- Stephen Walt towers over me as we walk
in the Harvard sunshine past Eliot Street, a big man who needs to be big
right now (he's one of two authors of an academic paper on the influence
of America's Jewish lobby) but whose fame, or notoriety, depending on your
point of view, is of no interest to him. "John and I have deliberately
avoided the television shows because we don't think we can discuss these
important issues in 10 minutes. It would become 'J' and 'S', the personalities
who wrote about the lobby - and we want to open the way to serious discussion
about this, to encourage a broader discussion of the forces shaping US
foreign policy in the Middle East."
-
- "John" is John Mearsheimer,
a political scientist at the University of Chicago. Walt is a 50-year-old
tenured professor at the John F Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.
The two men have caused one of the most extraordinary political storms
over the Middle East in recent American history by stating what to many
non-Americans is obvious: that the US has been willing to set aside its
own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests
of Israel, that Israel is a liability in the "war on terror",
that the biggest Israeli lobby group, Aipac (the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee), is in fact the agent of a foreign government and has
a stranglehold on Congress - so much so that US policy towards Israel is
not debated there - and that the lobby monitors and condemns academics
who are critical of Israel.
-
- "Anyone who criticises Israel's
actions or argues that pro-Israel groups have significant influence over
US Middle East policy," the authors have written, "...stands
a good chance of being labelled an anti-Semite. Indeed, anyone who merely
claims that there is an Israeli lobby runs the risk of being charged with
anti-Semitism ... Anti-Semitism is something no-one wants to be accused
of." This is strong stuff in a country where - to quote the late Edward
Said - the "last taboo" (now that anyone can talk about blacks,
gays and lesbians) is any serious discussion of America's relationship
with Israel.
-
- Walt is already the author of an elegantly
written account of the resistance to US world political dominance, a work
that includes more than 50 pages of references. Indeed, those who have
read his Taming Political Power: The Global Response to US Primacy will
note that the Israeli lobby gets a thumping in this earlier volume because
Aipac "has repeatedly targeted members of Congress whom it deemed
insufficiently friendly to Israel and helped drive them from office, often
by channelling money to their opponents."
-
- But how many people in America are
putting their own heads above the parapet, now that Mearsheimer and Walt
have launched a missile that would fall to the ground unexploded in any
other country but which is detonating here at high speed? Not a lot. For
a while, the mainstream US press and television - as pro-Israeli, biased
and gutless as the two academics infer them to be - did not know whether
to report on their conclusions (originally written for The Atlantic Monthly,
whose editors apparently took fright, and subsequently reprinted in the
London Review of Books in slightly truncated form) or to remain submissively
silent. The New York Times, for example, only got round to covering the
affair in depth well over two weeks after the report's publication, and
then buried its article in the education section on page 19. The academic
essay, according to the paper's headline, had created a "debate"
about the lobby's influence.
-
- They can say that again. Dore Gold,
a former ambassador to the UN, who now heads an Israeli lobby group, kicked
off by unwittingly proving that the Mearsheimer-Walt theory of "anti-Semitism"
abuse is correct. "I believe," he said, "that anti-Semitism
may be partly defined as asserting a Jewish conspiracy for doing the same
thing non-Jews engage in." Congressman Eliot Engel of New York said
that the study itself was "anti-Semitic" and deserved the American
public's contempt.
-
- Walt has no time for this argument.
"We are not saying there is a conspiracy, or a cabal. The Israeli
lobby has every right to carry on its work - all Americans like to lobby.
What we are saying is that this lobby has a negative influence on US national
interests and that this should be discussed. There are vexing problems
out in the Middle East and we need to be able to discuss them openly. The
Hamas government, for example - how do we deal with this? There may not
be complete solutions, but we have to try and have all the information
available."
-
- Walt doesn't exactly admit to being
shocked by some of the responses to his work - it's all part of his desire
to keep "discourse" in the academic arena, I suspect, though
it probably won't work. But no-one could be anything but angered by his
Harvard colleague, Alan Dershowitz, who announced that the two scholars
recycled accusations that "would be seized on by bigots to promote
their anti-Semitic agendas". The two are preparing a reply to Dershowitz's
45-page attack, but could probably have done without praise from the white
supremacist and ex-Ku Klux Klan head David Duke - adulation which allowed
newspapers to lump the name of Duke with the names of Mearsheimer and Walt.
"Of Israel, Harvard and David Duke," ran the Washington Post's
reprehensible headline.
-
- The Wall Street Journal, ever Israel's
friend in the American press, took an even weirder line on the case. "As
Ex-Lobbyists of Pro-Israel Group Face Court, Article Queries Sway on Mideast
Policy" its headline proclaimed to astonished readers. Neither Mearsheimer
nor Walt had mentioned the trial of two Aipac lobbyists - due to begin
next month - who are charged under the Espionage Act with receiving and
disseminating classified information provided by a former Pentagon Middle
East analyst. The defence team for Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman has
indicated that it may call Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and National
Security Adviser Stephen Hadley to the stand.
-
- Almost a third of the Journal's report
is taken up with the Rosen-Weissman trial, adding that the indictment details
how the two men "allegedly sought to promote a hawkish US policy toward
Iran by trading favours with a number of senior US officials. Lawrence
Franklin, the former Pentagon official, has pleaded guilty to misusing
classified information. Mr Franklin was charged with orally passing on
information about a draft National Security Council paper on Iran to the
two lobbyists... as well as other classified information. Mr Franklin was
sentenced in December to nearly 13 years in prison..."
-
- The Wall Street Journal report goes
on to say that lawyers and "many Jewish leaders" - who are not
identified - "say the actions of the former Aipac employees were no
different from how thousands of Washington lobbyists work. They say the
indictment marks the first time in US history that American citizens...
have been charged with receiving and disseminating state secrets in conversations."
The paper goes on to say that "several members of Congress have expressed
concern about the case since it broke in 2004, fearing that the Justice
Department may be targeting pro-Israel lobbying groups, such as Aipac.
These officials (sic) say they're eager to see the legal process run its
course, but are concerned about the lack of transparency in the case."
-
- As far as Dershowitz is concerned,
it isn't hard for me to sympathise with the terrible pair. He it was who
shouted abuse at me during an Irish radio interview when I said that we
had to ask the question "Why?" after the 11 September 2001 international
crimes against humanity. I was a "dangerous man", Dershowitz
shouted over the air, adding that to be "anti-American" - my
thought-crime for asking the "Why?" question - was the same as
being anti-Semitic. I must, however, also acknowledge another interest.
Twelve years ago, one of the Israeli lobby groups that Mearsheimer and
Walt fingers prevented any second showing of a film series on Muslims in
which I participated for Channel 4 and the Discovery Channel - by stating
that my "claim" that Israel was building large Jewish settlements
on Arab land was "an egregious falsehood". I was, according to
another Israeli support group, "a Henry Higgins with fangs",
who was "drooling venom into the living rooms of America."
-
-
- Such nonsense continues to this day.
In Australia to launch my new book on the Middle East, for instance, I
repeatedly stated that Israel - contrary to the anti-Semitic conspiracy
theorists - was not responsible for the crimes of 11 September 2001. Yet
the Australian Jewish News claimed that I "stopped just millimetres
short of suggesting that Israel was the cause of the 9/11 attacks. The
audience reportedly (and predictably) showered him in accolades."
-
- This was untrue. There was no applause
and no accolades and I never stopped "millimetres" short of accusing
Israel of these crimes against humanity. The story in the Australian Jewish
News is a lie.
-
- So I have to say that - from my own
humble experience - Mearsheimer and Walt have a point. And for a man who
says he has not been to Israel for 20 years - or Egypt, though he says
he had a "great time" in both countries - Walt rightly doesn't
claim any on-the-ground expertise. "I've never flown into Afghanistan
on a rickety plane, or stood at a checkpoint and seen a bus coming and
not known if there is a suicide bomber aboard," he says.
-
- Noam Chomsky, America's foremost moral
philosopher and linguistics academic - so critical of Israel that he does
not even have a regular newspaper column - does travel widely in the region
and acknowledges the ruthlessness of the Israeli lobby. But he suggests
that American corporate business has more to do with US policy in the Middle
East than Israel's supporters - proving, I suppose, that the Left in the
United States has an infinite capacity for fratricide. Walt doesn't say
he's on the left, but he and Mearsheimer objected to the invasion of Iraq,
a once lonely stand that now appears to be as politically acceptable as
they hope - rather forlornly - that discussion of the Israeli lobby will
become.
-
- Walt sits in a Malaysian restaurant
with me, patiently (though I can hear the irritation in his voice) explaining
that the conspiracy theories about him are nonsense. His stepping down
as dean of the Kennedy School was a decision taken before the publication
of his report, he says. No one is throwing him out. The much-publicised
Harvard disclaimer of ownership to the essay - far from being a gesture
of fear and criticism by the university as his would-be supporters have
claimed - was mainly drafted by Walt himself, since Mearsheimer, a friend
as well as colleague, was a Chicago scholar, not a Harvard don.
-
- But something surely has to give.
-
- Across the United States, there is
growing evidence that the Israeli and neo-conservative lobbies are acquiring
ever greater power. The cancellation by a New York theatre company of My
Name is Rachel Corrie - a play based on the writings of the young American
girl crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza in 2003 - has deeply
shocked liberal Jewish Americans, not least because it was Jewish American
complaints that got the performance pulled.
-
- "How can the West condemn the
Islamic world for not accepting Mohamed cartoons," Philip Weiss asked
in The Nation, "when a Western writer who speaks out on behalf of
Palestinians is silenced? And why is it that Europe and Israel itself have
a healthier debate over Palestinian human rights than we can have here?"
Corrie died trying to prevent the destruction of a Palestinian home. Enemies
of the play falsely claim that she was trying to stop the Israelis from
collapsing a tunnel used to smuggle weapons. Hateful e-mails were written
about Corrie. Weiss quotes one that reads: "Rachel Corrie won't get
72 virgins but she got what she wanted."
-
- Saree Makdisi - a close relative of
the late Edward Said - has revealed how a right-wing website is offering
cash for University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) students who report
on the political leanings of their professors, especially their views on
the Middle East. Those in need of dirty money at UCLA should be aware that
class notes, handouts and illicit recordings of lectures will now receive
a bounty of $100. "I earned my own inaccurate and defamatory 'profile',"
Makdisi says, "...not for what I have said in my classes on English
poets such as Wordsworth and Blake - my academic speciality, which the
website avoids mentioning - but rather for what I have written in newspapers
about Middle Eastern politics."
-
- Mearsheimer and Walt include a study
of such tactics in their report. "In September 2002," they write,
"Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes, two passionately pro-Israel neo-conservatives,
established a website (www.campus-watch.org) that posted dossiers on suspect
academics and encouraged students to report behaviour that might be considered
hostile to Israel... the website still invites students to report 'anti-Israel'
activity."
-
- Perhaps the most incendiary paragraph
in the essay - albeit one whose contents have been confirmed in the Israeli
press - discusses Israel's pressure on the United States to invade Iraq.
"Israeli intelligence officials had given Washington a variety of
alarming reports about Iraq's WMD programmes," the two academics write,
quoting a retired Israeli general as saying: "Israeli intelligence
was a full partner to the picture presented by American and British intelligence
regarding Iraq's non-conventional capabilities."
-
- Walt says he might take a year's sabbatical
- though he doesn't want to get typecast as a "lobby" critic
- because he needs a rest after his recent administrative post. There will
be Israeli lobbyists, no doubt, who would he happy if he made that sabbatical
a permanent one. I somehow doubt he will.
-
- Robert Fisk writes for the Independent.
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