Is it love or the lobby? Explaining America's special relationship with Israel

Security Studies

Volumn 18, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 58-78

  Mearsheimer, John J ^a   Walt, Stephen M ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO   (United States)

^b HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60549105224     PISSN: 09636412     EISSN: 15561852     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09636410802678031     Document Type: Article

References (45)

1. For a detailed response to the critics of our original London Review of Books article, see John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, "Setting the Record Straight: A Response to Critics of 'The Israel Lobby'," available at http://us.macmillan.com/ theisraellobbyandusforeignpolicy.
2. To note a few examples: We wrote the Israel lobby "is engaged in good old-fashioned interest group politics, which is as American as apple pie," and we repeatedly stressed that "lobbying on Israel's behalf is wholly legitimate." Nonetheless, Jeffrey Goldberg's review in The New Republic called our book "the most sustained attack ... against the political enfranchisement of American Jews since the era of Father Coughlin." Compare John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007), 5, 13, 147, 185
3. with Jeffrey Goldberg, "The Usual Suspect," New Republic, 8 October 2007. We wrote that our definition of the lobby "does not mean that every American with favorable attitudes towards Israel is a member of the lobby ... one has to actively work to move American foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction," and we emphasized that to qualify as part of the lobby one had to support the special relationship.
4. Yet Walter Russell Mead falsely charged in Foreign Affairs that "Mearsheimer and Walt have come up with a definition of the 'Israel lobby' that covers the waterfront, including everyone from Jimmy Carter and George Soros to Paul Wolfowitz and Tom Delay."
5. Compare Mearsheimer and Walt, Israel Lobby, 5, 113-14
6. with Walter Russell Mead, "Jerusalem Syndrome: Decoding the Israel Lobby," Foreign Affairs 86, no. 6 (November/December 2007): 163. We wrote that "the Israel lobby is not a cabal or conspiracy or anything of the sort" (and repeated this assertion five other times, yet Ruth Wisse published an op-ed in the Washington Post saying that "Mearsheimer and Walt allege that a Jewish cabal dictates U.S. policy in the Middle East, helping Israeli interests and hurting U.S. ones."
7. Compare Mearsheimer and Walt, Israel Lobby, 5, 13, 112, 114, 131, 150
8. with Ruth Wisse, "Are American Jews Too Powerful? Not Even Close," Washington Post, 4 November 2007. We explicitly said that "we are not challenging Israel's right to exist or questioning the legitimacy of the Jewish state," adding that we believed "the United States should stand willing to come to Israel's assistance if its survival were in jeopardy." Nonetheless, former Israeli Ambassador Itamar Rabinovich falsely claimed that our book "not only expressed criticism of Israel's policy but also questioned its legitimacy."
9. Again, compare Mearsheimer and Walt, Israel Lobby, 11-12, 341-42
10. with Itamar Rabinovich, "What Will Happen After Bush?" Ha'aretz, 29 October 2007. Finally, Leslie Gelb's review of our book in The New York Times referred repeatedly to a "Jewish lobby," even though we never used that phrase and explicitly argued that it was an inappropriate and misleading term. Compare Mearsheimer and Walt, Israel Lobby, 115
11. with Leslie Gelb, "Dual Loyalties," New York Times Book Review, 23 September 2007. Given that these individuals are all sophisticated readers, one must assume that their mischaracterizations of our book were deliberate.
12. Jerome Slater, "The Two Books of Mearsheimer and Walt," Security Studies 18, no. 1 (March 2009): 14, hereafter cited in text.
13. The works in question are A. F. K. Organski, The $36 Billion Bargain: Strategy and Politics in U.S. Assistance to Israel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990)
14. Steven L. Spiegel, The Other Arab-Israeli Conflict: Making America's Middle East Policy from Truman to Reagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985)
15. and Robert H. Trice, "Interest Groups and the Foreign Policy Process: U.S. Policy in the Middle East," Sage Professional Papers in International Studies, ed. V. Davis and M. East (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1976).
16. Mearsheimer and Walt, Israel Lobby, 163.
17. Spiegel, Other Arab-Israeli Conflict, 388. Even so, Spiegel understates the lobby's impact on the White House in part because he does not address "dogs that didn't bark," that is, situations where key officials decided not to undertake initiatives that might antagonize Israel's supporters. As long-time U.S. Middle East negotiator Aaron David Miller admitted recently: "those of us advising the secretary of state and the president were very sensitive to what the pro-Israel community was thinking, and when it came to considering ideas Israel didn't like, we too often engaged in a kind of preemptive self-censorship."
18. Aaron David Miller, The Much Too Promised Land: America's Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace (New York: Bantam Books, 2008), 123.
19. J. J. Goldberg, Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment (New York: Perseus Books, 1996).
20. In assessing the influence of different interest groups, Trice focuses on the issues of U.S. aid to Israel and U.S. policy toward the Middle East peace process. He finds that pro-Israel groups had considerable impact on the former but less impact on the latter. See Trice, Interest Groups and the Foreign Policy Process, 25-26, 51, 56-58, 71-72.
21. Mearsheimer and Walt, Israel Lobby, 112-14.
22. Saban has described himself as a "one-issue guy and my issue is Israel." Not only has he given some $13 million to candidates for office, PACs, or political parties (mostly Democratic) in recent years, but he also played a key role in persuading others to give as well. See Andrew Craig Sorkin, "Schlepping to Moguldom," New York Times, 5 September 2004
23. and Amy Wallace, "Haim Saban: Power Ranger," Conde Nast Portfolio September 2008, accessed at http://www.portfolio.com/executives/ features/2008/08/13/Profileof-Fundraiser-Haim-Saban.
24. On Adelson's beliefs and activities, see Connie Bruck, "The Brass Ring: A Multimillionaire's Relentless Quest for Global Influence," The New Yorker, 30 June 2008
25. and June Kronholz and Tamara Audi, "Vegas Tycoon Bankrolls Republicans," Wall Street Journal, 15 July 2008.
26. Mearsheimer and Walt, Israel Lobby, 5, 114, 120-21.
27. Mearsheimer and Walt, Israel Lobby, 114.
28. In a notorious incident in 1992, a New York businessman named Haim Katz posed as a potential AIPAC donor and secretly taped a phone call with AIPAC President David Steiner. Steiner told Katz that "we have a doze people in [Clinton's] campaign, in the headquarters ... and they're all going to get big jobs." Steiner was forced to resign after Katz made the transcript public and he later said his statements were not true, but there is little reason to question the thrust of his remarks. See Mearsheimer and Walt, Israel Lobby, 165.
29. Jerome Slater, "The Missing Pieces in The Missing Peace," Tikkun, May/June 2005, accessed at http://www.tikkun.org/archive/backissues/xtik0505/israel/ document.2005-04-22.7590826672.
30. Miller, Much Too Promised Land, 96.
31. Mearsheimer and Walt, Israel Lobby, 158-59.
32. Gary C. Jacobson, The Politics of Congressional Elections, 6th ed. (New York: Pearson Longman, 2004), 42.
33. As former AIPAC executive director Morris Amitay once noted, "we very rarely see ... [oil and corporate interests] lobbying on foreign policy issue ... In a sense, we have the field to ourselves," or as AIPAC's former legislative director, Douglas Bloomfield, remarked in 2003, "AIPAC has one enormous advantage. It really doesn't have any opposition." See Mearsheimer and Walt, Israel Lobby, 145-46.
34. For a fuller account of this episode, see Mearsheimer and Walt, Israel Lobby, 208-11.
35. Jeffrey Goldberg, "Enough About Israel, Already," The Atlantic, 12 October 2008, accessed at http://jeffreygoldberg.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/10/ enoughwithalltheisraeltal.php
36. M. J. Rosenberg, "Fodder for Comedy: Pandering to Jewish Voters," Weekly Opinion Column, Issue #385, Israel Policy Forum, Washington, DC, 10 October 2008
37. and Shmuel Rosner, "Enough About Israel, Already," Slate, 8 October 2008, accessed at http://www.slate.com/id/2201849/.
38. For a fuller account of the decision to invade Iraq in March 2003, see Mearsheimer and Walt, Israel Lobby, 229-62.
39. Mearsheimer and Walt, Israel Lobby, 230.
40. In December 2007, for example, Americans for Peace Now issued an open letter to President Bush calling for serious negotiations with Iran, emphasizing that "the goal of U.S. engagement and diplomacy should not be to make a show of exhausting all non-military options in order to build a case for war; rather, the goal must be to capitalize on non-military options in order to resolve the differences and avoid war." Accessed at www.peacenow.org/updates.asp?rid=0&cid]=4348.
41. Mearsheimer and Walt, Israel Lobby, 23.
42. Note that in this context "U.S. government" means the Executive Branch, not Congress.
43. Jerome Slater, "Muting the Alarm Over the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: The New York Times versus Haaretz, 2000-06," International Security 32, no. 2 (Fall 2007): 84-120.
44. Also see Richard Falk and Howard Friel, Israel-Palestine on Record: How the New York Times Misreports Conflict in the Middle East (London: Verso, 2007)
45. and Marda Dunsky, Pens and Swords: How the American Mainstream Media Report the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).