Walt and Mearsheimer’s book on the Israel Lobby is being
published today. I finished it last night. I said before that it was historic, but I did not realize quite what it was till I put it down: a great work of American muckraking in the tradition of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (the meatpacking industry), Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (pesticides), and Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed (Detroit). An overkill moral beauty aimed at an outrage, some day this book will be legendary and dated. Young people will ask, What was all the fuss about? Were politicians really blacklisted for criticizing the settlements? You will tell them yes. Then they’ll pull down a yellowed copy of this book from your shelf and find it mechanical and dated.
The reason it will seem dated is, it will have done its job. Ralph Nader once feared for his life; today carmakers advertise the safety of their cars, and Mike Kinsley calls Ralph "Saint Ralph." With this book, two great foreign-policy scholars have thrown their bodies down. What you see here is their life work. They are willing to sacrifice
reputation and future-career-arc for this study, and by book’s end, there is a tremendous sense of calm and achievement, when having made their case they restate their intellectual goal: to restore American
foreign policy in the Middle East to its senses.
"Ending the [Palestinian/Israeli] conflict should be seen as a national security priority for the United States. But this will not happen as long as the lobby makes it impossible for American leaders to use the leverage at their disposal to pressure Israel into ending the occupation and creating a viable Palestinian state…One cannot fathom contemporary Palestinian nationalism without being aware of the events surrounding the 1948 war… al-Nakba, or ‘the Catastrophe.’..Although we deplore the Palestinians’ reliance on terrorism and are well aware of their own contribution to prolonging the conflict, we believe their grievances are genuine and must be addressed…"
sense will finish this book in agreement.
I’ve wondered here whether the book
will be ignored. Now I am sure, it can’t be. It may be
ignored by the press; the authors may be be banned from speaking (though their website reveals a talk at "Politics and Prose" in D.C. tomorrow night (I imagine CSPAN will be there) and then Stephen Colbert next month!), it will surely
be savaged by the Dershowitzes and Foxmans and the Forward too. None of that matters. This book
is too powerful, and the ground has been prepared by Jimmy Carter’s book. So it will be passed around, it will be taught. Serious
people will press it on other serious people. Political aides will hand it to other
political aides. It may have to wear brown-paper covers in Congress, at the State Department and at Hillels, but it will be read hungrily. Young progressive Jews will read it. Arabs will translate it into Arabic. It will go like lightning around Europe. Israelis will snap it up (the book is actually very respectful of Israel; it’s America that has the big problem), and someday it will come out in Hebrew. It will work on people. It will
show what independent people ought to do when they form ideas, and others will chime in. A politician will finally speak out, with Walt and Mearsheimer as his or her role model.
The most important thing
the book will do, it is doing: legitimizing the discussion. Till now
this discourse has been considered a place for the unhinged. I never acquired former
Congressman Paul Findley’s book, They Dare to Speak Out, because it had a whiff
of anger and hysteria about it, and people are afraid of that. Norman
Finkelstein has done truly great scholarship that paved the way for W&M, but the incredible viciousness of
the campaign against him has inevitably made him angry and scared others
away. (Maybe this book will give him breathing room–or a frikkin’ job!) When David Remnick said that Walt
and Mearsheimer are not anti-Semites, their legitimization took a big step forward. I bet Chris Matthews will have them on. The conversation could snowball. (Why, look at this, the Washington Post questioning junkets to Israel!)
I have lots of
quibbles with the book. It is dense and dry. The authors handle personality like sheetrock. I think I saw one playful sentence. The language is often elegant and stirring, but it is stripped of
surface affect, without metaphor. This book teems with facts like a prosecutor’s brief, as Remnick put it. Evidently the authors were hurt by their experience of
being labeled antisemites, and they mean to answer in cold endless fact. I would have liked more flight and synthesis; W&M insist on keeping their feet on the ground. The discussion of dual loyalty is politically-correct and unimaginative to the point of being stupid. I wanted more U.S. sociology and Zionist history, more Jewish intellectual history. The authors dip their toes in but are afraid to talk too much about Jewish culture. A great idea in the book is that at the end of the cold war,
its rationale for the special relationship in providing an airstrip against the Soviet Union; but that now the “war on terror” has restored
that raison d’etre, under the false claim, We are in the same war. I would have liked them to develop that theory.
None of those quibbles matters. Because the analysis and moral argument
are so magnificent.
I realize I have not mentioned one fact from the book. Let me do that. I will pick out one story that tells it all.
Halfway through the 2006 Lebanon War, Maryland Congressman Chris Van Hollen–having heroically knocked off a Republican in 2004 over the incumbent’s Iraq War vote–wrote a sharp letter to Condoleezza
Rice urging the U.S. to pressure Israel to cease fire. Israel had caused “large loss of civilian life, and produced
over 750,000 refugees.” It had weakened the Lebanese government and
strengthened Hezbollah. “We have squandered an opportunity to isolate
Hezbollah…” Etc.
The bravery of Van Hollen’s letter was that an antiwar congressman was speaking the truth
at a moment it needed to be spoken. If America could have served any purpose in that war,
it should have been to hold Israel back, or say, This is not good. Van Hollen was stomped on. Right after the letter, Schmuel Rosner clucked in Haaretz that Van Hollen was to meet with AIPAC and “he will hear that this was an
unacceptable move.” An unacceptable move for a U.S. Congressman to open his mouth against an Israeli war, having gained his seat by opposing the Iraq War. Then Van Hollen issued an apology.
This wasn’t enough. The Jewish Community Relations Council of Washington said he had to reach out to
the Jewish community to undo the damage. The ADL said the apology wasn’t convincing in light of the anti-Israel character of the letter. After the war, Van Hollen duly went to Israel on a
special AIPAC-affiliated junket, to learn the error of his ways.
And meanwhile, AIPAC’s president crowed in a letter to supporters: "Look what you’ve done!… Only ONE nation in the world came out and flatly declared: Let Israel finish the job. That nation is the United States… and the reason it had such a clear, unambiguous view of the situation is YOU and the rest of American Jewry."
Look what they’d done. The Lebanon war stopped two weeks later, and we all know now what had
taken place: a disaster. Something like 50 Israelis killed and 1000
Lebanese, the
southern Lebanese infrastructure destroyed, including hospitals and
stores and bridges–for what, for nothing. As Van Hollen understood, Hezbollah was empowered.
Nasrallah became a hero. The
IDF hostages weren’t released. And Israel has since experienced a sense
of desperate waste. The Israeli army chief of staff, who called in his
stock sales just before the war began, was dismissed. And southern
Lebanon was
strewn with illegal cluster bombs, so that Lebanese children are
dismembered to this day.
Now here is
a breathtaking fact about this dramatic story of political muscle and dishonesty and tergiversation. Per W&M, It was only covered by Eric
Fingerhut in the Washington Jewish Week. Such a revealing moment in political life, it should have been front page of the LA Times or the Journal, or a big magazine article. But you did not read
it in the New York Times, and so the mugging wasn’t condemned on Op-Ed pages. I.e., an outspoken politician was provided absolutely no political cover for sticking his head up. At the end of their book, W&M identify this intimidated silence as the first problem they are trying to fix, a blot on our democracy.
One last point. For
years I thought of writing a "J’accuse" to my brothers in the American press to say that they were not covering a giant fact of our political landscape they all knew about, the Israel lobby. But I
couldn’t get the assignment, and to be honest, maybe I was a little afraid to keep pushing for it. Walt and Mearsheimer have now done that. I think some of the rage against them in the press has to do with the fact that they
have scooped the mainstream press on one of the biggest stories of our time. I say "J’accuse" because that was the title of Emile
Zola’s famous article exploding the anti-Semitic Dreyfus lie. The
Dreyfus case of the 1890s had tremendous political resonance. It resulted in the birth of political
Zionism, because the evidence of antisemitism so disillusioned Herzl in western societies; and it caused the reform of the French
ruling class, which was corrupted by connections to the Catholic church. With this book, Zola’s J’accuse comes full circle.
