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Links
below to current news developments re: Israel & Palestine. kwc Harvard
Takes On the Israel Lobby
By
Joshua Holland, AlterNet, April 4, 2006
A few weeks ago two scholars published a study that might
have languished in the obscurity of academia. But the paper was about the impact that the "Israel
Lobby" -- which the authors characterized as a loose confederation of
like-minded individuals and groups -- has on U.S. policy in the Middle East.
So, predictably, it set off a nice little firestorm with accusations of
anti-Semitism flying around our most hallowed Ivy League colleges and members
of Congress discussing how to respond to the study's "charges." "The Israel Lobby," by political scientists
Stephen Walt of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and John Mearsheimer of
the University of Chicago, offered nothing new to the debate about U.S. policy
toward the Middle East. The authors established no groundbreaking facts and
unearthed no shocking original documents that could change the course of historical
understanding. As
Walt and Mearsheimer noted, only their conclusion - that the Israel Lobby's
unprecedented success has shifted U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East away
from a narrow focus on America's national interests - is controversial, and
then only by a matter of degree. The data from which they drew that conclusion
came largely from Israeli academics and journalists and, as the authors point
out, "are not in serious dispute among scholars." What was interesting
about the paper was its authorship and the reaction it elicited from Israel's
many U.S. supporters. Those supporters inadvertently proved Walt and
Mearsheimer correct on at least one point: the Israel Lobby doesn't tolerate
debate about the relationship between the United States and its favorite client
state, and it's quick to accuse dissenters of having the vilest of intent. The New York Sun
-- known as a mouthpiece for neoconservatism -- ran six articles about the
paper the week it was released. Two were on the front page, above the fold. The
first was headlined "David Duke Claims to Be
Vindicated by a Harvard Dean" (Walt is the academic dean at the Kennedy
School). According to the Sun,
"Duke, a former Louisiana state legislator and one-time Ku Klux Klan
leader, called the paper 'a great step forward.'" Later in the article --
below the fold -- Duke admits that he hadn't actually read the study. The guilt-by-association didn't end with Duke - although he
made appearances in a number of other articles about the study, including one
in the Washington Post. Terrorists, apparently, also endorsed it:
"The Palestine Liberation Organization mission to Washington is
distributing the paper, which also is being hailed by a senior member of
Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist organization," according to the Sun. The Sun's second hit piece quoted two Harvard professors who are
"publicly supportive of Israel" and Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., who
conceded that the "'dishonest so-called intellectuals' who wrote the paper
are 'entitled to their stupidity'" but insisted that it was a matter of
common decency "to expose them for being the anti-Semites they are." That
statement alone illustrates one of Walt and Mearsheimer's main points
beautifully: "No discussion of how the Lobby operates," they wrote,
"would be complete without examining one of its most powerful weapons: the
charge of anti-Semitism In fact, anyone who says that there is an Israel Lobby
runs the risk of being charged with anti-Semitism, even though the Israeli
media themselves refer to America's 'Jewish Lobby.'" Alan Dershowitz, who fought to get the University of
California Press to kill an academic critique of his
book
"The Case for Israel" (in which he's accused of shoddy research and
plagiarism), said the paper was "simply a compilation of hateful
paragraphs lifted from other sources and given academic imprimatur." His
evidence? Apparently Walt and Mearsheimer used a quote - from former Time editor Max Frankel's memoir - that
also appeared on some white supremacist website. Dershowitz, without evidence,
dismissed the idea that the scholars could have gotten the quote from anywhere
but the white power hate sites, bloviating: "[Walt] quotes Max Frankel, as
if he read the whole 500 pages of Max Frankel? I promise you they did not read
Max Frankel's whole book." An editorial suggested that Walt should be replaced as
academic dean, and another urged wealthy Jewish backers of the Kennedy
School to pull their support. It got so hot that the professors removed
Harvard's logo from the paper (which critics said "proved" that it
was filled with errors, a claim Harvard's administration denies). There was much more in that vein from the New Republic, from Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes and from many others. The backdrop to all of this, of course, is the ongoing
campus wars, where the Israel-Palestine conflict is always Ground Zero. Walt
and Mearsheimer touch on the Lobby's efforts to constrain discussion of our
relationship with Israel by imposing a narrow political correctness. In
addition to funding the think tanks and academic chairs, that strategy rests on
relentless attacks against academics who criticize Israeli policy: The Lobby moved aggressively to "take
back the campuses." New groups sprang up, like the Caravan for Democracy,
which brought Israeli speakers to U.S. colleges. Established groups like the
Jewish Council for Public Affairs and Hillel jumped into the fray, and a new
group - the Israel on Campus Coalition - was formed to coordinate the many
groups that now sought to make Israel's case on campus. Finally, AIPAC
(American Israel Public Affairs Committee) more than tripled its spending for
programs to monitor university activities and to train young advocates for
Israel Ultimately, most of the criticism of the study amounted to
little more than knocking down straw men.
Walt and Mearsheimer were accused of furthering anti-Semitic conspiracy
theories about Jews "whispering in the ears of kings," but the authors
never suggest there's an organized conspiracy afoot, nor do they claim that the
Lobby is the only factor influencing U.S. policy in the Middle East. The
scholars went out of their way to say that the "Lobby" is not some
shady cabal, and in fact is not even Jewish; many in the Lobby -- they give
Dick Armey as an example - are in fact Christian Zionists. They add that there's nothing wrong with citizens lobbying
in a democracy. Their
point is simply that the Lobby's success has redirected U.S. policy in the
Middle East away from America's interests, narrowly defined. Arguing that the
relationship between the United States and Israel "has no equal in
American political history," the authors wrote: The U.S. national interest should be the
primary object of American foreign policy. For the past several decades,
however, and especially since the Six Day War in 1967, the centerpiece of U.S.
Middle East policy has been its relationship with Israel. Walt and Mearsheimer are not household names around America's
kitchen tables, but they are giants in the field of international relations.
They represent foreign policy "realism," the dominant paradigm in
international relations for over a century. At its heart, realism's focus is on
how countries best use their power to advance their own narrowly defined
interests. Realists tend not to get caught up in the kind of moral questions
and historical debates that characterize so much of the controversy around the
Israel-Palestine conflict. Walt and Mearsheimer's argument is powerful coming not from
the right or the left, but from smack in the center of the foreign policy
establishment. Forget about the immorality of occupation - the only time they
reference the burden the Palestinian population bears or Israel's poor human
rights record is to counter the Lobby's claim that the United States has a
moral duty to support Israel. Walt
and Mearsheimer's case is that, on balance, the United States' (almost)
unconditional support for Israel doesn't serve the interest of American power.
Israel - once a valuable counter to Soviet influence in Syria and Egypt - is,
in the post Cold-war era, a strategic liability. Their argument on this point is hard to dispute. While the
United States' support for Israel is not the only source of anti-American
terror, it is certainly a driving factor and always a good recruiting tool for
extremists. The relationship, the authors argue, is so inflammatory in both the
Arab world and among our European allies that Israel has become a highly
militarized partner that has
to sit on the sidelines
during American-led military actions in the Middle East, including both Gulf
Wars, in order to build and maintain international support. The authors' analysis of Israeli power in relation to that
of its regional neighbors was the strongest rebuttal to the case usually made
by Israel's supporters. The Israel Lobby claims that it is fighting for a
small, weak country surrounded by belligerents who are bent on her destruction.
But Walt and Mearsheimer argue that Israel - with military spending higher than
all of its neighbors combined, access to the latest U.S. weapons technology and
the only nuclear arsenal in the Middle East is not exactly fighting for its
existence. The scholars add that despite all the largesse, Israel
"does not act like a loyal ally." They cite a GAO report that found
that Israel "conducts the most aggressive espionage operations against the
U.S. of any ally" and concludes that "its willingness to spy on its
principal patron casts further doubt on its strategic value." Walt and Mearsheimer ask why, given all of that, do we spend
a fifth of our foreign aid budget on a country with a per capita economic
output similar to Spain's? Why do we provide that support with fewer strings
than we place on other aid recipients? Why do we continue that support even
when Israel often ignores our wishes on issues like selling weapons to the Chinese or continuing to build settlements when
it's the policy of the United States that such construction is illegal? Those questions are getting tougher to answer as we get
mired deeper in conflict in the Middle East. Walt and Mearsheimer's study comes
at an interesting time: Support for the Gulf War is in the basement, and a
growing number of voices are looking at the role Israel's supporters - inside
the government and out - played in making the case for the war. American
support of Israel appears as strong as ever, and fundamentally it is. But the
recent espionage case against AIPAC staffers and Pentagon officials (with Israeli
embassy personnel named as unindicted co-conspirators) and tensions over Israeli
weapons sales to third-party nations have weakened the once impregnable Lobby. At the same time, there are growing divisions within the American
foreign policy elite between
the neocons who want to shape the world in America's image and the realists who
counter that such hubris has been the undoing of other leading powers. Perhaps a crack is appearing in the monolith, and perhaps
that crack might widen into a real debate about our policies in the Middle
East. For some, that's a dangerous prospect. Small wonder that the study was
attacked with such rhetorical savagery. http://www.alternet.org/audits/34416/ Related 040706 Hamas hints at
recognizing Israel http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/07/AR2006040700393.html 040706 Hamas ministers
resign membership in movement http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/spages/703692.html 040706 EU stops payments
to Hamas-led Palestinians http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/07/world/middleeast/07cnd-hamas.html 040706 US cuts some aid to
Palestinians http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/07/AR2006040700927.html |
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