if
they speak out. The fact is that if there were no AIPAC, Americans
would have a more critical view of Israel and US policy in the Middle
East would look different.
On a related point, Michael Szanto
contrasts the US-Israeli relationship with the American military
commitments to Western Europe, Japan and South Korea, to show that the
United States has given substantial support to other states besides
Israel (6 April). He does not mention, however, that these other
relationships did not depend on strong domestic lobbies. The reason is
simple: these countries did not need a lobby because close ties with
each of them were in America’s strategic interest. By contrast, as
Israel has become a strategic burden for the US, its American backers
have had to work even harder to preserve the ‘special relationship’.
Other
critics contend that we overstate the lobby’s power because we overlook
countervailing forces, such as ‘paleo-conservatives, Arab and Islamic
advocacy groups . . . and the diplomatic establishment’. Such
countervailing forces do exist, but they are no match – either alone or
in combination – for the lobby. There are Arab-American political
groups, for example, but they are weak, divided, and wield far less
influence than AIPAC and other organisations that present a strong,
consistent message from the lobby.
Probably the most popular
argument made about a countervailing force is Herf and Markovits’s
claim that the centrepiece of US Middle East policy is oil, not Israel.
There is no question that access to that region’s oil is a vital US
strategic interest. Washington is also deeply committed to supporting
Israel. Thus, the relevant question is, how does each of those
interests affect US policy? We maintain that US policy in the Middle
East is driven primarily by the commitment to Israel, not oil
interests. If the oil companies or the oil-producing countries were
driving policy, Washington would be tempted to favour the Palestinians
instead of Israel. Moreover, the United States would almost certainly
not have gone to war against Iraq in March 2003, and the Bush
administration would not be threatening to use military force against
Iran. Although many claim that the Iraq war was all about oil, there is
hardly any evidence to support that supposition, and much evidence of
the lobby’s influence. Oil is clearly an important concern for US
policymakers, but with the exception of episodes like the 1973 Opec oil
embargo, the US commitment to Israel has yet to threaten access to oil.
It does, however, contribute to America’s terrorism problem,
complicates its efforts to halt nuclear proliferation, and helped get
the United States involved in wars like Iraq.
Regrettably, some
of our critics have tried to smear us by linking us with overt racists,
thereby suggesting that we are racists or anti-semites ourselves.
Michael Taylor, for example, notes that our article has been ‘hailed’
by Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke (6 April). Alan Dershowitz implies
that some of our material was taken from neo-Nazi websites and other
hate literature (20 April). We have no control over who likes or
dislikes our article, but we regret that Duke used it to promote his
racist agenda, which we utterly reject. Furthermore, nothing in our
piece is drawn from racist sources of any kind, and Dershowitz offers
no evidence to support this false claim. We provided a fully documented
version of the paper so that readers could see for themselves that we
used reputable sources.
Finally, a few critics claim that some of
our facts, references or quotations are mistaken. For example,
Dershowitz challenges our claim that Israel was ‘explicitly founded as
a Jewish state and citizenship is based on the principle of blood
kinship’. Israel was founded as a Jewish state (a fact Dershowitz does
not challenge), and our reference to citizenship was obviously to
Israel’s Jewish citizens, whose identity is ordinarily based on
ancestry. We stated that Israel has a sizeable number of non-Jewish
citizens (primarily Arabs), and our main point was that many of them
are relegated to a second-class status in a predominantly Jewish
society.
We also referred to Golda Meir’s famous statement that
‘there is no such thing as a Palestinian,’ and Jeremy Schreiber reads
us as saying that Meir was denying the existence of those people rather
than simply denying Palestinian nationhood (20 April). There is no
disagreement here; we agree with Schreiber’s interpretation and we
quoted Meir in a discussion of Israel’s prolonged effort ‘to deny the
Palestinians’ national ambitions’.
Dershowitz challenges our
claim that the Israelis did not offer the Palestinians a contiguous
state at Camp David in July 2000. As support, he cites a statement by
former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and the memoirs of former US
negotiator Dennis Ross. There are a number of competing accounts of
what happened at Camp David, however, and many of them agree with our
claim. Moreover, Barak himself acknowledges that ‘the Palestinians were
promised a continuous piece of sovereign territory except for a
razor-thin Israeli wedge running from Jerusalem . . . to the Jordan
River.’ This wedge, which would bisect the West Bank, was essential to
Israel’s plan to retain control of the Jordan River Valley for another
six to twenty years. Finally, and contrary to Dershowitz’s claim, there
was no ‘second map’ or map of a ‘final proposal at Camp David’. Indeed,
it is explicitly stated in a note beside the map published in Ross’s
memoirs that ‘no map was presented during the final rounds at Camp
David.’ Given all this, it is not surprising that Barak’s foreign
minister, Shlomo Ben-Ami, who was a key participant at Camp David,
later admitted: ‘If I were a Palestinian I would have rejected Camp
David as well.’
Dershowitz also claims that we quote David
Ben-Gurion ‘out of context’ and thus misrepresented his views on the
need to use force to build a Jewish state in all of Palestine.
Dershowitz is wrong. As a number of Israeli historians have shown,
Ben-Gurion made numerous statements about the need to use force (or the
threat of overwhelming force) to create a Jewish state in all of
Palestine. In October 1937, for example, he wrote to his son Amos that
the future Jewish state would have an ‘outstanding army . . . so I am
certain that we won’t be constrained from settling in the rest of the
country, either by mutual agreement and understanding with our Arab
neighbours, or by some other way’ (emphasis added).
Furthermore, common sense says that there was no other way to achieve
that goal, because the Palestinians were hardly likely to give up their
homeland voluntarily. Ben-Gurion was a consummate strategist and he
understood that it would be unwise for the Zionists to talk openly
about the need for ‘brutal compulsion’. We quote a memorandum
Ben-Gurion wrote prior to the Extraordinary Zionist Conference at the
Biltmore Hotel in New York in May 1942. He wrote that ‘it is impossible
to imagine general evacuation’ of the Arab population of Palestine
‘without compulsion, and brutal compulsion’. Dershowitz claims that
Ben-Gurion’s subsequent statement – ‘we should in no way make it part
of our programme’ – shows that he opposed the transfer of the Arab
population and the ‘brutal compulsion’ it would entail. But Ben-Gurion
was not rejecting this policy: he was simply noting that the Zionists
should not openly proclaim it. Indeed, he said that they should not
‘discourage other people, British or American, who favour transfer from
advocating this course, but we should in no way make it part of our
programme’.
We close with a final comment about the controversy
surrounding our article. Although we are not surprised by the hostility
directed at us, we are still disappointed that more attention has not
been paid to the substance of the piece. The fact remains that the
United States is in deep trouble in the Middle East, and it will not be
able to develop effective policies if it is impossible to have a
civilised discussion about the role of Israel in American foreign
policy.
John Mearsheimer & Stephen Walt
University of Chicago & Harvard University