Mearsheimer and Walt: “The Jews made me do it”

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have attracted much attention on account of their essay, “The Israel Lobby,” in the current London Review of Books. The pair are being demonized by some supporters of Israeli policies and dismissed by others, and lionized by some critics of those policies and, in some instances, by professional Jew haters.

The thesis of the essay is nicely summarized in the first paragraph: “Why has the US been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another state?” US support of Israel can’t be explained, say the authors, by “shared strategic interests or compelling moral imperatives.”

Defenders of the essay echo the argument that the genesis of homicidal rancor toward the US is the product of blind support for Israel. Detractors say that Mearshimer and Walt are, in the words of blind Israel supporter David Horowitz, intellectual frauds who authored an “anti-Semitic screed.”

They’re all wrong, as are Mearshimer and Walt. It’s true that US support for Israel hasn’t always been in this country’s best interests, but the point that the two political scientists miss, or perhaps dismiss, is that rightly or wrongly, the US administrations that continuously supported Israel since the 1967 and 1973 wars have for the most part thought their support was in the country’s best interests.

The US has had what successive presidents thought was a vested interest in a weak and splintered Middle East community of nations. The rise of Arab nationalism in the late 1950s and on into the 1960s threatened that interest. The two Israeli wars blew up not just the armies of the most powerful Middle East countries — absent Iran, a loyal US client since the installation of the Shah — but the looming threat of a more or less united and functional Arab super state. In exchange for serving as a US proxy in service to that goal and a variety of unsavory others, Israel received pretty much unwavering support.

One could make a case that support for Israel includes a moral component, but that assumes morality as an operative principle of US foreign policy, an assumption for which the evidence is scant and which ignores the relative lack of US interest in Israel prior to the wars. One could make a far better case that US support for Israel created a situation in which successive Israeli administrations acted more in our interest than in their own. But, like us, they thought they were acting in their country’s interest.

US policy in the Middle East has been driven by far more than blind support for Israel. Oil, obviously, has been and continues to be the overriding factor. Between World War II and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, containing the communist regime, for both the sake of containment and the sake of the oil, was the focus of our policy. We did a lot of ugly things to further those goals, yet popular affection for the US remained generally high until the more or less simultaneous arrivals of Ariel Sharon, the second intafada and the second Bush. Since 1967, at least, we have Israel to thank for absorbing animosities that might otherwise have been directed at us.

Lobbyists for Israel have without question been among the most successful in advancing their causes, but they’re certainly not alone: the NRA, for instance, has for decades been at least as successful at shaping policy and electing or intimidating politicians as has the collective Israel lobby, and trade associations representing the drug, insurance and other industries have stellar records as well. Well organized and well funded lobbies traditionally do well at getting what they want, but in the foreign policy arena, successful lobbying efforts are generally the product of interests coincident with those of whoever is running the country at a given moment thinks are ours, or of disinterest — situations in which US administrations don’t really care about the issue and therefore go where the money is.

Perhaps the most pernicious argument Mearshimer and Walt make, and one that critics of Israeli policies often make, is that Israel supporters such as Paul Wolfowitz, Elliot Abrams, Douglas Feith and others hijacked US foreign policy. The truth is pretty much the opposite: Wolfowitz et al and the policies they espouse are influential in the Bush administration because their political godfather, Dick Cheney, wanted them to be. In a very real sense, those who advance that argument are excusing US administrations from responsibility for their sins.

In other words, the problem with US policy in the Middle East, which has been ruthless and often counterproductive for decades, isn’t Israel; it’s us, and never more spectacularly so than with the Bush administration.