The problem with Walt and Mearsheimer
By Robert Horenstein
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When I received the World Affairs Council e-mail announcing Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer’s lecture in Portland, scheduled for Oct. 24, I was hardly surprised. The two distinguished scholars already had crisscrossed the country several times with their anti-Israel dog-and-pony show, selling thousands of copies of their highly controversial book, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.”
Though I had some initial misgivings—and notwithstanding advice from an AIPAC official to “simply ignore them”—I attended the lecture at the Hilton along with 400 other people.
It was a well-rehearsed presentation. With great self-assurance, first Walt, a professor of international affairs at Harvard, then Mearsheimer, a political science professor at the University of Chicago, laid out their thesis that an all-powerful “Israel lobby” has essentially manipulated, coaxed and threatened successive U.S. governments into blind and unwholesome support for Israel, to the detriment of American national interests.
Ironically, both scholars, despite such scurrilous accusations, stress that they categorically reject “Jewish conspiracy theories” which assert that Jews wield excessive power and exhibit dual loyalty. But just in case this disclaimer doesn’t disarm the skeptics, Walt and Mearsheimer shrewdly immunize themselves against charges of anti-Semitism by preemptively predicting that the Israel lobby will accuse them of it.
Perhaps mindful of this, Leslie Gelb, the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in the Sept. 23 New York Times that Walt and Mearsheimer’s allegations “have to be answered, not by calling them anti-Semites, but on the merits.” Similarly, in a mid-September memo to the community relations field, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs recommended that criticisms of “The Israel Lobby” focus on “discrediting the scholarship behind the book.”
To be sure, there’s no dearth of credible critics of Walt and Mearsheimer’s work. Among them are former U.S. Secretaries of State George Schultz and Madeleine Albright, former U.S. Middle East Envoy Dennis Ross, and David Gergen, a White House advisor to four presidents and, like Walt, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
Moreover, Walt and Mearsheimer’s scholarship has been variously described by academics, public officials and newspaper editors as “inept,” “substandard,” “laughable,” “wildly at variance with [reality],” and “lacking basic scholarly standards of fact and logic.”
Benny Morris, a professor of Middle East history at Ben-Gurion University who is cited as a source in “The Israel Lobby” (in ostensible corroboration of the authors’ arguments), called their work “a travesty of the history that I have studied and written for the past two decades,” adding that the book is “riddled with shoddiness and defiled by mendacity.”
Still, as I listened to the two professors that evening, I felt an uneasiness that had little to do with their flawed scholarship. True, I was annoyed by their fabrication of historical facts, their disingenuously selective use of sources and the utter lack of evidence for their claims. But their criticism of Israel was no different from that which I’ve heard on many occasions from pro-Palestinian propagandists.
What was different was that this presentation went beyond the pale. Here were two eminent scholars, hosted by a highly respected organization in a prestigious downtown hotel, being provided a platform from which to accuse Jewish Americans of subversion and implicate them in the worst terrorist attacks in our history.
I don’t claim to know what Walt and Mearsheimer’s motivations were for writing their thesis. What I do know is that they’ve singled out the pro-Israel community for supposedly undermining U.S. national interests while minimizing the well-funded campaign by the Saudi lobby to influence American foreign policy, secure massive advanced weapons deals, and promulgate the Arab line on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
I know, too, that their work, which was embraced by the white supremacist David Duke, has become recommended reading for Jew-haters worldwide. After all, is it such an unimaginable leap from Walt and Mearsheimer’s conclusions to the anti-Semitic rants of Duke, who claims that “Jewish power is ubiquitous” and that “Jewish organizations ruthlessly seek their perceived interests over the interests of the American people”?
I’m fully aware that this is precisely how Walt and Mearsheimer want me to react. The charge of anti-Semitism, Walt told the audience, is one of the tactics used by the Israel lobby to “stifle criticism of American support for Israel.”
But who’s trying to silence whom? The notion that Walt and Mearsheimer, who’ve been on a whirlwind speaking tour to promote their New York Times bestseller, are somehow being silenced is patently absurd. On the other hand, by framing the debate the way they do, isn’t it they themselves who seek to shield their work from censure?
The issue isn’t about whether criticsm of American support for Israel is anti-Semitic—generally speaking, it’s not. But if we allow the Walts and Mearsheimers of the world to set the rules of the game, at best we become participants in an academic debate that we may not win even with so many facts on our side.
At worst, we become paralyzed bystanders as old anti-Semitic canards about Jewish power and control, now bestowed legitimacy by two scholars with impressive credentials, creep into mainstream thought.
Robert Horenstein is the staff director of the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland Community Relations Committee.