Before Walt and Mearsheimer
I’ve been covering the paper “The Lobby” by Professors Walt and Mearsheimer for a little more than a month now.In the past week or so, I became aware of a couple of articles that seemed to anticipate the arguments of Walt and Mearsheimer. The Walt/Mearsheimer thesis is that Israel’s interests are not the interests of the United States so that in order to get the United States to champion Israel’s interests there is exists an incredibly powerful lobby that convinces the U.S. to work against its own interests.
Before Walt and Mearsheimer wrote “The Lobby” Josef Joffe wrote “A world without Israel.” Joffe writes towards the end of his article
Take the Cairo Declaration against “U.S. hegemony,” endorsed by 400 delegates from across the Middle East and the West in December 2002. The lengthy indictment mentions Palestine only peripherally. The central condemnation, uttered in profuse variation, targets the United States for monopolizing power “within the framework of capitalist globalization,” for reinstating “colonialism,” and for blocking the “emergence of forces that would shift the balance of power toward multi-polarity.” In short, Global America is responsible for all the afflictions of the Arab world, with Israel coming in a distant second.
This familiar tale has an ironic twist: One of the key signers is Nader Fergany, lead author of the 2002 U.N. Arab Human Development Report. So even those who confess to the internal failures of the Arab world end up blaming “the Other.”
In other words the objections to the United States that are heard in the Arab world, have little to do with Israel. Those who blame Israel for America’s problems in the Middle East, according to Joffe, are not paying attention. In fact Joffe notes
Another bit of suggestive evidence is that the fiercest (unofficial) anti-Americanism emanates from Washington’s self-styled allies in the Arab Middle East, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Is this situation because of Israel—or because it is so convenient for these regimes to “busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels” (as Shakespeare’s Henry IV put it) to distract their populations from their dependence on the “Great Satan”?
Before Walt and Mearsheimer wrote “The Lobby” Bernard Lewis, wrote The New Anti-Semitism in the American Scholar (and reproduced at Deja Vu) Lewis identifies where critics of Israel from critics of other foreign nations
We see other instances of differing standards and methods of judgment nearer home and in a perhaps less alarming form. We hear a great deal, for example, about the Jewish lobby and the various accusations that are from time to time brought against it, that those engaged in it are somehow disloyal to the United States and are in the service of a foreign power.
The Jewish lobby is, of course, not the only lobby of its kind. Consider three others: the Irish, Greek, and Armenian lobbies. The Irish lobby, which campaigned against the United Kingdom, America’s closest ally, and the Greek and Armenian lobbies, which campaigned against Turkey when Turkey was a crucial NATO ally, were seen as pursuing their legitimate concerns. I don’t recall accusations against any of them of disloyalty or even of divided loyalty.
AS Jewish Current Issues tells us though it’s
worth reading in its entirety
(And as long as we’re discussing Bernard Lewis, here’s an excellent assessment of him from Slate. I think, Yoffie, though is too optimistic that Lewis’s scholarship is winning the day in Middle Eastern Study Departments.)
Finally, (via Meryl Yourish) In Context shows us that before Walt and Mearsheimer wrote “The Lobby,” there were the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Walt and Mearsheimer’s arguments are not new. Not by a long shot. They have a long and dishonorable history. And they don’t hold up upon examination.
Technorati tags: Israel, the Lobby, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Bernard Lewis.
Related articles about Israel in Soccer Dad.
Related articles about Walt and Mearsheimer in Soccer Dad.
Crossposted on Israpundit and Soccer Dad.
