Ferment Over 'The Israel Lobby'
It's more than a month since I reported here of the release of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's report into Israeli influence over American foreign policy.
As I stated at the time, the coverage in Israeli newspapers was very fair and recognised that the report had some validity.
However, in the US the inevitable charges of anti-Semitism were levelled against the authors from the usual pro-Israeli sources, who deemed even discussion of the subject to be, not merely out of bounds, but an act neo-nazism.The Anti-Defamation League called the paper "a classical conspiratorial anti-Semitic analysis invoking the canards of Jewish power and Jewish control." University of Chicago Professor Daniel Drezner called it "piss-poor, monocausal social science." Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz said the men had "destroyed their professional reputations." Even left-leaning critics dismissed the piece as inflammatory and wrong.
However, it is an argument that, for all the rhetoric and anger displayed by Israel's supporters, is refusing to go away.
The New York Times, having first downplayed the article, printed a long op-ed by historian Tony Judt saying that out of fear, the mainstream media were failing to face important ideas the article had put forward. And Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, praised it at the Middle East Institute for conveying "blinding flashes of the obvious," ideas "that were whispered in corners rather than said out loud at cocktail parties where someone else could hear you."In this article in The Nation one of the authors discusses how he came to view the US/Israeli relationship in a new light:
September 11 was a catalytic event for the realists. Mearsheimer and Walt came to see the close US alliance with Israel as damaging American relations with other states. American policy toward the Palestinians was serving to foster terrorism, Walt wrote in a book called Taming American Power. And you weren't allowed to discuss it.It is simply astonishing to me that it has taken five years since 9-11 for this subject to be finally raised in the American mainstream public debate, although when one listens to the reaction given to people who previously attempted to raise it, one can understand the reticence of public figures to approach the issue.
The writer Anatol Lieven says he reluctantly took on the issue after 9/11 as a matter of "duty"--when the Carnegie Endowment, where he was a senior associate, asked him to. "I knew bloody well it would bring horrible unpopularity.... All my personal loyalties are the other way. I've literally dozens of Jewish friends; I have no Palestinian friends." Lieven says he was a regular at the Aspen Institute till he brought up the issue. "I got kicked out of Aspen.... In early 2002 they held a conference on relations with the Muslim world. For two days nobody mentioned Israel. Finally, I said, 'Look, this is a Soviet-style debate. Whatever you think about this issue, the entire Muslim world is shouting about it.' I have never been asked back."Indeed, it is extremely telling about the boundaries of the debate of this issue within the US, that no US publisher dared to print the report and that it only came into the public realm after the London Review of Books agreed to publish it.
The European left has also welcomed the paper, saying that these issues must be discussed. And even in Israel the article has had a respectful reading, with a writer in Ha'aretz saying it was a "wake-up call" to Americans about the relationship.It is a discussion who's time has come, and once out of the box, no amount of name calling is going to silence.
Click title to read The Nation article.
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