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Jerusalem Syndrome

[Foreign Affairs] Walter Russell Mead - John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt claim that they want The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy "to foster a more clear-eyed and candid discussion of this subject." Unfortunately, that is not going to happen. It will confuse the policy debate not just in the U.S. but throughout the world as well, while giving aid and comfort to anti-Semites wherever they are found. Rarely in professional literature does one encounter such a gap between aspiration and performance as there is in The Israel Lobby. Mearsheimer and Walt fail to define "the lobby" in a clear way. Their accounts of the ways in which it exercises power, as well as their descriptions of the power it wields, are incoherent. Their use of evidence is uneven. At the level of geopolitics, their handling of the complex realities and crosscurrents of the Middle East fails to establish either the incontestable definition of the national interest that their argument requires or the superiority they claim for the policies they propose. The book's poor analysis of U.S. domestic politics sometimes involves a remarkably slipshod handling of evidence. One rubs one's eyes, frequently, at the spectacle of these two academics earnestly and solemnly presenting fundraising letters and convention speeches and other materials by paid employees of AIPAC and other such groups as conclusive proof of those groups' power and reach. This is not serious scholarship. Their geopolitical analysis of Israel's position is interesting and in many respects useful. But Mearsheimer and Walt seem not to see how it undercuts the importance of the Israel lobby. According to them, Israel is the dominant regional power, and its enormous advantages in weapons and technology are so great that it has relatively little need for U.S. support at this point. Both the military and the economic aid that the U.S. offers, Mearsheimer and Walt tell us, can be substantially reduced or even eliminated without undermining Israel's security. But they do not carry this point through to its logical conclusion: if U.S. aid is of relatively limited value to Israel, then threats to trim or withhold that aid will have relatively little impact on Israel's behavior. Mearsheimer and Walt also significantly underestimate the importance of the U.S.-Israeli alliance to the United States. The authors do what anti-Semites have always done: they overstate the power of Jews. Although Mearsheimer and Walt make an effort to distinguish their work from anti-Semitic tracts, the picture they paint calls up some of the ugliest stereotypes in anti-Semitic discourse. The Zionist octopus they conjure - stirring up the Iraq war, manipulating both U.S. political parties, shaping the media, punishing the courageous minority of professors and politicians who dare to tell the truth - is depressingly familiar. The writer is Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations.
2007-10-26 01:00:00
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