Philip Weiss has read Walt and Mearsheimer’s book [emphasis in the title is in the original]:
‘The Jungle,’ ‘Silent Spring,’ ‘Unsafe at Any Speed’–And Now, ‘The Israel Lobby’
Walt and Mearsheimer’s book on the Israel Lobby is being published today. I finished it last night. I said before that it was historic, but I did not realize quite what it was till I put it down: a great work of American muckraking in the tradition of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (the meatpacking industry), Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (pesticides), and Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed (Detroit). An overkill moral beauty aimed at an outrage, some day this book will be legendary and dated. [e.a.]
Legendary And dated? As in superseded by even greater works of moral beauty by the same authors, something like, say, Our Kampf? or perhaps Our Jihad?
But that’s putting the cart before the horse. Meanwhile, Wess dares to dream:
So [The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy] will be passed around, it will be taught. Serious people will press it on other serious people. Political aides will hand it to other political aides. It may have to wear brown-paper covers in Congress, at the State Department and at Hillels, but it will be read hungrily. Young progressive Jews will read it. Arabs will translate it into Arabic. It will go like lightning around Europe. Israelis will snap it up (the book is actually very respectful of Israel; it’s America that has the big problem), and someday it will come out in Hebrew. It will work on people. It will show what independent people ought to do when they form ideas, and others will chime in. A politician will finally speak out, with Walt and Mearsheimer as his or her role model.
I can hardly wait. And I’m not alone.
Michael Gerson had a few choice words for Walt and Mearsheimer:
Walt and Mearsheimer are careful to say they are not anti-Semitic or conspiracy-minded. But their main inference [sic]– that Israel, the Israel lobby and Jewish neoconservatives called the shots for Bush, Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Stephen Hadley, Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld — is not only rubbish, it is dangerous rubbish. As “mainstream” scholars, Walt and Mearsheimer cannot avoid the historical pedigree of this kind of charge. Every generation has seen accusations that Jews have dual loyalties, promote war and secretly control political structures.
These academics may not follow their claims all the way to anti-Semitism. But this is the way it begins. This is the way it always begins.
Ron Rosenbaum called bullshit on Walt and Mearsheimer’s alleged “realism”:
To me, the real problem is not whether The Israel Lobby pleases this Grand Kleagle or that, or the one-sidedness of its depiction of Israel and its supporters, so much as the profound failure of the moral imagination that the book reflects. A failure to connect with the historical experience of Jews that motivates their support of Israel. A failure to empathize with the real danger the 6 million Jews of Israel face: the threat of a second Holocaust.
Leslie Gelb excoriated them for roiling the waters purely to gain vindication for their views about Iraq:
The inevitable last question is this: Why have two such serious students of United States foreign policy written so weak a book and added fuel, inadvertently, to the fires of anti-Semitism? The answer lies in their treatment of the Iraq war.
Mearsheimer and Walt should feel very proud, indeed, for their foresight in opposing the Iraq war. Their writings were more on target than anyone’s, and they are justifiably mystified about how the United States could have been so stupid and self-destructive. They appear to have reasoned that a mistake of this magnitude could have been fostered only by some irresistible force. And the only such force they can conjure from the landscape of the powerful is the Israel lobby, as embodied by neoconservative gladiators like Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. In the authors’ words, “the lobby did not cause the war by itself. … But absent the lobby’s influence, there almost certainly would not have been a war. The lobby was a necessary but not sufficient condition for a war that is a strategic disaster for the United States and a boon for Iran, Israel’s most serious regional adversary.”
Their vitriol about the Iraq war — about being so right while others were so wrong — is so overwhelming that they minimize two key facts. First, America’s foreign policy community, including many Democrats as well as Republicans, supported the war for the very same reasons that Wolfowitz and the lobby did — namely, the fact that Hussein seemed to pose a present or future threat to American national interests. Second, the real play-callers behind the war were President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. They hardly have a history of being in the pockets of the Jewish lobby (more like the oil lobby’s), and they aren’t remotely neoconservatives. The more we know, the clearer it is that the White House went to war primarily to erase the “blunder” of the elder Bush in not finishing off Saddam Hussein during the Persian Gulf war of 1991.
The authors, however, are feeling so satisfied with themselves, if their remarks to the Los Angeles Times editorial board are any indication, that Walt now blames the limitations of language—”lobby” is a “crude” term, Walt admits—for their inability to get their point across.
In this formulation, it’s not their intemperate blanket condemnation of anyone who supports Israel that’s to blame for the hostile reaction to their so-called “argument”; rather, Walt suggests, Americans have been so thoroughly brainwashed by Israel supporters that we no longer have the language to describe such a magical group as the “lobby”—or, more precisely, “the Lobby,” as it was forever imprinted on the minds of those who follow such arcane debates.
What’s crude here is not just the insult “Lobby.” It’s Walt and Mearsheimer’s continued slippery reluctance to define this amoeba-like group that they claim has “too much power” (by what measure?) and is asserting undue influence over American policy against the national interest. This group, they say under skeptical questioning by the L.A. Times’s editorial board, is forever changing its shape and its dimensions to include this person or that; this organization or that; this group of people or that. And all the while, Walt and Mearsheimer keep insisting, they’re not talking about a “cabal,” so what’s the problem?
Here’s the problem: when you describe a group with the mystical powers of a “cabal” but keep insisting that it isn’t a cabal because you’re not referring to it as a “cabal,” it gives off the unmistakable odor of skunk, and weasel.
Read this exchange and see if you don’t agree [e.a.]
Mearsheimer: … if you have a policy of unconditional aid, if you have a policy where you can’t criticize Israel in the United States without getting smeared, you’re going to give that state a lot of room to get itself in trouble. And our argument again is that it would be better if that aid were conditional and we were allowed to have an open debate about Israeli policy and the Israeli-U.S. relationship.
Walt: That is, something similar to the debate that happens in Israel itself, where you have a very wide-open debate about what their policies are and whether they make sense, and where you find lots more people willing to take positions similar to ours than you would here in the United States.
Tim: Then why is the book called The Israel Lobby and not The Pro-Settlement Lobby or The Likudnik Lobby?
Mearsheimer: For the very simple reason that the lobby is not monolithic or homogeneous. There are groups inside the lobby that are opposed to settlements; there are groups inside the lobby that are in favor of settlements. Also you want to remember, we’re not arguing that this is a Jewish lobby. Despite our best efforts to make the case clear that this is the Israel lobby and not the Jewish lobby, people continue to talk as if we’re only talking about Jews.
Who’s in the lobby?
Tim: You mentioned the uh, the non…mono…lithicism of the lobby. And looking through the book, it’s weird to me to think that there’s some team that comprises Martin Indyk, Daniel Pipes, you know, I’m trying to think of a third…I mean, this is really a wide-ranging group of, you know, Abe…
Mearsheimer: Henry Siegman. Do you know Henry Siegman? He was head of the American Jewish Congress. But again, there’s no reason why people inside the lobby can’t be very critical of Israel. Let me give you an example: One of the best reviews of our book, one of the most favorable reactions inside the United States, came from M.J. Rosenberg, who used to work for AIPAC. He said very nice things about the book.
Nick: My, one of my, one of the things that confuses me as I read the book is that you are, you talk in these, often about the lobby. The lobby does this, the lobby does that. The lobby seems so broad as you’ve defined it that it’s hard for me to, to know if that’s a meaningful group that you’re talking about. The differences go broader than Martin Indyk…
Walt: Martin got his start working for AIPAC. He helped found the Institute for Near East Policy.
Nick: He falls clearly in the…
Walt: And that’s not to say that he hasn’t advocated positions, both in his official capacity and outside it, that John and I would agree with. He’s a two-state-solution person; he understands that getting this thing shut down is in everybody’s interest. We might disagree on some other issues. That said, he’s not someone who would ever say the United States should make its support for Israel conditional on ending the settlements. He’s never advocated that, he… [e.a.]
im: So that’s what defines your presence in the lobby, is unconditional support?
Susan Brenneman: Yeah, and not just support but by support you mean aid?
Stephen: Aid and diplomatic support. And again, you’ve got, the way we define it… I think we laid this out as clearly as… You’ve got to be actively working. It’s not just somebody who has an attitude toward Israel. You’ve got to spend some part of your daily life trying to advance that particular goal. I’d also point out, like all other interest groups, these are fuzzy groups, right? I mean, there are people who are clearly in the core: Abraham Foxman, nobody’s really going to argue whether he’s a member. But you’re going to have some people who are further out, to where you get to people who are clearly not in the lobby. And there are going to be some cases in between where you can argue back and forth, and they might change their minds. I acknowledge that the term “lobby” has a certain crude quality to it, but almost due to the limitations of language. One of the things we did was we often used phrases like “groups within the lobby,” “organizations in the lobby,” “organizations and individuals in the lobby…” Trying to underscore to the reader that this is not a monolith. This is not a Comintern that gives orders to the followers. That there are issues where they genuinely disagree.
These two still cannot explain what they mean by “the lobby,” and they blame the constraints of language. Get this: The phenomenon they discern is so unique that language cannot even properly describe it. But they know it when they see it, and they know it’s very bad for America!
And Philip Weiss is eager to spread the seed of these “scholars.”
The mind reels.
