Jeff Goldberg on “The Israel Lobby”

His review in TNR will no doubt get a lot of attention (Matt Yglesias, one of Mearsheimer and Walt's defenders, is already mentioning his own Jewish grandparents — never a good early sign in intellectual combat).

Going on some of the quotes Jeff pulls, I have to say, his critique seems devastating:

They do not deny, though, that "there is anti-Semitism among European Muslims, some of it provoked by Israel's behavior toward the Palestinians and some of it straightforwardly racist." This is a bizarre and foul passage, its foulness easily clarified by a simple act of substitution. Imagine Farrar, Straus and Giroux publishing the following sentence: "We would not deny that there is some racial prejudice among whites, some of it provoked by the misbehavior of African- Americans, and some of it straightforwardly racist."

Or, to go for the more obvious example: "We would not deny that there is some racial prejudice among Israelis, some of it provoked by Palestinian behavior, and some of it straightforwardly racist." A sentence like that would be a scandal in all the usual places, wouldn't it?

M/W's blunder here comes at the expense of a topic they're most tetchy about: the conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. The above rationale for why anti-Semitism is on the rise again suggests that the two phenomena are inextricably linked. Yet M/W elsewhere swoop down like diver pigeons the minute anyone suggests that a condemnation of Israel necessarily has anything to do with condemnation of Jews as an ethnic group.

Whistling through contradictions of analysis and having it both ways depending on which way suits you better– such are the hallmarks of the "realist" school of foreign policy. Perhaps the greatest irony of the whole sorry debate is how effusively The Israel Lobby has been taken up in Arab media, despite its open dedication to Samuel Huntington, author of The Clash of Civilizations. It's as if Henry Ford were handing out copies of Das Kapital in Detroit.

Here's Jeff again:

In their discussion of these matters, Mearsheimer and Walt seem not just mendacious but also shallow. They are dilettantes in the subject, tourists in the conflict. Consider an example. After cherry-picking quotations from jihadists to support the view that America's ties to Israel brought us the attacks of September 11, they raise the subject of Sayyid Qutb's anti-Americanism. Qutb was a terribly important Egyptian Islamist, and Al Qaeda's main intellectual inspiration. Mearsheimer and Walt instruct that "Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian dissident whose writings have been an important inspiration for contemporary Islamic fundamentalists, was hostile to the United States both because he saw it as a corrupt and licentious society and also because of U.S. support for Israel." But wait. Qutb was executed by the Egyptian government in 1966, almost a year before the Six Day War. It was not until after that war that America replaced France as Israel's chief protector and arms- supplier. In fact, throughout the 1950s, the Eisenhower administration was often quite hostile to Israel. So Qutb's objection, then, was not to American support for Israel, but to American recognition of Israel. If this is the case, then Islamist anger at America predates our support for the usurping Zionists. And if this is so, then Al Qaeda would have attacked the United States whether or not America was Israel's patron, and whether or not the pro-Israel lobby existed. Therefore, as far-fetched as this may seem, the Jews should not be blamed for the attack on the World Trade Center.

In all fairness, Jeff's review is not without a contradiction of its own, namely its treatment of M/W's blame-Israel-first disposition on Al Qaeda and 9/11. Early on he writes:

It is rather uncontroversial to call Osama bin Laden an anti-Semite. He is the easy case. But since many people in the West are queasy about attaching the label of anti-Semitism to almost anybody, regarding the charge of anti-Semitism as itself proof of prejudice, let me begin by describing bin Laden's view of history less inflammatorily–not as anti-Semitic, but as Judeocentric. He believes that Jews exercise disproportionate control over world affairs, and that world affairs may therefore be explained by reference to the Jews. A Judeocentric view of history is one that regards the Jews as the center of the story, and therefore the key to it. Judeocentrism is a single- cause theory of history, and as such it is, almost by definition, a conspiracy theory.

But then he claims: "Never mind that Mearsheimer and Walt exaggerate the centrality of the Jews in bin Laden's worldview."

Judeocentrism, by definition, plants the Jews at the center of one's historical outlook. So either Bin Laden suffers from the pathology or he does not. The failure here may be only linguistic rather than logical, but one simply cannot exaggerate the centrality of the Jews in a Judeocentrist worldview.