Summary: Innocent Abroad: Review and Analysis of Martin Indyks Book

The problems addressed by the Clinton administration—the Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Syrian conflicts—remain acute issues on the Middle Eastern and international agendas, and the Obama administration's decision to assign a high priority to the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and to try early on to open dialogues with Iran and Syria have raised fresh interest in the failure of an earlier Democratic administration to implement a similar program.

Some of the actors in the diplomacy of the s are still in place and some are back—Benjamin Netanyahu as Israel's Prime Minister and Ehud Barak as Minister of Defense. And if Bill Clinton is not back, his wife, as Secretary of State, is designated to play a major role. Indyk chose to focus his book on Bill Clinton, his team, and his effort to restructure the Middle East, to resolve the Arab Israeli conflict, and to describe and analyze from his unusually rich perspective—Senior Director for the Middle East at the NSC, Ambassador to Israel twice , and Assistant Secretary of State in charge of the Near Eastern Bureau—what was attempted and what went wrong during that extraordinary period.

The outcome is not yet another peace process memoir but a well written, absorbing, and insightful book, enhanced by Indyk's frankness in depicting his superiors and colleagues and by his willingness to digress every so often from the narrative to provide an in-depth analysis of an important issue. As the title of his book suggests, Indyk believes that U. Bush had to be disabused of a great deal of innocence and in fact also hubris when they encountered the complexity of the region.

But tough or insurmountable as the challenge may be, U. They will run up against the same structural impediments described in this book: In order to understand fully what Indyk means by these "structural impediments," it would be useful to take a closer look at his account and interpretation of three of the most controversial episodes of that period. The first concerns one of the most important turning points in the evolution of the Madrid Process: Rabin's decision in August to sign the Oslo Accord rather than proceed with the Syrian track after having deposited with Secretary of State Christopher a conditional willingness to withdraw from the Golan in exchange for a package of peace and security comparable to the one given at the time by Anwar Sadat to Menachem Begin.

As Rabin's negotiator with Syria and ambassador in Washington, I attributed the failure of this gambit to Rabin's disappointment with Asad's response to his bold move yes in principle but a very low counter offer and with Christopher's decision to pass on this response rather than tell Asad that it was unacceptable. Indyk has an entirely different interpretation. Where Israel is concerned, however, potential critics fall silent. One reason is that some key members are Christian Zionists like Dick Armey, who said in September Its success is due to its ability to reward legislators and congressional candidates who support its agenda, and to punish those who challenge it.

Anyone who is seen as hostile to Israel can be sure that AIPAC will direct campaign contributions to his or her political opponents. AIPAC also organises letter-writing campaigns and encourages newspaper editors to endorse pro-Israel candidates. There is no doubt about the efficacy of these tactics.

Here is one example: And the American politicians — those who hold public positions now, and those who aspire — got the message. The bottom line is that AIPAC, a de facto agent for a foreign government, has a stranglehold on Congress, with the result that US policy towards Israel is not debated there, even though that policy has important consequences for the entire world. In other words, one of the three main branches of the government is firmly committed to supporting Israel.

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt · The Israel Lobby: the Israel Lobby · LRB 23 March

Thanks in part to the influence Jewish voters have on presidential elections, the Lobby also has significant leverage over the executive branch. Although they make up fewer than 3 per cent of the population, they make large campaign donations to candidates from both parties. And because Jewish voters have high turn-out rates and are concentrated in key states like California, Florida, Illinois, New York and Pennsylvania, presidential candidates go to great lengths not to antagonise them. Key organisations in the Lobby make it their business to ensure that critics of Israel do not get important foreign policy jobs.

Jimmy Carter wanted to make George Ball his first secretary of state, but knew that Ball was seen as critical of Israel and that the Lobby would oppose the appointment. In this way any aspiring policymaker is encouraged to become an overt supporter of Israel, which is why public critics of Israeli policy have become an endangered species in the foreign policy establishment. This worry was absurd; Dean is in fact quite hawkish on Israel: Although all three supported the Oslo peace process and favoured the creation of a Palestinian state, they did so only within the limits of what would be acceptable to Israel.

The American delegation took its cues from Ehud Barak, co-ordinated its negotiating positions with Israel in advance, and did not offer independent proposals. The situation is even more pronounced in the Bush administration, whose ranks have included such fervent advocates of the Israeli cause as Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, I. As we shall see, these officials have consistently pushed for policies favoured by Israel and backed by organisations in the Lobby. Accordingly, pro-Israel organisations work hard to influence the institutions that do most to shape popular opinion.

Conversely, he found just five pundits who consistently criticise Israeli actions or endorse Arab positions. Newspapers occasionally publish guest op-eds challenging Israeli policy, but the balance of opinion clearly favours the other side. It is hard to imagine any mainstream media outlet in the United States publishing a piece like this one. Not surprisingly, his newspaper, the Wall Street Journal , along with other prominent papers like the Chicago Sun-Times and the Washington Times , regularly runs editorials that strongly support Israel.

Editorial bias is also found in papers like the New York Times , which occasionally criticises Israeli policies and sometimes concedes that the Palestinians have legitimate grievances, but is not even-handed. As more Arab than Jewish readers recognised, I wrote them from a pro-Israel perspective. To discourage unfavourable reporting, the Lobby organises letter-writing campaigns, demonstrations and boycotts of news outlets whose content it considers anti-Israel.

One CNN executive has said that he sometimes gets email messages in a single day complaining about a story. The Israeli side also dominates the think tanks which play an important role in shaping public debate as well as actual policy. These think tanks employ few, if any, critics of US support for Israel. Take the Brookings Institution. For many years, its senior expert on the Middle East was William Quandt, a former NSC official with a well-deserved reputation for even-handedness.

What was once a non-partisan policy institute is now part of the pro-Israel chorus. Where the Lobby has had the most difficulty is in stifling debate on university campuses. The Lobby also monitors what professors write and teach. In September , Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes, two passionately pro-Israel neo-conservatives, established a website Campus Watch that posted dossiers on suspect academics and encouraged students to report remarks or behaviour that might be considered hostile to Israel.

Groups within the Lobby put pressure on particular academics and universities. Columbia has been a frequent target, no doubt because of the presence of the late Edward Said on its faculty. When Columbia recruited the historian Rashid Khalidi from Chicago, the same thing happened. It was a problem Princeton also faced a few years later when it considered wooing Khalidi away from Columbia.

The committee also discovered that the academics in question had themselves been the target of an overt campaign of intimidation. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of all this is the efforts Jewish groups have made to push Congress into establishing mechanisms to monitor what professors say. If they manage to get this passed, universities judged to have an anti-Israel bias would be denied federal funding. Their efforts have not yet succeeded, but they are an indication of the importance placed on controlling debate.

A number of Jewish philanthropists have recently established Israel Studies programmes in addition to the roughly Jewish Studies programmes already in existence so as to increase the number of Israel-friendly scholars on campus. No discussion of the Lobby would be complete without an examination of one of its most powerful weapons: In other words, the Lobby first boasts of its influence and then attacks anyone who calls attention to it.

Europeans have been more willing than Americans to criticise Israeli policy, which some people attribute to a resurgence of anti-semitism in Europe. Measuring anti-semitism is a complicated matter, but the weight of evidence points in the opposite direction. In the spring of , when accusations of European anti-semitism filled the air in America, separate surveys of European public opinion conducted by the US-based Anti-Defamation League and the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that it was in fact declining.

In the s, by contrast, anti-semitism was not only widespread among Europeans of all classes but considered quite acceptable. The Lobby and its friends often portray France as the most anti-semitic country in Europe. Finally, when a French Jew was murdered in Paris last month by a Muslim gang, tens of thousands of demonstrators poured into the streets to condemn anti-semitism. But this is a separate matter with little bearing on whether or not Europe today is like Europe in the s.

Nor would anyone deny that there are still some virulent autochthonous anti-semites in Europe as there are in the United States but their numbers are small and their views are rejected by the vast majority of Europeans. In other words, criticise Israeli policy and you are by definition an anti-semite. Critics are also accused of holding Israel to an unfair standard or questioning its right to exist. But these are bogus charges too. Western critics of Israel hardly ever question its right to exist: Nor is Israel being judged unfairly.

Israeli treatment of the Palestinians elicits criticism because it is contrary to widely accepted notions of human rights, to international law and to the principle of national self-determination. And it is hardly the only state that has faced sharp criticism on these grounds. Bush had very significant means of persuasion at his disposal. He could have threatened to reduce economic and diplomatic support for Israel, and the American people would almost certainly have supported him.

Indeed, 73 per cent said that the United States should not favour either side. Yet the administration failed to change Israeli policy, and Washington ended up backing it. By February , a Washington Post headline summarised the situation: The story begins in late September , when Bush began urging Sharon to show restraint in the Occupied Territories. Bush even said publicly that he supported the creation of a Palestinian state.

Sharon offered a pro forma apology, but quickly joined forces with the Lobby to persuade the administration and the American people that the United States and Israel faced a common threat from terrorism. Israeli officials and Lobby representatives insisted that there was no real difference between Arafat and Osama bin Laden: The Lobby also went to work in Congress.

On 16 November, 89 senators sent Bush a letter praising him for refusing to meet with Arafat, but also demanding that the US not restrain Israel from retaliating against the Palestinians; the administration, they wrote, must state publicly that it stood behind Israel. By late November, relations between Tel Aviv and Washington had improved considerably. Sharon visited the White House in early December and had a friendly meeting with Bush. Israel and the Lobby swung into action. Bush himself was being pressed by Jewish leaders and Christian evangelicals.

Sharon had done no such thing, but Bush was no longer willing to make an issue of it. Meanwhile, Congress was also moving to back Sharon. The Senate vote was 94 to 2; the House of Representatives version passed to Both resolutions were drawn up with the help of the Lobby. A few days later, a bipartisan congressional delegation on a fact-finding mission to Israel stated that Sharon should resist US pressure to negotiate with Arafat. Powell opposed the package, but the Lobby backed it and Powell lost. In short, Sharon and the Lobby took on the president of the United States and triumphed.

The situation has changed little since then. The Bush administration refused ever again to have dealings with Arafat. After his death, it embraced the new Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, but has done little to help him. With Hamas in power, however, Israel has another excuse not to negotiate. Bush has even endorsed unilateral Israeli annexations in the Occupied Territories, reversing the stated policy of every president since Lyndon Johnson. US officials have offered mild criticisms of a few Israeli actions, but have done little to help create a viable Palestinian state.

Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies

If Bush tries to distance the US from Israel, or even criticises Israeli actions in the Occupied Territories, he is certain to face the wrath of the Lobby and its supporters in Congress. Democratic presidential candidates understand that these are facts of life, which is the reason John Kerry went to great lengths to display unalloyed support for Israel in , and why Hillary Clinton is doing the same thing today.

It also wants America to help Israel remain the dominant regional power. Pressure from Israel and the Lobby was not the only factor behind the decision to attack Iraq in March , but it was critical. Some Americans believe that this was a war for oil, but there is hardly any direct evidence to support this claim. Instead, the war was motivated in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure. Israeli leaders were deeply distressed when Bush decided to seek Security Council authorisation for war, and even more worried when Saddam agreed to let UN inspectors back in.

Apart from Kuwait, which Saddam invaded in , Israel was the only country in the world where both politicians and public favoured war. Within the US, the main driving force behind the war was a small band of neo-conservatives, many with ties to Likud. In statement after statement community leaders stressed the need to rid the world of Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction. Although neo-conservatives and other Lobby leaders were eager to invade Iraq, the broader American Jewish community was not. The neo-conservatives had been determined to topple Saddam even before Bush became president.

But they were unable to sell a war to achieve that objective. They were no more able to generate enthusiasm for invading Iraq in the early months of the Bush administration. They needed help to achieve their aim. Specifically, the events of that day led Bush and Cheney to reverse course and become strong proponents of a preventive war. At a key meeting with Bush at Camp David on 15 September, Wolfowitz advocated attacking Iraq before Afghanistan, even though there was no evidence that Saddam was involved in the attacks on the US and bin Laden was known to be in Afghanistan.

Bush rejected his advice and chose to go after Afghanistan instead, but war with Iraq was now regarded as a serious possibility and on 21 November the president charged military planners with developing concrete plans for an invasion. Other neo-conservatives were meanwhile at work in the corridors of power. By early Cheney had persuaded Bush; and with Bush and Cheney on board, war was inevitable.

Outside the administration, neo-conservative pundits lost no time in making the case that invading Iraq was essential to winning the war on terrorism. Their efforts were designed partly to keep up the pressure on Bush, and partly to overcome opposition to the war inside and outside the government.

On 20 September, a group of prominent neo-conservatives and their allies published another open letter: This was the beginning of an unrelenting public relations campaign to win support for an invasion of Iraq, a crucial part of which was the manipulation of intelligence in such a way as to make it seem as if Saddam posed an imminent threat.

Within the Pentagon, the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group was charged with finding links between al-Qaida and Iraq that the intelligence community had supposedly missed. Its two key members were David Wurmser, a hard-core neo-conservative, and Michael Maloof, a Lebanese-American with close ties to Perle. Another Pentagon group, the so-called Office of Special Plans, was given the task of uncovering evidence that could be used to sell the war. It was headed by Abram Shulsky, a neo-conservative with long-standing ties to Wolfowitz, and its ranks included recruits from pro-Israel think tanks.

Like virtually all the neo-conservatives, Feith is deeply committed to Israel; he also has long-term ties to Likud. He wrote articles in the s supporting the settlements and arguing that Israel should retain the Occupied Territories. It also called for Israel to take steps to reorder the entire Middle East. Netanyahu did not follow their advice, but Feith, Perle and Wurmser were soon urging the Bush administration to pursue those same goals.

Wolfowitz is equally committed to Israel. They backed Chalabi because he had established close ties with Jewish-American groups and had pledged to foster good relations with Israel once he gained power. This was precisely what pro-Israel proponents of regime change wanted to hear. Matthew Berger laid out the essence of the bargain in the Jewish Journal: Yet few people would say so publicly, and most of those who did — including Senator Ernest Hollings and Representative James Moran — were condemned for raising the issue.

There is little doubt that Israel and the Lobby were key factors in the decision to go to war. And the war itself was intended to be only the first step. A front-page headline in the Wall Street Journal shortly after the war began says it all: Changing Not Just Regime but a Region: Pro-Israel forces have long been interested in getting the US military more directly involved in the Middle East.

The idea was to play local powers off against each other — which is why the Reagan administration supported Saddam against revolutionary Iran during the Iran-Iraq War — in order to maintain a balance favourable to the US. Substantial US forces would be stationed in the region in order to contain both Iran and Iraq, instead of one being used to check the other.

By the mids there was considerable dissatisfaction with dual containment, because it made the United States the mortal enemy of two countries that hated each other, and forced Washington to bear the burden of containing both. But it was a strategy the Lobby favoured and worked actively in Congress to preserve. By the late s, however, the neo-conservatives were arguing that dual containment was not enough and that regime change in Iraq was essential.

The Israel Lobby

By toppling Saddam and turning Iraq into a vibrant democracy, they argued, the US would trigger a far-reaching process of change throughout the Middle East. By , when an invasion of Iraq was on the front-burner, regional transformation was an article of faith in neo-conservative circles. Once Baghdad fell in mid-April , Sharon and his lieutenants began urging Washington to target Damascus.

Prominent members of the Lobby made the same arguments. It threatened sanctions against Syria if it did not withdraw from Lebanon, give up its WMD and stop supporting terrorism, and it also called for Syria and Lebanon to take concrete steps to make peace with Israel.

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The Bush administration had little enthusiasm for it, but the anti-Syrian act passed overwhelmingly to 4 in the House; 89 to 4 in the Senate , and Bush signed it into law on 12 December The administration itself was still divided about the wisdom of targeting Syria. Although the neo-conservatives were eager to pick a fight with Damascus, the CIA and the State Department were opposed to the idea. And even after Bush signed the new law, he emphasised that he would go slowly in implementing it.

His ambivalence is understandable. Targeting the Assad regime would jeopardise these valuable connections, and thereby undermine the larger war on terrorism. Second, Syria had not been on bad terms with Washington before the Iraq war it had even voted for UN Resolution , and was itself no threat to the United States.

Playing hardball with it would make the US look like a bully with an insatiable appetite for beating up Arab states. Third, putting Syria on the hit list would give Damascus a powerful incentive to cause trouble in Iraq. Even if one wanted to bring pressure to bear, it made good sense to finish the job in Iraq first. If there were no Lobby, there would have been no Syria Accountability Act, and US policy towards Damascus would have been more in line with the national interest. Israelis tend to describe every threat in the starkest terms, but Iran is widely seen as their most dangerous enemy because it is the most likely to acquire nuclear weapons.

Virtually all Israelis regard an Islamic country in the Middle East with nuclear weapons as a threat to their existence. We still have great threats of that magnitude coming from Syria, coming from Iran. The neo-conservatives, too, lost no time in making the case for regime change in Tehran.

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The speakers were all strongly pro-Israel, and many called for the US to replace the Iranian regime with a democracy. As usual, a bevy of articles by prominent neo-conservatives made the case for going after Iran.

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But Washington has had little success, and Iran seems determined to create a nuclear arsenal. As a result, the Lobby has intensified its pressure. One might argue that Israel and the Lobby have not had much influence on policy towards Iran, because the US has its own reasons for keeping Iran from going nuclear.

And that is why the Lobby must keep up constant pressure on politicians to confront Tehran. Iran and the US would hardly be allies if the Lobby did not exist, but US policy would be more temperate and preventive war would not be a serious option. In short, there are ample grounds for leaders to distance themselves from the Lobby and adopt a Middle East policy more consistent with broader US interests. In particular, using American power to achieve a just peace between Israel and the Palestinians would help advance the cause of democracy in the region.

But that is not going to happen — not soon anyway. Besides, American politicians remain acutely sensitive to campaign contributions and other forms of political pressure, and major media outlets are likely to remain sympathetic to Israel no matter what it does. It has made it impossible to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a situation that gives extremists a powerful recruiting tool, increases the pool of potential terrorists and sympathisers, and contributes to Islamic radicalism in Europe and Asia.

There is a moral dimension here as well. Thanks to the Lobby, the United States has become the de facto enabler of Israeli expansion in the Occupied Territories, making it complicit in the crimes perpetrated against the Palestinians. Silencing sceptics by organising blacklists and boycotts — or by suggesting that critics are anti-semites — violates the principle of open debate on which democracy depends.

The inability of Congress to conduct a genuine debate on these important issues paralyses the entire process of democratic deliberation. Its ability to persuade Washington to support an expansionist agenda has discouraged Israel from seizing opportunities — including a peace treaty with Syria and a prompt and full implementation of the Oslo Accords — that would have saved Israeli lives and shrunk the ranks of Palestinian extremists.

Denying the Palestinians their legitimate political rights certainly has not made Israel more secure, and the long campaign to kill or marginalise a generation of Palestinian leaders has empowered extremist groups like Hamas, and reduced the number of Palestinian leaders who would be willing to accept a fair settlement and able to make it work. Israel itself would probably be better off if the Lobby were less powerful and US policy more even-handed. There is a ray of hope, however. Although the Lobby remains a powerful force, the adverse effects of its influence are increasingly difficult to hide.

Powerful states can maintain flawed policies for quite some time, but reality cannot be ignored for ever. An unedited version of this article is available at http: On the LRB Blog: It achieves this through the strategic activity of its leaders and its ability to deflect criticism with accusations of anti-semitism. This argument rests on the belief that a small clique can achieve hegemony over an entity as complex as the US government.

AIPAC commands great resources, but its reputation for untrammelled dominance is grossly overstated. There are plenty of countervailing centres of power, such as paleoconservatives, Arab and Islamic advocacy groups e. CAIR and the diplomatic establishment. According to a February Gallup poll, 59 per cent of Americans express strong support for Israel. This figure includes 77 per cent of Republicans, but also half of all Democrats. In addition, reducing American and Western conflict with Islam to the issue of Israel obscures more than it reveals.

It fails to explain anti-Western Islamicist movements in places as far from Israel as Algeria and the Philippines. Could it be that vote-seeking European leftists and Saudi-funded Islamic clerics are amplifying the conflict in the Middle East into a transnational obsession? The violence following the publication of Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad in late may be instructive in this regard: Having made this point, the authors presume to suggest that a more restrained US policy will be good for Israel.

Arab resentment of America originates from a long pattern of British and French imperialism in the region. The distrust of the West including America was further exacerbated by a feeling in the region that the United States often favoured pro-American dictators over more democratic leaders. Over the past two decades, anti-Western militancy in the Middle East has evolved from a Marxist movement into one built on a twisted religious extremism. At the same time, the Arab world has been afflicted with extreme anti-semitism reminiscent of Nazism. A lost war by Israel or a significant poison gas attack on Tel Aviv could easily translate into another holocaust.

Finally, support for Israel does not seem quite so extensive when one considers the massive level of manpower America has deployed over the past six decades to defend Western Europe, South Korea and Japan. John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt write: Accusations of powerful Jews behind the scenes are part of the most dangerous traditions of modern anti-semitism. We have known and respected John Mearsheimer for over twenty years, which makes the essay all the more unsettling. That centrepiece has been and remains access to oil for the United States and for the global economy.

As it became apparent during the s that Israel was not merely the only democracy in the region but also a supporter of the West in the Cold War, the American relationship intensified. At that point, support for Israel, which had been strongest among liberals who supported a Jewish state in the wake of the Holocaust, expanded to include the previously less than enthusiastic military and diplomatic foreign policy establishment, some of which was deeply hostile to Israel and suspicious of Jews, to put it mildly.

This was not due to the efforts of the Jewish Lobby or the power of the five million Jews in a country of almost million. It was due to an assessment of American national interest made by an overwhelmingly non-Jewish political and military establishment long before Christian fundamentalism became a factor in the Republican Party. It coincided with increasingly close ties with the Saudi regime. Second, it is not true that the United States went to war in Iraq because of the pressure of a Jewish Lobby.

Even if the key decision makers were Jews, this would not prove the point about the Jewish Lobby. As it happens, the primary advisers and war planners for Bush were Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell and Rice and the entirely non-Jewish military leadership, not the usual suspects now trotted out by those peddling stories about Jewish power behind the scenes.

Whatever Israel or its supporters in the US may or may not have wanted, American and British leaders decided to go to war for reasons grounded in their own interpretation of their respective national interests. Saddam Hussein stunned and surprised his own military leaders three months before the US and Britain invaded by revealing to them that Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction.

There were many officials in London and Washington — or Berlin and Paris, for that matter — who would have been just as surprised. One need not agree that oil below the ground and dictatorship above it posed an immediate threat to recall that British and American as well as other Western leaders believed that Saddam with weapons of mass destruction in years to come would have posed a threat to the other Arab oil-producing states as much as to Israel.

Third, while much opinion in the Arab and Islamic world has rejected the presence of a Jewish state in its midst, anti-Americanism, hatred of Europe including Britain and of liberal modernity in general would exist if Israel was not there. This naivety is the reason that radical Islam and the enduring crises of modernisation in the region that produced it receive hardly a word in their long attack. Fourth, American Jewish citizens have a right to express their views without being charged with placing the interests of Israel ahead of those of the US. Mearsheimer and Walt further ignore that all of this happened also after Israel withdrew from Lebanon, offered the Barak plan, retaliated to the terrorist campaign as any state — including Britain or the United States — would, accepted the principle of a Palestinian state and thus agreed to withdraw from over 90 per cent of the West Bank, and then withdrew completely from Gaza.

If the Palestinians had responded to these offers of a compromise peace, they would perhaps have had a functioning state before radical Islam came to dominate their politics. It was radical Islamist and secular Palestinian militants, not the Jewish Lobby, that destroyed prospects for a compromise settlement. If the US concluded that it no longer had a vital interest in the continued survival of the only democracy in the Middle East, those now attacking Western modernity might conclude that the Americans could be convinced that the defence of Europe — and Britain — was also not in the American interest.

He had this to say about it: It is quite satisfying to see a body in the premier American University essentially come out and validate every major point I have been making since before the war even started. Please cancel my subscription. As an advocate of free speech and an opponent of censorship based on political correctness, I welcome a serious, balanced, objective study of the influences of lobbies — including Israeli lobbies — on American foreign policy.

I also welcome reasoned, contextual and comparative criticism of Israeli policies and actions. The authors pre-emptively accuse the Lobby of indiscriminately crying anti-semitism: Several years ago, I challenged those who made similar accusations to identify a single Jewish leader who equated mere criticism of Israeli policy with anti-semitism. No one accepted my challenge, because no Jewish leader has made such a claim.

Among the harshest critics of Israeli policy are Jews and Israelis: Mearsheimer and Walt rely on discredited allegations and partial quotation. They twice quote David Ben-Gurion out of context so that he appears to be saying the exact opposite of what he actually did say. First, the authors have Ben-Gurion stating: They omit what he said next: There are many other factual errors, but I will draw attention to just a few.

It is totally false. A person of any ethnicity or religion can become an Israeli citizen. Indeed, Mearsheimer and Walt admit that Israel has 1. If Mearsheimer and Walt were truly concerned about racist citizenship statutes, they could have looked right next door to Jordan, which openly and explicitly refuses to grant citizenship to Jews. Lawrence Lowell, who fought fiercely to keep Jews out of Harvard.

Mearsheimer and Walt do not cite the map Dennis Ross published in his book The Missing Peace , which contrasts the Palestinian characterisation of the final proposal at Camp David with the actual proposal. The second map — the real map offered to the Palestinians at Camp David — shows a contiguous Palestinian state in the West Bank. This is going to be a crime. Their first argument is that the very existence of an Israeli lobby proves that support for Israel is essentially un-American.

If it was, one would not need an organised special interest group to bring it about. Mearsheimer and Walt attribute anything that Israel and America do or aspire to achieve in common to Israeli manipulation. They confuse correlation with causation.