“The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy adds some substance to an argument that has already been made.”
by Khody Akhavi
When John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt published their controversial essay “The Israel Lobby” in the London Review of Books in March 2006, their work elicited the kind of response of which most academics only dream.
But it was also attacked and condemned by critics for its provocative and pointed argument that a wide-ranging coalition that includes neoconservatives, Christian Zionists, academics, columnists and Washington lobby groups such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is responsible for shaping US foreign policy in the Middle East and suppressing the public debate in Washington.Columnist Christopher Hitchens, himself no stranger to controversy, called the work “slightly but unmistakably fishy.” The Anti-Defamation League called it “a classical conspiratorial anti-Semitic analysis invoking the canards of Jewish power and Jewish control.” Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz said it was riddled with distortions, and questioned the motivations of Walt, who served at the time as academic dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and Mearsheimer, who teaches at University of Chicago, to produce a paper that “contributes so little to the existing scholarship while being so susceptible to misuse.”
To be sure, the article would not have engendered such visceral reactions if not for the robust credentials of its authors. Overnight, two pillars of the academic establishment achieved notoriety for pushing into the open a subject that had long remained a taboo.
And the object of their critique, the “lobby” – general parlance to describe those actors who actively promote a “pro-Israel” policy – launched an aggressive campaign to discredit their work and injure their reputations. More than one year later, they are still standing, proving that, according to Michael Massing, “the wide attention their argument has received shows that, in this case, those efforts have not entirely succeeded.”
Now, Mearsheimer and Walt have expanded their article into a 355-page book called The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. In it, they argue much the same, that there exists neither a strategic nor a moral reason for the US to diplomatically, military and unequivocally support Israel in the Middle East. As such, the US should treat Israel as it does its other allies and conduct foreign policy that benefits US interests.
http://www.antiwar.com/ips/akhavi.php?articleid=11567