Hurray for democracy. The Dallas Morning News’ editorial board has also given a forum to John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt (and apparently made up for this by reprinting Richard Cohen‘s Hatikvah-humming attack on the pair from the Washington Post of a week earlier).
The interview is marked by Mearsheimer’s best quality: his frankness about his thought process in a political context:
What’s going on here is that there is a
conventional wisdom in the United States about the state of Israel that we
are challenging. And that conventional wisdom tends to portray Israel in the
most positive light. And that’s due in good part to the fact that the
[pro-Israel] lobby works very hard to shape public discourse about Israel.. You know, and everybody who works for a major newspaper in this
country knows, that if you write articles critical of Israel, or talk about
the U.S.-Israeli relationship in a critical way, you’ll feel a tremendous
amount of heat from pro-Israel readers. As a consequence of this, we have a
discourse in this country that’s out of sync with No. 1, the history of
Israel, and No. 2, what’s going on in the Middle East today. We don’t love Israel. It’s not that we dislike Israel. Our argument in
the book is simply that Israel should be treated like a normal country.
But bad people have appropriated your work for their own malicious
ends. Do you have any moral responsibility for this?
What our critics are saying is we can’t talk about
this lobby because it might fuel anti-Semitism. That’s a fallacious
argument. It’s very important in the United States that we be able to talk
seriously about the principal actors that shape American foreign policy,
especially in the Middle East, because if you look at the Middle East today,
it’s very clear that the United States is in serious trouble. And we believe
that one of the reasons we’re in serious trouble – I underline "one of the
reasons" – is because of the efforts of the lobby… I do believe
there are anti-Semites in the United States, and there are anti-Semites in
Europe. Steve and I go to great lengths to condemn them in the book and to
condemn them every time we speak publicly…But I don’t believe this is the 1930s, and there’s imminent danger of a
massive increase in anti-Semitism. And to be perfectly frank, if I did
believe that were the case, I don’t believe I would have agreed to write the
book.
