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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

What The Essay Actually Says

While listening to Eli Lake busily distorting and lying about Profs. Mearsheimer and Walt and the argument in their original essay, it occurred to me that they never made anything like the main claim to which he objects so strenuously and which, according to Lake, make it perfectly appropriate to associate them with the likes of […]

While listening to Eli Lake busily distorting and lying about Profs. Mearsheimer and Walt and the argument in their original essay, it occurred to me that they never made anything like the main claim to which he objects so strenuously and which, according to Lake, make it perfectly appropriate to associate them with the likes of David Duke.  (You have the admire the gall of someone actively engaged in using the guilt by association tactic accusing other people of McCarthyism and “John Birch Society” tactics.)  Becoming ever more agitated, Lake continually repeated that they were accusing certain individuals of being “foreign agents,” which is what I would call a lie, since anyone can read the essay and see that it makes no such claims.  The essay does make the claim at one point that AIPAC is “a de facto agent for a foreign government,” which a perusal of AIPAC’s own website would tend to support to the extent that it very explicitly lobbies for the interests of Israel.     

First, on the terminology of “the Lobby,” the authors wrote:

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.

So it is a catch-all term to refer to diverse individuals and organisations, and does not refer to a “Jewish lobby” or conspiracy of Jews in high places or any of the other mischaracterisations that critics have made.  Those who say that the essay says any of these things either have not read the essay or are out to deceive. 

Defining “the Lobby” further, they write:

In its basic operations, the Israel Lobby is no different from the farm lobby, steel or textile workers’ unions, or other ethnic lobbies. There is nothing improper about American Jews and their Christian allies attempting to sway US policy [bold mine-DL]: the Lobby’s activities are not a conspiracy of the sort depicted in tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. For the most part, the individuals and groups that comprise it are only doing what other special interest groups do, but doing it very much better.

So it is an interest group, or an umbrella term to refer to a number of groups all working towards broadly shared goals.  It is engaged in a legitimate activity, at which it excels.  For some reason, this sends people into apoplectic fits.

What does “the Lobby” do?  They write:

The Lobby pursues two broad strategies. First, it wields its significant influence in Washington, pressuring both Congress and the executive branch. Whatever an individual lawmaker or policymaker’s own views may be, the Lobby tries to make supporting Israel the ‘smart’ choice. Second, it strives to ensure that public discourse portrays Israel in a positive light, by repeating myths about its founding and by promoting its point of view in policy debates. The goal is to prevent critical comments from getting a fair hearing in the political arena. Controlling the debate is essential to guaranteeing US support, because a candid discussion of US-Israeli relations might lead Americans to favour a different policy. 

All of this is pretty uncontestable.  This is what pro-Israel groups do, and they make no bones about what they are doing.  Christians United for Israel, for instance, is quite explicit about its goals.  I think the name gives it away. 

On the role of “the Lobby” in pushing for the war in Iraq, they write:

Pressure from Israel and the Lobby was not the only factor behind the decision to attack Iraq in March 2003, but it was critical [bold mine-DL]. Some Americans believe that this was a war for oil, but there is hardly any direct evidence to support this claim. Instead, the war was motivated in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure. According to Philip Zelikow, a former member of the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, and now a counsellor to Condoleezza Rice, the ‘real threat’ from Iraq was not a threat to the United States. The ‘unstated threat’ was the ‘threat against Israel’, Zelikow told an audience at the University of Virginia in September 2002. ‘The American government,’ he added, ‘doesn’t want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell.’

Of course, Zelikow did say something close to this, in that he did acknowledge that a likely target of any Iraqi WMD arsenal would be Israel, which is to state a fairly common view.  Are we really supposed to believe that Israeli security was not a critical factor in deciding whether or not to go to war against Iraq?  That is what the critics of Mearsheimer/Walt would have you believe.  You are supposed to believe that Mr. Bush, who has on the whole aligned Washington with Israel more than any other modern President, made such a decision without Israeli security having much to do with it at all.   

Something I have never understood about the hysterical reaction to this claim that war advocates supported the invasion because of expected advantages for Israel is simply this: why should pro-Israel Americans regard this claim as either false or malicious?  If Israel really is a strategically valuable, reliable ally, a fellow democracy to which we have such deep obligations and all the rest of it, surely its security would be of concern to our government and to citizens who support the connection with Israel.  The supposed threat from Iraq would have been greater to Israel than to the United States–this much is common sense.  You would expect close intelligence cooperation between the U.S. and an allied state in the months prior to a major military action against a nearby state, and I think you would be shocked if it did not take place.  Yet any suggestion that U.S. officials and activists believed this and acted accordingly is considered equivalent to accusing someone of treason.  That this reaction is a bit unhinged is putting it mildly.  

One point of the essay, of course, is to deny that Israel is a strategically valuable, reliable ally.  The authors argue that it is neither very valuable nor reliable.  Once you reject this assumption (which is really what it is), what used to appear right and proper might now seem wasteful and pointless.  A close U.S.-Israel connection might seem desirable if pro-Israel forces were correct about the merits and mutual benefits of the relationship.  The essay argues that they are not correct, and says instead that the connection is damaging to U.S. interests.  You might think that supporters of the invasion would hotly contest the basic idea that the Iraq war is contrary to U.S. interests, and perhaps some have done so, but unless you think the war actually is very bad for America (and it is) there would be little reason to express concern about the role of “the Lobby” in promoting said war. 

Honestly, I don’t quite understand how there can so much fuss about this essay, since the role of pro-Israel activists in pushing for this war is no different from Anglophiles pushing for entry into WWI and WWII or the Hearst machine and American imperialists pushing for war with Spain.  They were not “agents of a foreign power.”  They were horribly, horribly mistaken Americans who were horribly mistaken because they had become too attached to the cause of another country (whether England or Cuba) or conflated the interests of two different nations.  Critics of Mearsheimer/Walt claim that there is an accusation of bad faith, but the essay makes no such charge.  On the contrary, the frightening thing about pro-Israel activists today or Anglophiles in the past is their utterly sincere conviction that the interests and destinies of America and another nation are bound up together.  The dangerous thing about them is that they are typically not arguing in bad faith or acting cynically.  What makes them dangerous is that they are absolutely convinced that they are doing right by America by doing right by the other country.  It is their judgement about what is right for America that is so deeply flawed.  That is the point.  Naturally, they dislike this claim, as anyone might object to being characterised in this way, but what is never said in the essay is that any of the people in “the Lobby” are “agents of a foreign power.”   

Rather crucial for understanding this whole question is recognising that the perceptions of what is in Israel’s interest by pro-Israel advocates in this country are sometimes horribly wrong.  There were pro-Israel, pro-war pundits who believed that Israel’s position would be greatly improved by the overthrow of Hussein and said so in 2002-03 (“the road to Jerusalem goes through Baghdad,” and all that rot), and instead the aftermath for Israel has proven to be almost as harmful as the post-invasion has been for us.  The expansion of Iranian power that has resulted has been detrimental to Israeli security, and this was brought home by the war last year.  (Of course, this reality feeds anti-Iranian jingoism in this country, but it is difficult to see how Israeli security would be actually aided by spreading the war to Iran.)  It is also important to distinguish between what American pro-Israel activists are doing on behalf of what they think is right for Israel and what any particular Israeli government desires.  These may coincide from time to time, as they tend to do on policies relating to the Palestinians and the settlements in the territories, but there seems to be no question that the most hard-line pro-Israel activists are far more aggressive and militaristic towards Israel’s neighbours than people who actually live in Israel can afford to be.  Many Israelis are interested in the possibility of negotiating with Syria for a peace settlement, while for many pro-Israel activists here the idea is madness.   

P.S.  Early 20th century Easterners interested in promoting Chinese interests and connections with China also stand out in this long, bad tradition of boosters for other countries who wind up plunging us into unnecessary wars.

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