[The New Yorker] David Remnick - Mearsheimer and Walt are not anti-Semites or racists. They are serious scholars, and there is no reason to doubt their sincerity. But their announced objectives have been badly undermined by the contours of their argument - a prosecutor's brief that depicts Israel as a singularly pernicious force in world affairs. Their conclusions are unmistakable: Israel and its lobbyists bear a great deal of blame for the loss of American direction, treasure, and even blood. Where many accounts identify Osama bin Laden's primary grievances with American support of "infidel" authoritarian regimes in Islamic lands, Mearsheimer and Walt align his primary concerns with theirs: America's unwillingness to push Israel to end the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. (It doesn't matter that Israel and the Palestinians were in peace negotiations in 1993, the year of the first attack on the World Trade Center, or that during the Camp David negotiations in 2000 bin Laden's pilots were training in Florida.) Mearsheimer and Walt give you the sense that, if the Israelis and the Palestinians come to terms, bin Laden will return to the family construction business. It's a narrative that recounts every lurid report of Israeli cruelty as indisputable fact but leaves out the rise of Fatah and Palestinian terrorism before 1967; the Munich Olympics; Black September; myriad cases of suicide bombings; and other spectaculars. There is scant mention of Palestinian violence or diplomatic bungling, only a recitation of the claim that, in 2000, Israel offered "a disarmed set of Bantustans under de-facto Israeli control." (Strange that, at the time, the Saudi Prince Bandar told Yasser Arafat, "If we lose this opportunity, it is not going to be a tragedy. This is going to be a crime.") Nor do they dwell for long on instances when the all-powerful Israel lobby failed to sway the White House, as when George H. W. Bush dragged Yitzhak Shamir to the Madrid peace conference.
2007-08-28 01:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive