[Mb-civic] A Lobby, Not a Conspiracy By TONY JUDT

[Michael Butler]

The New York Times
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April 19, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
A Lobby, Not a Conspiracy
By TONY JUDT

IN its March 23rd issue the London Review of Books, a respected British
journal, published an essay titled "The Israel Lobby." The authors are two
distinguished American academics (Stephen Walt of Harvard and John
Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago) who posted a longer (83-page)
version of their text on the Web site of Harvard's Kennedy School.

As they must have anticipated, the essay has run into a firestorm of
vituperation and refutation. Critics have charged that their scholarship is
shoddy and that their claims are, in the words of the columnist Christopher
Hitchens, "slightly but unmistakably smelly." The smell in question, of
course, is that of anti-Semitism.

This somewhat hysterical response is regrettable. In spite of its
provocative title, the essay draws on a wide variety of standard sources and
is mostly uncontentious. But it makes two distinct and important claims. The
first is that uncritical support for Israel across the decades has not
served America's best interests. This is an assertion that can be debated on
its merits. The authors' second claim is more controversial: American
foreign policy choices, they write, have for years been distorted by one
domestic pressure group, the "Israel Lobby."

Some would prefer, when explaining American actions overseas, to point a
finger at the domestic "energy lobby." Others might blame the influence of
Wilsonian idealism, or imperial practices left over from the cold war. But
that a powerful Israel lobby exists could hardly be denied by anyone who
knows how Washington works. Its core is the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee, its penumbra a variety of national Jewish organizations.

Does the Israel Lobby affect our foreign policy choices? Of course ‹ that is
one of its goals. And it has been rather successful: Israel is the largest
recipient of American foreign aid and American responses to Israeli behavior
have been overwhelmingly uncritical or supportive.

But does pressure to support Israel distort American decisions? That's a
matter of judgment. Prominent Israeli leaders and their American supporters
pressed very hard for the invasion of Iraq; but the United States would
probably be in Iraq today even if there had been no Israel lobby. Is Israel,
in Mearsheimer/Walt's words, "a liability in the war on terror and the
broader effort to deal with rogue states?" I think it is; but that too is an
issue for legitimate debate.

The essay and the issues it raises for American foreign policy have been
prominently dissected and discussed overseas. In America, however, it's been
another story: virtual silence in the mainstream media. Why? There are
several plausible explanations. One is that a relatively obscure academic
paper is of little concern to general-interest readers. Another is that
claims about disproportionate Jewish public influence are hardly original ‹
and debate over them inevitably attracts interest from the political
extremes. And then there is the view that Washington is anyway awash in
"lobbies" of this sort, pressuring policymakers and distorting their
choices.

Each of these considerations might reasonably account for the mainstream
press's initial indifference to the Mearsheimer-Walt essay. But they don't
convincingly explain the continued silence even after the article aroused
stormy debate in the academy, within the Jewish community, among the opinion
magazines and Web sites, and in the rest of the world. I think there is
another element in play: fear. Fear of being thought to legitimize talk of a
"Jewish conspiracy"; fear of being thought anti-Israel; and thus, in the
end, fear of licensing the expression of anti-Semitism.

The end result ‹ a failure to consider a major issue in public policy ‹ is a
great pity. So what, you may ask, if Europeans debate this subject with such
enthusiasm? Isn't Europe a hotbed of anti-Zionists (read anti-Semites) who
will always relish the chance to attack Israel and her American friend? But
it was David Aaronovitch, a Times of London columnist who, in the course of
criticizing Mearsheimer and Walt, nonetheless conceded that "I sympathize
with their desire for redress, since there has been a cock-eyed failure in
the U.S. to understand the plight of the Palestinians."

And it was the German writer Christoph Bertram, a longstanding friend of
America in a country where every public figure takes extraordinary care to
tread carefully in such matters, who wrote in Die Zeit that "it is rare to
find scholars with the desire and the courage to break taboos."

How are we to explain the fact that it is in Israel itself that the
uncomfortable issues raised by Professors Mearsheimer and Walt have been
most thoroughly aired? It was an Israeli columnist in the liberal daily
Haaretz who described the American foreign policy advisers Richard Perle and
Douglas Feith as "walking a fine line between their loyalty to American
governments ...and Israeli interests." It was Israel's impeccably
conservative Jerusalem Post that described Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy
secretary of defense, as "devoutly pro-Israel." Are we to accuse Israelis,
too, of "anti-Zionism"?

The damage that is done by America's fear of anti-Semitism when discussing
Israel is threefold. It is bad for Jews: anti-Semitism is real enough (I
know something about it, growing up Jewish in 1950's Britain), but for just
that reason it should not be confused with political criticisms of Israel or
its American supporters. It is bad for Israel: by guaranteeing it
unconditional support, Americans encourage Israel to act heedless of
consequences. The Israeli journalist Tom Segev described the
Mearsheimer-Walt essay as "arrogant" but also acknowledged ruefully: "They
are right. Had the United States saved Israel from itself, life today would
be better ...the Israel Lobby in the United States harms Israel's true
interests."

BUT above all, self-censorship is bad for the United States itself.
Americans are denying themselves participation in a fast-moving
international conversation. Daniel Levy (a former Israeli peace negotiator)
wrote in Haaretz that the Mearsheimer-Walt essay should be a wake-up call, a
reminder of the damage the Israel lobby is doing to both nations. But I
would go further. I think this essay, by two "realist" political scientists
with no interest whatsoever in the Palestinians, is a straw in the wind.

Looking back, we shall see the Iraq war and its catastrophic consequences as
not the beginning of a new democratic age in the Middle East but rather as
the end of an era that began in the wake of the 1967 war, a period during
which American alignment with Israel was shaped by two imperatives: cold-war
strategic calculations and a new-found domestic sensitivity to the memory of
the Holocaust and the debt owed to its victims and survivors.

For the terms of strategic debate are shifting. East Asia grows daily in
importance. Meanwhile our clumsy failure to re-cast the Middle East ‹ and
its enduring implications for our standing there ‹ has come into sharp
focus. American influence in that part of the world now rests almost
exclusively on our power to make war: which means in the end that it is no
influence at all. Above all, perhaps, the Holocaust is passing beyond living
memory. In the eyes of a watching world, the fact that an Israeli soldier's
great-grandmother died in Treblinka will not excuse his own misbehavior.

Thus it will not be self-evident to future generations of Americans why the
imperial might and international reputation of the United States are so
closely aligned with one small, controversial Mediterranean client state. It
is already not at all self-evident to Europeans, Latin Americans, Africans
or Asians. Why, they ask, has America chosen to lose touch with the rest of
the international community on this issue? Americans may not like the
implications of this question. But it is pressing. It bears directly on our
international standing and influence; and it has nothing to do with
anti-Semitism. We cannot ignore it.

Tony Judt is the director of the Remarque Institute at New York University
and the author of "Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945."