Steve Walt reflects on the publication of the Israel lobby paper 5 years ago. He says that he and co-author Mearsheimer managed to raise awareness and open up an important conversation, or helped to do so, along with Israel’s intransigence; that J Street and JVP are the very sort of new groups they were pushing to see emerge; and that they failed in their main objective, to influence White House policy for the better. (Though I’d inject, if they had succeeded, people would be saying, Walt and Mearsheimer were wrong, see there is no Israel lobby; and Obama’s failure has vindicated the scholars). And this:
The result, unfortunately, is that a two-state solution that would secure Israel’s long-term future is farther away than ever, and America’s image in the region — which showed signs of improvement at the time of Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech — remains parlous. And we are now witnessing a series of political upheavals in the Arab world that are likely to create governments that are far more sensitive to public sentiment than their predecessors were, even if they fall short of being perfect democracies. These new governments will pay more attention to the “Arab street,” where the Palestinian issue resonates in powerful ways. This situation will raise the costs of the “special relationship” even more, which makes America’s failure to achieve a two-state solution over the past 20 years — a failure for which the lobby bears considerable (though not all) responsibility — especially tragic.
Finally, I am sometimes asked whether I have any regrets about writing the article or the book. My answer is clear: absolutely not. As I told a Harvard official back in 2006, it was a “life-altering” event in the sense that it almost certainly closed some doors that might otherwise have been open to me. But writing the book and engaging in serious public debate about Israeli policy, the “special relationship,” and the lobby also taught me a lot about politics and introduced me to a new community of scholars, policy analysts, and journalists from whom I’ve learned an enormous amount and who have become valued colleagues. I would do it again without hesitation, and I would not alter any of our central arguments.
