More debate over report on Israel's influence in US
Supporters cite freedom of speech, need to discuss topic. Detractors
say it promotes 'crass bigotry.'
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0406/dailyUpdate.html
By Tom Regan | csmonitor.com
Coverage of the debate over the recent paper by professors Stephen
Walt of Harvard and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago that
examines the influence of Israel and its supporters in Washington over
US foreign policy has been, mostly, absent from US media. But the
paper generated vigorous debate in the British and international media
and on the Internet. Since the working paper's release, there have
been several more attacks on it, but also more support for the
professors' position on the need to look hard at the US-Israel
relationship.
The Financial Times reports on Wednesday that Harvard Law School's
Alan Dershowitz posted a 15,000-word response to the Walt-Mearsheimer
paper on the Kennedy School of Government site, where the original
report appeared. In his response to the paper, Professor Dershowitz
denounced the work of the two professors as having an "illogical and
conspiratorial approach."
"What would motivate two recognized academics to issue a compilation
of previously made assertions that they must know will be used by
overt anti-Semites... that will give an academic imprimatur to crass
bigotry and... place all Jews in government and the media under
suspicion of disloyalty to America?"
The publication of the response paper marked the first time in the
Kennedy School's history that it has allowed faculty from other
schools at Harvard to answer back directly to the work of any of its
professors.
Since the paper was published several other well-known authors have
condemned or disagreed with it, including David Gergen in US News and
World Report and Christopher Hitchens in Slate.com. The Washington
Post reported on Sunday that while well-known Israel critic Noam
Chomsky applauded the two professors for their courage in writing the
paper, he felt they took a naive view of US foreign policy.
University of Maryland professor Shibley Telhami, a vocal critic of
the war in Iraq, said the men were "incredibly bold" for trying to
start the debate. But he also said "he does not believe Jewish neocons
and their Christian supporters forced the United States into the war
[as the Walt-Mearsheimer paper contends]," and that it was George W.
Bush's decision alone.
The original working paper was also strongly defended over the
weekend. The Guardian Observer reported on Sunday that the editor of
the London Review of Books, which was the only nonacademic publication
to carry a shorter version of the original 81-page report, defended
her decision to carry the report, and also said the charges of
anti-Semitism were ridiculous. Editor Mary-Kay Wilmers, who is Jewish,
said that while the support of people like David Duke was
"unsettling," it did not detract from the debate the authors were
attempting to start.
'I don't want David Duke to endorse the article,' [she] told The
Observer from France on Friday. 'It makes me feel uncomfortable. But
when I re-read the piece, I did not see anything that I felt should
not have been said. Maybe it is because I am Jewish, but I think I am
very alert to anti-Semitism. And I do not think that criticising US
foreign policy, or Israel's way of going about influencing it, is
anti-Semitic. I just don't see it.'
Ms. Wilmers also said that those making the charges of anti-Semitism
may actually encourage it in the long run.
'It serves a purpose. No one wants to be thought of as anti-Semitic
because it is thought of as worse than anything else, although it is
not worse being anti-Semitic than being anti-black or Islamophobic.
Really, one of the most upsetting things is the way it can contribute
to anti-Semitism in the long run just by making so many constant
appeals and preventing useful criticism of Israel. No one can say
Israel's posture does not contribute to anti-Semitism, yet charges of
anti-Semitism are used to justify that policy.'
The Financial Times also carried two pieces over the past week in
support of the Walt-Mearsheimer paper. On Sunday, the paper
editorialized that in the US, "Reflexes that ordinarily spring
automatically to the defence of open debate and free enquiry shut down
– at least among much of America’s political elite - once the subject
turns to Israel, and above all the pro-Israel lobby’s role in shaping
US foreign policy." The Times also said that the Walt-Mearsheimer
paper is not truly being considered, but "swept aside by a wave of
condemnation."
Honest and informed debate is the foundation of freedom and progress
and a precondition of sound policy. It is, to say the least, odd when
dissent in such a central area of policy is forced offshore or reduced
to the status of samizdat. Some of Israel’s loudest cheerleaders,
moreover, are often divorced by their extremism from the mainstream of
American Jewish opinion and the vigorous debate that takes place
inside Israel. As Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator,
remarked in Haaretz about the Walt-Mearsheimer controversy: “It would
in fact serve Israel if the open and critical debate that takes place
over here were exported over there [the US].”Nothing, moreover, is
more damaging to US interests than the inability to have a proper
debate about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, how Washington should
use its influence to resolve it, and how best America can advance
freedom and stability in the region as a whole. Bullying Americans
into a consensus on Israeli policy is bad for Israel and makes it
impossible for America to articulate its own national interest.
The other piece on the controversy the Financial Times carried was
from Mark Marzower, professor of history at Columbia University, who
wrote Monday in an opinion piece called, "When vigilance undermines
freedom of speech," that what is striking about the whole debate is
not so much the content of their report but how "discussing the
US-Israel special relationship still remains taboo in the US media
mainstream." Prof. Marzower writes that is seems that it is all but
impossible "to have a sensible public discussion in the US today about
the country’s relationship with Israel."
If fear of being tarred as an anti-Semite – and there is no more toxic
charge in American politics – blocks the way, what anti-Semitism
actually implies in today’s America is increasingly unclear. Over the
past century, secularization, wealth and prestige have bolstered the
place of American Jewry in national life. Polls suggest that seriously
anti-Semitic views are now found only among a small minority of
Americans. Yet, fear of anti-Semitism has not vanished. Where once it
was suspected – and often found – in the workplace and the domestic
political arena, it is now expressed in terms of sensitivity towards
criticism of the Jewish state. Often ambivalent about the methods of
lobby groups such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee
(AIPAC), American Jews generally share the committee’s ultimate goal
of maintaining a high level of US support for Israel. As Earl Raab,
the veteran commentator, has noted, there is a sense that if America
abandons Israel, it also may be in some way abandoning American Jewry
itself. In the process, the line between anti-semitism and criticism
of Israeli policy has become blurred. Defending what Bernard
Rosenblatt, the distinguished interwar Zionist, predicted would be
"the Little America in the East" is seen by many as synonymous with
defending Jews as a whole.
Marzower also wrote that there is no reason that the relationship
between Israel and the US should not be subject to the same kind of
cost-benefit analysis as any other any other relationship the US has
with another country.
In perhaps the most balanced view of the debate about the working
paper and the response to it, Geoffrey Wheatcroft, an English
journalist and author whose books include "The Controversy of Zion"
which won a National Jewish Book Award, writes that "the American
reaction is puzzling to Europeans," and he says is another example of
the great transatlantic rift.
On the eastern side of the Atlantic, it has long been recognized that
there is an intimate connection between the United States and Israel,
in which Aipac clearly plays a major role. The degree to which this
has affected American policy, up to and including the war in Iraq, has
been discussed calmly by sane British commentators - though also, to
be sure, played up maliciously by bigots.
In America, by contrast, there has been an unmistakable tendency to
shy away from this subject. As Michael Kinsley wrote in Slate in the
autumn of 2002, both supporters and opponents of the coming war did
not want to invoke classic anti-Semitic images of cabals, arcane
conspiracies, and malign courtiers whispering into the prince's ear.
Such motives are honorable, and yet there is always a danger when
something is wilfully ignored. As Kinsley said, the connection between
the invasion of Iraq and Israeli interests had become "the proverbial
elephant in the room. Everybody sees it, no one mentions it." Until
now, at any rate.
Mr. Wheatcroft also wrote that no one needed Walt and Mearsheimer to
point out the work being done by Israeli lobbyists because they are
happy to point it out themselves, especially on the website of Aipac,
which "proudly quotes Bill Clinton's description of Aipac as
'stunningly effective' and John McCain's praise of its 'instrumental
and absolutely vital role' in protecting the interest of Israel.
Perhaps Mearsheimer and Walt would have done better to confine
themselves to that website as their source." And ultimately, he says,
the key question in the entire debate is, Has the relationship been a
success on its own terms?
When Mearsheimer and Walt ask if there are really strategic
imperatives on the American side for ''unwavering support" of Israel,
that is at least worth discussing as a hypothesis. But it's scarcely
more fascinating than the question of whether such support has been to
the long-term benefit of Israel.
Bolstered by American aid, successive Israeli governments tried to
strengthen their settlements on the West Bank and in Gaza, the policy
[New York Times columnist Tom] Friedman calls insane. Ariel Sharon at
last gave up the dream of a Greater Israel, including his promise to
remain in Gaza ''for Zionist reasons." And now Ehud Olmert, when he
has formed his new government, will withdraw from most of the West
Bank. Might not much blood and treasure have been saved if Israel had
been obliged to make those choices years ago?
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0406/dailyUpdate.html
This article linked from: antiwar.com
(as are many posts seen in this NG)
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