What rankles is that it is leveled as a charge. When given voice by the likes of Walt and Mearsheimer [bold mine-DL], it suggests that the loyalties of millions of American Jews are evenly split and that, in extremis, the Israeli loyalty could win out over the American one, posing a permanent risk of betrayal or treason. ~Bret Stephens

This isn’t correct at all.  Mearsheimer and Walt didn’t make their claims about “millions of American Jews,” nor did they focus only on American Jewish supporters of Israel (since they and everyone else who can read knows that there are a great many more non-Jewish supporters of Israel in this country).  They never made the sloppy and easily disproven equation of the American Jewish community with those who hold the fairly hard-line, often militaristic attitudes that inform much of American Israel and Near East policy.  In fact, the question of “dual loyalty” does not form a part of the Mearsheimer-Walt article.  On this point, they have this to say:

The explanation is the unmatched power of the Israel Lobby. We use ‘the Lobby’ as shorthand for the loose coalition of individuals and organisations who actively work to steer US foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction. This is not meant to suggest that ‘the Lobby’ is a unified movement with a central leadership, or that individuals within it do not disagree on certain issues. Not all Jewish Americans are part of the Lobby, because Israel is not a salient issue for many of them. In a 2004 survey, for example, roughly 36 per cent of American Jews said they were either ‘not very’ or ‘not at all’ emotionally attached to Israel.

The phrase “dual loyalty,” of course, appears nowhere in the article.  To put it bluntly, to say that claims about “dual loyalty” form a part of the article is to tell a lie (or it is to admit that you have never read the article).  To say that Mearsheimer and Walt give the “charge” of dual loyalty “voice” is to tell a lie.  Mr. Stephens links them to this argument about “dual loyalty” as a way of trying to smear them yet again.  Virtually every critic of the article has circulated the falsehood, whether wittingly or no, that Mearsheimer and Walt were making arguments about “the Jews” or “the Jewish lobby” or that they said, “A small group of Jews controls the government.”  They did not say these things, but it has served the turn of those, like Mr. Stephens, who wish to stymy and suppress debate to claim that they did say them.  Everyone would recognise these claims just mentioned as both false and of a piece with oddball conspiracy theories, which is why these claims are falsely and (I suspect) maliciously attributed to Mearsheimer and Walt.  Now comes this new lie about their “giving voice” to the charge of dual loyalty with the obvious implication that they are spurring on their fellow Americans to regard Jewish Americans as being inherently disloyal to this country.  They have not made this claim and they do no such thing, and it is an appalling falsehood to suggest otherwise. 

What really rankles pro-Israel people about the Mearsheimer-Walt article itself is the following claim:

A final reason to question Israel’s strategic value is that it does not behave like a loyal ally.

Talk about an inconvenient truth.  It is Israel’s status as a “reliable ally” that many critics of the alliance doubt, and it is this status that pro-Israel activists work overtime to defend.  That’s why we don’t talk about what happened to the Liberty in 1967, and that’s why we try to forget the insult of the Pollard case even when Netanyahu pleads for the man’s release over a decade later, and that’s why we often politely ignore it when Israel sells sensitive military technologies to China, and that’s why some of us treat the indictments of AIPAC officials who took confidential information from Larry Franklin as a witch hunt rather than the proper defense of national security.  It isn’t that Washington would cut off support for Israel if more people knew about the unprovoked attack on the Liberty, for example, but the problem is that it would probably damage the public’s view of Israel, and support or at least acquiescence from the American public is crucial if pro-Israel activists are to succeed in influencing policy.  Therefore we must continually pretend that Israel and America are always on the same side working towards complementary goals, even though no two nations anywhere on earth will always be pursuing complementary goals.  To point out all the times when Israel has not been a loyal ally or, to put it more simply, when Israel has pursued its interests regardless of how they impact the United States would be to shatter this myth and open up our level of support to Israel for revision and possible reduction (just as we would rationally do with any other state, ally or no). 

To the extent that anyone might make the charge of something like “dual loyalty” today, the charge would be that anyone who has a strong affinity or attachment to another nation (for whatever reason) is liable to imagine that the interests of the two countries are usually compatible when they are not and frequently overlap when they do not.  Such a person is liable to advocate policies that he believes, probably sincerely, are in the interests of both countries, but which are, in reality, in the interests mainly of the foreign country.  His emotional attachment to this other country, whether based in religion, ethnicity, or what have you, blinds him to the unpleasant reality that his native country and the country to which he feels such strong attachment often have conflicting or mutually exclusive interests.  In other words, to pursue what is actually in the best interest of his native country he must agree to policies that would sacrifice at least some of the interests of the other country, which would be very painful and something he would continue to deny in the face of the evidence, so he feels obliged to make sure that as many people as possible continue to see the interests of the two countries as being strongly complementary and harmonious.  He will do this even if this means advocating for his native country policies that may actually bring his native country harm.  He does this not out of malice towards his native country, but out of the confusion of the interests of the two that comes from his unduly strong attachment to the other country.  Such a person’s loyalties are not “evenly split,” because he does not perceive a split at all.  He believes–erroneously, but in all probability quite seriously–that it is possible to be 100% faithful to American interests and 100% faithful to the interests of the other country.  This becomes even more obvious to him if the two countries are allies.  (Incidentally, I have never quite understood why pro-Israel activists resent the charge of devotion to Israel, since they insist that Israel is such an important ally.  It therefore ought to be considered–at least by them–a positive thing that they are strongly devoted to the security and interests of a U.S. ally, but for whatever reason they always take this as an insult.) 

The problem with strong attachments to other nations–and this goes for Anglophiles c. 1914 or 1940–is that it can convince Americans that the best interests of the United States are served by serving the best interests of another country on the false, emotionally-clouded assumptions that those interests are more or less identical and their strong attachment is simply “subsidiary” rather than taking an unacceptable dominating role in their decisionmaking.  That is why it would be best to avoid such strong attachments if possible, and the next best thing would be to temper them when they do arise.

What Mearsheimer and Walt’s article argued was that reflexive support for Israel of the kind we have seen over the past generation is not in the national interest.  That should be a more or less empirical claim.  Can pro-Israel activists actually demonstrate the real value of the close connection to Israel they insist that we have?  Can they explain how our reflexive support for Israel’s aimless bombardment of Lebanon last year advanced any American interests in the region?  Must they resort to a lot of hand-waving sentimentalism about our “fellow democracy” and accusations of anti-Semitism against critics, or does Israel actually offer enough to the United States to make the costs of the alliance worth our while?  This is a calculation of costs and benefits, and it is one that we make with far less hysteria when it comes to other allied states.  That they seem unable to make a positive case, but are frequently just tearing down and smearing the critics of current policy, speaks volumes about the weakness of their claims.