There’s been an important, wonderful development on the Israel/Palestine front that typically has gotten no attention: Hillel societies at American universities have helped sponsor the tour of the Israeli army veterans’ group, Breaking the Silence. I find this association as startling as that other great development of 2006: when the LRB published Walt and Mearsheimer on the Israel lobby.
What am I talking about? What is Breaking the Silence?
I met Yehuda Shaul last summer in Hebron. Raised Orthodox in Jerusalem, Shaul was a sergeant in the IDF serving in the Occupied Territories when he woke up one morning a couple of years ago and realized he did not recognize the person in the mirror. Everything he had been told was right and wrong as a boy had gotten blended into nothing. He had done hideous things that would make his parents and friends vomit if they knew about them, and he had curtained off these actions and been numbed to it all. He began talking to other soldiers and formed an organization, Breaking the Silence, to describe what Israeli society was forcing its youth to do for the occupation. He read history and came to the awareness that all military occupations become corrupt in exactly the ways that Israel’s is: humiliating the occupied, depriving them of human rights, let alone civil and democratic freedoms.
Shaul is this week wrapping up a five-week tour of the U.S. notable for the unbelievable photos he shows, taken by IDF soldiers, that document abuses. For instance, pictures taken by Israeli soldiers of other soldiers treating handcuffed and blindfolded Palestinian detainees as mannequins to do monkeyshines with.
The amazing development is that some of Shaul’s college events have been sponsored by Hillel chapters, the on-campus Jewish organization. (This according to Tammy Shapiro, who heads the Union of Progressive Zionists, which also sponsored portions of Shaul’s tour.) At some universities, the Hillel chapter declined to sponsor Shaul; and he was sponsored there by Palestinian groups. But (Shapiro notes,) at the U. of Wisconsin, the Hillel staff and leaders had a special meeting with Shaul, to hear what he had to say. At Columbia, a largely-Jewish group called Pro-Israel Progressives, which is related to the College Democrats, sponsored Shaul.
I find this amazing because it shows the discourse really is changing. And who is changing it? Youth. Shaul hasn’t met with any congressmen; Lantos and Pelosi already know what to think of the occupation—no problem—so they won’t meet with him. But these American campus organizations are tired of their role as cheerleaders for Israel. They understand that there is truth in the progressive understanding that occupation is crushing Israel’s soul. Can American Jewish youth break the logjam on the Israel lobby? Well they can help.
Israeli progressives will lead us, as they feel greater freedom to discuss these matters. Here I would point to the comments of two other members of Breaking the Silence who visited the U.S. a year ago. “My commanding officer told me that public opinion in the U.S. is the most powerful weapon that Israel has,” said Noam Chayut. “Public opinion here enables us to do many things that in my opinion are bringing us to our social destruction.” To which his friend Avichai Sharon chimed in: “It’s about time you know what you are enabling.”
Their insight recalls a statement by the black South African poet Dennis Brutus. When he was in prison under apartheid, a jailer said to him, “The African National Congress will never win, you know why—because the U.S. is on our side.” (Thanks to James North, author of Freedom Rising, for that.) The Israelis have placed a similar wager on our endless support for their injustices. They have been enabled so far by a stiffnecked, fearful and obedient Jewish leadership here. What a beautiful thing if it is idealistic Jewish youth that at last brings down this moral house of cards.
Oh my goodness, they did this:
"soldiers treating handcuffed and blindfolded Palestinian detainees as mannequins to do monkeyshines" how HORRIBLE!!!
Iraqi prisoners of the US forces wish they had it so good.
Wake up douche bag.
Go visit the pediatric ward of any Israeli hospital and see all of the Palestinian kids being treated for serious illnesses and birth defects.
croft: Go visit the pediatric ward of any Israeli hospital and see all of the Palestinian kids being treated for serious illnesses and birth defects.
Go visit any Palistinian cemetery and see the graves of all the Palistinian kids who died during childbirth because their mothers couldn't get through the Israel checkpoints to make it to the hospital.
That's the price they pay for smuggling bombs in ambulances…it's too bad that they have such damaged leadership…
REBUTTALS TO MEARSHEIMER & WALT'S ISRAEL LOBBY
By Jeff Weintraub
April 29, 2006
Rebuttals to Mearsheimer and Walt
Some Rebuttals to Mearsheimer & Walt's "Israel Lobby"
The manifesto attacking the "Israel Lobby" and its alleged stranglehold on US policy in the Middle East by two prominent "realist" academics, John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, appeared in mid-March in two versions: The full 83-page version (with footnotes) was printed as a Working Paper at Harvard entitled "The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy," and a condensed version (without footnotes) appeared in the London Review of Books (vol. 28, #6 – 23 March 2006) as "The Israel Lobby."
A number of critical responses have already appeared, many of which are internet-accessible. I referred to some of them in a few of my own previous posts: Mearsheimer & Walt on the Zionist Conspiracy… with a response by Herf & Markovits, Why Mearsheimer & Walt are wrong (continued), and Chomsky and Massad on Mearsheimer & Walt. It was suggested to me that it might be useful to collect a lot of the most serious and systematic critiques of Mearsheimer & Walt's argument in one place, so I have tried to do that below.
This is a preliminary list–not least because I expect that further critiques of M&W's argument will be appearing. Among the relatively brief responses, I think the letter to the LRB by Herf & Markovits remains the most substantial single critique. (I would also highlight the Forward editorial, despite the fact that it has a few slips and errors of its own, and the piece by Lee Smith, which is both cogent and hilarious–see here ). Any comprehensive, point-by-point refutation would have to be a long piece, given how many of M&W's assertions are either tendentious, misleading, logically questionable, or simply incorrect. So far, the only full-scale refutation I know of is the one by Alan Dershowitz that appeared on April 5, but I suspect that others are in the works. When they appear, they can be included in this list.
If anyone knows of other significant pieces that should also be included here, suggestions are welcome.
Yours for reality-based discourse,
Jeff Weintraub
P.S. Richard Kuper reminded me of a piece that appeared several months before Mearsheimer & Walt's paper, but which–in effect–strongly criticizes some key elements of their argument (since Mearsheimer & Walt are mostly just recycling earlier claims made by others). So while this piece does not precisely fit into the list below, it is nevertheless relevant and deserves to be mentioned here:
Steven Zunes, "The US Invasion of Iraq: Not the Fault of Israel and Its Supporters " Foreign Policy in Focus – January 4, 2006
================
Jeffrey Herf & Andrei Markovits, Letter to the London Review of Books | LRB (Vol. 28, #7) dated April 6, 2006 [also here ]
Martin Kramer, "Stephen Walt's World " | Sandstorm – March 17, 2006
Martin Kramer, "Israel and the Iraq War " | Sandstorm – April 12, 2006
Lee Smith, "A Place Called Saudi Arabia " | Michael J. Totten's Middle East Journal – March 20, 2006
Richard Baehr & Ed Lasky, "Stephen Walt's War with Israel " | American Thinker – March 20, 2006
Robert Fine, "The Lobby: Mearsheimer and Walt's Conspiracy Theory " | Engage – March 21, 2006
David Hirsh, "The Blame Game " | Guardian "Comment is Free" blog – March 21, 2006
Rick Richman, "Walt, Mearsheimer, and Academic Malpractice " | Jewish Current Issues – March 22, 2006
Shalom Lappin, "More on Mearsheimer and Walt " | Normblog – March 22, 2006
Ruth R. Wisse, "Harvard attack on 'Israel lobby' is actually a targeting of American public " | Jewish World Review – March 23, 2006
Forward Editorial, "In Dark Times, Blame the Jews " | Forward – March 24, 2006
ADL Analysis, "Mearsheimer and Walt's Anti-Israel Screed: A Relentless Assault in Scholarly Guise " | Anti-Defamation League – March 24, 2006
Adam Shatz, "Dialogue of the Deaf " | Guardian "Comment is Free" blog – March 24, 2006
[Shatz would clearly like to be able to praise M&W's paper. He goes out of his way to compliment their "welcome" contributions and dismiss their critics, and he devotes much of this piece to his own attacks on Israel and the "Israel Lobby"; but in the end he is forced to conclude that M&W's argument is overstated, unconvincing, and misleading. "[T]hey seem so in awe of the lobby's power that they have abandoned their realism for the fantasy that Washington is Israeli-occupied territory." –JW]
Ami Isseroff, "The Israel Lobby Revisited " | Zionism & Israel Web Log – March 26, 2006
Christopher Hitchens, "Overstating Jewish Power " | Slate.com – March 27, 2006
Noam Chomsky, "The Israel Lobby " | ZNet – March 28, 2006
Joseph Massad, "Blaming the Lobby " | Al Ahram Weekly On-line (#787) March 23-29, 2006
Max Boot, "Policy analysis — paranoid style " | Los Angeles Times – March 29, 2006
Erik Schechter, "The Lobby Made Me Do It " | Worldpress.org – March 29, 2006
Brendan Simms, "'The Israel Lobby': Why John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt are Wrong about United States Middle East Policy and Its Motivations – Brendan Simms Offers a 'Realist' Response to their LRB Article " | The Social Affairs Unit – March 29, 2006
Richard L. Cravatts, "The Paranoid View of History Infects Harvard " | History News Network – April 3, 2006
David Aaronovitch, "Terrorism, the Iraq war–now we can blame one mysterious, powerful group " | Times Online – April 4, 2006
Eliot A. Cohen, "Yes, It's Anti-Semitic " | Washington Post – April 5, 2006
Alan Dershowitz, "Debunking the Newest–and Oldest–Jewish Conspiracy: A Reply to the Mearsheimer-Walt 'Working Paper '" | Harvard Faculty Responses to KSG Working Papers – April 5, 2006
Alan Dershowitz, Letter to the London Review of Books | LRB (Vol. 28, #8) dated April 20, 2006
Jacob T. Levy, "Thoughts on 'The Israel Lobby' " | jacobtlevy.blogspot.com – April 6, 2006
Dov Waxman, "'The Israel Lobby"–Finally a Balanced Review " | The Globalist – April 6, 2006
Dov Waxman, "The Israel Lobby–Preserving an All-Around Perspective " | The Globalist – April 7, 2006
James Klurfeld, "'Israel lobby' didn't con Bush into invading Iraq " | Newsday – April 7, 2006
Ned Lazarus, "The Irony of Great Power Politics " | Ha'aretz – April 11, 2006
Jeremy Schreiber, Letter to the London Review of Books | LRB (Vol. 28, #8) dated April 20, 2006
John Gretton, Letter to the London Review of Books | LRB (Vol. 28, #8) dated April 20, 2006
Michael Grenfell, Letter to the London Review of Books | LRB (Vol. 28, #8) dated April 20, 2006
Michelle Goldberg, "Is the 'Israel Lobby" distorting America's Mideast policies? " | Salon.com – April 18, 2006
REBUTTALS TO MEARSHEIMER & WALT'S ISRAEL LOBBY
By Jeff Weintraub
April 29, 2006
Rebuttals to Mearsheimer and Walt
Some Rebuttals to Mearsheimer & Walt's "Israel Lobby"
The manifesto attacking the "Israel Lobby" and its alleged stranglehold on US policy in the Middle East by two prominent "realist" academics, John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, appeared in mid-March in two versions: The full 83-page version (with footnotes) was printed as a Working Paper at Harvard entitled "The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy," and a condensed version (without footnotes) appeared in the London Review of Books (vol. 28, #6 – 23 March 2006) as "The Israel Lobby."
A number of critical responses have already appeared, many of which are internet-accessible. I referred to some of them in a few of my own previous posts: Mearsheimer & Walt on the Zionist Conspiracy… with a response by Herf & Markovits, Why Mearsheimer & Walt are wrong (continued), and Chomsky and Massad on Mearsheimer & Walt. It was suggested to me that it might be useful to collect a lot of the most serious and systematic critiques of Mearsheimer & Walt's argument in one place, so I have tried to do that below.
This is a preliminary list–not least because I expect that further critiques of M&W's argument will be appearing. Among the relatively brief responses, I think the letter to the LRB by Herf & Markovits remains the most substantial single critique. (I would also highlight the Forward editorial, despite the fact that it has a few slips and errors of its own, and the piece by Lee Smith, which is both cogent and hilarious–see here ). Any comprehensive, point-by-point refutation would have to be a long piece, given how many of M&W's assertions are either tendentious, misleading, logically questionable, or simply incorrect. So far, the only full-scale refutation I know of is the one by Alan Dershowitz that appeared on April 5, but I suspect that others are in the works. When they appear, they can be included in this list.
If anyone knows of other significant pieces that should also be included here, suggestions are welcome.
Yours for reality-based discourse,
Jeff Weintraub
P.S. Richard Kuper reminded me of a piece that appeared several months before Mearsheimer & Walt's paper, but which–in effect–strongly criticizes some key elements of their argument (since Mearsheimer & Walt are mostly just recycling earlier claims made by others). So while this piece does not precisely fit into the list below, it is nevertheless relevant and deserves to be mentioned here:
Steven Zunes, "The US Invasion of Iraq: Not the Fault of Israel and Its Supporters " Foreign Policy in Focus – January 4, 2006
================
Jeffrey Herf & Andrei Markovits, Letter to the London Review of Books | LRB (Vol. 28, #7) dated April 6, 2006 [also here ]
Martin Kramer, "Stephen Walt's World " | Sandstorm – March 17, 2006
Martin Kramer, "Israel and the Iraq War " | Sandstorm – April 12, 2006
Lee Smith, "A Place Called Saudi Arabia " | Michael J. Totten's Middle East Journal – March 20, 2006
Richard Baehr & Ed Lasky, "Stephen Walt's War with Israel " | American Thinker – March 20, 2006
Robert Fine, "The Lobby: Mearsheimer and Walt's Conspiracy Theory " | Engage – March 21, 2006
David Hirsh, "The Blame Game " | Guardian "Comment is Free" blog – March 21, 2006
Rick Richman, "Walt, Mearsheimer, and Academic Malpractice " | Jewish Current Issues – March 22, 2006
Shalom Lappin, "More on Mearsheimer and Walt " | Normblog – March 22, 2006
Ruth R. Wisse, "Harvard attack on 'Israel lobby' is actually a targeting of American public " | Jewish World Review – March 23, 2006
Forward Editorial, "In Dark Times, Blame the Jews " | Forward – March 24, 2006
ADL Analysis, "Mearsheimer and Walt's Anti-Israel Screed: A Relentless Assault in Scholarly Guise " | Anti-Defamation League – March 24, 2006
Adam Shatz, "Dialogue of the Deaf " | Guardian "Comment is Free" blog – March 24, 2006
[Shatz would clearly like to be able to praise M&W's paper. He goes out of his way to compliment their "welcome" contributions and dismiss their critics, and he devotes much of this piece to his own attacks on Israel and the "Israel Lobby"; but in the end he is forced to conclude that M&W's argument is overstated, unconvincing, and misleading. "[T]hey seem so in awe of the lobby's power that they have abandoned their realism for the fantasy that Washington is Israeli-occupied territory." –JW]
Ami Isseroff, "The Israel Lobby Revisited " | Zionism & Israel Web Log – March 26, 2006
Christopher Hitchens, "Overstating Jewish Power " | Slate.com – March 27, 2006
Noam Chomsky, "The Israel Lobby " | ZNet – March 28, 2006
Joseph Massad, "Blaming the Lobby " | Al Ahram Weekly On-line (#787) March 23-29, 2006
Max Boot, "Policy analysis — paranoid style " | Los Angeles Times – March 29, 2006
Erik Schechter, "The Lobby Made Me Do It " | Worldpress.org – March 29, 2006
Brendan Simms, "'The Israel Lobby': Why John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt are Wrong about United States Middle East Policy and Its Motivations – Brendan Simms Offers a 'Realist' Response to their LRB Article " | The Social Affairs Unit – March 29, 2006
Richard L. Cravatts, "The Paranoid View of History Infects Harvard " | History News Network – April 3, 2006
David Aaronovitch, "Terrorism, the Iraq war–now we can blame one mysterious, powerful group " | Times Online – April 4, 2006
Eliot A. Cohen, "Yes, It's Anti-Semitic " | Washington Post – April 5, 2006
Alan Dershowitz, "Debunking the Newest–and Oldest–Jewish Conspiracy: A Reply to the Mearsheimer-Walt 'Working Paper '" | Harvard Faculty Responses to KSG Working Papers – April 5, 2006
Alan Dershowitz, Letter to the London Review of Books | LRB (Vol. 28, #8) dated April 20, 2006
Jacob T. Levy, "Thoughts on 'The Israel Lobby' " | jacobtlevy.blogspot.com – April 6, 2006
Dov Waxman, "'The Israel Lobby"–Finally a Balanced Review " | The Globalist – April 6, 2006
Dov Waxman, "The Israel Lobby–Preserving an All-Around Perspective " | The Globalist – April 7, 2006
James Klurfeld, "'Israel lobby' didn't con Bush into invading Iraq " | Newsday – April 7, 2006
Ned Lazarus, "The Irony of Great Power Politics " | Ha'aretz – April 11, 2006
Jeremy Schreiber, Letter to the London Review of Books | LRB (Vol. 28, #8) dated April 20, 2006
John Gretton, Letter to the London Review of Books | LRB (Vol. 28, #8) dated April 20, 2006
Michael Grenfell, Letter to the London Review of Books | LRB (Vol. 28, #8) dated April 20, 2006
Michelle Goldberg, "Is the 'Israel Lobby" distorting America's Mideast policies? " | Salon.com – April 18, 2006
A reply to Mearsheimer and Walt
Accusations of powerful Jews behind the scenes are part of the most dangerous traditions of modern anti-Semitism. So it is with dismay that we read John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt's "The Israel Lobby."
We have known and respected John Mearsheimer for over twenty years which makes the essay all the more unsettling. A long reply to the erroneous history of recent events they present would exceed the length of a letter to the editor. The following must suffice.
First, it is not true that the American relationship with Israel has been "the centrepiece of US Middle Eastern policy." That centrepiece has been and remains access to oil for the United States and for the global economy. As it became apparent during the 1960s that Israel was not merely the only democracy in the region but also a supporter of the West in the Cold War, the American relationship intensified. At that point, support for Israel, which had been strongest among liberals who supported a Jewish state in the wake of the Holocaust, expanded to include the previously less than enthusiastic traditional military and diplomatic foreign policy establishment, some of which was deeply hostile to Israel and suspicious of Jews, to put it mildly. This was not due to the efforts of the Jewish lobby or the power of the five million Jews (in a country of almost 300 million). It was due to an assessment of American national interest made by an overwhelmingly non-Jewish political and military establishment long before Christian fundamentalism became a factor in the Republican Party. It coincided with increasingly close ties with the Saudi regime.
Second, it is not true that the United States went to war in Iraq due to the pressure of a Jewish lobby. Even if the key decision makers were Jews, this would not prove the point about the Jewish lobby. As it happens, primary advisers and war planners for Bush were Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell and Rice and the entirely non-Jewish military leadership, not the usual suspects now trotted out by those peddling stories about Jewish power behind the scenes. Whatever Israel or its supporters in the United States may or may not have wanted, American and British leaders decided to go to war for their reasons grounded in their interpretation of the respective national interest. Saddam Hussein stunned and surprised his military leaders three months before the United States and Britain invaded by revealing to them that indeed, Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction. There were many officials in London and Washington – or Berlin and Paris, for that matter – who would have been just as surprised. One need not think the decision to go to war was the correct one to remember that it was not motivated by concerns about Israel's national security. One need not agree that oil below the ground and dictatorship above it posed an immediate threat to recall that British and American (as well as other Western) leaders believed that Saddam with weapons of mass destruction in years to come would have posed a threat to the other Arab oil producing states as much as Israel. Mearsheimer and Walt's realism ignores this conventional threat on the minds of American and British policy makers.
Third, while much opinion in the Arab and Islamic world has rejected the presence of a Jewish state in its midst, anti-Americanism, hatred of Europe (including Britain) and of liberal modernity in general would exist if Israel was not there. Mearsheimer and Walt stand in a long tradition of "realist" political scientists known for naivete regarding the power and import of ideological fanaticism in international affairs. This naivete is the reason that radical Islam and the enduring crises of modernization in the region that produced it receive hardly a word in their long attack.
Fourth, American Jewish citizens have a right to express their views without being charged with placing the interests of Israel ahead of those of the United States. Mearsheimer and Walt's attack appears eight years after the terrorist war against the West declared by Osama Bin Laden; six years after Ehud Barak offered a compromise plan to end the conflict and occupation of the West Bank and Yassir Arafat responded with a terrorist campaign of his own; after countless terrorist attacks all over the world by Al Qaeda and its sympathizers, including the London underground bombings; after repeated acts of terrorist barbarism in Iraq by radical Islamists; the declaration by the Iranian President that Israel should be wiped out and that the Holocaust was a myth; and most recently after the world's first electoral victory with a solid majority won by an openly anti-Semitic terrorist organization, Hamas. Mearsheimer and Walt further ignore that all of this happened also after Israel withdrew from Lebanon; offered the Barak plan; retaliated to the terrorist campaign as any state – including Britain or the United States – would; accepted the principle of a Palestinian state and thus agreed to withdraw from over 90% of the West Bank; and then withdrew completely from Gaza. If the Palestinians had responded to these offers of a compromise peace, they would now have a functioning state perhaps before radical Islam came to dominate their politics. It was radical Islamist and secular Palestinian militants as well, not the Jewish lobby, that destroyed prospects for a compromise settlement.
Were Mearsheimer and Walt's views to win the day in Washington – and we are confident that they won't – terrorists inspired by Islamic fundamentalism would conclude that the terror campaign of recent years has paid handsome dividends among some Western academics, perhaps among some Western politicians. If the United States concluded that it no longer had a vital interest in the continued survival of the only democracy in the Middle East, those now attacking Western modernity might conclude that the Americans could be convinced that defence of Europe – and Britain as well – was also not in the American interest. Turning one's back on one's good friends when times are tough has never been, is not now and will never be a realistic, decent or wise foreign policy.
Sincerely
Jeffrey Herf, Professor, Department of History, University of Maryland
Andrei S. Markovits, Karl W. Deutsch Collegiate Professor of Comparative Politics and German Studies, Department of Political Science and Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, The University of Michigan
I add just one comment of my own relating to this sentence: 'American Jewish citizens have a right to express their views without being charged with placing the interests of Israel ahead of those of the United States.' Yes, and Jewish citizens anywhere and everywhere likewise, mutatis mutandis. It is high time that the suggestion that somehow Jews are especially disqualified from having a voice in the affairs of whatever nation they belong to (lest they come to be a sinister cabal) was banished from acceptable political discourse. By that I don't mean it should become a criminal offence; I mean merely that it should be regarded and roundly condemned by everyone of progressive democratic outlook for what it is: at best, a disgraceful exercise in the operation of double standards; at worst, anti-Semitism.
A reply to Mearsheimer and Walt
Accusations of powerful Jews behind the scenes are part of the most dangerous traditions of modern anti-Semitism. So it is with dismay that we read John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt's "The Israel Lobby."
We have known and respected John Mearsheimer for over twenty years which makes the essay all the more unsettling. A long reply to the erroneous history of recent events they present would exceed the length of a letter to the editor. The following must suffice.
First, it is not true that the American relationship with Israel has been "the centrepiece of US Middle Eastern policy." That centrepiece has been and remains access to oil for the United States and for the global economy. As it became apparent during the 1960s that Israel was not merely the only democracy in the region but also a supporter of the West in the Cold War, the American relationship intensified. At that point, support for Israel, which had been strongest among liberals who supported a Jewish state in the wake of the Holocaust, expanded to include the previously less than enthusiastic traditional military and diplomatic foreign policy establishment, some of which was deeply hostile to Israel and suspicious of Jews, to put it mildly. This was not due to the efforts of the Jewish lobby or the power of the five million Jews (in a country of almost 300 million). It was due to an assessment of American national interest made by an overwhelmingly non-Jewish political and military establishment long before Christian fundamentalism became a factor in the Republican Party. It coincided with increasingly close ties with the Saudi regime.
Second, it is not true that the United States went to war in Iraq due to the pressure of a Jewish lobby. Even if the key decision makers were Jews, this would not prove the point about the Jewish lobby. As it happens, primary advisers and war planners for Bush were Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell and Rice and the entirely non-Jewish military leadership, not the usual suspects now trotted out by those peddling stories about Jewish power behind the scenes. Whatever Israel or its supporters in the United States may or may not have wanted, American and British leaders decided to go to war for their reasons grounded in their interpretation of the respective national interest. Saddam Hussein stunned and surprised his military leaders three months before the United States and Britain invaded by revealing to them that indeed, Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction. There were many officials in London and Washington – or Berlin and Paris, for that matter – who would have been just as surprised. One need not think the decision to go to war was the correct one to remember that it was not motivated by concerns about Israel's national security. One need not agree that oil below the ground and dictatorship above it posed an immediate threat to recall that British and American (as well as other Western) leaders believed that Saddam with weapons of mass destruction in years to come would have posed a threat to the other Arab oil producing states as much as Israel. Mearsheimer and Walt's realism ignores this conventional threat on the minds of American and British policy makers.
Third, while much opinion in the Arab and Islamic world has rejected the presence of a Jewish state in its midst, anti-Americanism, hatred of Europe (including Britain) and of liberal modernity in general would exist if Israel was not there. Mearsheimer and Walt stand in a long tradition of "realist" political scientists known for naivete regarding the power and import of ideological fanaticism in international affairs. This naivete is the reason that radical Islam and the enduring crises of modernization in the region that produced it receive hardly a word in their long attack.
Fourth, American Jewish citizens have a right to express their views without being charged with placing the interests of Israel ahead of those of the United States. Mearsheimer and Walt's attack appears eight years after the terrorist war against the West declared by Osama Bin Laden; six years after Ehud Barak offered a compromise plan to end the conflict and occupation of the West Bank and Yassir Arafat responded with a terrorist campaign of his own; after countless terrorist attacks all over the world by Al Qaeda and its sympathizers, including the London underground bombings; after repeated acts of terrorist barbarism in Iraq by radical Islamists; the declaration by the Iranian President that Israel should be wiped out and that the Holocaust was a myth; and most recently after the world's first electoral victory with a solid majority won by an openly anti-Semitic terrorist organization, Hamas. Mearsheimer and Walt further ignore that all of this happened also after Israel withdrew from Lebanon; offered the Barak plan; retaliated to the terrorist campaign as any state – including Britain or the United States – would; accepted the principle of a Palestinian state and thus agreed to withdraw from over 90% of the West Bank; and then withdrew completely from Gaza. If the Palestinians had responded to these offers of a compromise peace, they would now have a functioning state perhaps before radical Islam came to dominate their politics. It was radical Islamist and secular Palestinian militants as well, not the Jewish lobby, that destroyed prospects for a compromise settlement.
Were Mearsheimer and Walt's views to win the day in Washington – and we are confident that they won't – terrorists inspired by Islamic fundamentalism would conclude that the terror campaign of recent years has paid handsome dividends among some Western academics, perhaps among some Western politicians. If the United States concluded that it no longer had a vital interest in the continued survival of the only democracy in the Middle East, those now attacking Western modernity might conclude that the Americans could be convinced that defence of Europe – and Britain as well – was also not in the American interest. Turning one's back on one's good friends when times are tough has never been, is not now and will never be a realistic, decent or wise foreign policy.
Sincerely
Jeffrey Herf, Professor, Department of History, University of Maryland
Andrei S. Markovits, Karl W. Deutsch Collegiate Professor of Comparative Politics and German Studies, Department of Political Science and Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, The University of Michigan
I add just one comment of my own relating to this sentence: 'American Jewish citizens have a right to express their views without being charged with placing the interests of Israel ahead of those of the United States.' Yes, and Jewish citizens anywhere and everywhere likewise, mutatis mutandis. It is high time that the suggestion that somehow Jews are especially disqualified from having a voice in the affairs of whatever nation they belong to (lest they come to be a sinister cabal) was banished from acceptable political discourse. By that I don't mean it should become a criminal offence; I mean merely that it should be regarded and roundly condemned by everyone of progressive democratic outlook for what it is: at best, a disgraceful exercise in the operation of double standards; at worst, anti-Semitism.
wise king
Do you really have to copy-paste these so often?
Americans know whether the Israeli Lobby has too much power or not. All the apologists in the world can't change that.
al,
when you refer to Americans, do you mean;
isolationist paleocon antisemites?
apostate self-loathing ex-jews, like little phil weiss?
paranoid conspiracy theorists of both extremes?
I thought it might be fun/informative to do a Dermatology forum.
There is so much misinformation/hype/b.s. out there. Perhaps we can cut through it all.
never mind Dermatology forum,
that was from a different/better publication
I thought it might be fun/informative to do a Dermatology forum.
There is so much misinformation/hype/b.s. out there. Perhaps we can cut through it all.
the wise king apologizes for the multipasting.
seems our friend little phil weiss now blocks certain posters thus making it more of a challenge to present counterpoints out here. this results in the occasional technical error.
cheers.
Wise King: Are you sure you are not Bill Pearlman, traveling under a false flag? You and Pearlman have an eerie similarity to your prose.
On the other hand, I did appreciate you pasting in articles to substantiate your position — the first time you posted them. Once was enough, for the same article.
A question: Do you ever read the English version of Haaretz? Do you ever look at the work of Amira Hass (Israeli, daughter of Holocaust survivors), Meron Benvenisti (former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, now supporter of a one-state solution), Gideon Levy, and others? They live in Israel, yet they are sharply critical of Israeli government policy. If you read them, what do you think?
very single day, hundreds of African tribesmen are killed in Darfur by militias acting with the blessing of Sudan's Arab Islamist government. Each day, Hamas bombs from Gaza deliberately target innocent Israeli civilians in Sderot: although the weapons are crude, they occasionally find their mark — last week a Qassam killed Fatima Slutsker, a 57-year-old (Muslim) Israeli woman who was waiting for her (Jewish) Israeli husband at a bus stop. Hezbollah, backed by Iran and Syria, has ratcheted up its campaign of violence this week, assassinating a Maronite Christian cabinet minister in Lebanon in a blatant attempt to provoke a constitutional crisis. (As of this writing, under the Byzantine Lebanese constitution, the terrorist group needs to eliminate only one more minister to bring about the collapse of the government.) The life-span of Zimbabweans is 34 years, and 550,000 have died over the past three years due to deliberate policies of the Mugabe dictatorship.
All of these barbaric crimes are human and moral tragedies that call for international action, prioritization, even obsession. But that self-proclaimed source of international legitimacy, the United Nations is not obsessed or even particularly concerned with any of them. None of these abuses of human rights by authoritarian regimes or movements was the object of the General Assembly resolution "condemning the military assaults…which have caused loss of life and extensive destruction…of property…in particular the killing of many… civilians, including children and women." For none of these violations of the right to life did the UN summon righteous indignation to "emphasize the importance of the safety and well-being of all civilians" and demand "the immediate cessation of military incursions and all acts of violence, terror, provocation, incitement and destruction."
Rather, since November 7, the UN has been obsessed with one accident, committed in self-defense, by the world body's favorite pariah, the democratic State of Israel.
A brief reminder of uncontoverted facts is in order:
In August 2005 Israel disengaged from the entire Gaza strip, after pledges by the Palestinian Authority (PA) that it would not use the area to wage war on Israel, and that it would remain faithful to the "roadmap for peace."
Immediately after Israeli disengagement the Palestinians broke their word. Hamas-backed terrorists have fired more than 1,000 Qassam rockets at Israeli civilians like Mrs. Slutsker. Via arms smuggling operations in southern Gaza, terrorists have brought in more than 30 tons of high explosives. This massive smuggling of lethal weapons from Egypt has taken place with the silent complicity of Cairo (Egypt had promised to seal its border against terrorist traffic under an international accord brokered Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice), and with no effort by PA police to prevent the transit. Indeed, the Palestinian government itself essentially declared war on Israel with the election of Hamas. The kidnapping of an Israel soldier and killing of two others by forces the PA clearly harbors if not supports is another transparent act of war.
Bombs fall regularly on Sderot and Ashkelon, Israel, from northern Gaza in general and from the village of Beit Hanoun in particular. Hamas spokesmen have admitted that one of their key objectives is to force the evacuation of all Israeli towns and villages around the Gaza Strip. Obliged to protect its own civilians, Israel initially used its intelligence to target the locations of individual murderers, but both because of intelligence failures and the craven use of Palestinian women and children as human shields, the Jewish state has put these targeted killings on hold.
Israel's remaining recourse, short of re-occupying Gaza (which doubtless will incur the indignant wrath of the world community…) is to launch missiles at the sites of rocket launchers. This it has done. Because of equipment failure, one single missile missed its mark, landing instead on an apartment house and tragically killing nineteen women and children. Israel expressed extreme regret immediately for this event (one searches in vain for such contrition from Hamas). But of course the Hamas murderers are the ones who bear ultimate moral responsibility for these deaths.
Angry residents screamed at the car that brought UN Commission on Human Rights Louise Arbour under heavy security to Sderot early Tuesday. The day before, Qubcoise law professor had slammed Israel for "intolerable violations" of Palestinian human rights during a visit to Gaza's Beit Hanoun.
Therein lies the rub, the incredible rub, the impossible-to-explain-otherwise-than-as-anti-Semitism rub. The one Israeli missile that struck the Beit Hanoun apartment house was: 1) launched in justifiable self-defense; 2) reasonably produced and targeted; and 3) absolutely not intended to kill civilians. The daily Palestinian bombs, meanwhile, are 1) acts of aggressive war; 2) callously launched without any effort to aim them accurately at military targets (in fact, legal experts long ago concluded that the use of the notoriously inaccurate Qassams are ipso facto a war crime since they simply cannot be targeted); and 3) in fact meant to kill and terrorize civilians.
This asymmetry is well understood by Palestinians. The Jabaliya Refugee Camp in Gaza was the scene of Palestinian celebrations earlier this week. Locals celebrated the victory of female "human shields" in thwarting an air strike against the home of murderous terrorist Wail Barud. Note the implications of this celebration: it demonstrates that Palestinians know that Israel does not seek to kill civilians wholesale. Palestinians do not believe their own propaganda about the Zionist thirst for blood — otherwise they would not have been able to recruit those human shields. Human shields are worthless in the face of the heinous enemy Israel is supposed to be. If Israel placed "human shields" in front of Hamas, they would be mowed down.
In the face of this asymmetry, how does the international community react? Why, by blaming the Jews, as Ms. Arbour has done. For fourteen days, despite all the tragedies in the world, the UN has done virtually nothing but condemn Israel for its reasonable act of self-defense.
Consider:
The General Assembly convened a special emergency session on November 17 to censure Israel. Were the circumstances of Beit Hanoun not so tragic, this episode would read like a satirical farce. The session was called by none other than Fidel Castro's mouthpiece at Turtle Bay, Cuban Ambassador Rodrgo Malmierca Daz, acting as chair of the "Non-Aligned Movement." Diaz was seconded by Senegalese envoy Paul Badji, chair of the "UN Committee for the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People." (There is no committee for the rights of the Jews, Christians, Bahais, Darfurians, Tibetans, or members of other faiths in Muslim countries.) Next to the podium was none other than the ambassador of that country of free and fair elections, Ilgar Mammadov of Azerbaijian, chair of the "Organization of the Islamic Conference." Israel's UN representative, Ambassador Dan Gillerman, was diplomatically understating it when he said the General Assembly was being "used, abused, and hijacked."
The special emergency session's anti-Israel resolution passed by 156 votes to 7. Only Australia, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, and Palau joined Israel and the United States in opposition. (Canada, Cte d'Ivoire, Papua New Guinea, Tonga, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu abstained.) The resolution called, inter alia, for the establishment of an international mission under the personal supervision of UN chief Kofi Annan to probe the "circumstances of the incident," as well as a demand that the UN defend the Palestinian population. American media reported that former US President Jimmy Carter might instead head the probe committee. (Carter's latest book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, slams Israel as an "apartheid state," undoubtedly to establish his "expert credentials" to undertake assignments on behalf of the international lynch mob.) Fortunately, resolutions of the General Assembly, while bothersome, are not legally binding.
Only a U.S. veto, wielded by Ambassador John Bolton, avoided a UN Security Council resolution condemning Israel which would have been legally binding, opening the way to sanctions. Ambassador Bolton was furious at the blatant perfidy of the international body. His remarks are worth quoting at some length. "This type of resolution serves only to exacerbate tensions by serving the interests of elements hostile to Israel's inalienable and recognized right to exist," he noted. "This deepens suspicions about the United Nations that will lead many to conclude that the organization is incapable of playing a helpful role in the region." "In a larger sense, the United Nations must confront a more significant question, that of its relevance and utility in confronting the challenges of the 21st century. We believe that the United Nations is ill served when its members seek to transform the organization into a forum that is a little more than a self-serving and a polemical attack against Israel or the United States," Bolton continued. "The problem of anti-Israel bias is not unique to the Human Rights Council. It is endemic to the culture of the United Nations. It is a decades-old, systematic problem that transcends the whole panoply of the UN organizations and agencies." [This is the man the Democrats want to eliminate as our UN ambassador - we think he should win the Nobel Peace Prize.]
Last week the laughable UN Human Rights Council held its third special session in less than six months focusing on Israel alone.. In its entire existence the Human Rights Council has failed to pass one resolution on any country other than Israel, events taking place in Burma, North Korea Cuba, and the states mentioned to at the beginning of this essay notwithstanding. (See our article earlier this year on the Human Rights Council.) Meanwhile, back in the real world, ninety-two percent of respondents in a recent poll of one thousand adult Egyptians characterize Israel as an enemy state. Only 2 percent see Israel as "a friend to Egypt." These sentiments express themselves in many ways, including a popular song entitled "I Hate Israel," venomously anti-Semitic Egyptian political cartoons, bizarre conspiracy theories, and terrorist attacks against visiting Israelis. Egypt's leading democracy movement, Kifaya, recently launched an initiative to collect a million signatures on a petition demanding the annulment of the March 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty. (One wonders if they intend to return the Sinai to Israel, since it was relinquished in consideration of peace?)
Mark Steyn muses on the blatant double standard of the international community in an essay in the Jerusalem Post
"The Zionist Entity is for the moment permitted to remain in business but, like Aaron Lazarus, it's not entitled to the enforceable property rights of every other nation state. No other country – not Canada, not Slovenia, not Thailand – would be expected to forego the traditional rights of nations subjected to kidnappings of its citizens, random rocket attacks into residential areas, and other infringements of its sovereignty….
"…by ensuring that the ‘Palestinian question' is never resolved one is also ensuring that Israel's sovereignty is also never really settled…. The Jew is tolerated as a current leaseholder but, as in Anthony Hope's Ruritania, he can never truly own the land. Once again the Jews are rootless transients, though, in one of history's blacker jests, they're now bemoaned in the salons of London and Paris as an outrageous imposition of an alien European population on the Middle East…. With hindsight, even the artful invention of the hitherto unknown ethnicity of ‘Palestinian' can be seen as the need to demonstrate that where there is a Jew there is the Jew's victim. It's a very strange feeling to read 19th century novels and travelogues and recognize the old psychoses currently reemerging in even more preposterous forms. These are dark times for the world: we are on the brink of the nuclearization of ancient pathologies."
The threat of a second Holocaust grows more acute by the day. The mutation of the world's oldest hatred, in a West that stood by during the first Holocaust, cries out for immediate response. Who, apart from America, is willing to furnish one?
See how little the Zionists did for themselves in regards to fighting against the Third Reich. They scattered in order to be safe while others were left to put up a defense.
http://www.marxists.de/middleast/brenner/ch21.htm
The Online text "When Victims Rule" has a lot of info in this regard as well, particularly Chapter 18 Pts 1 & 2.
http://www.jewishtribalreview.org/open.htm
The Wise King: American Jewish citizens have a right to express their views without being charged with placing the interests of Israel ahead of those of the United States.
No American citizen has the right to place Israeli interests ahead of those of the United States. And when anyone does, the rest of us have the right to call such people what they really are–traitors to America.
Darfur is not the only genocide which was not stopped recently besides the Holocaust. Ukraine, Stalin's purges, China's Great Leap Forward, Congo, Cambodia and North Korea (self-genocide in some of these cases). Should the US have invaded in these cases? I think not. US politicians would have had to call for a sacrifice which almost all individual Americans would not be willing to accept.
With respect to Israel and nuclear attack it is the same. I am not willing to risk nuclear attack on the US to save Israel from the same. Well, maybe if Israel were innocent. But the occupied territories remove all moral legitimacy from Israel. She can keep her Army there, but get the settlers out.
Israel should announce that she will nuke Mecca or Damascus or whatever if Tel Aviv goes. The US should do the same with respect to any US city.
Then we should concentrate on fighting terrorism and solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. No more pre-emptive wars. No forced exporting of democracy. It worked in the Cold War and it's our best bet now.
AMERICAN POLITICIANS FOR SALE
I'm new to all of this, but since first learning of the Israeli Lobby I've done some looking and it's hard to refute the fact that Israel has a stronghold on our politicians. I don't criticize Israel for this, in fact, I congratulate them. However, I strongly criticize our American politicians for selling us out.
Because Israel is surrounded by enenies on every side, we must provide adequate defensive support to them, but we should not be taking sides the way we do. Our mission as a world leader should be to negotiate peace.
To: Jeffrey Herf
You: Fourth, American Jewish citizens have a right to express their views without being charged with placing the interests of Israel ahead of those of the United States.
Me: Then it should follow that American citizens have the right to express their views without being charged
with anti-Semitism.(As Dershowitz and so many others are quick to do.)
This is a war no one can win. A negotiated peace is the only sensible answer and that's the only "side" the US should be on.
Democracy Now! has the interview with Yehuda Shaul. On breaking the silence, telling the stories about what the Israeli military occupation of Palestine is like, he says:
" … in my eyes, responsibility doesn't end with ex-soldiers who served there. …. Americans for sure, because at the end of the day for all what Israel does, there is only one country in the world that the chief of staff and the prime minister of Israel has to report in the end of the day, and that's the United States of America. For that reason, I think the people of America must know what's going on there and must break their own silence and take civil responsibility, human responsibility, to what is being done there."
Yehuda Shaul is 23 years old, he was conscripted at age 18 and served for about 2 years in Hebron. His group, "Breaking The Silence" has been active in Israel for about 2 years and has now come to America. He is not a refusnik.
IDF refusniks now number 1,670 — translated into American is about the equivalent of 100,000 US military refusals to serve in a war.
It is interesting the way the AIPAC/Israeli crowd have flooded this thread with commentary on an old issue. But to no avail, I believe. When IDF soldiers start speaking in America the game is pretty well over. All over but the mopping up. Pass the popcorn.