The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy

THE ISRAEL LOBBY AND U.S. FOREIGN POLICY, by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt. Farrar Straus, and Giroux, 484 pp.

This book has one thing in common with the state of Israel: Before any progress can be made, it is necessary to affirm its right to exist.

In March 2006, the London Review of Books ran a long article called "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" that soon became the focus of heated denunciations, along lines that were all too predictable. It was denounced as anti-Semitic - or in the case of David Duke, the well-groomed Klansman, endorsed as anti-Semitic - more or less immediately. The publisher of one prominent magazine denounced the piece as the work of men who should wear tinfoil hats.

The people denouncing it as a work of conspiracy theory seemed a little feverish themselves. Their rhetorical overkill was perhaps necessary given how bland, centrist and professorial the article, and now the expanded book, really was.

One of the authors, John J. Mearsheimer, heads the program on international security policy at the University of Chicago. The other, Stephen M. Walt, was formerly Academic Dean at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, where he still teaches. Both adhere to the philosophy of international relations called "realism" - an approach that has waxed and waned in influence within the policy-making establishment, but that is far from a "fringe" doctrine.

For realists, the starting point in understanding international relations is the bedrock truth that countries have different national interests. The realist approach places a premium on tough-mindedness. It emphasizes that the relationship among nations is normally one of conflict - sometimes overt antagonism, sometimes low-level dis- agreement. Cooperation and peace are possible, and desirable. But they can only be achieved through an awareness of differences in national interest.

Mearsheimer and Walt might have done themselves a favor by opening The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy with a short sketch of that analytic framework. Instead, they poke their heads right into a hornet's nest. The relationship of the United States and Israel is special, even unique. And it seems not to fit their schema very well - which, in their eyes, can only mean that there is something "off" about the relationship, not about their framework.

For more than three decades, Israel has been the largest recipient of American foreign aid; it now gets at least $3 billion per year, though another calculation would place the figure closer to $4.3 billion. Beyond that, the Israeli state has long enjoyed the benefit of unconditional diplomatic backing from the United States.

For Mearsheimer and Walt, looking at things from a realist perspective, this high level of support made sense during the Cold War, when Israel was a "strategic asset" the U.S. could rely on, should the Soviets make a grab for the region's oil. But now the festering conflict with the Palestinians (among other factors) has turned American support for Israel into a liability.

"Turning a blind eye to Israel's nuclear program and human rights abuses," they write, "has made the United States look hypocritical when it criticizes other countries on these grounds, and it has undermined American efforts to encourage political reform throughout the Arab and Islamic world."

Yet the idea that American and Israeli national interests might be distinct - even incompatible at times - has no real traction in mainstream political discourse. How to account for this? Here, the authors whack the hornet's nest with a stick. The one-sided nature of the discussion is, they say, a product of the influence of "the Israel lobby."

That expression is, they say, "a convenient shorthand term for the loose coalition of individuals and organizations that actively work to shape U.S. foreign policy in the pro-Israel direction." It includes the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a powerful lobbying group by any definition, as AIPAC itself is not shy about indicating. It also includes most (though not all) major American Jewish organizations. But the "lobby" also contains fundamentalist Christians who are gung-ho about the role of Israel in God's apocalyptic timetable.

Naturally, "the Israel lobby" sounds close enough to "the Jewish lobby" to take on problematic overtones, but Mearsheimer and Walt make haste to clarify that they are not talking about a conspiracy: "On the contrary, the organizations and individuals who make up the lobby operate out in the open and in the same way other interest groups do." They also cite a recent poll indicating that more than a third of American Jews feel little or no emotional attachment to Israel - while many "who care a lot about Israel do not support the policies endorsed by the dominant organizations in the lobby."

The real problem with their argument is not that it is anti-Semitic, or even overly polemical. (You can find harsher criticisms of both Israel and its American supporters in Israeli newspapers.) It's that the term "Israel lobby" is both too diffuse and too narrow.

From a couple of prominent political scientists, you'd expect a close analysis of particular pro-Israel organizations (for example, AIPAC) and fresh research into how they exercise influence. But the footnotes, which draw heavily from books and newspaper articles, reveal that the authors have not really done interviews with people presumably belonging to the "lobby," nor gotten access to internal documents.

At the same time, they are wedded to the notion that the U.S. and Israel have distinct national interests - with the American interest defined, more or less, as sustained access to Middle Eastern oil. They reject the idea that Iraq was occupied in pursuit of oil. Hence, that policy was an effect of the Israel lobby's efforts on behalf of a different national interest.

Here, we see the real limits of their analysis. After 1993, by their own account, the major focus of Israel's concern about its own security was Iran, not Iraq. But it was the American neoconservatives - defined by the authors as part of the Israel lobby - who drew up the plans for attacking Iraq. This scheme did win support among the Israeli public in 2002 and '03, but it's hardly a matter of subordinating American policy to another country's interests.

What Mearsheimer and Walt describe as the influence of an "Israel lobby" on U.S. politics sometimes looks like a tail wagging the dog. For decades now, Israel has been part of the American global system. Supporting and defending it - often in hostile circumstances - has been one of the more forthright ways of projecting U.S. power on the world stage. And power creates its own interests, which then have to be looked after.

The virtual unanimity of American leaders in supporting Israel is less the product of a "lobby" than of something Mearsheimer and Walt seem not to understand: Given a choice between the interests of two nations, the final decision will be made in favor of the empire that contains them both.