The London Review of Books put on a panel last Thursday, held at Cooper Union’s Great Hall in New York City, with the provocative title “The Israel Lobby: Does it have too much influence on U.S. foreign policy?” Speaking for the affirmative: John J. Mearsheimer, a co-author of the controversial Harvard University study, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” (shortened version here) and dean of the “realist” school of foreign policy studies, Tony Judt, and Rashid Khalidi. Speaking for the “Lobby? What lobby?” position, two of the major players in the Lobby: Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk, with Shlomo Ben-Ami, former Israeli diplomat and Labor party politician, providing back-up and some degree of plausible deniability.
The New York Observer‘s Philip Weiss was there, and provides us with his impression that “the debate belonged to Tony Judt.” Weiss writes:
“He arrived late to the hall in a turtleneck—everyone else was in ties—and might have been Mariano Rivera, for his confidence and dispatch. He was the most imaginative speaker, and imagination is required when you are describing a King kong sasquatch no one has seen and whose wranglers say doesn’t exist. When Shlomo Ben-Ami and Martin Indyk said that John Mearsheimer was antisemitic for speaking of a collection of Jews who influence policy, Judt demolished them by quoting Arthur Koestler when he became an anticommunist and said that Just because idiots and bigots share some of his views doesn’t discredit the views. The job of the social scientist is to describe the true conditions of society; are these statements accurate or not? That is the only issue. I’m paraphrasing. Judt was way more eloquent.
“Judt’s second great moment was when he accused Indyk of being ‘faux-naive’ —a civilized way of saying, You’re lying—when Indyk kept saying that the lobby was one small factor in an American president’s exertions of power. Here again, he used his imagination. Because when you’re talking about something about which there is very little information, and those who know something about it are trying to deny its existence, you need imagination. Anyway, Judt described the real exercise of power. He said that when a small state defied an American president, and the president wanted to do something about it, he had a great number of seen and unseen ways of compelling that state to fall into line, all sorts of bullying and pressure and fury. None of these had been deployed in Israel’s case, and lo and behold the settlements had continued to expand, over four decades… Again I’m paraphrasing. Judt also got the last word of the night when he explained to a hungry audience that knew in its bones it has been deprived, that this discussion was an astoundingly rare one, and mind you it was organized by the London Review of Books. Thus he gave the audience a real sense of how the U.S. discourse/policy works, which is what the evening was after all fumbling towards.
“The most resonant moment of the debate was Judt’s, too. He pointed out that when he had endorsed the Mearsheimer-Walt thesis, in an article for an unnamed major North American newspaper, he was asked by the editors whether he is Jewish, and told to stick that fact in the article. (Otherwise they couldn’t publish it, was implicit or explicit, I’ll have to check my tape). The newspaper—obviously—was the New York Times, in which Judt’s op-ed taking Walt/Mearsheimer’s side, appeared last April, as I recall, to stunning effect. I say resonant, and damning: Let’s consider the lesson of this story: You can only speak out on this issue if you’re Jewish? Oh my god, how did we get here…”
Writing in Counterpunch, Michael J. Smith, in noting the panel was “moderated” by Ann-Marie Slaughter, dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of International Affairs at Princeton, quips: “The name of this institution always makes me laugh — as who should say, the Henry VIII School of Women’s Studies, or the Lester Maddox Institute for Racial Amity.“ Smith goes on to observe that the inevitable query — was the paper produced by Mearsheimer and his colleague Stephen Walt (former dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government) anti-semitic? — was asked of the Amen Corner in Slaughter’s first question:
“Well, more or less, yes, was the predictable answer from Israel’s defense bench. Mearsheimer, said the imposing, silver-maned Indyk, postulates a sinister “cabal” (he must have used this word a hundred times over the next two hours) that includes “anyone who has a good word to say about Israel.” With regard to the Iraq war, Indyk’s trump card was that the Israel lobby couldn’t have made that happen, since the Israel lobby really wanted to go after — Iran! Mearsheimer, who has presumably heard this sort of thing quite a lot lately, watched Indyk with an unblinking, curious, naturalist’s gaze, as though he had discovered a new subspecies of E. Coli.”
You don’t need a microscope to see these bugs — they dominate the foreign policy establishment, the nation’s media, the thinktanks, and there’s nothing new about them. What is new, however, is that it’s suddenly okay to name them, and debate them, even if they spend the entire time denying their own existence. Some people, on the other hand, are not all that comfortable with the new glasnost….
The content and tone of an indignant “report” in the New York Sun, authored by Ira Stoll, is summed up in the headline: “‘Israel Lobby’ Caused War in Iraq, September 11 Attacks, Professor Says.” Bollocks. When you read Stoll’s piece, it turns out that Mearsheimer, the professor in question, was merely quoting Al Qaeda honcho Khalid Sheik Mohammed to the effect that his “animus to the United States stemmed from U.S. foreign policy toward Israel.” Mearsheimer arguing that there is a “link” between America’s Israel-centric foreign policy and the motives and ideology of Al Qaeda is not to say that either Israel or its Amen Corner in the U.S. in any way “caused” the 9/11 terrorist attacks. That this even needs to be pointed out is a measure of how quickly the Lobby’s “arguments” have degenerated into demagogy and hysteria when faced with a serious challenge.
Twist and turn, distort and smear — the Lobby’s smear machine is a perpetual motion machine of malice and misinformation. In reacting with this level of unreasoned vitriol, the Lobby only confirms the validity of the Mearsheimer-Walt thesis — that unconditional support for Israel, over and above the pursuit of American interests in the Middle East, is the singular achievement of Israel’s lobby in the U.S., made possible by a veritable embargo against any discussion of the Lobby’s political and social power.
Does the Israel lobby have undue influence in Washington? Why, to even ask the question is “anti-semitic,” don’tcha know? It is also “anti-semitic” to notice — let alone comment on — the House’s recent approval of a $500 million “aid package” to Israel for “joint defense systems.”
That’s in addition to the $2.36 billion in military aid handed to Israel by U.S. taxpayers annually. It is also double what the Bush administration asked Congress for — but then, to say that the U.S. Congress is “Israeli-occupied territory,” as Pat Buchanan trenchantly remarked some years ago, is a “hate crime.”