Two years ago this week, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt released their essay "The Israel Lobby" and kick-started a much-overdue discussion of America's relationship with Israel.
For those not in the know, Mearsheimer is a prominent political scientist at the University of Chicago, and Walt is a political scientist at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government (at the time the paper was released, Walt was the KSG Academic Dean, but he had planned to leave the post and has since done so). In 2002, the Atlantic commissioned an article on the Israel lobby by the two profs, but, despite their making extensive revisions and edits to the piece, the magazine ultimately passed on it. Instead, Mearsheimer and Walt published the essay in the London Review of Books. Simultaneously, they released a Harvard working paper on the same topic, an extended version of the LRB essay, on the KSG website.
And then all hell broke loose. The Harvard working paper was downloaded nearly a million times, an astounding number for any academic text, let alone a political science working paper posted on a university website. The Israel Lobby sparked outrage among defenders of Israeli policy--I refuse to call them pro-Israel because they harm Israel--who declared Walt and Mearsheimer to be nothing less than Jew-haters with good resumes. The Anti-Defamation League called the paper "a classical conspiratorial anti-Semitic analysis invoking the canards of Jewish power and Jewish control." Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz said the men had "destroyed their professional reputations," and released a detailed response. The furor was covered in the Washington Post Magazine, the New York Post, the New Yorker and other national publications. As Michael Massing put it, without hyperbole, "Not since Foreign Affairs magazine published Samuel Huntington's 'The Clash of Civilizations?' in 1993 has an academic essay detonated with such force as 'The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy.'"
Mearsheimer and Walt alleged that "the United States has been willing to set aside its own security in order to advance the interests of another state [Israel]", and that U.S. Middle East policy is driven primarily by the "Israel Lobby," defined as a "loose coalition of individuals and organizations who actively work to steer U.S. foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction." The Lobby set terms of acceptable debate on Israel in America, and intimidated those who stepped outside the consensus. Most immediately, they charged that the Lobby--they later lower-cased the L--had been instrumental in driving the U.S. toward an unnecessary, self-destructive war in Iraq. Along with 9/11, they said, the Israel lobby was the key factor that influenced the Bush administration to invade Iraq.
None of these charges was especially novel. Writers operating closer to the fringe had said much the same thing for years. Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky, Pat Buchanan, Edward Said, Patrick Findley, George Ball--all had written at length about an Israel lobby and its influence on US foreign policy. But all of these writers were marginalized, discredited or controversial voices. "The Israel Lobby" struck a chord not because of the contents of the paper itself, but because of the reputations of its authors. Mearsheimer and Walt were not fringe professors, operating on the edges of academia. They were two of the most prominent political scientists in the country, advocates of the 'realist' tradition that has dominated international relations theory since the 1940 and 1950s. A November/December 2005 survey of international relations scholars released in Foreign Policy magazine (subscription required but the list is here) listed Mearsheimer and Walt as the fifth and the 22nd most influential profs in their field, respectively. In other words, these guys were establishment big-wigs. They were attacking the establishment from the inside.
CONTINUED ON WEDNESDAY