Mainstream or Just Extreme?

At first glance, the two books inhabit different worlds. One, carrying the imprint of a prestigious publisher, is riding high in the Amazon bestseller chart. The other, from a tiny publisher in Atlanta, would not make a bestseller list on Amazon or anywhere else. The first book is splendidly printed and bound, reflecting the gravitas of the authors. The second looks and feels cheap, like a trinket from a murky political gathering.

And yet this is one instance where packaging tells us very little. What counts is that the two books – Mearsheimer and Walt’s The Israel Lobby, which everyone is talking about, and James Petras’s The Power of Israel in the United States, an unabashedly conspiratorial tome unnoticed by the reviewers – focus upon the same subject. What counts even more – lest readers should think that my purpose is to damn by association – are the arresting similarities between the two books in terms of argument.

That observation would no doubt chafe with Mearsheimer and Walt’s self-image as taboo busters, bravely enabling the mainstream to say the unsayable through reasoned argument. Any overlaps with a conspiracy-monger like Petras are, one imagines, most inconvenient. Nevertheless, they are there.

Petras is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at SUNY, Binghamton. He has written for several leftist newspapers and journals, mainly on Latin America. In the book under consideration here, he skates dangerously close to the crackpots for whom the “Jewish Lobby” has long been an obsession. One of the endorsements of his book comes from a writer known as “Israel Shamir”, a Russian Jewish convert to orthodox Christianity who uses his web site to push the blood libel, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and other notorious myths of classic anti-Semitism.

The differences in packaging are mirrored in the tone. Mearsheimer and Walt decry anti-Semitism, assure us that their definition of the Israel Lobby bears no resemblance to conspiracy theory and argue in a measured, composed manner. Petras, by contrast, is breathless in exposing what he calls the “ZPC” (Zionist Power Configuration) – a term which brings to mind white supremacist rantings about the “ZOG” (Zionist Occupation Government) in Washington, DC.

What about the substance? Petras argues: “The ZPC can best be understood as a complex network of interrelated formal and informal groupings, operating at the international, national, regional and local levels, and directly and systematically subordinated to the State of Israel, its power holders and key decision makers.”

What Mearsheimer and Walt refer to as the Israel Lobby “has a core consisting of organizations whose declared purpose is to encourage the US government and the American public to provide material aid to Israel and to support its governments policies…” Later on, they tell us that the Lobby wants “the United States to help Israel remain the dominant military power in the Middle East.”

All three writers, then, are in agreement that the Lobby/ZPC does Israel’s bidding. Moreover – and here’s the rub – they agree that the Lobby/ZPC is sufficiently empowered to secure decisions which, in the normal scheme of things, would not be made.

The results of this distorted decision making are global in import. Petras says that Israel’s “tyranny” over the US threatens democracy at home and provokes war and economic instability abroad. By the same token, Mearsheimer and Walt assert that US backing for Israel drastically undermines harmonious relations with other countries, casts doubt upon American moral vision and inspires anti-American extremism.

Both sets of authors seize on the Iraq war as proof that the Lobby/ZPC cajoles the US into behaving as a harmful force. Both pin the blame on the same cast of rogues: the “small band of neoconservatives” discussed by Mearsheimer and Walt become, in the parlance of Petras, Israeli “colons” strategically distributed across every branch of government. The imperatives which prevailed in Iraq, the authors all agree, drove the 2006 conflict between Israel and Hezbollah and dominate current policy towards Iran and its nuclear program.

Partisans of Mearsheimer and Walt might counter, not unfairly, that Petras wades deep into territory which they would avoid like the plague – for example, by insinuating that Israel had a hand in the 9/11 atrocities. Yet, even when considering the twilight world of espionage and counter-terrorism, the books are closer than may seem apparent. Both make, for example, expansive and largely unsubstantiated claims about Israeli espionage activities in the United States. Mearsheimer and Walt conclude that this is evidence of Israeli duplicity; Petras seems to believe that a Mossad operative lurks behind every tree.

What all this demonstrates is that the shadow of conspiracy theory hangs over the efforts of Mearsheimer and Walt, much as they try dissociate themselves from it. I would modestly recommend that they read Petras’s book (if they buy it along with their own volume on Amazon, they’ll get a discount). Who knows? In a rational world, they might just be induced to think again.

Ben Cohen is associate director of AJC’s department on Anti-Semitism and Extremism.