When All Else Fails: The Israel Lobby

Decades ago a criminal defense attorney offered a credo for the zealous defense of a client: “Contest everything, concede nothing, and when defeated allege fraud.”John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, in their new book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, go to similar lengths to defend their thesis that Israel is a strategic liability.

While The Israel Lobby is a more nuanced effort than their earlier London Review of Books article, the main problem is the same: Walt and Mearsheimer genuinely believe that U.S. interests in the Middle East are overwhelmingly tied to the Arab states, not to Israel. They are at a loss to understand why what seems obvious to them is lost on the majority of Americans, including those who make policy decisions.

Never entertaining the possibility they might be wrong, they posit some “unfair play.” The “lobby,” they argue, works hard to keep Americans from understanding the truth about the Middle East.

Such a dogmatic approach blinds them from seeing what most Americans do. They seek to destroy the “moral” case for Israel by pointing at alleged Israeli misdeeds, rarely noting the terror and anti-Semitism that predicates Israeli reactions.

They also do not consider American revulsion when Arab leaders praise teenagers who turn themselves into human bombs, and don’t recall Palestinians (and other Arabs) taking to the streets and cheering on 9/11, while Israelis declared a day of mourning.

Remarkably, while the authors have great sympathy for Palestinians, they never exhibit empathy for Israelis. They do not ask, “If America were Israel, and Americans were being blown up by terrorists, and regional powers issuing clear existential threats were attempting to acquire nuclear bombs, what would I want my government to do?”

They do not lack intellectual curiosity. Indeed, they ask, “If a hostile power conquered Canada or Mexico and tried to set up a sympathetic government there, wouldn’t the United States try and complicate that hostile power’s efforts and ensure an outcome more favorable to U.S. interests?” But that question is asked to justify Iranian efforts to aid militias in Iraq.

Iran, seemingly, can act in ways clearly detrimental to U.S. interests without engaging their wrath (they say Iran should be influenced with “carrots”). However any Israeli reaction to attacks against its civilians is castigated as harmful to America’s image in the Arab world, because of Israel’s close ties with the U.S. (and Israel, of course, should be prodded with “sticks”).

That blindness also infects their understanding of Iranian nuclear ambitions, something concerning Americans and Israelis alike. They are “skeptical” that Iranian leadership would be suicidal enough to carry out their threats, and argue that “there is reason to think a nuclear Iran could be contained and deterred, just as the Soviet Union was contained during the Cold War.”

The Soviets, however, believed they had history on their side. The Iranian leadership believes they have both history and God on theirs. This frightening distinction is one the authors do not engage.

For Walt and Mearsheimer the only rationale for the continued existence of terrorist groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad is the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. If only the Israelis would seek peace, they assert, such groups would become “outdated.”

Not surprisingly, they fail to mention that none of these groups would accept a Jewish state even within the pre-1967 borders. Hamas favorably cites the anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in its charter, and Hezbollah has asserted, “It is an open war until the elimination of Israel and until the death of the last Jew on earth.”

They miss entirely the political role of extremist Islam in global strife, arguing that if there were a peace settlement (the lack of which they uniformly blame on the Israelis), anti-American animus and the recruiting ability of Osama bin Laden would decrease.

They do not recognize two major facts. 1) A peace settlement would be Islamists’ worst nightmare. It would mean acceptance of non-Islamic sovereignty over what they believe is holy land. 2) Islamists see any democracy as theologically toxic, to be violently overturned.

Deeply disturbing, also, is Walt and Mearsheimer’s analysis of “the lobby’s” role in getting the U.S. into Iraq. There is no question that neo-conservatives (and others) were advocating an invasion. But what the authors do not seem to understand is that President Bush did not get pushed into this war. He wanted it.

Although Walt and Mearsheimer note that Israelis, and Israel’s supporters, have for years been much more concerned with Iran than with Iraq, they also allege that once it was understood that Iran would be “next” after Iraq, “the lobby” went into full gear to push for the war.

During the lead-up to the Iraq invasion, I argued that war would be counterproductive to both America’s and Israel’s interest, even assuming Hussein had WMD. I pointed to Tito and the former Yugoslavia as an example of what might happen if a country with historically competing ethnic groups becomes destabilized. I spoke about Iraq becoming a magnet for Islamist fighters just as Franco’s Spain had become for Communists in the 1930s. I spoke about the chance that a weakened Iraq would mean a strengthened Iran.

If the majority of the Jewish community, which actually agreed with my view, were able to derail magically the President’s plan for Iraq at the time, then Walt and Mearsheimer might have had a case.

And that fanciful observation returns us to the central problem with The Israel Lobby. Its view of what is right and wrong about the Middle East, and what is good and bad for America and Israel, is so rigidly fixed that the authors can only see the tentacles of “the lobby” at work to make fathomable policy decisions with which they disagree.

Kenneth Stern is AJC’s expert on anti-Semitism and extremism.