‘Israel lobby’ saga continues

washington | "Israel Lobby, The Sequel" is officially on the road, and it's forcing the Jewish community to reassess the two professors peddling the story of Washington in the grip of nefarious pro-Israel lobbyists.

In an address Monday, Aug. 28 in Washington hosted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer expanded their original thesis of an excessively influential Israel lobby by addressing the reaction to their March paper, "The Israel Lobby," and assessing its theories in the wake of the Lebanon war.

The result was clarity: There no longer is any doubt about what drove the two academics.

"It'll be much easier now to deal with them and their arguments," said Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League. "They're not academics, they're handmaidens of the Arab propaganda machine."

CAIR and Mearsheimer did not return requests for comment.

The most damning criticism of the original paper was that it made assertions not backed by evidence. Yet instead of retreating from their critique, Mearsheimer and Walt seemed to revel in it.

Not only had Israel long planned its war this summer against Hezbollah in Lebanon, Mearsheimer claimed, but it did so with the connivance of the Bush administration.

"It now seems clear that Israel had been planning to strike at Hezbollah for months before the July 12 kidnapping" of two Israeli soldiers, "and that key Israelis had briefed the administration about their intentions," Mearsheimer said. "The available evidence indicates that the Bush administration enthusiastically endorsed Israel's plans for war in Lebanon."

No serious researcher has made this claim. New Yorker magazine investigative journalist Seymour Hersh and others have reported on Israeli contingency plans and how senior Israeli officials believed a confrontation was inevitable because of Hezbollah's missile buildup in southern Lebanon. But the argument that Israel was seeking a pretext to attack — and that the United States "enthusiastically" endorsed it — seems to be Mearsheimer's alone.

Asked to present evidence, Mearsheimer cited articles quoting Israel's "understandable" fears of a missile buildup, but failed to cite evidence of a search for a pretext with U.S. collusion.

Mearsheimer also said the American Israel Public Affairs Committee was the "driving force" behind efforts in Congress to remove language from pro-Israel war resolutions that called on all sides to preserve civilian life.

In fact, JTA has established that the initiative was purely Republican and had nothing to do with AIPAC.

The appearance at an event hosted by CAIR, a group that calls for cuts in U.S. funding to Israel and in the past has been accused of excusing Arab terrorism, was enough for some to underscore the lack of seriousness of men once better known as leading advocates of "realist" foreign policy. That school argues that nations pursue power, not ideals, in their foreign dealings.

"They've crossed the line from the academy to advocacy by adopting the Arab-Muslim narrative," said Eric Rozenman, Washington director for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, the first group to deconstruct the "Israel Lobby" paper. "This shows how far from academic moorings they've drifted."

Walt brushed aside one critic's charge their their work was "sloppy." He said the duo's credentials should speak for themselves. Mearsheimer teaches at the University of Chicago, Walt at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

"John and I have between us written six books and countless articles," Walt said. "No one has ever said before that our work was sloppy. Is it credible to think that the two of us would tackle a third-rail issue like this one and suddenly decide to be careless and cavalier in what we did?"

Walt repeated, without qualification, the paper's most controversial thesis: that the Israel lobby was critical in leading the United States into the Iraq war.

"If the lobby were less influential, the United States would have been much less likely to have invaded Iraq in 2003," he said. "This war was conceived by neoconservatives — many of them connected in the lobby — encouraged by many Israeli leaders and endorsed openly by groups like AIPAC."

In fact, AIPAC never openly endorsed the war. It was reported at the time that its lobbyists were friendly to the invasion, but only as an inevitable quid pro quo to a Bush administration that was friendly to Israel and in return expected its friends to back a war it was determined to undertake.

The vast majority of Jewish groups refrained from endorsing the war, fearing precisely the backlash manifested in the Walt-Mearsheimer argument. Subsequently, polls showed U.S. Jews outpaced non-Jews in opposing the war, and in the past year major U.S. Jewish groups have joined calls for a phased ending of the occupation.