The New York Times ran an op-ed piece by Tony Judt this morning about a paper (abbreviated and full) co-authored by professors at the University of Chicago and Harvard about the role of the so-called "Israel Lobby" in defining US foreign policy that has already sparked news and debate.
Put aside for the moment the actual discussions of the US’s role in the Middle-East; whether there is a monolithic "Israel Lobby" as opposed to a variety of lobbies in co-opetition with each other; and if that Lobby has, or those lobbies have, undue influence on US policy or, do they exist because US policy is so pro-Israel. This is the subject for another post. Besides, I haven’t had a chance to read the Mearsheimer/Walt paper yet, although my gut tells me the two are vastly overstating the influence of the lobbyist in question.
What struck me was the ad hominem, reductio ad absurdum attacks on the authors. The NYT quoted Prof. Mearsheimer as saying, "We certainly wanted to provoke a debate, and this has happened. But we hoped to provoke a rational debate, not a food fight in which people accuse us of being anti-Semites."
As someone who studied Islam, Arabic and the Middle-East, who lived
in Palestine, and, more importantly, who grew up with a huge circle of
close Jewish-American friends, I have a lot of sympathy for what Profs.
Mearsheimer and Walt are probably going through. In my first swing at
blogging (before it was called blogging), I actually wrote an entire post
about this because of the flak my mother was getting from Jewish
friends who were willing to jump to the conclusion that, because I had
decided to see the Arab-Israeli conflict first hand, I was an
antisemite.
I actually had a woman whose son I had grown up with, who had known
me and my family since I was five years old, suggest that I might as
well support Pol Pot as think that Palestinians should have a state in
the West Bank. Then, by saying that Jordan is the only
Palestinian state, she implied that every single Palestinian in Gaza
and the West Bank should be forcibly expelled from their homes. An odd
twist to the Roman expulsion of Jews from Jerusalem in 67 CE? From
Spain in 1492? From England in 1290? Of American Indians from 1500 to
1900? Or just finishing off Numbers 33:50-56?
I think it’s one of the saddest parts of the dialogue, or lack
thereof, regarding the US’s role in the Middle-East and unflagging,
unquestioning support of Israel: that if you don’t toe the party line,
you will be silenced by loud accusations that you are an antisemite, a
Nazi. And, I believe, that was the point of Judt’s Op-Ed piece: to
point out that those hysterical accusations stifle healthy debate and
are themselves inimical to free speech.