Book Report: The Israel Lobby

Mearsheimer & Walt's book was a frustrating read. In the end, there seemed to be little point to it all. Every step of the way, they insist that it's okay for people to lobby for Israel, but they insist just as often that something is wrong because the Israel lobby gets its way most of the time. I'm not saying that the authors should have argued against a right to lobby for Israel. They argued convincingly that pro-Israeli groups are only doing what other ethnic lobbies do. My problem with the book is that the authors want to blame the lobby for this country's Middle East policy when the fault clearly lies with decision-makers, not lobbyists, but they can't show that the lobby is doing anything unethical, or anything that would disqualify their right to keep on lobbying.

The problem, as the authors state it, is that this country supports Israel unconditionally to the detriment of its own interests. This presupposes an objective calculation of the country's "real" interest in the Middle East. The authors have every right to try to identify that interest. Unfortunately, the U.S. is a democratic republic, and as a result, our foreign policy can never be purely objective. It will reflect the preferences and prejudices of the majority of voters, or at least those of the majority party. Mearsheimer & Walt acknowledge this at the end when they argue that part of the solution is educating the public about the real situation in Palestine and countering pro-Israel propaganda. They believe that an expose of Israel's "crimes" could turn more Americans against a policy of unconditional support. I think they're too literal-minded, too objective to see the real situation. The facts are out there to be found in any Borders or Barnes & Noble bookstore. But how people fit facts into a narrative is determined by their original understanding of the plot, and as long as most influential Americans buy into Zionism, they'll remain unmoved by any facts they learn from Mearsheimer or Walt.

Most Americans who actually think about it consider Zionism a moral issue. Whether because of God's promise or past history of oppression, they believe that the Jewish people are entitled to a sovereign state. From their perspective, the Arabs have a moral obligation to make room for Jewish settlement, and any "crimes" that Palestinians have suffered at the hands of Zionists are only just desserts for their stubborn, hateful refusal to acknowledge Jewish rights. Further, there can be no peace in Palestine, or in the Middle East generally, unless the Arabs, or the Muslims generally, make some kind of unconditional surrender, some somehow convincing acknowledgement of Jewish sovereignty and Israeli rights. At this point I don't know what form such a capitulation could take to make it convincing to Israelis and their Christian Zionist friends -- would it have to be a mass exodus from Palestine? A renunciation of Islam? -- but until the Arabs show themselves to be as abjectly defeated as atom-bombed Japan in 1945, the friends of Israel will continue to insist, on subjectively moral grounds, that the burden of compromise weighs entirely on the other side. Since Mearsheimer & Walt themselves don't question the basic Zionist premises, and apparently don't want the U.S. to threaten to abandon Israel to its fate, I don't know what they want anyone to say to change people's minds about the Middle East.

As for their research, their most controversial conclusion is that the invasion of Iraq was driven mainly by the Israel lobby and its neocon sympathizers. The authors reject the claim that it was a war for oil, assuming that the oil companies are too interested in stability to want to rock the boat as the neocons proposed. I'm not sure if I can agree. There's at least a self-image of entrepreneurial risk-taking in the oil industry, so I don't know if the authors can so quickly rule out the possibility that at least some oil people might take a chance in hope of an epic payoff. At least chronologically, the authors can show that the neocons (as ever a nebulous category) were calling for war on Iraq earlier than anyone else, apparently before even Bush and Cheney were ready to talk about it. But from their own evidence, it can be argued that the choice for war was made within the government, thanks to key neocon appointments, rather than through lobbying as such. If so, then the solution is not to curtail anyone's lobbying privileges (which, again, the authors don't propose anyway), but to elect better people who'll make better appointments.

Finally, I found it odd that Mearsheimer & Walt failed to mention anti-Arab bigotry as a factor in American opinion. The Zionist narrative mirrors the American frontier myth, with the Arabs in the role of savages whose noble qualities must wait for discovery until they cease to threaten anyone. Until then, they're only dirty, primitive aborigines who ought to be grateful that someone is bringing them civilization. Our misadventures in Iraq may leave us more prudent about messing with the region, but it's doing nothing to change the standard image of the Arab, and is probably exacerbating the existing bigotry. Here it's important to stress a fact that the authors note several times: there isn't really an Arab lobby to counter the Israel lobby's influence. Given Arab wealth and a growing Arab-American population, this becomes increasingly difficult to explain. In another context, I've always wondered why the Saudis or other emirs don't do the sort of ad campaigns in this country that Mormons do, to make Islam look utterly bourgeois and ordinary. There may never be a real counter to the Israel lobby in this country until somebody does this to "sell" Arabs and their culture to Americans, and until someone tries it, all the objective arguments and fact-finding of Mearsheimer & Walt and hundreds of other writers are unlikely to change many minds.