Two Professors Fail To Clean Up Their Act

Professors John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government burst onto the national scene in March of 2006 with a Harvard "working paper" in which they wrote of the "unmatched power of the Israel Lobby." They charged, "Were it not for the Lobby's ability to manipulate the American political system, the relationship between Israel and the United States would be far less intimate than it is today.... AIPAC, which is a de facto agent for a foreign government, has a stranglehold on the U.S. Congress.... manipulating the media."

At the time, the paper was praised by Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood and the American white supremacist David Duke, while widely condemned by the American Jewish community and a number of general interest publications, including The New York Sun. Next week, the two professors will publish a book-length expansion of their argument, "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 484 pages, $26).

In this latest iteration, the professors have tried to clean up their act — but only on the surface. The "Lobby" has been revised to the lowercase "lobby." Gone in this new presentation is much of the inflammatory rhetoric — the verb "manipulate," the term "stranglehold," the accusation that AIPAC is a foreign agent rather than an American interest group. The new version of this argument, with its stamp of approval from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, may be more acceptable for sale at a Barnes & Noble near you, for open discourse in the New York Times, on National Public Radio, and at the Council on Foreign Relations.

But from beneath the surface, try though the professors may have to suppress it, what Messrs. Mearsheimer and Walt themselves define as anti-Semitism manages to poke through. The professors write that "anti-Semitism indulges in various forms of stereotyping and implies that Jews should be viewed with suspicion or contempt, while seeking to deny them the ability to participate fully and freely in all realms of society." They are at pains to emphasize that "the lobby is defined not by ethnicity or religion but by a political agenda." Then they proceed to jump in and do exactly what they say anti-Semites do.

What are we to make of the professors' classification of the former governor of Vermont, Howard Dean, as a supporter of Israel in part on the basis that "Dean's wife is Jewish and his children were raised Jewish as well"? Or of the assertion that "Christian Zionists exert less impact on U.S. Middle East policy than the other parts of the Israel lobby do," because the Christians "lack the financial power of the major pro-Israel Jewish groups, and they do not have the same media presence"?

Instead of the charge that the Jews or the "Lobby" are "manipulating" the press, the new, cleaned-up, book version of Messrs. Walt and Mearsheimer asserts that, "If the media were left to their own devices, they would not serve up as consistent a diet of pro-Israel coverage and commentary." Left unexplained is exactly whose devices the press has been left to, if not their own.

Discussing Elliott Abrams, an aide to President Bush, they quote an unremarkable passage from one of his books — "there can be no doubt that Jews, faithful to the covenant between God and Abraham, are to stand apart from the nation in which they live. It is the very nature of being Jewish to be apart — except in Israel — from the rest of the population" — and tutt-tutt, "This is a remarkable comment coming from an individual who holds a critically important position on Middle East policy in the U.S. government."

Clinton administration aides who are American Jews come in for the same treatment. The authors describe Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk by approvingly quoting a Palestinian Arab who protested "negotiating with two Israeli teams — one displaying an Israeli flag, and one an American flag." The professors protest that they are using the term "dual loyalty" not in its "earlier, anti-Semitic incarnation" but in "a neutral and nonpejorative fashion." It's an awfully fine distinction.

To those with time-in-grade on this beat, there are jarring notes. What's with the notion that the Nazi Holocaust, as Messrs. Walt and Mearsheimer write, "killed nearly six million Jews"? Not six million, as some but not all historians have found, but "nearly" six million, a distinction that, without discussing it, Messrs. Walt and Mearsheimer seem strangely careful to maintain.

They claim that anti-Semitic bigotry was widespread "until recently," but minimize its current surge in Europe. Statistics are piled upon statistics to dismiss the problem of anti-Semitism in France, with no mention of the fact that France's ambassador in Great Britain called Israel a "[expletive] little country" or of the fact that the number of French Jews each year who are fleeing France for Israel has more than doubled in recent years because of the anti-Semitism. Of the anti-Semitism among European Muslims, the authors assert that "some of it" is "provoked by Israel's behavior toward the Palestinians." It's a textbook example of the error of blaming the Jews for anti-Semitism rather than the anti-Semites.

Genuine anti-Semites, such as the leader of Hezbollah, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, who in 2002 said of Jews, "If they all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide," — a quote omitted by the professors — get stunningly favorable treatment in this book. Messrs. Walt and Mearsheimer buy into the claim that Hezbollah's initial rocket attacks on Israeli towns last summer were intended not to kill Jews, but to divert Israeli attention from a kidnapping raid on Israeli soldiers. Sheik Nasrallah preached, "death to America" and "each of us lives his days and nights hoping more than anything to be killed for the sake of Allah. The most honorable death is to be killed." These are but two more quotes omitted by the professors, who write that "it is impossible to make that case that the United States supported Israel" against Hezbollah "because it was the morally correct policy choice." They may think Israel had no moral high ground against Hezbollah — they clearly do think that — but to claim that such a case is "impossible to make" overstates it.

If Hezbollah is practically benign, in the view of Messrs. Walt and Mearsheimer, so too are Israel and America's other enemies. "Tehran has made several attempts in recent years to improve relations with Washington and settle outstanding differences, but Israel and its American supporters have been able to stymie any détente between Iran and the United States," they write. "Absent the lobby, there might already be a peace treaty between Israel and Syria." Israel's existence, they write, "is not in danger at present." Saudi Arabia, they claim, has offered to sign a peace treaty with Israel. "Remarkably, Iran has even offered to put its nuclear program up for negotiation and offered to work out a modus vivendi with Israel," they write. Israel's supporters in America doubtless wish the professors were right, but know they are not.

Also apparent, even in this newly polished presentation, is the shakiness of Messrs. Mearsheimer and Walt's grip on the facts. They claim that terrorist attacks "do relatively little damage to Israel's economy." What of the fact that, amid a terrorism surge, foreign tourism to Israel declined to 718,000 in 2002 from 2.7 million visitors in 2000? They claim that "the Arabs were not attempting to destroy Israel" in the wars of 1948, 1967, and 1973, dismissing the assertions of Arab leaders to the contrary as "largely rhetoric designed to appease their publics." The implication of the qualifier "largely" in that sentence, undermining as it does their own claim, seems largely to have escaped the professors.

The authors get a good ride out of the qualifier "largely" elsewhere in the book, too. "Unlike virtually every other country, Israel is largely immune from criticism on Capitol Hill," the professors write. The professors go on to name a long list of lawmakers who have criticized Israel, the country's supposed immunity notwithstanding — Paul Findley, Lincoln Chafee, Charles Hagel, Earl Hilliard, Pete McCloskey, William Fulbright, Roger Jepson, Charles Percy, Nick Rahall. Others, such as David Bonior, are omitted.

New to the book version is the claim that the Israel lobby is damaging not only American interests but also Israel's interests, a claim the authors repeat — with a straight face — again and again. Their concern for Israel's interests is touching, but it's a safe bet that the American Jewish leadership and the Israeli voters and elected officials have a more reliable judgment of what is in Israel's interests than do these two professors.

The professors have their own view of American Jews, reporting with a tone of some exasperation that many of them "still believe that anti-Semitism is rife." That view is sure to be confirmed after reading this book.

But one need not pass judgment on the motivations of Messrs. Walt and Mearsheimer to reject their conclusions. One can even assess, as does David Remnick, writing in this week's New Yorker, that, "Mearsheimer and Walt are not anti-Semites or racists," while still finding fault, as Mr. Remnick does, with their unrelentingly negative depiction of Israel and mystifyingly rosy depiction of Israel's enemies.

The professors blame the Israel lobby in America for nearly everything, from the failure of peace to break out between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs to the failure of peace to break out between America, Iran, and Syria. "In fact, the United States has a terrorism problem in good part because it has long been so supportive of Israel," they write. It's all too neat — the Israel lobby as an all-purpose scapegoat, a catch-all to blame for everything from the Iraq War to al Qaeda. As Mr. Remnick put it, "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 not a useful argument for Middle East policymakers, but it is an illuminating one for those concerned about the state of both the American publishing industry and higher education. The authors conclude by noting ecstatically that "In November 2006, twenty-five peace researchers in Germany called for questioning the ‘special relationship' between Germany and Israel,' because of Israel's actions against the Palestinians." That relationship is about to be eroded further by the publication of this book by the German company Holtzbrinck, through its imprint Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

That these authors could propound these views from prominent perches at respected American universities is a sign of a decline in standards in American higher education. During World War II, Harvard and the University of Chicago threw themselves into the effort to defeat the Nazis. In the current war, at least two professors are calling not for a defeat of the Islamist terrorists but for appeasing them at Israel's expense. This book is long but it offers not a scintilla of evidence that doing that would advance either America's security or the cause of freedom.