Breaking
the Last Taboo
The United States of Israel?
By ROBERT FISK
Stephen
Walt towers over me as we walk in the Harvard sunshine past Eliot
Street, a big man who needs to be big right now (he's one of two
authors of an academic paper on the influence of America's Jewish
lobby) but whose fame, or notoriety, depending on your point of view,
is of no interest to him. "John and I have deliberately avoided the
television shows because we don't think we can discuss these important
issues in 10 minutes. It would become 'J' and 'S', the personalities
who wrote about the lobby - and we want to open the way to serious
discussion about this, to encourage a broader discussion of the forces
shaping US foreign policy in the Middle East."
"John" is John
Mearsheimer, a political scientist at the University of Chicago. Walt
is a 50-year-old tenured professor at the John F Kennedy School of
Government at Harvard. The two men have caused one of the most
extraordinary political storms over the Middle East in recent American
history by stating what to many non-Americans is obvious: that the US
has been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its
allies in order to advance the interests of Israel, that Israel is a
liability in the "war on terror", that the biggest Israeli lobby group,
Aipac (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee), is in fact the
agent of a foreign government and has a stranglehold on Congress - so
much so that US policy towards Israel is not debated there - and that
the lobby monitors and condemns academics who are critical of Israel.
"Anyone
who criticises Israel's actions or argues that pro-Israel groups have
significant influence over US Middle East policy," the authors have
written, "...stands a good chance of being labelled an anti-Semite.
Indeed, anyone who merely claims that there is an Israeli lobby runs
the risk of being charged with anti-Semitism ... Anti-Semitism is
something no-one wants to be accused of." This is strong stuff in a
country where - to quote the late Edward Said - the "last taboo" (now
that anyone can talk about blacks, gays and lesbians) is any serious
discussion of America's relationship with Israel.
Walt is
already the author of an elegantly written account of the resistance to
US world political dominance, a work that includes more than 50 pages
of references. Indeed, those who have read his Taming Political Power:
The Global Response to US Primacy will note that the Israeli lobby gets
a thumping in this earlier volume because Aipac "has repeatedly
targeted members of Congress whom it deemed insufficiently friendly to
Israel and helped drive them from office, often by channelling money to
their opponents."
But how many people in America are putting
their own heads above the parapet, now that Mearsheimer and Walt have
launched a missile that would fall to the ground unexploded in any
other country but which is detonating here at high speed? Not a lot.
For a while, the mainstream US press and television - as pro-Israeli,
biased and gutless as the two academics infer them to be - did not know
whether to report on their conclusions (originally written for The
Atlantic Monthly, whose editors apparently took fright, and
subsequently reprinted in the London Review of Books in slightly
truncated form) or to remain submissively silent. The New York Times,
for example, only got round to covering the affair in depth well over
two weeks after the report's publication, and then buried its article
in the education section on page 19. The academic essay, according to
the paper's headline, had created a "debate" about the lobby's
influence.
They can say that again. Dore Gold, a former
ambassador to the UN, who now heads an Israeli lobby group, kicked off
by unwittingly proving that the Mearsheimer-Walt theory of
"anti-Semitism" abuse is correct. "I believe," he said, "that
anti-Semitism may be partly defined as asserting a Jewish conspiracy
for doing the same thing non-Jews engage in." Congressman Eliot Engel
of New York said that the study itself was "anti-Semitic" and deserved
the American public's contempt.
Walt has no time for this
argument. "We are not saying there is a conspiracy, or a cabal. The
Israeli lobby has every right to carry on its work - all Americans like
to lobby. What we are saying is that this lobby has a negative
influence on US national interests and that this should be discussed.
There are vexing problems out in the Middle East and we need to be able
to discuss them openly. The Hamas government, for example - how do we
deal with this? There may not be complete solutions, but we have to try
and have all the information available."
Walt doesn't exactly
admit to being shocked by some of the responses to his work - it's all
part of his desire to keep "discourse" in the academic arena, I
suspect, though it probably won't work. But no-one could be anything
but angered by his Harvard colleague, Alan Dershowitz, who announced
that the two scholars recycled accusations that "would be seized on by
bigots to promote their anti-Semitic agendas". The two are preparing a
reply to Dershowitz's 45-page attack, but could probably have done
without praise from the white supremacist and ex-Ku Klux Klan head
David Duke - adulation which allowed newspapers to lump the name of
Duke with the names of Mearsheimer and Walt. "Of Israel, Harvard and
David Duke," ran the Washington Post's reprehensible headline.
The
Wall Street Journal, ever Israel's friend in the American press, took
an even weirder line on the case. "As Ex-Lobbyists of Pro-Israel Group
Face Court, Article Queries Sway on Mideast Policy" its headline
proclaimed to astonished readers. Neither Mearsheimer nor Walt had
mentioned the trial of two Aipac lobbyists - due to begin next month -
who are charged under the Espionage Act with receiving and
disseminating classified information provided by a former Pentagon
Middle East analyst. The defence team for Steven Rosen and Keith
Weissman has indicated that it may call Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice and National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley to the stand.
Almost
a third of the Journal's report is taken up with the Rosen-Weissman
trial, adding that the indictment details how the two men "allegedly
sought to promote a hawkish US policy toward Iran by trading favours
with a number of senior US officials. Lawrence Franklin, the former
Pentagon official, has pleaded guilty to misusing classified
information. Mr Franklin was charged with orally passing on information
about a draft National Security Council paper on Iran to the two
lobbyists... as well as other classified information. Mr Franklin was
sentenced in December to nearly 13 years in prison..."
The Wall
Street Journal report goes on to say that lawyers and "many Jewish
leaders" - who are not identified - "say the actions of the former
Aipac employees were no different from how thousands of Washington
lobbyists work. They say the indictment marks the first time in US
history that American citizens... have been charged with receiving and
disseminating state secrets in conversations." The paper goes on to say
that "several members of Congress have expressed concern about the case
since it broke in 2004, fearing that the Justice Department may be
targeting pro-Israel lobbying groups, such as Aipac. These officials
(sic) say they're eager to see the legal process run its course, but
are concerned about the lack of transparency in the case."
As
far as Dershowitz is concerned, it isn't hard for me to sympathise with
the terrible pair. He it was who shouted abuse at me during an Irish
radio interview when I said that we had to ask the question "Why?"
after the 11 September 2001 international crimes against humanity. I
was a "dangerous man", Dershowitz shouted over the air, adding that to
be "anti-American" - my thought-crime for asking the "Why?" question -
was the same as being anti-Semitic. I must, however, also acknowledge
another interest. Twelve years ago, one of the Israeli lobby groups
that Mearsheimer and Walt fingers prevented any second showing of a
film series on Muslims in which I participated for Channel 4 and the
Discovery Channel - by stating that my "claim" that Israel was building
large Jewish settlements on Arab land was "an egregious falsehood". I
was, according to another Israeli support group, "a Henry Higgins with
fangs", who was "drooling venom into the living rooms of America."
Such
nonsense continues to this day. In Australia to launch my new book on
the Middle East, for instance, I repeatedly stated that Israel -
contrary to the anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists - was not responsible
for the crimes of 11 September 2001. Yet the Australian Jewish News
claimed that I "stopped just millimetres short of suggesting that
Israel was the cause of the 9/11 attacks. The audience reportedly (and
predictably) showered him in accolades."
This was untrue. There
was no applause and no accolades and I never stopped "millimetres"
short of accusing Israel of these crimes against humanity. The story in
the Australian Jewish News is a lie.
So I have to say that -
from my own humble experience - Mearsheimer and Walt have a point. And
for a man who says he has not been to Israel for 20 years - or Egypt,
though he says he had a "great time" in both countries - Walt rightly
doesn't claim any on-the-ground expertise. "I've never flown into
Afghanistan on a rickety plane, or stood at a checkpoint and seen a bus
coming and not known if there is a suicide bomber aboard," he says.
Noam
Chomsky, America's foremost moral philosopher and linguistics academic
- so critical of Israel that he does not even have a regular newspaper
column - does travel widely in the region and acknowledges the
ruthlessness of the Israeli lobby. But he suggests that American
corporate business has more to do with US policy in the Middle East
than Israel's supporters - proving, I suppose, that the Left in the
United States has an infinite capacity for fratricide. Walt doesn't say
he's on the left, but he and Mearsheimer objected to the invasion of
Iraq, a once lonely stand that now appears to be as politically
acceptable as they hope - rather forlornly - that discussion of the
Israeli lobby will become.
Walt sits in a Malaysian restaurant
with me, patiently (though I can hear the irritation in his voice)
explaining that the conspiracy theories about him are nonsense. His
stepping down as dean of the Kennedy School was a decision taken before
the publication of his report, he says. No one is throwing him out. The
much-publicised Harvard disclaimer of ownership to the essay - far from
being a gesture of fear and criticism by the university as his would-be
supporters have claimed - was mainly drafted by Walt himself, since
Mearsheimer, a friend as well as colleague, was a Chicago scholar, not
a Harvard don.
But something surely has to give.
Across
the United States, there is growing evidence that the Israeli and
neo-conservative lobbies are acquiring ever greater power. The
cancellation by a New York theatre company of My Name is Rachel Corrie
- a play based on the writings of the young American girl crushed to
death by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza in 2003 - has deeply shocked
liberal Jewish Americans, not least because it was Jewish American
complaints that got the performance pulled.
"How can the West
condemn the Islamic world for not accepting Mohamed cartoons," Philip
Weiss asked in The Nation, "when a Western writer who speaks out on
behalf of Palestinians is silenced? And why is it that Europe and
Israel itself have a healthier debate over Palestinian human rights
than we can have here?" Corrie died trying to prevent the destruction
of a Palestinian home. Enemies of the play falsely claim that she was
trying to stop the Israelis from collapsing a tunnel used to smuggle
weapons. Hateful e-mails were written about Corrie. Weiss quotes one
that reads: "Rachel Corrie won't get 72 virgins but she got what she
wanted."
Saree Makdisi - a close relative of the late Edward
Said - has revealed how a right-wing website is offering cash for
University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) students who report on
the political leanings of their professors, especially their views on
the Middle East. Those in need of dirty money at UCLA should be aware
that class notes, handouts and illicit recordings of lectures will now
receive a bounty of $100. "I earned my own inaccurate and defamatory
'profile'," Makdisi says, "...not for what I have said in my classes on
English poets such as Wordsworth and Blake - my academic speciality,
which the website avoids mentioning - but rather for what I have
written in newspapers about Middle Eastern politics."
Mearsheimer
and Walt include a study of such tactics in their report. "In September
2002," they write, "Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes, two passionately
pro-Israel neo-conservatives, established a website
(www.campus-watch.org)
that posted dossiers on suspect academics and
encouraged students to report behaviour that might be considered
hostile to Israel... the website still invites students to report
'anti-Israel' activity."
Perhaps the most incendiary paragraph
in the essay - albeit one whose contents have been confirmed in the
Israeli press - discusses Israel's pressure on the United States to
invade Iraq. "Israeli intelligence officials had given Washington a
variety of alarming reports about Iraq's WMD programmes," the two
academics write, quoting a retired Israeli general as saying: "Israeli
intelligence was a full partner to the picture presented by American
and British intelligence regarding Iraq's non-conventional
capabilities."
Walt says he might take a year's sabbatical -
though he doesn't want to get typecast as a "lobby" critic - because he
needs a rest after his recent administrative post. There will be
Israeli lobbyists, no doubt, who would he happy if he made that
sabbatical a permanent one. I somehow doubt he will.
Robert Fisk writes for the Independent.
April 27, 2006