The Scapegoat on K Street

...In March 2006 they created a sensation with the publication of their study, “The Israel Lobby and U.S...

...They recognize, too, the right of any American interest group to lobby freely...

...that its democracy is for Jews only, therefore seriously flawed...

...Or that the U.S...

...The tone of The Israel Lobby is reasonable and moderate, and its argument, on the surface, seems eminently rational...

...When that quickly also became a campaign to replace Middle East autocracies with democracies, of course Israel, the only stable democracy in the region, was seen as being on “our side...

...They maintained that because the pro-Israel lobby in the United States is so effective, American policy has become tilted toward Israel’s interests, which are not necessarily identical with those of the U.S...

...played an indispensable role in fomenting the current war in Iraq...

...The September 11, 2001 attacks raised once again the question of Israel’s geopolitical value to the United States...

...This book argues that support for the State of Israel does not serve American national interests...

...The bill of indictment also contains some truths, though they are less shocking than suggested...

...and now wants to embroil the U.S...

...Given that American support is vital for the Jewish state’s economic and political survival, Mearsheimer and Walt’s advocacy of a reassessment of the relationship brought accusations of hostility toward Israel...

...backing of Israel’s war against Hezbollah in Lebanon was justifiable, because a decisive defeat of the Shi’ite militants would have dealt a body blow to their Syrian and Iranian sponsors, thereby strengthening America’s position in the region...

...and Israel...

...The case for Israel as an American strategic asset did not emerge until the Six-Day War of 1967...

...Over the last two years Tony Judt, director of the Remarque Institute at New York University, has argued that a parochially “Jewish” state is an anachronism and called for its replacement by a binational entity...

...The charge of anti-Semitism also arose as their argument appeared to evoke Protocols of the Elders of Zion conspiracy theories of Jews working behind the scenes to undermine their host societies and take over the world...

...Blackening Israel’s moral standing can only erode the affinity so many Americans have felt for Israel...

...Some argued that support for Israel helped stoke the passions that killed thousands of innocent Americans, and that a more sympathetic approach to the Palestinian plight was one way to alleviate the Arab world’s anger against the U.S...

...in hostilities against Syria and Iran, even though we have nothing to gain from such aggressive behavior...

...And contrary to the usual proIsrael inclination of that approach, here it operates to undermine the moral case for Israel...

...to support Israel’s calamitous 34-day war against Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006...

...Or that it was the Gaza Strip terrorists who, instead of working to build a functioning society after Israel’s withdrawal, have preferred to inflict bloodshed and indulge in self-pity...

...Hence the intensive U.S...

...For example, the remarkable effectiveness of the Israel lobby is undeniable, yet the handful of instances cited where public officials have allegedly been voted out of office for bucking it hardly prove the lobby has the power to lead the U.S...

...Whether a Jewish state in the Middle East helps or hurts the United States is a debate that goes back to Israel’s founding...

...efforts to broker a deal between Israel and the Palestinians that culminated in the failed negotiations at Camp David and Taba in 2000-01...

...special relationship returned to the fray...

...In 2006, former President Jimmy Carter published a book accusing Israel of apartheid...

...from brokering an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal...

...Secretary of State George C. Marshall threatened to vote against the President’s re-election should he go through with the decision...

...Or that America does not need Israel to tell it a nuclear Iran poses an ominous danger...

...persuaded the U.S...

...Never mind that it was PLO leader Yasir Arafat, not the Israel lobby, who turned down the opportunity to create a viable Palestinian state in the waning days of President Bill Clinton’s Administration...

...In a chapter entitled “A Dwindling Moral Case,” they claim that “Israel’s past and present conduct offers little moral basis for privileging it over the Palestinians,” and say, “a good case can be made that current U.S...

...Somehow, despite their protestations to the contrary, one gets the strong impression that Israel’s disappearance would elicit few tears from them...

...Figures on the fringes of the American political spectrum, it was noted had raised similar unsubstantiated charges of Jewish “dual loyalty” in the past...

...Communism’s collapse and the end of the Cold War severely weakened the realist argument...

...This new factor—so vital to the calculations of foreign policy realists—justified a heavy infusion of aid to the Jewish state, as well as security coordination and diplomatic backing...

...Israel’s boosters are portrayed as stepping out of bounds only when they seek to intimidate critics into silence by smearing them as anti-Semites...

...Such a shift in the American position would, the book claims, enhance our standing in Arab and Muslim nations, safeguard our oil supplies, and reduce the threat of Islamist terrorism—with the added bonus of saving Israel from itself by ridding it of the onus of being an occupier...

...Thus, after first drawing attention to the magnitudeofAmericanaidto Israel, they argue that the powerful lobby repeatedly prevented the U.S...

...Some argued against Israel on moral grounds...

...Once Israel became a fait accompli the skeptics accepted the new reality, but never relinquished their conviction that the Jewish state was a hindrance to U.S...

...Furthermore, they were unmoved by the historical, moral and political considerations that impelled Truman to act as he did...

...Simply put, Mearsheimer and Walt give aid and comfort to those international forces eager to destroy the Jewish state—whose potency, it should be added they seriously underestimate...

...Ironically, much of the documentation the authors use to put together their picture of a superpowerful Israel lobby comes either from its supporters, who have a vested interest in exaggerating its clout, or from Jewish opponents, who, frustrated by their inability to alter Israeli and American policies in the Middle East, find the lobby a convenient scapegoat...

...In Its Incarnation as a book, The Israel Lobby and U.S...

...policy objectives...

...The predominant view, however, shared most emphatically by the Bush Administration, was that Israel—itself the victim of many terrorist attacks— is an ally in the “war on terror...

...They believed that facilitating the return of the Jews to their Promised Land contributed to the fulfillment of God’s will, were convinced that the homeless survivors of the bloodiest tragedy in Jewish history deserved a national home, and appreciated the fledgling Jewish state as a fellow democracy...

...But as in polyphonic music, more than one melody runs through the performance...

...Besides being pernicious, it also gives the lie to Mearsheimer and Walt’s assurances that they accept Israel’s right to exist and would use American power to preserve it...

...MORE REVEALING is the book’s condemnation of Israel on moral grounds...

...The primary realist indictment came from two established political scientists at very prestigious institutions, John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen M. Walt of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government...

...Foreign Policy cleverly attempts to short-circuit those complaints...

...The authors, bemoaning the indulgence of the major Presidential candidates in standard pro-Israel rhetoric, call for fresh thinking on the subject so that the next administration will emulate European countries pursuing a more “evenhanded” set of Middle East policies...

...Its quick and overwhelming triumph over Egypt, Syria and Jordan made Israel seem a military powerhouse that could serve as a Cold War counterweight to Soviet influence...

...The President and an untold number of other Christian Americans felt a special affinity with the people of the Bible...

...Or that Israel and its American supporters argued that, if anything, Iran should be targeted rather than Iraq...

...President Harry S. Truman’s willingness to grant Israel recognition in 1948 aroused f ierce opposition within the highest echelons of his Administration...

...But—and this is the crux of their thrust— Mearsheimer and Walt contend that precisely the opposite is true...

...Marshall and others feared that alienating the Arab world could lead to a disruption in the supply of oil to the West and facilitate Soviet penetration of the region...

...Over 100 pages of endnotes seem intended to insulate the volume from accusations of shoddy research...

...Drawing on the revisionist views of Israel’s Leftwing “new historians,” they declare that Israel was never in danger of destruction, not even during its 1948 War of Independence...

...These would include the exertion of economic and diplomatic pressure on Israel to withdraw to its pre1967 borders to make room for a “viable” Palestinian state, and the satisfaction, even if only symbolically, of the Palestinian “right of return...

...Now, amid widespread public revulsion against a war in Iraq ostensibly being fought to democratize the Middle East, and with a Presidential election looming next year, the realists are poised for a comeback...

...Reviewed by Lawrence Grossman Editor, “American Jewish Year Book...

...down the primrose path against its own interests...

...and that today, after engaging in criminal behavior, terrorism and “ethnic cleansing” against Palestinians, it illegally occupies their lands...

...Foreign Policy,” as an article in the London Review of Books and as a working paper on the Kennedy School Web site...

...has restrained Israel from making peace overtures to Syria, not the other way around...

...Many of the authors’ critics, faulting them for not backing their assertions with documentation, dismissed their thesis as nothing new...

...associate director of research, the American Jewish Committee SINCE ITS BEGINNINGS, United States foreign policy has been shaped by the interplay between an idealistic urge to spread democracy around the world and a realistic insistence on the pursuit of our national interests...

...And unlike the old canards about American Jews putting Israel’s interests before those of their own country, the authors describe the lobby—comprising Jews and many Christians—as sincerely convinced the policies it advocates are in the best interests of both the U.S...

...But as American efforts to transform the Arab world bogged down in the quagmire of Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict festered, critics of the IsraeliU.S...

...Mearsheimer and Walt also repeatedly proclaim their respect for the State of Israel and its accomplishments, and assert that the U S. must come to its aid should its existence be endangered...

...In addition to the realist appeal to value-free national interest, there is a subtly drawn idealist invocation of ethical values...

...policy conflicts with basic American values...

...In fact, the emergence of militant Islam as a potent threat to the West in the 1990s gave new life to the old view that a U.S.-allied Jewish state in the midst of a Muslim Middle East complicated the conduct of American foreign policy, especially since Israel’s continued control of territory captured in 1967 furnished a burning grievance for Islamists to exploit...

...Or that in principle the U.S...