What I have urged more than anything else in the Israel lobby discussion is: discussion! Because only with open discussion can the true extent of the Israel lobby be understood. Chas Freeman's ouster has had a huge effect, of course. A week or so back David Rothkopf published a vicious attack on Walt and Mearsheimer at Foreign Policy suggesting the lobby is a figment of their gentile imaginations. Below, Jerry Slater, a friend of this site who has published his own critique of Walt and Mearsheimer and is distinguished for practicing the new history of Israel/Palestine in our country, leaps to the scholars' defense re Rothkopf. An ardent, sincere, and moving argument. Slater:
In the year and a half since the publication of John Mearsheimer’s and Stephen Walt’s Israel Lobby, the attacks on the book’s main arguments as well as personal attacks on its authors have intensified–even as Israeli policies and behavior towards the Palestinians have become more disastrous than ever, and even as the lobby demonstrated its muscle in its successful effort to induce Obama to abandon support for the appointment of Charles Freeman as Director of the National Intelligence Council.
The most recent such attack—and in a number of ways perhaps the nadir of all of them, at least for now–was David Rothkopf”s March 12 column on the Foreign Policy web site, “Why Freeman Was Wrong Himself About What His Defeat Signified.” Oddly, Rothkopf begins by admitting what is obvious to almost everyone else, that the Freeman affair “offered apparent support to the ‘theories’ of Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer…there is no doubt that a small group of virulent supporters of Israel were at the heart of the movement to undo Freeman” (emphasis in original), and that this group was “very effective in getting its message out and in mobilizing some in the government…to become their advocates.”
Rothkopf continues: Thanks to the efforts of this group and “the mob mentality [it] generated…it was impossible for [Freeman] to assume the role for which he was nominated,” the consequence of which was that “a great disservice [was] done to Freeman and to the U.S. government….When political leaders cave to the sentiments of the electronic mob…[they] debase the process and rob the government of the diversity of perspectives it needs.”
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