US professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer’s paper “The Israel Lobby” first received an airing in the London Review of Books in March 2006. Despite the controversy this paper aroused and Walt and Mearsheimer’s claims that their voices were being silenced, “The Israel Lobby” has now been published in book form.
The original article was widely criticised for failing to meet scholarly standards, for its factual distortions and for its innuendoes about a Jewish conspiracy in the US.
The UK is a particularly receptive market for those who wish to denigrate Israel and propagate the canard of Jewish power controlling US foreign policy. Thus, W & M have come full circle with a book tour in November where they will speak at LSE; SOAS; Chatham House; St Antony’s College, Oxford; and the House of Lords, where they will be hosted by the All-Party Parliamentary group on Global Security and Non-Proliferation.
The book has received many harsh reviews in the US press:
Tim Rutten, LA Times: “Anyone familiar with the tortured history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will have a hard time recognizing the history Mearsheimer and Walt rehearse. Every hoary old Israeli atrocity tale is trotted out, and the long story of Palestinian terrorism is rendered entirely as a reaction to Israeli oppression. The failure of every peace negotiation is attributed to Israeli deviousness under the shield of the American Israel lobby. There is nothing here of Palestinian corruption, division and duplicity or even of this unhappy people’s inability to provide a reliable secular partner with whom peace can be negotiated.
At times, the authors simply contradict themselves, asserting — rather remarkably — at one point that the United States has nothing to fear from a nuclear-armed Iran and, at another, that the dangerous prospect of a nuke-equipped Tehran is the Israel lobby’s fault. Similarly, they write, Al Qaeda would hammer its swords into ploughshares and Osama bin Laden would lay down with the lamb if only the United States would come out from under Israel’s thrall and create by coercion a Palestinian state.
Baloney. If — as was long ago proposed — the Jewish state had been established in Uganda, the Twin Towers still would be rubble.”
David Remnick, The New Yorker: “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.”
See HonestReporting’s roundup for more reviews here.
John Mearsheimer has even appeared on a satirical news show where the joke appeared to be on him. (Click on the image below to view the full interview.)
In the UK, the book and the arguments surrounding it have already featured on Channel 4 News (click here to view video) and it is inevitable that there will be much more media coverage of W & M during their visit.
In preparation, HR UK has some resources that can be used to counter W & M’s claims:
- StandWithUs‘s brochure (PDF format) for a comprehensive point by point rebuttal and analysis.
- Dore Gold, Understanding the U.S.-Israel Alliance: An Israeli Response to the Walt-Mearsheimer Claim
- Rebuttals to Mearsheimer & Walt on the Engage website.
Please be ready to write to your newspapers in response to any future coverage of Walt & Mearsheimer’s “The Israel Lobby”.
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