(left) and
Stephen Walt, authors of
The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy The March 2006 publication of Mearsheimer and Walt's essay, "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy", was highly controversial. The essay's central controversial claim was that the Israel lobby's influence has distorted U.S. Middle East foreign policy away from what the authors referred to as "American
national interest."
Alan Dershowitz opined that criticizing the Israel lobby promoted a charged debate about what constitutes
antisemitic conspiracy theorizing. Early drafts of this were sent to
Jeffrey Epstein; at the time, Dershowitz was Epstein's lawyer during a child sex trafficking case. As a result of the controversy created by Mearsheimer and Walt's article, the
Dutch Backlight () program produced a documentary entitled
The Israel Lobby.
Backlight is
VPRO's regular international 50 minute documentary program.
Praise Former U.S. Ambassador
Edward Peck wrote that "The expected
tsunami of rabid responses condemned the report, vilified its authors, and denied there is such a lobby — validating both the lobby's existence and aggressive, pervasive presence and obliging Harvard to remove its name." Peck is generally in agreement with the paper's core thesis: "Opinions differ on the long-term costs and benefits for both nations, but the lobby's views of Israel's interests have become the basis of U.S. Middle East policies."
William Grimes of the
New York Times wrote: "Coolly, not to say coldly, Mr. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt mount a prosecutorial brief against Israel’s foreign and domestic policies, and against the state of Israel itself." In his review in
The Times, journalist
Max Hastings wrote "otherwise intelligent Americans diminish themselves by hurling charges of antisemitism with such recklessness. There will be no peace in the Middle East until the United States faces its responsibilities there in a much more convincing fashion than it does today, partly for reasons given in this depressing book."
Adam Kirsch argued that
Robert D. Kaplan's "deification" of Mearsheimer in
The Atlantic in January 2012 showed that the authors of
The Israel Lobby were winning the argument.
Glenn Greenwald has endorsed the book's central thesis, arguing "Walt and Mearsheimer merely voiced a truth which has long been known and obvious but was not allowed to be spoken. That’s precisely why the demonization campaign against them was so vicious and concerted: those who voice prohibited truths are always more hated than those who spout obvious lies." Marxist historian
Perry Anderson also endorsed the book's thesis, calling it "outstanding".
Mixed reviews The paper was described as a "wake-up call" by
Daniel Levy, former advisor to
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and said it is "jarring for a self-critical Israeli" and lacks "finesse and nuance." In a March 25 article for
Haaretz, Levy wrote, "Their case is a potent one: that identification of American with Israeli interests can be principally explained via the impact of the Lobby in Washington, and in limiting the parameters of public debate, rather than by virtue of Israel being a vital strategic asset or having a uniquely compelling moral case for support". Levy also criticized Mearsheimer and Walt for confusing cause and effect; he added that the Iraq war was already decided on by the Bush administration for its own reasons. Columnist
Christopher Hitchens agreed that "AIPAC and other Jewish organizations exert a vast influence over Middle East policy", and stated that the paper "contains much that is true and a little that is original" and that he "would have gone further than Mearsheimer and Walt". However, he also says, paraphrasing a statement popularly misattributed to
Samuel Johnson, that "what is original is not true and what is true is not original", and that the notion that the "Jewish tail wags the American dog... the United States has gone to
war in Iraq to gratify
Ariel Sharon, and... the alliance between the two countries has brought down on us the wrath of
Osama Bin Laden" is "partly misleading and partly creepy". He also stated that the authors "seriously mischaracterize the origins of the problem" and produced "an article that is redeemed from complete dullness and mediocrity only by being slightly but unmistakably smelly." In an address to
Stanford University, Hitchens said that Mearsheimer and Walt "think that they are smarter than the American imperialists. If they were running the empire, [Mearsheimer and Walt] wouldn't be fooled by the Jews. They'd be making big business with the Saudis instead and not letting Arabs get upset about
Zionism. Well, it's an extraordinary piece of cynicism, I would say, combined with an extraordinary naiveté. It doesn't deserve to be called realistic at all."
Joseph Massad, professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at
Columbia University, writes, "Is the pro-Israel lobby extremely powerful in the United States? As someone who has been facing the full brunt of their power for the last three years through their formidable influence on my own university and their attempts to get me fired, I answer with a resounding yes. Are they primarily responsible for U.S. policies towards the Palestinians and the Arab world? Absolutely not." Massad then argued U.S. policy is "imperialistic", and has only supported those struggling for freedom when it is politically convenient, especially in the Middle East. In describing the last of three "surprising weaknesses" of the paper,
Eric Alterman writes in
The Nation, "Third, while it's fair to call AIPAC obnoxious and even anti-democratic, the same can often be said about, say, the
NRA,
Big Pharma and other powerful
lobbies. The authors note this but often seem to forget it. This has the effect of making the Jews who read the paper feel unfairly singled out and inspires much emotionally driven (craziness) in reaction. Do these problems justify the inference that the authors are anti-Semitic? Of course not." In an extended review for
Salon,
Michelle Goldberg writes about some "baffling omissions," e.g.: "Amazingly, Walt and Mearsheimer don't even mention
Fatah or
Black September,
Munich or
Entebbe. One might argue that Israel has killed more Palestinians than visa [sic] versa, but it doesn't change the role of spectacular Palestinian terrorism in shaping American attitudes toward Israel." She also finds valuable points: "Walt and Mearsheimer are correct, after all, in arguing that discussion about Israel is hugely circumscribed in mainstream American media and politics.... Indeed, one can find far more critical coverage of the Israeli occupation in liberal Israeli newspapers like
Haaretz than in any American daily."
Stephen Zunes, professor of politics at the
University of San Francisco, gives a detailed point by point critique of the paper. Zunes also writes that "The authors have also been unfairly criticized for supposedly distorting the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, though their overview is generally quite accurate," and agreed with
Joseph Massad's interpretation of Mearsheimer's and Walt's argument: "[T]here is something quite convenient and discomfortingly familiar about the tendency to blame an allegedly powerful and wealthy group of Jews for the overall direction of an increasingly controversial U.S. policy." In a review in
The New Yorker,
David Remnick writes, "Mearsheimer and Walt give you the sense that, if the Israelis and the Palestinians come to terms, bin Laden will return to the family construction business. It's a narrative that recounts every lurid report of Israeli cruelty as indisputable fact but leaves out the rise of Fatah and Palestinian terrorism before 1967; the Munich Olympics; Black September; myriad cases of suicide bombings; and other spectaculars. ... The duplicitous and manipulative arguments for invading Iraq put forward by the Bush Administration, the general inability of the press to upend those duplicities, the triumphalist illusions, the miserable performance of the military strategists, the arrogance of the Pentagon, the stifling of dissent within the military and the government, the moral disaster of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, the rise of an intractable civil war, and now an incapacity to deal with the singular winner of the war, Iran—all of this has left Americans furious and demanding explanations. Mearsheimer and Walt provide one: the Israel lobby. In this respect, their account is not so much a diagnosis of our polarized era as a symptom of it." Writing in
Foreign Affairs,
Walter Russell Mead applauds the authors for "admirably and courageously" initiating a conversation on a difficult subject, but criticizes many of their findings. He observes that their definition of the "Israel lobby" is amorphous to the point of being useless: anyone who supports the existence of Israel (including Mearsheimer and Walt themselves) could be considered a part of the lobby, according to Mead. He is especially critical of their analysis of domestic politics in the United States, suggesting that the authors overstate the magnitude of lobbying in favor Israel when considered relative to overall sums spent on lobbying—only 1% in a typical election cycle. Mead considers their wider geopolitical analysis "more professional" but still "simplistic and sunny" on alternatives to a U.S.-Israeli alliance; he notes, for instance, that simply threatening to cut off aid to Israel in order to influence its behavior is misguided policy, given that other powers such as China, Russia, and India might well view an Israeli alliance as advantageous, should the United States withdraw. Mead rejects any antisemitic intent in the work, but feels that the authors left themselves open to the charge through "easily avoidable lapses in judgment and expression."
Criticism In the following issue of the magazine were a number of responses criticizing the essay including from
Jeffrey Herf,
Andrei Markovits and
Daniel Pipes. Herf and Markovits found Mearsheimer and Walt's arguments reminiscent of traditional fabricated antisemitic global conspiracies. They argue that Israel was not the focus of American Middle Eastern policy, but rather ensuring the secure global supply of oil. According to them, Israel would come to be viewed by the U.S. military establishment as a useful ally in a challenging region. They refute Mearsheimer and Walt's claim blaming the Israel Lobby for the Iraq War. They cite Saddam Hussein's own military commanders as not being aware that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction up to three months before the US led invasion. Herf and Markovits dispute Mearsheimer and Walt's implications that the State of Israel is the main cause for anti-Western sentiment in the Middle East and assert that American Jews have the right to free speech and political participation like all Americans. Daniel Pipes clarified that he was not involved in the founding of Campus Watch, and asserted that he does not "take orders from some mythical 'Lobby'." After that even more criticisms appeared in the second issue of April, most prominently by
Alan Dershowitz citing a long list of what he said were factual errors and distortions. Mearsheimer and Walt had referred to Dershowitz specifically as an "apologist" for the Israel lobby. In a March 2006 interview with
The Harvard Crimson, Dershowitz called the article "one-sided" and its authors "liars" and "bigots". The next day, on MSNBC's
Scarborough Country, he suggested the paper had been derived from multiple hate sites: "Every paragraph virtually is copied from a
neo-Nazi Web site, from a radical Islamic Web site, from
David Duke's Web site." Dershowitz subsequently wrote a report challenging the paper, arguing that it contained "three types of major errors: Quotations are wrenched out of context, important facts are misstated or omitted, and embarrassingly weak logic is employed." In a May 2006 letter in
The London Review of Books, Mearsheimer and Walt denied that they had used any racist sources for their article, writing that Dershowitz had failed to offer any evidence to support his claim. Robert Pfaltzgraff of the
Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis questioned why Mearsheimer and Walt had suddenly arrived at completely different assumptions related to the Israel Lobby than that they had utilized for the rest of their career. Pfaltzgraff also denied their claim that "pro-Israeli forces" had established a "commanding presence" at the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis. Mearsheimer and Walt responded to their critics in the May issue. They denied that their essay was intended to propagate antisemitic conspiracy theories and claim that they never intended to solely blame Israel for America's problems in the Middle East. Mearsheimer and Walt insist they support Israel's survival and necessary steps to protect it. They fault Szanto for not recognizing that America's security ties with Western Europe, Japan and South Korea did not according to them depend on "strong domestic lobbies."
Alan Dershowitz, at the time a professor at Harvard University, published an extended criticism of Mearsheimer's and Walt's position in his 2008 book, ''The Case Against Israel's Enemies: Exposing Jimmy Carter and Others Who Stand in the Way of Peace.''
Robert C. Lieberman a Professor of Political Science at
Columbia University in his extensive review he explores the book thesis and in conclusion he writes "It is quite clear that the book’s argument does not support Mearsheimer and Walt’s central contention, that the existence and activities of an Israel lobby are the primary causes of American policy in the Middle East. The claim is supported neither by logic nor evidence nor even a rudimentary understanding of how the American policymaking system works"
Former government officials Former Director of the
CIA James Woolsey also wrote a strongly negative review, remarking that "... Reading [Walt and Mearsheimer's] version of events is like entering a completely different world." Woolsey contends the authors "are stunningly deceptive", and that a "commitment to distorting the historical record is the one consistent feature of this book", proceeding with a few examples. Former Secretary of State
Henry Kissinger said that the paper has not had "any great impact on the general public. The American public continues to support the relations [between the two countries], and resistance to any threat to the survival of Israel."
Jewish organizations The
American Jewish Committee's (AJC) executive director David A. Harris wrote several responses to the paper and the book. His 2007 article in
The Jerusalem Post discusses the difficulty Europeans have in understanding America's "special relationship" with Israel and the resulting eagerness of European publishers to fast track the book. "Although the book was panned by most American reviewers, it will serve as red meat for those eager to believe the worst about American decision-making regarding Israel and the Middle East." AJC also published several critiques of the paper, many of which were reproduced in newspapers around the world. AJC's antisemitism expert,
Kenneth Stern, made the following argument against the paper: "Such a dogmatic approach blinds them from seeing what most Americans do. They seek to destroy the "moral" case for Israel by pointing at alleged Israeli misdeeds, rarely noting the terror and anti-Semitism that predicates Israeli reactions." The
Anti-Defamation League's (ADL) national director
Abraham H. Foxman wrote a book in response to Mearsheimer and Walt's paper, entitled
The Deadliest Lies: The Israel Lobby and the Myth of Jewish Control where he allegedly
"demolishes a number of shibboleths . . . a rebuttal of a pernicious theory about a mythically powerful Jewish lobby." Former
Secretary of State George Shultz wrote in the Foreword to the book,
"... the notion. U.S. policy on Israel and Middle East is the result of their influence is simply wrong." The ADL also published an analysis of the paper, describing it as "amateurish and biased critique of
Israel,
American Jews, and American policy" and a "sloppy diatribe". Other critical organizations and affiliated individuals include
Dore Gold from the
Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, and
Neal Sher of AIPAC.
Journalists Those critical of the paper include
Leslie H. Gelb of the
New York Times;
Caroline Glick of
The Jerusalem Post; columnist
Bret Stephens; and editor of
Jewish Current Issues Rick Richman.
John Judis, a senior editor at
The New Republic and a visiting scholar at the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote: "I think Walt and Mearsheimer do exaggerate the influence of the Israel lobby and define the lobby in such an inclusive way as to beg the question of its influence." In a review in the
Denver Post,
Richard Cohen writes, "Where Israel is wrong, they say so. But where Israel is right, they are somehow silent. By the time you finish the book, you almost have to wonder why anyone in their right mind could find any reason to admire or like Israel. ... They had an observation worth making and a position worth debating. But their argument is so dry, so one-sided — an Israel lobby that leads America around by the nose — they suggest that not only do they not know Israel, they don't know America, either."
Scholarly reaction to the criticism Harvard's Kennedy School removed its
logo from the version of the Walt and Mearsheimer paper published on its website, and more strongly worded its disclaimer by making it more prominent, while insisting the paper reflected only the views of its authors. Harvard Kennedy School said in a statement: "The only purpose of that removal was to end public confusion; it was not intended, contrary to some interpretations, to send any signal that the school was also 'distancing' itself from one of its senior professors" and stated that they are committed to academic freedom, and do not take a position on faculty conclusions and research. However, in their 79-page rebuttal to the original papers criticisms, former Harvard dean Walt ensures that it was his decision - not Harvard's - to remove the Harvard logo from the on-line Kennedy school version of the original."
Mark Mazower, a professor of history at
Columbia University, wrote that it is not possible to openly debate the topic of the article: "What is striking is less the substance of their argument than the outraged reaction: to all intents and purposes, discussing the US-Israel special relationship still remains taboo in the U.S. media mainstream. [...] Whatever one thinks of the merits of the piece itself, it would seem all but impossible to have a sensible public discussion in the U.S. today about the country's relationship with Israel." Criticism of the paper was itself called "moral blackmail" and "bullying" by an opinion piece in the
Financial Times: "Moral blackmail—the fear that any
criticism of Israeli policy and U.S. support for it will lead to charges of anti-Semitism—is a powerful disincentive to publish dissenting views ... Bullying Americans into a consensus on Israeli policy is bad for Israel and makes it impossible for America to articulate its own national interest." The editorial praised the paper, remarking that "They argue powerfully that extraordinarily effective lobbying in Washington has led to a political consensus that American and Israeli interests are inseparable and identical."
Mearsheimer and Walt's response to the criticism Mearsheimer stated, "[w]e fully recognised that the lobby would retaliate against us" and "[w]e expected the story we told in the piece would apply to us after it was published. We are not surprised that we've come under attack by the lobby." He also stated "we expected to be called anti-semites, even though both of us are
philo-semites and strongly support the existence of Israel." • To the accusation that they "see the lobby as a well-organised Jewish conspiracy," they point out that they refer to their description of the lobby "a loose coalition of individuals and organisations without a central headquarters." • To the accusation of mono-causality, they remark "we also pointed out that support for Israel is hardly the only reason America's standing in the Middle East is so low." • To the complaint that they "'catalog Israel's moral flaws' while paying little attention to the shortcomings of other states," they refer to the "high levels of material and diplomatic support" given by the United States especially to Israel as a reason to focus on it. • To the claim that U.S. support for Israel reflects "genuine support among the American public" they agree but argue that "this popularity is substantially due to the lobby's success at portraying Israel in a favorable light and effectively limiting public awareness and discussion of Israel's less savory actions." • To the claim that there are countervailing forces "such as 'paleo-conservatives, Arab and Islamic advocacy groups ... and the diplomatic establishment,'" they argue that these are no match for the lobby. • To the argument that oil rather than Israel drives Middle East policy, they claim that if that were so, the United States would favor the Palestinians instead of Israel and would not have gone to war in Iraq or be threatening Iran. • They accuse various critics of smearing them by linking them to racists, and dispute various claims by Alan Dershowitz and others that their facts, references or quotations are mistaken. In December 2006 the authors privately circulated a 79-page rebuttal, "Setting the Record Straight: A Response to Critics of 'The Israel Lobby'". In the book published in August 2007 the authors responded to criticisms leveled against them. They claimed that the vast majority of charges leveled against the original article were unfounded, but some critiques raised issues of interpretation and emphasis, which they addressed in the book. == Debate ==