Professors spark political firestorm with Israel essay

Chicago Tribune

CHICAGO - A University of Chicago professor has ignited an intellectual firestorm in halls of ivy and corridors of power with an essay in a highbrow British journal.

Writing in the London Review of Books, John Mearsheimer, a University of Chicago political scientist, and his academic partner, Harvard University professor Stephen Walt, offered a simple diagnosis for what ails U.S. foreign policy.

How did we get involved in a seemingly endless Iraq war? Why are we reviled in Muslim countries and targeted by terrorists?

"Why," they asked, "has the United States been willing to set aside its own security in order to advance the interests of another state?"

Mearsheimer and Walt say a vocal and well-financed lobby - made up of Jewish organizations and Christian fundamentalists, political fundraisers, media outlets and neo-conservatives - gets Washington to slavishly do Israel's bidding.

Mearsheimer and Walt's thesis, published late last month, has provoked both applause and a torrent of criticism. It also has inspired several spinoff counter-conspiracy theories.

When Walt recently stepped down as dean of Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, some speculated he was forced out because the university was taking heat for their essay, "The Israel Lobby." Harvard published a news release saying the change long had been in the works. Both Harvard and the University of Chicago have argued universities must be a forum for controversial ideas like those discussed in the essay.

"We wanted to stimulate a serious debate," said Mearsheimer, "not a food fight."

Some observers suggest that Mearsheimer and Walt have done just the opposite, potentially scaring people away from the debate by putting the issue in polarizing terms.

But Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator, told a leading Israeli newspaper: "It would in fact serve Israel if the open and critical debate that takes place over here were exported" to the United States.

The Christian Science Monitor favorably cited Mearsheimer and Walt's theory in an editorial on the Middle East. Some Israeli commentators have given it cautious praise as a warning that American support for Israel can't be taken for granted.

But to Jewish-American groups, "The Israel Lobby" smacks of the age-old accusation that a secret cabal of Jews aims at world dominance.

The Anti-Defamation League pronounced Mearsheimer and Walt's essay "a classic conspiratorial anti-Semitic analysis invoking the canards of Jewish power and Jewish control." Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz told a reporter for the university's student newspaper that "The Israel Lobby" repeats material posted on neo-Nazi Web sites.

Jewish ears are particularly sensitive to blame-the-Jews theories, notes Richard Hirschhaut, director of the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center. Recently, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan attacked the Jews of Hollywood for undermining America's morals with movies promoting homosexuality.

Critics of the Israel lobby thesis, though, aren't limited to Jewish communal leaders and Israel's defenders. Mearsheimer and Walt name Dershowitz, O.J. Simpson's lawyer, as a lobby member. On the far right, David Duke, the white supremacist, charges the professors with being Johnny-come-latelies to an argument he has long made. At the other end of the political spectrum is Noam Chomsky, the father of modern linguistics, a notable professorial dissenter and vocal critic of Israel.

Writing for the Znet Web site, Chomsky applauded Mearsheimer and Walt for their courage in writing "The Israel Lobby," but he added: "We still have to ask how convincing their thesis is. Not very, in my opinion."

A piece on Israel and the U.S. national interest originally was commissioned by The Atlantic Monthly, but when editors saw it, they declined to run it. Some of Mearsheimer and Walt's supporters take that as further proof of the Israel lobby thesis, saying such is the power of the Jewish state's supporters that dissenting views can't get published in the United States.

Mearsheimer, a former West Point cadet, said international relations should be based on cold, clear calculation of a nation's best interests. Emotional or moral considerations are irrelevant, according to this viewpoint.

Despite his soft-spoken manner, Mearsheimer is hardly a stranger to controversy. In 1990, he wrote an essay proposing that Germany be encouraged to develop atomic weapons. He was an outspoken opponent of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, fearing it would give the Israelis an opportunity for an ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza.

He told a reporter for the Maroon, the University of Chicago's student newspaper: "The precedent is there (to forcibly expel Palestinians), and it behooves us to make sure it does not happen again."

The reference was to Palestinian refugees uprooted by Israel's 1948 war of independence. In the lobby essay, Mearsheimer and Walt charged that "the creation of Israel entailed a moral crime against the Palestinian people."

Of America's pro-Israel tilt, the professors write: "This extraordinary generosity might be understandable if Israel were a vital strategic asset or if there were a compelling moral cause for sustained U.S. backing."

They argue that Israel is neither morally in the right nor militarily endangered; therefore, the cause of U.S. foreign policy must be the alternative: the power of the Israel lobby.

Critics note that Mearsheimer and Walt's logic - that either one or the other must be true - leads to some highly controversial conclusions. The two argue that Israel has always been the Goliath, not the David, of the Middle East. "The Zionists had larger, better equipped and better led forces during the (war of independence)," the two professors wrote.

Military historians, though, note that the newly born Israel had only a militia when it was attacked by professional armies from Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Jordan, backed by air power and heavy weapons. The Israelis had two artillery pieces; their opponents had several hundred.

Chomsky notes that, militarily, the lobby theory gets things backward. Instead of reducing the U.S. to its pawn, Israel has been several times reined in by Washington.

"In several of the Arab-Israeli wars, the U.S. forced the Israeli army to stop when it was on the verge of annihilating the Arab forces," he said in an interview.

The influence of Israel on American foreign policy, Chomsky said, is dwarfed by that of the energy companies.

"I wish the lobby theory was true," he said. "But does anybody doubt that American oil interests are what are at stake in the Middle East?"

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