OVERSTATING JEWISH POWER
By Christopher Hitchens
Slate
March 27 2006
Mearsheimer and Walt give too much credit to the Israeli lobby.
It’s slightly hard to understand the fuss generated by the article
on the Israeli lobby produced by the joint labors of John Mearsheimer
and Stephen Walt that was published in the London Review of Books. My
guess is that the Harvard logo has something to do with it, but then
I don’t understand why the doings of that campus get so much media
attention, either.
The essay itself, mostly a very average “realist” and centrist critique
of the influence of Israel, contains much that is true and a little
that is original. But what is original is not true and what is true
is not original.
Everybody knows that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and
other Jewish organizations exert a vast influence over Middle East
policy, especially on Capitol Hill. The influence is not as total,
perhaps, as that exerted by Cuban exiles over Cuba policy, but it is
an impressive demonstration of strength by an ethnic minority. Almost
everybody also concedes that the Israeli occupation has been a moral
and political catastrophe and has implicated the United States in a
sordid and costly morass. I would have gone further than Mearsheimer
and Walt and pointed up the role of Israel in supporting apartheid
in South Africa, in providing arms and training for dictators in
Congo and Guatemala, and helping reactionary circles in America do
their dirty work-most notably during the Iran-Contra assault on the
Constitution and in the emergence of the alliance between Likud and
the Christian right. Counterarguments concerning Israel’s help in
the Cold War and in the region do not really outweigh these points.
However, Mearsheimer and Walt present the situation as one where the
Jewish tail wags the American dog, and where the United States has
gone to war in Iraq to gratify Ariel Sharon, and where the alliance
between the two countries has brought down on us the wrath of Osama
Bin Laden. This is partly misleading and partly creepy. If the Jewish
stranglehold on policy has been so absolute since the days of Harry
Truman, then what was Gen. Eisenhower thinking when, on the eve of an
election 50 years ago, he peremptorily ordered Ben Gurion out of Sinai
and Gaza on pain of canceling the sale of Israeli bonds? On the next
occasion when Israel went to war with its neighbors, 11 years later,
President Lyndon Johnson was much more lenient, but a strong motive
of his policy (undetermined by Israel) was to win Jewish support for
the war the “realists” were then waging in Vietnam. (He didn’t get
the support, except from Rabbi Meir Kahane.)
If it is Israel that decides on the deployment of American force,
it seems odd that the first President Bush had to order them to
stay out of the coalition to free Kuwait, and it is even more odd
that the first order of neocon business has not been an attack on
Iran, as Israeli hawks have been urging. Mearsheimer and Walt are
especially weak on this point: They speak darkly about neocon and
Israeli maneuvers in respect to Tehran today, but they entirely fail
to explain why the main initiative against the mullahs has come from
the European Union and the International Atomic Energy Authority,
two organizations where the voice of the Jewish lobby is, to say the
least, distinctly muted. Their theory does nothing to explain why it
was French President Jacques Chirac who took the lead in isolating
the death-squad regime of Assad’s Syria (a government that Mearsheimer
and Walt regard, for reasons of their own, as a force for stability).
As for the idea that Israel is the root cause of the emergence of
al-Qaida: Where have these two gentlemen been? Bin Laden’s gang
emerged from a whole series of tough and reactionary battles in
Central and Eastern Asia, from the war for a separate Muslim state in
the Philippines to the fighting in Kashmir, the Uighur territories in
China, and of course Afghanistan. There are hardly any Palestinians
in its ranks, and its communiques have been notable for how little
they say about the Palestinian struggle. Bin Laden does not favor a
Palestinian state; he simply regards the whole area of the former
British Mandate as a part of the future caliphate. The right of
the Palestinians to a state is a just demand in its own right, but
anyone who imagines that its emergence would appease-or would have
appeased-the forces of jihad is quite simply a fool. Is al-Qaida
fomenting civil war in Nigeria or demanding the return of East Timor
to Indonesia because its heart bleeds for the West Bank?
For purposes of contrast, let us look at two other regional allies
of the United States. Both Turkey and Pakistan have been joined to
the Pentagon hip since approximately the time of the emergence of the
state of Israel, which coincided with the Truman Doctrine. Pakistan
was, like Israel, cleaved from a former British territory. Since that
time, both states have carried out appalling internal repression
and even more appalling external aggression. Pakistan attempted a
genocide in Bangladesh, with the support of Nixon and Kissinger, in
1971. It imposed the Taliban as its client in a quasi-occupation of
Afghanistan. It continues to arm and train Bin Ladenists to infiltrate
Indian-held Kashmir, and its promiscuity with nuclear materials
exceeds anything Israel has tried with its stockpile at Dimona. Turkey
invaded Cyprus in 1974 and continues in illegal occupation of the
northern third of the island, which has been forcibly cleansed of
its Greek inhabitants. It continues to lie about its massacre of the
Armenians. U.N. resolutions have had no impact on these instances
of state terror and illegality in which the United States is also
partially implicated.
But here’s the thing: There is no Turkish or Pakistani ethnic
“lobby” in America. And here’s the other thing: There is no call for
“disinvestment” in Turkey or Pakistan. We are not incessantly told
that with these two friends we are partners in crime. Perhaps the
Greek Cypriots and Indians are in error in refusing to fly civilian
aircraft into skyscrapers. That might get the attention of the
“realists.” Or perhaps the affairs of two states, one secular Muslim
and one created specifically in the name of Islam, do not possess
the eternal fascination that attaches to the Jewish question.
There has been some disquiet expressed about Mearsheimer and Walt’s
over-fondness for Jewish name-dropping: their reiteration of the
names Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, etc., as the neocon inner circle.
Well, it would be stupid not to notice that a group of high-energy Jews
has been playing a role in our foreign-policy debate for some time. The
first occasion on which it had any significant influence (because,
despite its tentacular influence, it lost the argument over removing
Saddam Hussein in 1991) was in pressing the Clinton administration to
intervene in Bosnia and Kosovo. These are the territories of Europe’s
oldest and largest Muslim minorities; they are oil-free and they
do not in the least involve the state interest of Israel. Indeed,
Sharon publicly opposed the intervention. One could not explain any
of this from Mearsheimer and Walt’s rhetoric about “the lobby.”
Mearsheimer and Walt belong to that vapid school that essentially
wishes that the war with jihadism had never started. Their wish is
father to the thought that there must be some way, short of a fight,
to get around this confrontation. Wishfulness has led them to seriously
mischaracterize the origins of the problem and to produce an article
that is redeemed from complete dullness and mediocrity only by being
slightly but unmistakably smelly.
Related in Slate Michael Kinsley explored why some people believe that,
as Hitchens put it, the “Jewish tail wags the American dog.” Anne
Kornblut explained why, unlike past Republican presidents, President
Bush is tight with Jewish voters. With a track record like this, maybe
Turkish-Americans should think about setting up an ethnic lobby. On
the other hand, the Cuban-American lobby may be pretty powerful,
but Jacob Weisberg suggested it has helped keep the island isolated
from democracy.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent
book is Thomas Jefferson: Author of America. His most recent collection
of essays is titled Love, Poverty, and War.