More than two years ago the New York Review of Books published a piece by Michael Massing that began: "Not since Foreign Affairs magazine published Samuel Huntington's
'The Clash of Civilizations?' in 1993 has an academic essay detonated
with such force as 'The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy,' [published in the London Review of Books in March 2006], by
professors John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen
M. Walt of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government…" The piece went on for pages.
And that's the last the NYRB has had to say on the matter. The forceful 2006 essay in LRB has now given way of course to a forceful book, published more than a year ago. Search NYRB for Walt and Mearsheimer and you turn up a letter or two after Massing's piece, but no review. I say The Israel Lobby is the most important book on foreign policy published in the last year; and the most important literary review in the country has had nothing to say.
I hear that the Review commissioned a review some time ago and then turned it down, for what reason I have no idea. But the Review's inability to pronounce on this important book is symptomatic of the discomfort in the establishment–even the left-lib establishment–over the depth charge that Walt and Mearsheimer dropped and, given the importance of the authors' charges re the Iraq-war neocons and Israel's brutal treatment of Palestinians, is a regrettable abdication of cultural power. Assign Max Rodenbeck.
