The Reviews of Walt and Mearsheimer: Moving Past the 'Lobby' and Getting Stuck in the 'Middle'
by Jeremiah Haber
The Magnes Zionist

The reviews of Walt and Mearsheimer’s book-length version of the 'Israel Lobby' in the mainstream media have run from the mixed to the negative.

More accurately, they have been negative, with some crumbs thrown to the authors for having raised certain questions and broken certain taboos. The consensus of the reviews that I have seen is that the book is a one-sided indictment against Israel’s policies and supporters, a screed that needs to be balanced.

That certainly seems to have been the view of the Washington Post, which commissioned Samuel Freedman to review the Israel Lobby together with Abe Foxman’s 'refutation,' The Deadliest Lies. Freedman, who teaches journalism at Columbia University, and who wrote an interesting book called Jew vs. Jew a few years back, has a lot to say against both books.

To his credit, he takes Walt and Mearsheimer much more seriously than Abe Foxman, whose silly little book I leafed through in Barnes and Nobles. Freedman is an intelligent man and a first-rate journalist. But his implied conclusion that the truth lies somewhere in the middle reveals him in all his glory as a liberal Zionist – hardly the fairest reviewer for a book on the Israel Lobby. And yet, virtually all the reviews in the major media outlets have been by liberal Zionists, both Jewish and non-Jewish.

By 'liberal Zionism' I mean the view that supports the state of Israel as founded in 1948 by political Zionists like Ben-Gurion. While liberal Zionists are often critical of Israeli policies (especially those advocated by the Israeli right and their hawkish allies, e.g., the settlements), they assume that a) that there are two sides to the Israel-Palestine story, and b) a lot of justice is on the Israeli side.

So when they read works by such disparate authors as Walt and Mearsheimer, Jimmy Carter, Tony Judt and Norman Finkelstein, they cannot refrain from saying, “Yeah, but what about the responsibility of the Palestinian side for the mess?”

This is because they fundamentally accept the Zionist narrative of Jewish history that culminates in the State of Israel, and they reject the Palestinian narrative that a foreign settler movement displaced the natives who, as the majority population in Palestine, had every expectation of a belonging to an Arab Palestine with a Jewish minority.

Now, one can favor Israel over the Palestinians without accepting the justice of the Zionist narrative. One can argue that Israel is a state recognized by the United Nations and that there is a prima facie case for favoring a state over a non-state collective, a favored position that will evaporate when Palestine becomes a state. But this is not the position taken by the reviewers. To a man they appeal to the comfortable (and banal) adage that the truth lies between the two extremes. The difficulty, however, is that they locate the 'center' in the Zionist camp. Those who take a position that dissents from political Zionism, even if that position accepts de facto the state of Israel, are dogmatic and one-sided.

The triumph of Zionism in this country is not so much that nobody 'normal' today questions the wisdom, or the justice, of the establishment and continued existence of a Zionist state. Rather, it is that nobody questions the correctness of the Zionist narrative that justifies the Jewish claim to a state at the expense of the Palestinian claim. Because if they did, then the failure to establish a strong and vibrant Palestinian state sixty years after the UN supported such a state, a state that is at least the equal of the Jewish state, would not allow them to sleep at night.

I am not saying that reviewers should have been chosen who reject the Zionist narrative. But why not ask people who have no vested interest in either narrative to review the book? Or, if liberal Zionists, are being asked, why not liberal Palestinians, like Rashid Khalidi (who happens to be critical of the book’s thesis.)?

As long as the world does not impose a solution that levels the playing field between Israeli Jew and Palestinian, there is no point in talking about 'balance'. The situation there is incredibly skewed in favor of Israel, which has virtually all the cards, and against the Palestinians, which has virtually none.

Let me demonstrate Freedman’s fundamental acceptance of the liberal Zionist narrative with the following passage.

It is certainly the right of Mearsheimer and Walt to advance these arguments, and their analysis of Camp David in particular echoes that of Robert Malley, one of the American mediators there. There is no lack of Israeli culpability in the Middle East morass, most obviously for the settlement enterprise. Still, one can leave this book with only the faintest realization that the political majority in Israel had been prepared to withdraw from most of the occupied territories to conclude a peace agreement with a Palestinian state -- until the Al-Aksa intifada brought terrorism as deeply into sovereign, pre-1967 Israel as the Tel Aviv beachfront.

Having withdrawn from all of Gaza in 2005, Israel received a steady barrage of rocket attacks, which undermined public support for further disengagement from portions, at least, of the West Bank. The authors do not have to concur with the Israeli reaction to those events, but they prove their intellectual dishonesty in barely even mentioning them… Thus, while Mearsheimer and Walt endorse a two-state solution, they still lump into the nefarious Israel lobby some of the very diplomats -- Martin Indyk and Dennis Ross, to name two -- who tried to negotiate precisely such a peace agreement.

Here you have in a nutshell the faith of the liberal Zionist.

Israel is indeed responsible for much of the Middle East morass, “most obviously for the settlement enterprise,” as if everything pre-1967 was just hunky-dory and could be solved by a simple withdrawal to the 67 borders by ceding “much of the occupied territories,” with a “peace agreement.” It seems that according to Freedman, the Israel-Palestinian conflict could have been solved via Oslo, were it not for the al-Aksa intifada, “that brought terrorism as deeply into sovereign, pre-1967 Israel as the Tel Aviv beachfront.”

Aside from the fact that this factually incorrect -- Palestinians blew up Israeli civilians in Tel Aviv before, during, and after Oslo, it assumes that Israelis were once willing to conclude a peace agreement with the Palestinians that would create a strong, secure Palestinians state. As I have written before, this is pure balderdash. Nobody in Israel, except those on the extreme left, have ever supported the establishment of a Palestinian state -- rather, they support an emasculated demilitarized 'state' that survives because of its neocolonial relation to Israel, and that will not pose a threat to the security of the Jewish state.

Freedman, the liberal Zionist, seems to believe that Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005. That is also balderdash. Israel never 'withdrew' from Gaza; it redeployed its troops for the most part on the other side of the 'Green Line' and later imposed a crippling siege against Gaza, when the Palestinians elected Hamas. In short, the people who felt that Gaza could be most effectively controlled by the presence of settlers and IDF troops lost out to the people who felt that Gaza could be most effectively controlled by withdrawing the settlers and the IDF. But the control of Gaza was never once in doubt.

This is the classic Zionist debate – the sort of 'Jew vs. Jew' that Freedman should have written about: How does one control the maximum amount of territory with the minimum responsibility for the natives? Had Ariel Sharon been interested in giving peace a chance – and, to his credit, he never once even hinted in that direction – he would have negotiated a withdrawal with the PA, and, more importantly, he would have negotiated a final settlement.

But the Gaza withdrawal was never about peace – and Sharon had the guts to say that. In fact, the Gaza withdrawal was intended to humiliate the Palestinians by implying that negotiating with them made as much sense as negotiating with wild animals. (Remember the liberal Zionist Benny Morris’s solution for the Palestinians in his interview with Ari Shavit – put them in cages.) Only a liberal Zionist, who identifies troop-redeployments with peace overtures, can spin the Gaza withdrawal as an opportunity for peace.

Because Freedman is a liberal Zionist – and I don’t criticize him for that, only the editors for asking him to review the book without full disclosure -- he is shocked that Walt and Mearsheimer lump Martin Indyk and Dennis Ross in the Israeli lobby. How dare they throw these two liberal peacemakers into the same camp as Abe Foxman, AIPAC, Daniel Pipes, and Norman Podhoretz? I mean, how many times were Indyk and Ross called self-hating Jews by the rightwing? And how hard did they labor for peace?

But the truth is that virtually all Jews in the US, from the far right to the Peace-Now-Meretz left, are a part of the Israel Lobby, or if you don’t like that term (I don’t), they are strong supporters of Israel, each in their own way. Again, this is not a criticism – believe me, some of my best friends are liberal Zionists (full-disclosure: I am a card-carrying member of Meretz, although, in my defence, I joined the party just to vote for Yossi Beilin in the primaries) . To see how deeply Zionist Dennis Ross is, one needs only read a few pages of The Missing Peace. The fact that he doesn’t share the 'Islamofascist' neuroses of Podhoretz and Pipes doesn’t make him into a centrist on Israel-Palestine.

So, who is on really in the middle and not just in the 'middle'? Well, Walt and Mearsheimer, Carter, Chomsky, Khalidi, for a start. They are all willing to allow a strong Zionist state in Palestine -- more than I can say for most Israelis with respect to Palestine.

Because the Zionist narrative has been accepted by the mainstream liberal press in the US, (but not, necessarily, by Middle East experts), one doesn’t need an AIPAC or a Foxman or a Dershowitz to make the case for Israel. The latter will always serve as the 'bad cops' to 'good cops' like Tom Friedman, Richard Cohen, Dennis Ross, etc. The real question is – and Walt and Mearsheimer don’t raise it – why has Israel been so successful in getting the Zionist narrative accepted?

It is not just the alleged political clout or money of an Israel Lobby. There may be many factors -- liberal Christian guilt for Christian antisemitism, sympathy for the Jews after the Holocaust, the shared Judaeo-Christian heritage on the Bible (the secret weapon of the Zionist), the success story of Jews in the US, including the high intermarriage rates, which makes it more difficult for Christians to act against members of their family. The Palestinians have failed to make the same impact on the consciousness of American non-Jews as have the Jews. They haven't been around as much. And they are 'oriental' in the a way that ashkenazi Israelis are not.

And they are Arab, and, mostly, Muslim.

__________

also, I was lobbied by the 'Israel lobby'
Read it here

Pro Patria Mori?

In William Shirer's epic, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Air Marshal Goering is quoted as having predicted that, "In thirty years time, Britain [would] be an overcrowded little island living on the glories of its past."

How right he was.

For weeks now, Brits have been force-fed glorified memories of an event which took place 25 years ago proving to the world that the British ruling classes cling on desperately to their imperial pretensions regardless of the price in blood that is invariably paid for it by their subjects.

Subjects, for in Britain there are no citizens, only the lowly subjects of Her Satanic Majesty, that notorious blood-sucker whose hidden and most influential hand still manipulates the death-machine of international monopoly capitalism and usury.

Governments, as the astute Tony Benn has observed quoted in an article below, use the Media to project the distorted version of reality which suits them. In Britain, it also uses the monarchy to promote a bluster of hollow patriotism in the manner described by an earlier commentator, Walter Bagehot, as a necessary tool of pomp and circumstance, bread and circuses, by which the masses are governed and kept in their place.

By promoting the disgraceful, modern-day colonialist adventure of the 1982 Falklands/Malvinas war the mainstream media (MSM) is playing to classic form, glorifying a sickening episode in which hundreds of young Brits and Argentinos died over a crop of rocks in the bleak South Atlantic. For weeks now we have heard nothing but blaring chauvinism, led as always by the BBC, on what a great job "our boys" did in liberating the hardy, Best-of-British Falklanders from the dastardly grip of that dago, Leopoldo Galtieri.

Of course, no mention is made of that other dictator, Margaret Thatcher (or 'Señora Torture' as she was aptly described by an Argentino mispronouncing her name), or the reasons behind her galloping patriotism and willingness to spill the blood of Britain's youth in a war which was a calculated attempt, on her part, to bully a weaker country into submission, claim victory and thereby bolster her badly-flagging electoral popularity.

Nor the fact that the disputed sovereignty of the Falkands/Malvinas dates back to 1833 when the British opportunistically seized the islands with its military might. These things are better left undiscussed. As is the uncomfortable contrast some have made since of the obviously racist interest the British Government had in coming to the rescue of a handful of white colonists 8000 miles away from the Motherland while, in the Indian Ocean, having expelled through threat and deceit another small group of dark-skinned people from the Chagos Islands.

There is no comparison, the British Government would maintain. After all, the Chagos Islanders were descendants of indentured labour (legal colonial slavery) whereas the Falklanders were authentic colonists (colonizers). And besides which, the Big White Father in Washington had made it known that he wished to acquire the Chagos Islands, lock stock and barrel, in order to build a nuclear strategic base on Diego Garcia (called Fantasy Island by its Yankee usurpers) to fight the good fight for Democracy-'n'-Freedom and occasional bomb the shit out of uppity rag-heads in Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran.

Reality doesn't bear looking at too closely. It never has. Especially the vicious, murdering lies behind what is called patriotism, that perpetuator of paternalism and an inherited, psychopathic Jewish thunder-god. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, it is sweet and seemly to die for one's country. Evidently, the BBC, the British MSM, the Government and the Royal spokesperson, Prince Andrew, on TV for those miserable parasites called the monarchy, still insist it to be so.

But let me tell you of an alternative, personal version to the official glorification of that episode of tribal blood-letting.

Back in 1982, I was living in south Oxfordshire, the heart of Tory-land, out-of-work together with the rest of Thatcher's marginalized millions, scraping a living out of a mixture of substitute teaching and government welfare, fathering a child and two step-children and campaigning daily against the Reagan/Thatcher Arms Race and the Cruise missiles at Greenham Common.

Then suddenly came the Falklands/Malvinas crisis. Instead of dealing with it peacefully through the United Nations, as she could have done, Thatcher decided to live out her pretensions of being a latter-day Boadicea, offering the blood-sacrifice of British youth in yet another opportunist war ('yet another' because it was a repeat of how the Falklands were originally seized).

Hurriedly, I photocopied a batch of hand-bills which had written across them, Ceasefire Now!, drove across town and plastered them wherever I could. On inspection twenty-four hours later, I discovered them all to have been torn down. Such was the fever of jingoism that had infected every little market-town through Her Satanic Majesty's land. So, determined not to be outdone, I printed double the number of hand-bills and, this time, stuck them with a much stronger glue. The next day, with satisfaction, I noted that many of the posters were still up. But such was the frenzied anger of our local patriots, you could see where they had attempted to scratch down the offending posters, leaving behind a trail of claw-marks.

To make it worse, I developed the measles and had to be put in quarantine in the living room next to the TV. So I had very little else to do but to watch the entire playing out of the Falklands war-movie from start to finish. Every time a British battle-ship was sunk by the Argentinos, I cheered traitorously, "teach the British colonialists a lesson!" Later on, I discovered that I was not alone. Many other Brits opposing Thatcher's war had done the same.

One interesting aspect of the media show which accompanied the adventure in the South Atlantic was the manner in which the War Office (aka Ministry of Defence) censored all TV reports by running a thick cable from the TV cameras to caravans installed outside Downing Street where all reports would be monitored and adjusted to Government requirements. Now called 'embedding' that process of censorship and government-sanctioned propaganda has been developed to a fine art both in Britain and the USA.

Sadly, Thatcher won and by doing so condemned her subjects to 15 more years of penal servitude. A great victory march was organized in Portsmouth and the patriots gave themselves to an orgy of chauvinism, booze and self-degradation. One of the memories of that celebration of pomp and circumstance were the numbers of one-legged war-wounded. How sad, these sheep who, over and over ad nauseam so easily go to their slaughter!

At what was really nothing more than a football match where murder was sanctioned.

My other memories of that war are of the the young lad from a school in which I taught who had been sent out, fresh from training to fight, never to return. I felt the paternal feeling one develops, as a teacher, for one's charges and, from that time onward harbour a cold contempt for all the Thatchers and the Blairs who turn our planet into a hell on earth.

Today, I hear that still the veterans of that war continue to suffer the after-effects. And that far more have died since by their own hands than ever did in the Falkands/Malvinas. So much for all the filth and subliminal poison being pumped out by the whores of the MSM.

THAT is the reality of pro patria mori.

MALVINAS BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY


Link

This story now at Bellaciao and OpEdNews.com