Professors Tone Down ‘Lobby’ Critique

The two professors who came under fire last year for arguing that a pro-Israel lobby distorts U.S. foreign policy have returned with a book, this time toning down parts of their argument and offering rebuttals to critics of their controversial claims.

“The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” by international relations scholars Stephen M. Walt of the Kennedy School of Government and John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, hit store shelves last month and has landed on the New York Times bestseller list—a distinction shared by few academic books.

The two scholars drew intense criticism when they published an article in March 2006 arguing that current levels of American support for Israel can only be explained by the power of the “Israel Lobby,” a “loose coalition” of lobby groups, think tanks, and academics who work to advance Israel’s foreign-policy interests. The “core” of the lobby, the professors wrote, is composed of American Jews.

The publication of the essay prompted an unusually vitriolic debate in academic circles worldwide. The professors drew criticism from high-profile scholars including Frankfurter Professor of Law Alan M. Dershowitz and MIT linguist Noam Chomsky, while earning praise from others, like New York University historian Tony Judt.

While far less has been written about Walt and Mearsheimer’s latest work, an examination of the book shows that it is not like the original essay in all respects.

Perhaps as a result of the reaction to the essay, the authors take pains in the book to show that their criticisms of the Israel lobby can be applied to other lobbies, while also spending more time tracing the American-Israel relationship. The authors also clarify many of their criticisms, bringing a less inflammatory tone to the book as a whole. 

THE NEW AND THE OLD

In the first part of the book, Walt and Mearsheimer advance their thesis in three parts—as they did in the original article, which was published in the London Review of Books.

First, they show that the U.S. provides a high level of support for Israel. Second, they argue that neither strategic considerations nor moral ones are valid explanations for the level of American aid to Israel. Third, they conclude that the reason for American support for Israel is the lobby, which they argue has a powerful influence over both American policymaking institutions and public discourse.

This first section contains few new arguments, but unlike in the article, the authors devote significant space to a detailed discussion on history, tracing both the evolution of American relations with Israel and the development of the lobby.

Walt and Mearsheimer argue that previous American presidents, like Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower, were much more evenhanded in dealing with Israel and its Arab neighbors. Only as the power of the lobby grew throughout the second half of the twentieth century, they contend, did American support for Israel increase alongside it.

The discussion of the composition of the lobby is similar, and more extensive, than the one in the original article, though the professors admit in the book that the lobby’s boundaries are “somewhat fuzzy.” At one point, they even write that “using the term ‘Israel lobby’ is itself somewhat misleading, insofar as many of the individuals and some of the groups in this loose coalition do not engage in formal lobbying activities.”

Walt and Mearsheimer also discuss the role non-Jewish actors, most notably “Christian Zionists,” play in the lobby.

In the second part of the book, as in the article, the authors take up the influence of the lobby, writing about its impact on relations with the Palestinians, the war in Iraq, policy toward Syria, possible military action against Iran, and the 2006 war in Lebanon.

The main arguments are very similar to those made in the article, though the authors do make two new acknowledgments regarding Iraq and Iran.

In the original article, the professors had claimed that the lobby played a critical role in taking the U.S. to war with Iraq but never mentioned the role of the Sept. 11 attacks in any part of the piece. In the book, the authors write that “the war would probably not have occurred absent the September 11 attacks,” a position they first took in the July/August 2006 issue of Foreign Policy magazine.

Additionally, many commentators have criticized Walt and Mearsheimer’s claim that the lobby led the U.S. into Iraq by pointing out that the Israeli political leadership regarded Iran as a greater threat than Iraq.

The professors concede this in the book and adjust their original point: while the lobby would have preferred to attack Iran, they say, it was perfectly happy to support an invasion of Iraq after it saw the direction in which the Bush administration was heading.

The discussion of the 2006 war between Israel and Lebanon is also new, as the article was published before the conflict erupted. To Walt and Mearsheimer, the war is a microcosm of the problem posed by the lobby: the conflict, they say, was a “strategic folly” for both the U.S. and Israel but enjoyed the support of the American government due to the power of the lobby.

A NEW TONE

Though Walt and Mearsheimer’s central arguments change only marginally, the book does contain several new assertions and clarifications which, taken together, have the effect of moderating their overall tone. Even Ira E. Stoll ’94, managing editor of The New York Sun and a strong critic of the authors, acknowledged that the new presentation is more “polished.”

For example, the professors situate the Israel lobby as just one lobby among a host of ethnic lobbies—something they did not do in the original article. The authors write that “ethnic lobbies representing Cuban Americans, Irish Americans, Armenian Americans, and Indian Americans have [also] managed to skew U.S. foreign policy in directions they favored.”

Likewise, in the article, the professors wrote that the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza have led to “crimes perpetrated against the Palestinians.” While they do not back off this claim, they acknowledge in the book that “virtually all states have committed serious crimes at one time or another” and that “some of Israel’s Arab neighbors have at times acted with great brutality.”

On the question of Israel’s security, the professors repeat well over a dozen times that there is a “strong moral case” for Israel’s existence, something they mentioned only briefly in the original article. They also assert for the first time in the book that “the United States should stand willing to come to Israel’s assistance if its survival were ever in jeopardy.”

At one point, the professors even write that they themselves “are ‘pro-Israel,’ in the sense that we support its right to exist, admire its many achievements, want its citizens to enjoy secure and prosperous lives, and believe that the U.S. should come to Israel’s aid if its survival is in danger.”

Finally, gone from the book are two things that had incensed critics of the original essay.

First, the authors no longer assert that Israeli “citizenship is based on the principle of blood kinship,” a charge that had prompted Harvard’s Dershowitz to declare that the “mendacious emphasis on Jewish ‘blood’ “might indicate that the professors had used “neo-Nazi propaganda” in their sourcing.

And second, the pair use a lowercase “l” in the word “lobby,” in contrast to the capital “L” used in the article. Many critics of the original essay had taken issue with Walt and Mearsheimer’s use of a capital “L,” saying that it made the lobby seem like a unified, monolithic “cabal” without internal disagreements.

THE EARLY RESPONSE

So far, the reception of the book has been more muted than the response following the original essay.

Over the past week, the book has ranked in first place in three categories—general U.S. history, Israeli history, and international relations—according to Amazon.com data. It also reached number 17 on the New York Times bestseller list for hardcover nonfiction as of yesterday evening.

Few reviews of the book have appeared so far, but those that have been published range widely.

Stoll wrote in his review that the authors’ command of the relevant facts is “shaky” and that “anti-Semitism manages to poke through” in the book.

“[A]t least two professors are calling not for a defeat of the Islamist terrorists but for appeasing them at Israel’s expense,” wrote Stoll, a former Crimson president.

On the other end of the spectrum, Publisher’s Weekly praised the authors for “careful reasoning and meticulous documentation” while also acknowledging that the book “increase[s] the megatonnage of their explosive claims.”

And The New York Times, one of the few major newspapers to run a review, has taken the middle ground, calling the book “ruthlessly realistic” and saying the authors make their case “deliberately and dispassionately.” But the review went on to call the book a “prosecutorial brief” and said that its “general tone of hostility to Israel grates on the nerves.”

Many of the strongest voices of condemnation from the first time around have remained silent so far. Most notably, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a group that Walt and Mearsheimer say is the central part of the lobby—and, indeed, calls itself “America’s Pro-Israel Lobby”—has said it will not respond to the book, according to The Jerusalem Post.

At Harvard, Dershowitz, Professor of Public Service David R. Gergen, and Murrow Professor of Practice Emeritus Marvin Kalb all criticized the original article but have not yet said anything publicly about the book.

And though Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature Ruth R. Wisse has not directly commented on the book, she released a book of her own earlier this month titled “Jews in Power.” In it, Wisse makes a point of taking to task those who, like Walt and Mearsheimer, accuse the Bush administration of caving in to pressure from Jewish organizations when pushing to invade Iraq.

—Staff writer Paras D. Bhayani can be reached at pbhayani@fas.harvard.edu.