Noam Chomsky and Christopher Hitchens both have histories of supporting Palestinian rights against the occupation policies of various Israeli governments. Both have weighed in on the Mearsheimer-Walt paper, "The Israel Lobby."
Noam Chomsky: "[W]e still have to ask how convincing their thesis is. Not very, in my opinion. . . . The thesis M-W propose does however have plenty of appeal. The reason, I think, is that it leaves the US government untouched on its high pinnacle of nobility, 'Wilsonian idealism,' etc., merely in the grip of an all-powerful force that it cannot escape. It's rather like attributing the crimes of the past 60 years to 'exaggerated Cold War illusions,' etc. Convenient, but not too convincing."
Christopher Hitchens: "[W]hat is original is not true and what is true is not original. . . . Wishfulness [that "the war with jihadism had never started"] has led them to seriously mischaracterize the origins of the problem and to produce an article that is redeemed from complete dullness and mediocrity only by being slightly but unmistakably smelly."
Noam Chomsky's article, The Israel Lobby, appears at ZNet. After congratulating Mearsheimer and Walt for courage (how much courage does it take for tenured professors at Chicago and Harvard to publish something in the very proper London Review of Books?) and the obligatory slam of Alan Dershowitz, Chomsky turns to the merits of the Mearsheimer-Walt paper.
According to Chomsky, M&W "tend to conflate: (1) the alleged failures of US ME policy; (2) the role of The Lobby in bringing about these consequences." Looking at (1), Chomsky disputes M&W's contention that U.S. policy in the Middle EAst has failed:
[F]or whom has policy been a failure for the past 60 years? The energy corporations? Hardly. They have made "profits beyond the dreams of avarice" (quoting John Blair, who directed the most important government inquiries into the industry, in the '70s), and still do, and the ME is their leading cash cow. Has it been a failure for US grand strategy based on control of what the State Department described 60 years ago as the "stupendous source of strategic power" of ME oil and the immense wealth from this unparalleled "material prize"? Hardly. The US has substantially maintained control -- and the significant reverses, such as the overthrow of the Shah, were not the result of the initiatives of the Lobby.
Moreover, according to Chomsky, M&W fail to ask how it is that, without the so-called Israel Lobby, the U.S. pursued "very similar policies throughout the world":
Consider the year 1958, a very critical year in world affairs. In 1958, the Eisenhower administration identified the three leading challenges to the US as the ME, North Africa, and Indonesia -- all oil producers, all Islamic. North Africa was taken care of by Algerian (formal) independence. Indonesia and the were taken care of by Suharto's murderous slaughter (1965) and Israel's destruction of Arab secular nationalism (Nasser, 1967). In the ME, that established the close US-Israeli alliance and confirmed the judgment of US intelligence in 1958 that a "logical corollary" of opposition to "radical nationalism" (meaning, secular independent nationalism) is "support for Israel" as the one reliable US base in the region (along with Turkey, which entered into close relations with Israel in the same year). Suharto's coup aroused virtual euphoria, and he remained "our kind of guy" (as the Clinton administration called him) until he could no longer keep control in 1998, through a hideous record that compares well with Saddam Hussein -- who was also "our kind of guy" until he disobeyed orders in 1990. What was the Indonesia Lobby? The Saddam Lobby? And the question generalizes around the world. Unless these questions are faced, the issue (1) cannot be seriously addressed.
Turning to (2), Chomsky argues that "the US-Israeli alliance was firmed up precisely when Israel performed a huge service to the US-Saudis-Energy corporations by smashing secular Arab nationalism," that is, by defeating Nasser's Egypt in the 1967 Six-Day War. "That's also when the Lobby takes off . . . And it's also when the intellectual-political class began their love affair with Israel, previously of little interest to them. . . . From that point on it's hard to distinguish 'national interest' (in the usual perverse sense of the phrase) from the effects of the Lobby."
Regarding M&W's "highly selective use of evidence," Chomsky offers "arms sales to China"
which they bring up as undercutting US interests. But they fail to mention that when the US objected, Israel was compelled to back down: under Clinton in 2000, and again in 2005, in this case with the Washington neocon regime going out of its way to humiliate Israel. Without a peep from The Lobby, in either case, though it was a serious blow to Israel.
And Chomsky notes, "that M-W do not address is the role of the energy corporations."
They are hardly marginal in US political life -- transparently in the Bush administration, but in fact always. How can they be so impotent in the face of the Lobby? As ME scholar Stephen Zunes has rightly pointed out, "there are far more powerful interests that have a stake in what happens in the Persian Gulf region than does AIPAC [or the Lobby generally], such as the oil companies, the arms industry and other special interests whose lobbying influence and campaign contributions far surpass that of the much-vaunted Zionist lobby and its allied donors to congressional races."
Christopher Hitchens' article, Overstating Jewish Power, appears in Slate. After noting that he "would have gone further than Mearsheimer and Walt" in criticizing various Israeli government policies, Hitchens directly confronts the M&W thesis "the situation [is] one where the Jewish tail wags the American dog, and where the United States has gone to war in Iraq to gratify Ariel Sharon, and where the alliance between the two countries has brought down on us the wrath of Osama Bin Laden."
This is partly misleading and partly creepy. If the Jewish stranglehold on policy has been so absolute since the days of Harry Truman, then what was Gen. Eisenhower thinking when, on the eve of an election 50 years ago, he peremptorily ordered Ben Gurion out of Sinai and Gaza on pain of canceling the sale of Israeli bonds? On the next occasion when Israel went to war with its neighbors, 11 years later, President Lyndon Johnson was much more lenient, but a strong motive of his policy (undetermined by Israel) was to win Jewish support for the war the "realists" were then waging in Vietnam. (He didn't get the support, except from Rabbi Meir Kahane.)
Hitchens also points out the weakness in M&W's treatment of Iran:
They speak darkly about neocon and Israeli maneuvers in respect to Tehran today, but they entirely fail to explain why the main initiative against the mullahs has come from the European Union and the International Atomic Energy Authority, two organizations where the voice of the Jewish lobby is, to say the least, distinctly muted.
"As for the idea that Israel is the root cause of the emergence of al-Qaida," Hitchens asks: "Where have these two gentlemen been?"
Bin Laden's gang emerged from a whole series of tough and reactionary battles in Central and Eastern Asia, from the war for a separate Muslim state in the Philippines to the fighting in Kashmir, the Uighur territories in China, and of course Afghanistan. There are hardly any Palestinians in its ranks, and its communiqués have been notable for how little they say about the Palestinian struggle. Bin Laden does not favor a Palestinian state; he simply regards the whole area of the former British Mandate as a part of the future caliphate. The right of the Palestinians to a state is a just demand in its own right, but anyone who imagines that its emergence would appease--or would have appeased--the forces of jihad is quite simply a fool. Is al-Qaida fomenting civil war in Nigeria or demanding the return of East Timor to Indonesia because its heart bleeds for the West Bank?
Hitchens then discusses U.S. relations with Turkey and Pakistan, both of which "have carried out appalling internal repression and even more appalling external aggression."
Pakistan attempted a genocide in Bangladesh, with the support of Nixon and Kissinger, in 1971. It imposed the Taliban as its client in a quasi-occupation of Afghanistan. It continues to arm and train Bin Ladenists to infiltrate Indian-held Kashmir, and its promiscuity with nuclear materials exceeds anything Israel has tried with its stockpile at Dimona. Turkey invaded Cyprus in 1974 and continues in illegal occupation of the northern third of the island, which has been forcibly cleansed of its Greek inhabitants. It continues to lie about its massacre of the Armenians. U.N. resolutions have had no impact on these instances of state terror and illegality in which the United States is also partially implicated.
"But here's the thing," Hitchens notes:
There is no Turkish or Pakistani ethnic "lobby" in America. And here's the other thing: There is no call for "disinvestment" in Turkey or Pakistan. We are not incessantly told that with these two friends we are partners in crime. Perhaps the Greek Cypriots and Indians are in error in refusing to fly civilian aircraft into skyscrapers. That might get the attention of the "realists." Or perhaps the affairs of two states, one secular Muslim and one created specifically in the name of Islam, do not possess the eternal fascination that attaches to the Jewish question.
Turning, finally, to "the Jewish question," Hitchens observes that "it would be stupid not to notice that a group of high-energy Jews has been playing a role in our foreign-policy debate for some time." But Hitchens notices that the first time they actually influenced the conduct of U.S. foreign policy was in support of Muslims and against the views of Ariel Sharon:
The first occasion on which it had any significant influence . . . was in pressing the Clinton administration to intervene in Bosnia and Kosovo. These are the territories of Europe's oldest and largest Muslim minorities; they are oil-free and they do not in the least involve the state interest of Israel. Indeed, Sharon publicly opposed the intervention. One could not explain any of this from Mearsheimer and Walt's rhetoric about "the lobby."
At this point, I think it's safe to say that the Mearsheimer-Walt paper has been thoroughly exposed as a shoddy piece of pseudo-scholarship. Perhaps we can put their paranoid view of policy making behind us. Looking ahead, we should recognize that the "realist" school of foreign policy to which Mearsheimer and Walt belong is not ours. They want a foreign policy that reflects the country's "national interest," and they claim an insight into what the "national interest" is superior to the citizenry at large or democratically-elected politicians. We want a foreign policy that reflects American values, which certainly includes a prudent attention to national interests, and believe that the content of American values and foreign policy, as with domestic policy, ought to result from a genuinely democratic conversation and genuinely democratic politics.