Review: The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy

Abstract

THE ISRAEL LOBBY AND U.S. FOREIGN POLICY John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt Toronto: Viking Canada 2007. 484pp, $34.00 cloth (ISBN 0-670-06725-3)When you check in at the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem, the favourite watering hole of foreign correspondents in the Levant, you are offered a choice of Israeli newspapers to be folded into your morning International Herald Tribune: the right-wing nationalist Jerusalem Post (previously owned by Conrad Black) or the English-language edition of Ha'aretz, with its distinguished reporting and editorial openness to the full spectrum of Israeli opinion. Mearsheimer and Walt, ail-American nationalists and prominent political scientists of the realist school, are decidedly more comfortable with Ha'aretz, which they cite repeatedly in this hugely controversial work.While there is nothing in this book that would scandalize Israeli scholars and intellectuals of the centre-left or cosmopolitan opinion overseas, Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy has created a furore among the Israeli-American right in the United States, including of course leading neoconservative spokespersons. As with any succes de scandale, a reviewer is tempted to focus on the public controversy-with its charges of disloyalty to American interests in the Middle East and high-profile imputations of anti-Semitism-rather than on the intrinsic merits and demerits of the work under review. That said, it is instructive to note the work's unusual publication history, beginning with an article commissioned by Atlantic that was later killed in mysterious circumstances by that magazine's editors, the authors' subsequent conclusion that their thesis and viewpoint was simply too iconoclastic to see publication in book form in the US, and eventual vindication when the original Atlantic article was published to considerable fanfare across the pond in the London Review of Books.Yet it would be wrong to view Mearsheimer and Walt-thoroughly conventional pillars of the IR community at Chicago and Harvard-as prophets without honour in their own country. Their book has acquired stature and a measure of fame not because of any original research or analytical rigour but because of the calumny heaped upon it and its authors by their uncritically pro-Israel enemies. This tells us something interesting about American intellectual culture. While there is much that is useful in this book, there is more that is unsurprising, prosaic, and predictable. And the authors' own prescriptions for American policy in the greater Middle East are largely unworkable in today's environment.The book is divided into two parts. In part one, The United States, Israel, and the lobby, Mearsheimer and Walt recapitulate, largely from newspapers and other secondary sources, the financial assistance lavished by the United on Israel, the dwindling moral for American indulgence of Israeli territorial expansion and occupation of Palestinian land, the structure and functioning of the famously effective Israel (notably the American Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC) on Capitol Hill, and the direct effect on policy toward Palestine and the Middle East, generally by pro-Israel think tanks and networks of neoconservative policymakers in George Bush's Washington. authors detail the influence of pro-Israel writers and intellectuals in the media and on university campuses. While there is little new here, it is useful to have this material on the Bush years pulled together in one place. What is new in part one-and legitimately debatable-is the authors' conclusion that [n]ow that the Cold War is over, has become a strategic liability for the United States (5). issue is analyzed at length in chapter two.In part two, Mearsheimer and Walt discuss The lobby in action. What follows are essentially case studies of the lobby's influence on the Bush administration's longstanding do-nothing policy toward the question of Palestinian statehood, the American tilt against Syria, rising tensions with Iran, and the nonchalant stance of the United toward Israel's disproportionate attack on Lebanon in the summer of 2006. …