As happens every few years, intense attention has turned recently to the United States’ extraordinarily close relationship with Israel — an alliance that stirs passions both from those who agree with it and those who think it is at the root of all our foreign policy blunders. It is the latter who have forced the question this time around. A paper published last spring by Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, of Harvard and the University of Chicago respectively, on the nature of the “Israel Lobby,” a coalition of individuals and groups that they feel cement and consistently reinforce blind support for the Jewish state, is still reverberating through the ranks of the chattering classes.
One of the charges the professors make in their paper, published in a shorter form in the London Review of Books, is that the ‘Lobby’ — which in their account consists not just of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the actual Israel lobby, but of nearly anybody in American public life who has expressed a pro-Israel sentiment — is so powerful that they have effectively censored any real discussion of the costs and benefits of our Israeli alliance. Their own article, they insist, was rejected by the Atlantic Monthly, where it had been first commissioned, because it was too inflammatory for an American publication.
Flying in the face of this thesis are a couple of more recent events, beginning with the duo’s landing a book deal with Farrar, Straus and Giroux — possibly the most prestigious publishing house in the United States — and now an incisive two-part series (that ended today) in the New York Times on the “relationship” between Israel and the United States. Walt and Mearsheimer could claim that it was their exposing of the issue that forced the Times to assign the series. Though it is true that their paper is mentioned in the article as having made Israel particularly sensitive about trying to openly affect American foreign policy towards Iran, what is immediately striking, in yesterday’s more general appraisal of the “relationship” by Steven Erlanger and today’s look at the role of evangelical Christians by David Kirkpatrick, is the amount of complexity both writers allow for in their analysis. It’s the very opposite of the reductionism of the Walt-Mearsheimer paper. Rather than attempting to find one magic bullet to explain the strength of the Israeli-American alliance (not to mention the three billion dollars it provides Israel every year), Erlanger and Kirkpatrick lay the story out in such a way that it is not clear at all that either the mythic or real “Israel Lobby” is really the glue that keeps the two countries so bound together.
For one thing, Erlanger’s piece returns agency to the Israeli government, something the Walt-Mearsheimer paper strangely took away. In their accounting, Israel, as a sovereign country with its own concerns, is almost completely absent. Instead it’s a group of influential American Jews pulling all the strings, with more power even than the country they are supposedly lobbying for. Erlanger doesn’t fall into this trap. Instead, he takes a look at the two countries and their competing interests, specifically now on the question of what to do about Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
What he comes up with has plenty of nuance to it. Though Israel has been grateful for the Bush administration’s unwavering support, especially during the war with Hezbollah this past summer, there is much wariness about the ideology of democracy exportation that has been the president’s hallmark. As Erlanger puts it, the Israelis “view his effort as naïve and counterproductive, because it brings Islamists and Iranian clients to power.”
On the question of Iran, Israel is terrified about the threat of a nuclear bomb in the hands of a country whose president has pledged himself to wiping Israel “off the map.” For the Israelis, their priority has always been to deal with this problem first. America’s war on Iraq and the more recent post-midterm election talk of opening up conversation with Iran shows that on this point, the two countries are not on the same page. Erlanger again: “Israelis have been increasingly anxious about the Bush approach, seeing recently a tendency to delay confrontation through further negotiations. They worry that because of Iran’s ability to further inflame Iraq, Mr. Bush is hesitant to take any steps that could lead to confrontation. And Israelis are worried about what concessions an administration seeking to build an anti-Iran alliance in the Arab world might ask of them on the Palestinian question in order to bolster that alliance.”
These points of friction and difference in priorities between Israel and America, in addition to offering a more realistic portrait of the relationship also gives the lie to Walt and Mearsheimer’s insistence that it was the “Israel Lobby” who played the greatest part in dragging America into war with Iraq. The question is begged: if Iran is Israel’s top concern and the lobby has the omnipotence the professors grant it, why couldn’t they have directed American policy towards this more pressing objective?
The shorter second part in the series, which appeared today, also exposes more of the simple-mindedness of the Walt-Mearsheimer thesis. Their reading fails to take into account that there might be other forces in American political life pushing for support of Israel, like, say, the entire evangelical community, a section of the electorate that, as we saw in 2004 and again just last week, is capable of tipping an election one way or the other based on whether they decide to leave their houses and vote. Very often the role they have played in committing the president to a certain hard-line policy on Israel has been overlooked. It’s easier to imagine a Jewish cabal at work and much harder to take into account deeply held theological beliefs that might be steering the direction of that special relationship.
To his credit, Kirkpatrick acknowledges a full range of evangelical reactions to Israel. There are those, he writes, who believe “the Bible assigns Israel a pivotal role as a harbinger of the second coming,” and think a conflict between Israel and Iran may just be a sign that the end times are approaching. (What Kirkpatrick fails to mention here is that though the Jews are critical to bringing back Christ for these evangelicals, there is no question that they too will face damnation if they don’t acknowledge that he is the messiah). On the other end of spectrum are evangelicals who “believe more generally that God maintains his Old Testament covenant with the Jewish people and thus commands Christian believers to help protect their ‘older brothers.’
But regardless of the specific motivation, what this portends is an extremely influential portion of the population giving the nod to a hard line of support on Israel and against Iran. Messieurs Walt and Mearsheimer apparently forgot about this segment of the American population and what role they might play in defining the “relationship,” especially with a theologically inclined commander in chief.
The Times needs to be commended for dealing with this touchy subject in a complex manner, and not resorting to the kid gloves the subject is normally treated with. These are tough pieces that offer no easy applause lines to those on either side of the debate over the propriety of the “relationship.” Instead the articles offer just the kind of analysis we need when looking at the various quagmires of the Middle East: not one-shot Manichean answers, but the nuance of many answers, some of which might even contradict each other. We hope, at the very least, that Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer took the time to read it.
Gal Beckerman is a former staff writer at CJR and a writer and editor for the New York Times Book Review.