America and Israel

[Michele]

editorial in the financial times regarding the buggahboo over the Walt-Mearscheimer paper.


Published: April 1 2006
Financial Times
Editorial Comment

Freedom of academic debate, political polemic, populist prejudice, outlandish exaggeration and even mildly slanderous innuendo about anything from Britney Spears to the president is axiomatic in the United States of America, is it not? Well, perhaps not altogether.

Reflexes that ordinarily spring automatically to the defence of open debate and free enquiry shut down - at least among much of America’s political elite - once the subject turns to Israel, and above all the pro-Israel lobby’s role in shaping US foreign policy.

snip

Doctrinal orthodoxy was flouted last month in a paper on the Israel lobby by two of America’s leading political scientists, Stephen Walt from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and John Mearsheimer from the University of Chicago. They argue powerfully that extraordinarily effective lobbying in Washington has led to a political consensus that American and Israeli interests are inseparable and identical.

Only a UK publication, the London Review of Books, was prepared to carry their critique, in the same way that it was Prospect, a British monthly journal, that four years ago published a path-breaking study of the Israel lobby by the American analyst, Michael Lind.

snip

Judgment of the precise value of the Walt-Mearscheimer paper has been swept aside by a wave of condemnation. Their scholarship has been derided and their motives impugned, while Harvard has energetically disassociated itself from their views. Mr Walt’s position as academic dean of the Kennedy School is in doubt.

On various counts, this is a shame and a self-inflicted wound no society built on freedom should allow.

snip

As Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator, remarked in Haaretz about the Walt-Mearsheimer controversy: “It would in fact serve Israel if the open and critical debate that takes place over here were exported over there [the US].”Nothing, moreover, is more damaging to US interests than the inability to have a proper debate about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, how Washington should use its influence to resolve it, and how best America can advance freedom and stability in the region as a whole. Bullying Americans into a consensus on Israeli policy is bad for Israel and makes it impossible for America to articulate its own national interest.

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you can't access it from FT unless you subscribe. I found the editorial here (http://www.israpundit.com/2006/?p=718). Below is the paper the editorial refers about which you can google all current criticism.


The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy
By John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt
Working Paper Number:RWP06-011
Submitted: 03/13/2006

Download PDF (http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/Research/wpaper.nsf) or if that becomes outdated you can download from this link directly (http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/Research/wpaper.nsf/rwp/RWP06-011/$File/rwp_06_011_walt.pdf)

Abstract
In this paper, John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago's Department of Political Science and Stephen M.Walt of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government contend that the centerpiece of U.S. Middle East policy is its intimate relationship with Israel. The authors argue that although often justified as reflecting shared strategic interests or compelling moral imperatives, the U.S. commitment to Israel is due primarily to the activities of the “Israel Lobby." This paper goes on to describe the various activities that pro-Israel groups have undertaken in order to shift U.S. foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction.

[GI Joe]

Here’s an excellent piece on the Walt/Mearsheimer anti-Israel paper
The writer is a professor at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies.




Yes, It's Anti-Semitic
By Eliot A. Cohen

snip
Inept, even kooky academic work, then, but is it anti-Semitic? If by anti-Semitism one means obsessive and irrationally hostile beliefs about Jews; if one accuses them of disloyalty, subversion or treachery, of having occult powers and of participating in secret combinations that manipulate institutions and governments; if one systematically selects everything unfair, ugly or wrong about Jews as individuals or a group and equally systematically suppresses any exculpatory information -- why, yes, this paper is anti-Semitic.

Mearsheimer and Walt conceive of The Lobby as a conspiracy between the Washington Times and the New York Times, the Democratic-leaning Brookings Institution and Republican-leaning American Enterprise Institute, architects of the Oslo accords and their most vigorous opponents. In this world Douglas Feith manipulates Don Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney takes orders from Richard Perle. They dwell on public figures with Jewish names and take repeated shots at conservative Christians (acceptable subjects for prejudice in intellectual circles), but they never ask why a Sen. John McCain today or, in earlier years, a rough-hewn labor leader such as George Meany declared themselves friends of Israel.

The authors dismiss or ignore past Arab threats to exterminate Israel, as well as the sewer of anti-Semitic literature that pollutes public discourse in the Arab world today. The most recent calls by Iran's fanatical -- and nuclear weapons-hungry -- president for Israel to be "wiped off the map" they brush aside as insignificant. There is nothing here about the millions of dollars that Saudi Arabia has poured into lobbying and academic institutions, or the wealth of Islamic studies programs on American campuses, though they note with suspicion some 130 Jewish studies programs on those campuses. West Bank settlements get attention; terrorist butchery of civilians on buses or in shopping malls does not. To dispute their view of Israel is not to differ about policy but to act as a foreign agent.

If this sounds personal, it is, although I am only a footnote target for Mearsheimer and Walt. I am a public intellectual and a proud Jew; sympathetic to Israel and extensively engaged in our nation's military affairs; vaguely conservative and occasionally hawkish. In a week my family will celebrate Passover with my oldest son -- the third generation to serve as an officer in the United States Army. He will be home on leave from the bomb-strewn streets of Baghdad. The patch on his shoulder is the same flag that flies on my porch.

Other supposed members of "The Lobby" also have children in military service. Impugning their patriotism or mine is not scholarship or policy advocacy. It is merely, and unforgivably, bigotry.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/04/AR2006040401282.html

[Sauniere]

You've been absent lately, glad you are back... :flowers:

We need your scholarship here, as this post so profoundly attests. How you even found this amazes me. As an 80-page piece this will take a day or two to digest.