Who's afraid of the `Israel Lobby'?
The idea of a powerful "Jewish lobby" that has its gnarled fingers in the machinery of the government is an old and repugnant canard. Along with the Jews who supposedly own the media and those who reputedly control the banks, the cabal of sinister,
third-column Hebrews who whisper into the ears of our leaders is a classic in the traditional checklist of anti-Semitic fulminations.
So it's no surprise that in the modern era, even to broach the idea of a "Jewish lobby" is unacceptable. It's just not done in polite society -- even in situations in which there's some truth to it. Few would deny, after all, that there are people who lobby for various Jewish issues, including, of course, Israel (just as there are a lot of Jews working in Hollywood and just as Jews do own the New York Times). But even though we know these things, we generally don't talk about them.
That's why it was a bit of a shock last week when a 12,000-word article by two eminent professors -- Stephen Walt, the academic dean of Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, and John Mearsheimer, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago -- appeared in the London Review of Books under the title "The Israel Lobby." Not quite the same words as the offensive phrase above, but close enough to raise a ruckus.
According to the two academics, the United States' "unwavering support" for Israel -- including the $3 billion a year we give in direct assistance, as well as the decades of unequivocal military and diplomatic support we've provided -- is justified by neither strategic nor moral imperatives.
Perhaps Israel was a strategic asset during the Cold War (oil embargo aside), but more recently it has inflamed Arab and Islamic public opinion and emboldened the world's Osama bin Ladens, they say. It has made us more -- not less -- vulnerable to terrorism. What's more, Israel routinely ignores U.S. requests (to stop building settlements, say, or end "targeted assassinations"). Our acceptance of its nuclear arsenal makes us look hypocritical on proliferation issues.
Nor is our support of Israel morally justifiable, according to Walt and Mearsheimer. Despite the common view, Israel is, in fact, the Goliath in the Middle East, not the David. It is not a truly democratic country, but an avowedly Jewish state in which Arabs live as second-class citizens, a country that has committed crimes against its Palestinian neighbors with which the U.S. should be ashamed to be associated.
