Transcript: The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy – John J. Mearsheimer

I particularly want to thank the Seminary Co-op Bookstore. I think this is payback for all the money that I spent there over a 10-year period.

It’s also nice. I feel like this is a bit of a homecoming because I’m standing now about 100 yards from my home back when I was here so it really feels very nice to be back at the university. We’re going to talk about two main questions tonight.

We’re going to ask first, is there a powerful pro-Israel lobby in the United States and if so, how does it work? And second, on balance, is the influence of that lobby positive or negative for the United States and also for Israel? I’m going to tackle the first question there and John is going to address the second.

But before I get started, I want to acknowledge why it’s a topic that needs to be handled with some sensitivity. If we were here today to talk about energy policy, you wouldn’t be surprised if I talked about the political activities of oil companies. And if I were here to talk about gun control, it wouldn’t be controversial to bring up the National Rifle Association.

If the subject was the recent U.S.-Indian nuclear agreement, discussing the lobbying activities of Indian American groups would be unexceptionable. But when the subject is Middle East policy and you bring up the Israel lobby, you’re grabbing the third rail with both hands. Now that’s partly because some of the groups in the lobby are very quick to attack anyone who questions what they’re doing.

But it’s also because this entire conversation takes place in the shadow of centuries of anti-Semitism, including bizarre conspiracy theories like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and tragic events like the Holocaust, and that history shapes how all of us think about these events. So if you talk about a powerful interest group that is mostly, though by no means exclusively, comprised of Jewish Americans, some may think you’re saying that there’s some kind of secret conspiracy to control American foreign policy. If you say that media coverage in the United States tends to favor Israel, it sounds to some people like you’re making the old canard that Jews control the media.

If you talk about campaign contributions by pro-Israel political action committees, some people think you’re saying that money is doing something nefarious. Let me make it very clear, John and I reject every one of those various anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. For us, the Israel lobby is an interest group, just like lots of other interest groups.

Most of its activities are as American as apple pie. We don’t question Israel’s legitimacy or its right to exist. We believe the United States should come to Israel’s aid if its survival is ever in jeopardy.

But we also think that the activities of the lobby and its impact on American policy is a subject that reasonable people ought to be able to discuss openly, the same way we would discuss any other interest groups that try to influence any other aspect of American domestic or foreign policy.

U.S. Support for Israel

All right, so with that as background, what are we talking about here? Well, the late Yitzhak Rabin once said that American support for Israel was beyond compare in modern history, and he was right.

It’s the largest recipient of U.S. economic and military aid, about $500 per year for every Israeli, even though Israel is now a country with a per capita income that’s 29th in the world. It’s not a poor country like Bangladesh. And it gets this support even when it does things the United States opposes, like building settlements in the occupied territories.

Israel gets consistent diplomatic backing from the United States. We almost always take its side in regional disputes. The people who are now running for president are going to disagree on many issues, but all of them are already going to considerable lengths to show how personally devoted they are to Israel.

Israel is rarely, if ever, criticized by U.S. officials, and of course the presidential election illustrates that very nicely. So why is this the case? Well, the usual answer is that Israel’s a vital strategic asset and a country that shares our values.

But if you step back and look at those two rationales, they can’t explain why we give them so much aid and why we give it so unconditionally. Israel may have been a strategic asset during the Cold War, but the Cold War is now over. Today, giving Israel nearly unconditional support is one of the reasons we have a terrorism problem, and it makes it harder to address a lot of other problems in the Middle East.

Support for Israel is not the only source of anti-Americanism there or elsewhere. Our problems in that region would not disappear if we had a more normal relationship with Israel, but giving it nearly unconditional backing is not making America more popular or making Americans safer and more secure. On balance, that aid, that relationship has become a strategic liability.

As for the other argument, that Israel’s a democracy that shares our values, it is completely true. Israel’s a democracy, a vibrant democracy with many admirable qualities, but there are a lot of other states with equally admirable qualities, other democracies, and none of them gets the level of support that Israel does. Plus, Israel’s treatment of its own Arab population and its treatment of the Palestinians in particular is sharply at odds with American values.

Nor is Israel’s behavior significantly better than that of the Palestinians. I won’t go into the details here, but any reasonably fair-minded look at the history of the region, including the more recent histories written by Israeli historians, shows that both sides in this conflict have done many cruel things to one another. Neither side owns the moral high ground.

Now, please note, I’m not saying that Israel has behaved worse than other countries have, only that it hasn’t behaved better, and so one cannot justify or explain unconditional American support by saying that its conduct is somehow exemplary. I also want to emphasize again that we think there is a strong moral case for Israel’s existence based on the long history of anti-Semitism, and we believe that the United States should come to its aid if its survival is at risk. But the good news is that Israel’s survival is not at risk today, and past crimes against the Jewish people do not justify a blank check now.

Defining the Israel Lobby

So what explains American policy? In our view, it’s the Israel lobby. What’s the lobby?

It’s a loose coalition of individuals and groups that works openly to influence American policy in a pro-Israel direction. It includes organizations like AIPAC, the Conference of Presidents, the Anti-Defamation League, Christian Zionist groups like Christians United for Israel, think tanks like the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the American Enterprise Institute, and publications like the Weekly Standard or the New Republic. Now that’s a broad definition, but most special interest groups in America also have lots of different elements.

The environmental movement isn’t just Greenpeace and the Sierra Club. It also includes research groups, sympathetic local chapters, academics who work on environmental topics, journalists who write about the environment, just like the pro-Israel movement does. It’s not a centralized organization, and the groups that comprise it do not agree on every single issue.

And it is certainly not a cabal or a conspiracy to control American foreign policy. Again, it’s just a powerful interest group that operates the same way others do. A key point I want to emphasize here, the Israel lobby is not synonymous with Jewish Americans.

Surveys show that about a quarter of American Jews don’t care very much one way or the other about Israel. Many others do not support the positions taken by the big organizations in the lobby, and some of the groups that work on Israel’s behalf, such as the so-called Christian Zionists, are not Jewish at all. The lobby is defined by its political agenda, not by ethnicity or religion.

Finally, the lobby doesn’t include anyone who happens to have a favorable attitude towards Israel. You have to be actively working to try and influence American policy to be considered part of the lobby. And obviously, some groups and individuals are going to be more active and more influential than others.

How the Lobby Works

So how does it work? In the United States, small groups with a focused agenda can often wield disproportionate influence. Think of the NRA again, because they care a lot about a single issue, and politicians could get their support without losing anybody else’s by catering to their preferences.

Like these other interest groups, the Israel lobby works in two main ways. First, it operates inside the beltway and in American elections to try and get sympathetic people elected to office or appointed to key positions, and then giving politicians clear incentives to embrace the positions it favors. Organizations like AIPAC work 24-7 to convince politicians to support the policies they like.

This is an organization, by the way, with an annual budget of about $50 million, very active in Capitol Hill, helping draft legislation, providing talking points, writing letters for congressmen to sign. AIPAC is not a political action committee, however, and it doesn’t give money directly to candidates, but it does vet candidates for office in various ways, and it helps steer campaign contributions from individuals and pro-Israel political action committees that do exist, and they’re roughly 30 to 40 currently active. Since 1992, pro-Israel political action committees have given about $55 million to various candidates for office.

That’s just the PAC money, by the way, not individual contributions. And by way of comparison, the handful of Arab-American PACs that do exist gave about $800,000 over that same period, so $55 million to $800,000. Over the past 30 years, AIPAC and others have helped drive a number of politicians from office, including Paul Finley, Pete McCloskey, Charles Percy, Cynthia McKinney, Roger Jepson, and Lincoln Chafee.

I want to make it clear that the lobby doesn’t win or AIPAC doesn’t win every election where it weighs in, but everyone in Congress now knows you are playing with fire if you question U.S. support for Israel. And of course, that goes for presidential candidates, too. And that’s why Steve Rosen, the AIPAC official who is now under indictment for passing classified information, once put a napkin in front of a journalist from The New Yorker and said:

In 24 hours, we could have the signature of 70 senators on this napkin.

Or as Senator Daniel Inouye explained when he was asked why he had signed an AIPAC-sponsored letter to President Ford in 1975, “It’s easier to sign one letter than to answer 5,000.” Things are no different today. AIPAC was ranked number two among lobbies on Capitol Hill in a 2003 National Journal survey, tied, by the way, with the AARP, and ranked second in a 1997 survey by Forbes magazine.

Bill Clinton said AIPAC was, quote, “better than anyone else lobbying in this town.” And Newt Gingrich, who didn’t agree with Clinton on much, said “it’s the most effective general interest group across the entire planet.” Former Senator Fritz Hollings said as he was leaving office, “you can’t have an Israel policy other than what AIPAC gives you around here.”

Or as Lee Hamilton put it, who served in the House for, I think, 34 years, “there’s no group that matches it. They’re in a class by themselves.”

Again, I want to emphasize it’s not just AIPAC, but also a number of other groups and individuals, including a subset of the Christian evangelicals. So that’s one broad set of tools that uses to influence policy.

Shaping Public Discourse

The second strategy is trying to shape public discourse and perceptions so that Israel is viewed favorably by most Americans.

Mainstream media in the United States tends to be pro-Israel, especially in editorial commentary and in terms of op-ed columnists and punditry. If you compare the United States with either Europe or Israel, there’s simply a much narrower range of views expressed in most major media outlets. There’s simply no equivalent in the United States of a Robert Fisk or a Patrick Seale who write in the United Kingdom, and no one like Akiva Elder, Gideon Levy, Bradley Burstyn, or Amira Haas who write for Haaretz in Israel.

Again, my point is not that these critics of Israeli policy are always right and that pro-Israel commentators are always wrong. My point is that the critical voices are largely absent from mainstream outlets here in the United States. But even so, watchdog groups like the ADL and CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy on Middle East Reporting in America, monitor media coverage, organize boycotts and demonstrations against news agencies that publish anything critical of Israel, and of course groups like Campus Watch monitor activities on campus and try and put pressure on universities.

# Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy Panel Discussion (Continued)

So when Jimmy Carter published his book “Palestine, Peace, Not Apartheid,” the ADL and CAMERA took out ads in major newspapers which included the publisher’s phone number and invited readers to call in and protest. More recently, a few weeks ago, the Jewish newspaper Forward reported that CNN was coming under what it called unprecedented attack for its three-part series comparing Muslim, Christian, and Jewish fundamentalism. Moreover, the Forward also reported that the Conference of Presidents was urging its member organizations to take up that issue with any companies that had bought advertising time for the program.

Now, a key tactic in shaping discourse is also to try and keep views like John’s and mine from getting a wide hearing. And to give you an idea how this works, we were invited, as many of you know, to speak at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs on our own. We were asked to come there and speak by ourselves.

And then they canceled the event after protests and pressure, which is why, of course, we’re here today. We were scheduled to speak at the City University of New York, which then withdrew its invitation. We were scheduled to speak at Google headquarters a week or so ago, and they canceled it a few days prior to our arrival.

C-SPAN filmed an appearance we made at Politics and Prose bookstore on September 5th and have yet to broadcast it without an explanation to our publicist. We gave long interviews to Newsweek and Stern magazines, complete with photos. Both stories have not run and were apparently killed.

And almost every place we have appeared, and we have appeared in a number of venues, almost every place we have appeared has faced protest and pressure to cancel the events, some of it quite overt. Now, I want to be clear, we’re not complaining because we’re getting other invitations, but it highlights the lobby’s interest in stifling discussion.

Finally, the efforts to stifle criticism often include smearing critics by again accusing them of being anti-Semitic. Martin Peretz of the New Republic said that Jimmy Carter will go down in history as a Jew hater, despite the fact that he’s the president who probably did more for Middle East peace than any other. Another critic in the Washington Post said Carter’s views were very similar to David Duke’s.

Needless to say, this was a common charge leveled at the two of us, even though there is not the slightest shred of evidence to support it. And smearing people in this way is done for three reasons. First, it distracts people from the real issue, which is American policy in the Middle East. Second, it deters people from voicing criticisms because who wants to be labeled with a loathsome label like being an anti-Semite. And finally, it marginalizes people in the public arena because what politician would want to associate with anyone who had been accused of being an anti-Semite, right?

And the bottom line is few, if any, American politicians will say anything remotely critical of Israel, and neither will anyone else who wants to be a serious player in the making of American foreign policy.

Just look what happened to Zbigniew Brzezinski, right? Barack Obama got attacked a couple of weeks ago for having Brzezinski as an advisor. And what was the sin that Brzezinski had committed? Not that he’d given bad advice to Jimmy Carter. The sin he’d committed was that he had written a very brief article praising our original article in the London Review of Books. And think of the chilling effect that would have on, say, a 35 or 40-year-old person who wanted to have a career in the foreign policy business in the United States.

All right, one final point before I turn this over to John. It is often said that the United States backs Israel because there is broad public support for Israel in the United States. And so the politicians are just doing what the people want. Groups like AIPAC are essentially irrelevant. This argument isn’t persuasive for several reasons. It’s true Americans do have a generally favorable image of Israel, but they do not think the United States should give it unconditional or one-sided support.

A survey conducted for the Anti-Defamation League in 2005 found that 78% of Americans think the United States should favor neither side in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Another survey reported by Americans for Peace Now found that 87% of Jewish Americans favor a two-state solution. And finally, a poll by the University of Maryland in 2003 found that over 70% of what they called politically active Americans supported cutting aid to Israel if it refused to settle the conflict.

So while Americans do have a favorable image of Israel, they want it to exist and be secure, as John and I do, they’re not insisting that the United States back it no matter what. But of course that’s pretty much what American policy is, and the reason is the political influence of the Israel lobby. All right, so that’s what the lobby is and how it works.

The question now is what effect does this have on U.S. foreign policy? Is it good for the United States? Or Israel? And that’s an easy question, so I’ll leave it to John. Thank you.

The Negative Impact of the Lobby on U.S. Foreign Policy

JOHN J MEARSHEIMER: Thank you, Adele, for moderating. Thank you, Steve, for hosting Steve and me. And thank you all for coming.

Steve has defined the lobby and made the case that it has a powerful influence on U.S. Middle East policy. I’d like to take the analysis a step further and argue that its influence has been largely negative. In a nutshell, our argument is that the lobby, working with Israel itself, has pushed U.S. Middle East policy in ways that are not in the American national interest, and I might add not in Israel’s interest either. I will focus on two cases tonight. First, how U.S. support for Israel’s policies against the Palestinians in the occupied territories has fueled our terrorism problem. And second, the run-up to the Iraq war and the influence that Israel in the lobby played in that set of events.

There are three cases that we talk about in the book that I will not address in my formal presentation, but we can certainly talk about in the Q&A. That’s U.S. policy toward Iran, U.S. policy toward Syria, and U.S. policy during the Lebanon war in the summer of 2006. Let me start with America’s terrorism problem.

America’s Terrorism Problem and Israel

The conventional wisdom among Israel’s supporters is that Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians has little to do with why the United States is so hated in the Arab and Islamic world, and more importantly, little to do with our terrorism problem. In fact, Israel is said to be a valuable ally in America’s fight against terrorism. Indeed, it is said to be the most important ally by far in the Middle East.

This received wisdom, however, is wrong. There is an abundance of survey data and anecdotal evidence that shows U.S. support for Israel’s brutal treatment of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, and U.S. support for Israel’s efforts to colonize those territories, angers, if not enrages, huge numbers of people in the Arab and Islamic world. The State Department, for example, set up an advisory group on public diplomacy in Arab and Islamic countries, which reported in 2006 that:

Citizens in these countries are genuinely distressed at the plight of the Palestinians and at the role they perceive the United States to be playing.

Not surprisingly, that anger helps fuel terrorism against the United States. Let me emphasize that I am not making the argument that our support for Israel’s policy towards the Palestinians is the only cause of our terrorism problem. I am simply saying that it is a major cause.

Specifically, it motivates some individuals to attack the United States, it serves as a powerful recruitment device for terrorist organizations, and it generates sympathy and support for terrorists among huge numbers of people in the Arab world. The hostility towards the United States generated by Israel’s policies in the occupied territories has been recognized by American presidents since 1967, when Israel first conquered the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. This is why the official policy of every U.S. president since Lyndon Johnson has been to oppose settlement building in the occupied territories. But no president has been able to put meaningful pressure on Israel to stop building settlements. Indeed, as Steve pointed out, the U.S. has protected Israel from criticism at the United Nations and given Israel more foreign aid than any other country and given it unconditionally. Of course, the reason why no president can put meaningful pressure on Israel to stop building settlements, even though that’s official American policy, is the lobby.

Israel and 9/11

A critically important issue when talking about America’s terrorism problem is the matter of how U.S. support for Israel’s brutal treatment of the Palestinians relates to what happened on September 11th. It is commonplace to hear Israel’s supporters say that: 1. Osama bin Laden did not care much about the Palestinians until recently, and he only cares now because it is an effective recruiting device 2. The events on 9-11 had nothing to do with Israel 3. Those involved in the attack on 9-11 hate us because of who we are, not because of our Middle East policies

These lines of argument are frequently purveyed by key figures in the lobby. For example, Robert Satloff from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy claims that bin Laden’s identification with the Palestinians is, quote, “a recent and almost surely opportunistic phenomenon.”

Alan Dershowitz maintains that, quote, “prior to September 11th, Israel was barely on bin Laden’s radar screen,” end of quote. And Dennis Ross, who also works at the Washington Institute, says that bin Laden was merely, quote, “trying to gain legitimacy by implying that this attack on America was about the plight of the Palestinians.” These claims, however, are simply not true.

It is clear from the historical record that bin Laden has been deeply concerned about the plight of the Palestinians since he was a young man. That concern was reflected in public statements of his throughout the 1990s, well before 9-11. Consider what Max Rodenbeck, the Middle East correspondent for The Economist magazine, wrote in a review of two books about bin Laden, one which was a compilation of his major speeches:

Of all the themes, the notion of payback for injustices suffered by the Palestinians is perhaps the most powerfully recurrent in bin Laden’s speeches.

Regarding the actual attack on 9-11, we now know from the work of the 9-11 Commission that U.S. support for Israel was a major cause of those attacks. It was not the only cause for sure, but it was a key cause. For example, the 9-11 Commission reports that bin Laden wanted to make sure that Congress was a target of the attackers because it is the most important source of support for Israel in the United States. The Commission also reports that bin Laden twice wanted to move up the date of the attack because of events involving Israel, even though doing so would have increased the risk of failure.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, consider what the 9-11 Commission report says about the motives of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who it describes as the principal architect of the attacks:

By his own account, KSM’s animus towards the United States stemmed not from his experiences there as a student, but rather from his violent disagreement with U.S. foreign policy favoring Israel.

It is hard to imagine more compelling evidence of the role that U.S. support for Israel played in the 9-11 attacks. In short, the present relationship between Washington and Jerusalem is helping to fuel America’s terrorism problem.

The Iraq War

It is manifestly clear to most Americans that the Iraq war is one of the greatest strategic blunders in American history. Our argument is that Israel, and especially the lobby, were two of the main driving forces behind the decision to invade Iraq. It is hard to imagine that war happening, we argue, in their absence.

To start with Israel itself, it was the only country besides Kuwait where both the government and a majority of the population favored the war. The Israeli government, to include Prime Minister Sharon, pushed the Bush administration hard to make sure that it did not lose its nerve in the months before the invasion. Other influential Israelis, like former Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Benjamin Netanyahu, also implored the United States to take down Saddam.

In fact, Israel was pushing so hard for war that Israel’s allies in the United States warned Israeli officials to damp down their rhetoric lest it be seen as a war for Israel. I might also note that in 2006, former President Bill Clinton said that every Israeli politician I knew favored a war against Iraq, even if Saddam did not have WMD. The Israeli public was also solidly behind the war.

According to a February 2003 poll, that is one month before the war started, 77.5 percent of Israelis said that they wanted the United States to attack Iraq. One sometimes hears the argument, as I’m sure many of you have, that Israel opposed the Iraq war and actually favored attacking Iran instead. There is no question that in early 2002, when the Israelis first got wind that the Bush administration was thinking about attacking Iraq, the key Israeli officials went to Washington and made it clear to the Bush administration and others that they thought Iran was the greater enemy and that the Bush administration should focus on Tehran, not on Baghdad.

It is important to emphasize, however, that Israel was not opposed to the United States toppling the regimes in Iraq or Syria, two countries that Jerusalem considers mortal enemies. Israel simply wanted the United States to deal with Iran first. But once the Israelis realized that the war party intended to deal with Iran after it finished the job in Iraq, it enthusiastically embraced the idea of invading Iraq.

The Israel Lobby and Iraq War

JOHN J MEARSHEIMER: Thus, between early 2002 and March 2003, the Israelis put significant pressure on the Bush administration to make sure that it chose war over diplomacy with regard to Iraq, while reminding Washington along the way at numerous points that it had to make sure that it did Iran after it finished Iraq. I might add that there is no evidence that Israel warned the United States that Iraq would turn into a quagmire. Indeed, the reason the Israelis were confident that the United States would deal with Iran after they finished with Iraq was because the Israelis thought that we were going to encounter a cakewalk in Iraq.

Turning now to the lobby, there is no question that the neoconservatives, one of the core constituencies in the lobby, were the main driving force behind that war. But they were supported by key organizations in the lobby, such as AIPAC. Now that the war has gone south, it is common to hear Israel’s supporters say that the main organizations in the lobby did not push for war.

But that’s not true. This point is made clear in a May 2004 editorial written in The Forward, a Jewish weekly newspaper based in New York. I’m going to read to you from The Forward editorial, again written in May 2004:

As President Bush attempted to sell the war in Iraq, America’s most important Jewish organizations rallied as one to his defense. In statement after statement, community leaders stressed the need to rid the world of Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction. Concern for Israel’s safety rightfully factored in to the deliberations of the main Jewish groups.

One sometimes hears the claim these days that AIPAC took no position on the Iraq war and certainly did not advocate it. This is not true either. First of all, this claim fails the common sense test, as AIPAC usually supports what Israel wants, and Israel certainly wanted the United States to invade Iraq.

Second, and more importantly, there is hard evidence that AIPAC lobbied for the war. For example, AIPAC’s Executive Director, this is AIPAC’s Executive Director, not Steve Walt or John Mearsheimer, AIPAC’s Executive Director, Howard Korr, told the New York Sun in January 2003 that one of AIPAC’s successes over the past year was, quote, “quietly lobbying Congress to approve the use of force in Iraq.” The neoconservatives, of course, were the main driving force behind the war.

They initiated the idea of using force to topple Saddam in two letters written to President Clinton in early 1998. Over the next five years, and especially after 9-11, they pushed relentlessly for a war against Iraq. No other group or institution in the United States was seriously committed to invading Iraq over that five-year period.

Indeed, there was significant opposition to invading Iraq even after 9-11 within the State Department, the intelligence community, and the uniformed military. The neoconservatives are, by their own admission, deeply committed to Israel. In fact, many of them are connected with key organizations in the lobby like the American Enterprise Institute and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Our argument here, it should be emphasized, is not that the neoconservatives or the leaders of the principal organizations in the lobby were pushing a war that was in Israel’s national interest but was not in America’s national interest. On the contrary, they believe that invading Iraq was in both the American and Israeli national interests. For the neoconservatives, what is good for Israel is good for the United States and vice versa.

Unfortunately, in the case of Iraq, they were tragically wrong. Although the neoconservatives were deeply committed to a war with Iraq, they could not make it happen by themselves. They failed to convince Clinton to go to Baghdad, and they had little luck selling the war in the first eight months of the Bush administration.

Moreover, Steve and I both believe that if Al Gore had been elected president, there would have been no war in Iraq. So I’m making this argument very clear here. We are not arguing that the neoconservatives of the lobby by itself caused the war.

Our argument is that the lobby was a major driving force. It was the events of 9-11 that actually created the circumstances where the lobby could help convince both President Bush and Vice President Cheney that invading Iraq was a smart idea. But without Bush and Cheney on board, there would not have been a war.

All of this is to say that the neoconservatives were necessary to have the war, but by themselves they could not make it happen. One final point is in order about Iraq. We are sometimes accused of saying that Iraq was a Jewish war.

Nothing could be further from the truth. We pointed out in the article that we wrote and we point out in the book that polls taken before the war show that American Jews were 10% less supportive of the war than the general American public. Our argument is that the neoconservatives and the lobby more generally—not the American Jewish community—were the principal driving forces behind the war.

And as Steve emphasized, the lobby is defined by its political agenda, not religion or ethnicity.

Recommendations for U.S.-Israeli Relations

Let me conclude with a brief word about what we think the U.S.-Israeli relationship should look like. To start with, the United States should end its special relationship with Israel and treat it as a normal country.

The United States should treat Israel the way it treats other democracies like Britain, France, Germany, and India, just to name a few. In practice, this means that when Israel is acting in ways that are consistent with the American national interest, Washington should back the Jewish state. But when Israel is acting in ways that harm U.S. interests, Washington should distance itself from Israel and use its considerable leverage to get Israel to change its behavior, just as it would do with any other country that was acting in ways that might hurt the United States.

Regarding Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians, the United States should act as an honest broker. In other words, Washington should pursue an even-handed policy toward the two sides. In particular, the United States should make it clear to Israel that it must abandon the occupied territories and allow for the creation of a viable Palestinian state.

Jerusalem should be told that the United States will oppose, not tolerate, its colonial expansion in the West Bank. None of this is to say that the United States should abandon Israel. On the contrary, the United States should defend Israel’s right to exist within its pre-1967 borders, with some minor modifications.

And most importantly, as Steve said, we both believe that if Israel’s survival is threatened, the United States should come to its aid. Thank you.

Q&A Session

ADELE: Thank you very much. We now have time for questions, and I’d like to ask people who want to ask questions to line up behind the microphone, and to please introduce yourselves and make your questions brief, because there are a lot of people here who I know want to be part of an active conversation. And I’m going to save one question for the end, but I’m hoping some of you will ask the five questions I have so I can choose.

Go ahead.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Thank you so much for coming here and giving us your perspectives. Just a quick question, which I have to give a little context of. I’m going to try to be brief, but I asked Mr. Meir Sharma to come on a national podcast and WHBK radio show. I understand due to time concerns he could not come on. So then I asked him, myself or any other moderator, anyone who you two could agree on, why don’t you debate Alan Dershowitz, someone who has a different point of view? You said that would be counterproductive as a faculty member in a university that promotes intellectual and thoughtful and rigorous debate.

I’m curious why you’d find it counterproductive to debate someone on an issue that has a diverging point of view.

JOHN J MEARSHEIMER: We have a basic rule of thumb, which is that we don’t debate anyone who has called us an anti-Semite.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: I got a phone call today from Beirut. Can you hear me? I got a phone call today from Beirut, from the American University of Beirut, to ask both of you about whether Israel and Syria are collaborating in the destruction of Lebanon, starting with the assassination of the prime minister.

Is that possible or just a ridiculous thing?

STEPHEN M. WALT: I don’t know if this is on or not. I don’t believe Israel and Syria are collaborating in the destruction of Lebanon. I’ve seen no evidence to suggest that there’s any collusion of an active sort between Israel and Syria.

Israel and Syria have undertaken actions in Lebanon that have been deeply damaging to the Lebanese people and to Lebanese society. Both countries, both Syria and Israel, should be heavily criticized for their policies towards Lebanon over the last 20 or more years. But I don’t think there’s collusion there.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Bill Wendt from Chicago. There was an article in Tikkun Magazine last year that this Jewish lobby was, to a great extent, a fig leaf for other things, such as the military-industrial complex. Are you familiar with this article?

Would you care to make any comment about that?

JOHN J MEARSHEIMER: I’ll make two points. First of all, it’s very important to emphasize that we do not refer to it as the Jewish lobby. We refer to it as the Israel lobby.

I just want to be very clear on this. I don’t know how many of you saw Leslie Gelb’s review of our book in the Sunday New York Times, but we go to great lengths in the book to say we’re not talking about the Jewish lobby, we’re talking about the Israel lobby. But yet he and the editors of the Times saw fit to misrepresent their argument and refer to it as the Jewish lobby.

It’s the Israel lobby, okay?

AUDIENCE QUESTION: I could be wrong, but I think the article reused the term Jewish lobby. The article did use the term Jewish lobby.

STEPHEN M. WALT: Not our article.

JOHN J MEARSHEIMER: No, no, the Tikkun article. Do you want to comment on the Tikkun article? And the Tikkun argument.

Basically, there is an argument out there that it was not the Israel lobby that drove the Iraq war, and it’s mainly not the Israel lobby that’s driving U.S. Middle East policy. It’s either the oil lobby, the oil-producing states, or the military-industrial complex. I’ll say a couple quick words about Iraq and then about Middle East policy more generally.

First of all, with regard to Iraq, there is hardly any evidence that the oil companies, or the oil-producing states, or the military-industrial complex was pushing this war. We’ve done extensive investigations of this and can find hardly any evidence. And in fact, the oil-producing states were clearly against the war, with the exception of Kuwait.

And the oil companies were not in favor of a war with Iraq. What the oil companies wanted to do was to jump into bed with Saddam Hussein and make money. They didn’t want to fight a war.

It is very clear that in 1991, the first Gulf War, that the oil-producing states and the oil companies did favor that war. But I just don’t see any evidence of it in the second Gulf War. With regard to overall American foreign policy in the Middle East, actually prominent figures in the lobby, prominent figures associated with AIPAC, like Doug Bloomfield, who was the legislative director, and Morris Amitay, who was once the head of AIPAC, both admit that when it comes to U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, they pretty much have no opposition in terms of other interest groups. They don’t see the oil lobby as carrying on a campaign to get a particular foreign policy in the Middle East. They pretty much, again, view it as an open field for AIPAC and for the lobby more generally.

STEPHEN M. WALT: I just want to add one quick point to that, which is that the author of the piece in Tikkun, I think it was Stephen Zunes, and other people, Noam Chomsky comes to mind as well, have disagreed with us in the way that the questioner suggested. This is a perfectly terrific kind of scholarly debate. They managed to take issue with our arguments in a substantive way and without calling us names.

We wrote the article and the book to try and encourage a civilized discussion. Although we’re not persuaded by their arguments, we admire the fact that they took us on on substance and didn’t make it personal.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Danny Bush predicted a quagmire in Iraq in his book, A World Transformed. So did Dick Cheney in 1991.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: I’m Michael Johnson. I’m an international trade lawyer in Chicago, before that in New York. This goes along with your answer, Professor Walt, just a minute ago, and it’s for those of us who are not—Could you talk into the microphone?

JOHN J MEARSHEIMER: I’m sorry.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: This goes along with your answer, Professor Walt, a few minutes ago, and it’s for those of us who are not political scientists. You’re described as realists. How would you describe Mr. Zunes, and how would you describe the neocons in terms of the descriptors used for political scientists?

And secondly, what is the realist solution to the conflict in Israel-Palestine?

STEPHEN M. WALT: We’ve just entered an international relations theory seminar, for which we apologize. I’ll take the first part of this. I would characterize, I think, the Zunes critique as, for lack of a better term, and this probably isn’t exactly right, soft Marxist, or very left-wing structural interpretation of foreign policy as being heavily driven by economic forces, the large forces of world capitalism, American multinational corporations, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

And that’s a well-established intellectual view that I don’t happen to agree with, although, again, as I said, I have no problems with people taking issue with us on that. The neoconservatives I have occasionally described as sort of liberal internationalists on steroids, in the sense that they believe American power is almost always a good thing, and it should be used to advance the cause of freedom and liberty. And it’s also a very, in my view, ahistorical, unrealistic view of history.

# Panel Discussion on The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy

Neoconservative Foreign Policy Perspective

JOHN J MEARSHEIMER: One of the things they believe is that all human beings are kind of hardwired for freedom, and if there’s some dictator who’s denying them freedom, all you have to do is remove the dictator, and then people will form political parties and start voting. All you have to do is look at history to know that creating free societies, creating workable democracies, is in fact quite difficult and often quite a wrenching social process, particularly in societies where it’s never been known before. So I think neoconservatives are, they like to talk as though they are occasionally realists, but I think in fact really they’re about as unrealistic a foreign policy group as we’ve had in recent memory.

The Two-State Solution

JOHN J MEARSHEIMER: Just on your second question, I tried to make clear in my presentation that I think the solution here is to move to two states, and that means the Israelis occupying, moving out of almost all of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, of course, which they’ve left already, and then the United States behaving in an even-handed fashion to make this happen. I believe that the United States should actually put great pressure on Israel to abandon the settlements and to abandon what I see as a colonization project. Many in the audience might think that this is a bad idea and we should leave Israel to its own devices, but for those of you who think that, I would ask you where do you think this is all headed?

In other words, if Israel continues to build settlements, build bypass roads, and incorporate more and more of the West Bank into what I would call a greater Israel, what is this going to look like? It seems to me if you’re an Israeli, you have three choices. You can expel the Palestinians so that you can keep this as a Jewish state, because you all know what the demographics look like if you have a greater Israel.

You can expel the Palestinians. That’s probably not going to happen. Second, you can have a binational state.

There are probably some people in the audience who favor that, but I don’t think that the Israelis are going to allow that to happen. So if you can’t do expulsion, you can’t have a binational state, you’re left with one alternative. It’s called apartheid, and of course this is one of the reasons why Israel’s supporters in the United States reacted so vehemently to Jimmy Carter’s use of the term, because that’s where you’re headed.

Don’t you think if you’re a strong supporter of Israel, if you love Israel, that it would be better to get out of the settlements, to get out of the occupied territories, and create a viable Palestinian state, rather than creating an Israel that has more Palestinians in it than Jews, and where those Palestinians are basically locked up in bantustans?

We don’t think so, and this is why Steve and I emphasize it point after point when we talk to audiences like this, that what is now going on is not only not good for the United States, it is not good for Israel, and if the United States had told Israel starting in 1967 in no uncertain terms that it can’t build settlements, that would have been much better for Israel than allowing them to build all those settlements and get into a situation now where they are headed towards becoming an apartheid state.

Q&A Session

ADELE: Thank you. Let me just say one thing. We have a lot of people wanting to ask questions, and if someone before you asks a question that’s even similar to yours, it would help a lot if we didn’t repeat the same questions. I’m not commenting on early ones, I’m just trying to ensure that we get as much variety in the discussion and as many people as possible get to speak. There are not very many in the line.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Thank you for your presentation, professor. It’s a magnificent presentation. It would seem to me, I’d like to propose that this occasion, this occurrence at the University of Chicago is the greatest event ever happened at this university ever since Enrico Fermi split the atom some 60 years ago.

JOHN J MEARSHEIMER: I don’t know how to take that.

STEPHEN M. WALT: And some people don’t think splitting the atom was all that great a thing either.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: I’m in trouble already. Okay, my question is this. You both refer to IPAC as a lobbying organization. However, I understand that it’s not a registered lobbying organization. Would you explain why it’s not, and what are the consequences of not being a lawyer, or what are the benefits, or why are they not registered as a lobbying organization?

STEPHEN M. WALT: They are registered as a lobbying organization here in the United States. If you get money from outside the United States, say from the government of Germany to lobby on Germany’s behalf or France, you have to register as a foreign agent, right, if your funding comes from outside. But APAC’s funding comes from American citizens, private contributions, completely legitimate, entirely legal, entirely appropriate, like lots of other special interest groups.

I can’t emphasize that enough. And therefore, it doesn’t have to register as, under U.S. law, as a foreign lobbying agent, because again, its support comes from Americans doing what Americans do.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Could you just move Ayub Talhami, an activist in the peace and justice movement. I have one quick comment, and one question. The quick comment is this. I heard both of you, I read the original article, and I heard Dr. Walt on NPR. I’m not so sure how to describe it. Both of you are overly apologetic for writing what you did write, and you lean over backwards to be defensive.

AUDIENCE: Correct.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: That’s my impression. And it doesn’t work. Okay.

The question. In 1975, Commentary magazine published an article by a professor, Lipschultz, in which he says, and I’m choosing, I’m not quoting everything. He starts, For us, for us as Jews, Israel is and must remain our first priority.

We must protect it, we must defend it, and we must stand with it at all costs. We must insist that Israel interests are also the interest of the U.S. Even when these interests run in opposite directions, we must be firm in our views. The United States is a large country, a powerful country, and it can and must afford a setback.

Israel is small and cannot afford it. Any comment on your part? And did you, why did you not address this in your book?

The Dual Loyalty Question

JOHN J MEARSHEIMER: Okay, I’ll take this question. This is the dual loyalty issue, and we did not address the dual loyalty issue in the article, because it is a third rail issue for sure, but we did discuss it at considerable length in the book. So I think if you look in the book, you can see our discussion of this matter in great detail.

I’ll say a few words about it right here. There is no question that every human being has multiple loyalties. You have loyalty to your family, you have loyalty to a religious group, you have loyalty to your country, and it is perfectly permissible in the United States of America to have loyalty to another country.

In fact, you are allowed to serve in the military of another country if you so desire. You can have dual citizenship in the United States. In other words, you can be a citizen of Germany and a citizen of the United States.

The question that one has to ask him or herself on this particular issue is, what happens if you have a loyalty to a foreign country and a loyalty to the United States? You’re an American, you have a loyalty to the United States, and you have a loyalty to another country, and those two loyalties come into conflict because there is a particular instance where the interests of the two countries diverge. And what you read was a case where someone said that if that were to happen, he would side with Israel over the United States.

I do not believe that is representative of what happens in the American Jewish community or in the American Indian community or almost all of the other ethnic communities that I know anything about. I think what happens in the vast majority of cases is that individuals conflate, let’s take Israel as an example since that’s what we’re talking about, they conflate Israel’s interests with America’s interests, and they don’t act as if the particular policy in question is going to be good for Israel and not good for the United States. I tried to make this point clearly when I was talking about the Iraq War.

I do not believe for one second that the neoconservatives believed that they were fostering a policy that was good for Israel but not good for the United States. They thought it was good for both countries. And I think people do not want to face up to the fact, for understandable reasons, that there might be a conflict in their two loyalties.

So the case that you described, I believe, is going to be very rare. Our point is that no two states in the system can always have, or in the international system, can always have the same interests. They’re going to be clashing interests, whether you’re talking about Germany in the United States, Britain in the United States, Israel in the United States.

And we think it’s important that we be able to point out where there is a conflict of interest and where we think individuals who are deeply committed to Israel may be thinking in a wrong headed way about a particular policy because of their deep attachment to Israel and their deep attachment to the United States.

AUDIENCE: Thank you.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: The comment was about both of you being apologetic and leaning over backwards and being defensive. This is one case where you’re doing exactly the same.

JOHN J MEARSHEIMER: We had an interview with a German magazine. Steve was referencing the magazine, Stern Magazine. They interviewed us at great length.

And the interviewer said, he read our book, and he said, you are so defensive in this book. You keep saying, you know, you’re not saying this, you’re not saying this, you’re not saying this. Why are you repeating this?

And we said that when we wrote the article, we felt we were misunderstood. And therefore we thought if we were, if we would repeat our arguments endlessly in the book, we wouldn’t be misunderstood. And as I said to you before, we were wrong.

We can’t, we can’t seem to find many people who read the book that we wrote.

STEPHEN M. WALT: I would just add, it’s a footnote in the United States, coverage, of course, outside the United States. It’s remarkable how much better they read English in some other countries.

JOHN J MEARSHEIMER: By the way, including Israel. I would suggest to you in the audience who are interested in this, that in six months, go to Haaretz, the New York Times of Israel, go to Haaretz, and put in the search engine, my name or Steve’s name, and look at all the articles and editorials that have been written. And you will see, I bet a lot of money, that we will be treated much better there than we have been in the United States.

ADELE: Next question. No, we need to move on. We need to move on with other questions because there’s so many people who have them. We’re not going to get to everyone. Thank you.

Addressing the Lobby’s Influence

AUDIENCE QUESTION: The undue influence of the Israel lobby that you consider harmful for the American foreign policy, how do you propose we remedy this without curtailing the right to freedom of speech of people that support the Israel lobby? Because the right to give money to senators and whatnot is the right to freedom of speech. The right to give money is like what you said, it’s doing what Americans do. So you’ve certainly raised the debate, you’ve certainly taken it to a new level, but where do we go from here?

STEPHEN M. WALT: That’s a great question, and we dealt with that at some length in the conclusion of the book. We agree with the basic premise behind the question that this activity is legitimate, and therefore you shouldn’t try to legislate against AIPAC or anything like that. I think doing something like that would in fact be anti-Semitic.

One way that you could undermine the impact of all special interest groups would be campaign finance reform, public financing of elections, which would make the American political system somewhat more like some other democracies where money does not play as critical a role, and of course that would make lots of special interest groups less influential. I sense some support for that policy here. The bad news is I think I will probably go to my grave waiting for true campaign finance reform that would have that effect.

I don’t think that’s going to happen. So I think there are two things one can hope for. One is just a much more open discussion here in the United States of these issues, have a much more open discourse, get more views represented more readily so that more Americans hear different views on the subject than the ones they’re tending to hear now, and that’s one of the reasons of course we wrote the book to try and encourage that.

The second thing that we also hope for is that a number of the key organizations in the lobby become the more moderate groups, Americans for Peace Now, Brit Zedek v. Shalom, the Israel Policy Forum, become more well-supported and more influential, and some of the hardline groups become less well-off, less influential, or equally plausible, begin to recognize that the policies they have backed have not been good for the United States and also deeply harmful to Israel. There would be nothing wrong with having a very powerful pro-Israel movement in the United States if it were pushing a much more sensible set of policies.

In fact, that would be a good thing. So one of the things we hope the book does is starts to encourage some discussion and dialogue within some of those groups as well and get them to ask, gee, are the policies we’ve been pushing all along really accomplishing the objective we’re hoping for, which is namely a strong, secure, prosperous Israel?

ADELE: Next question.

# Q&A Session

Audience Questions

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Hi, I’m Mike Wolfe from the South Side of Chicago. I read your journal article a couple of years ago. It started a firestorm in Arliss.

The question I have is concerning the U.S. interests and policies which you feel are being distorted or not served well. Could you discuss a little bit what those are in the Middle East and relate that to the three-letter word, the U.S. long-term relation with Saudi Arabia, the interference in Iran, and so forth? Because it seems to me that to a certain degree, and I know you’ve heard this in a much more eloquent, sophisticated way, that your focus on the Israel lobby, while I love a lot of the stuff that you’ve written, tends to cover up the long-term goals of what I call U.S. imperialism. Thank you.

ADELE: Let me just take a couple questions and maybe we can get some collective answers. I’m trying to get everybody. You need to speak into the mic.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Earlier, you said that you did not see any influence of an oil lobby, but I could give you some examples. Going back a few years ago, they were promoting a sale of AWACS to Saudi Arabia. Immediately following September 11th, when American airlines were grounded for passenger flights, they were very influential in allowing hundreds of members of the Saudi royal family and bin Laden’s family to leave the country.

Sir, could you wind up?

ADELE: There are a lot of people who want to ask questions.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: My basic point is, is there a petroleum group that operates behind the scenes who don’t need a lobby to produce their point? Your points have all been towards the oil of Iraq. Could it be that the petroleum companies have a much longer timeframe they’re operating in, and they’re really looking at going into Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq, not for that oil, which was acquired immediately after World War I, but they want to extract the oil of the six stands of the former Soviet Union?

The conflict is, if America wins the war…

ADELE: Next question, please. We’ll do one more, and then let these gentlemen try to answer all three. Go ahead.

One more.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Dr. Mearsheimer, you make the very potent claim that America’s support for Israel was one of the motivating factors, one of the critical motivating factors behind September 11th, but wouldn’t there be more common sense to that if bin Laden concentrated more of al-Qaeda’s efforts on directly attacking Israel and on directly attacking symbols of the U.S.-Israeli relationship, rather than on the World Trade Center, which has very little symbolic implications about Israel, but rather on American capitalism and the American way of life? Also, why is it never articulated in one of bin Laden’s videos that he specifically disapproves of the U.S.-Israeli relationships, and rather he concentrates so much more on talking about what he dislikes from the American way of life?

ADELE: I have to ask all of you who have questions to please, standing in line, think really carefully about how you’re going to say it very briefly, and I’d like to even ask our commentators to figure out how they’re going to answer these questions really briefly.

Responses to Initial Questions

JOHN J MEARSHEIMER: Okay, very quickly, the first question, isn’t this all imperialism when you look at what’s going on in the Middle East? Imperialism is a mushy word, and one might argue that the United States is an imperialist power in the Middle East, depending on how you define the term imperialism. I would argue the United States has three sets of interests in the Middle East.

One is oil, and that requires making sure that oil continues to flow out of the Middle East, and number two, preventing nuclear proliferation, and number three, dealing with our terrorism problem. I think those are three major interests in the Middle East, and I think that most Americans would agree on that. I do not think you have to be a stereotypical imperial power to achieve those goals.

I think if the United States got physically out of the region and maintained an over-the-horizon military capability and only intervened when it absolutely had to, it would be able to deal with the Middle East very well. The problem that we face is that we’ve decided that we can go into the Middle East and use military force to reorder the place at the end of a rifle barrel. We can do social engineering on a massive scale with military means.

This was delusional. This is why the Iraq War has turned into a total disaster. We should get out of the business of telling people in the Arab and Islamic world what color toilet paper they can use. That’s their business, not our business. Again, I do believe that the United States has strategic interests in the Middle East, but they don’t require a stereotypical imperialist policy.

Very quickly on the third question, I did try to point out that the principal reason that Osama bin Laden wanted to make sure that the capital was attacked was because he saw the capital as the bastion of support for Israel here in the United States.

STEPHEN M. WALT: There was a question on the oil lobby that came up again. I’ll just say this very quickly. Yes, there is an oil lobby, and it’s politically very influential. It exercises influence on government regulations, on environmental policy, on drilling policy, on all sorts of tax policies and things like that, but it doesn’t exert much influence on U.S. foreign policy.

You just have to ask yourself, if the oil companies were really driving the train here, what would American Middle East policy be? Well, for one thing, we wouldn’t have had sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s, and we wouldn’t have sanctions against Iran today because that keeps American oil companies from going and doing what they really love doing, which is drilling oil and making money.

Dick Cheney, when he was head of Halliburton, which is an oil services firm, gave a speech denouncing our sanctions-happy foreign policy. So again, if oil companies were really driving the train in the Middle East, it would look rather different than what we have now. They don’t like wars. They don’t like reordering the region. They just want to make money.

Additional Questions

ADELE: Thank you. Okay, let me tell you what’s going to happen. We have basically time for even less than three questions, but we’ll take the first three gentlemen, and because I was going to ask a question at the end, and I think at least a woman should ask one question, I’m going to cede my question to the woman in line. So you come forward. So we get four questions, and that’s it, because we’re supposed to be ending at 7:30, and this is going to last later, already even.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Hi, my name is Elisa Becker. I’ll be very brief. You seem to conflate the policies of the pro-Israel mainstream lobby with Israeli policy, when in fact in many occasions they have deviated, Oslo, Gaza withdrawal, anti-terrorism act, and at the conference last year, the one Israeli politician that got the strongest applause was Netanyahu, who was not in office, and I wanted to know if you could respond to how you differentiate between Israeli government policies, Israeli people policies, and the policies of the pro-Israel lobby.

ADELE: Thank you. Next question.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Okay, I know that in your article, and also in Professor Walt’s speech, you said that the U.S. backing for Israel is unconditional. There is a counter-argument that there is a quid pro quo, that it is conditional, that Israel frequently acts as a proxy for the United States in the Middle East and elsewhere, doing the dirty work that the United States government wants to maintain plausible deniability on. For example, the 1980s arms shipments to the Islamic Republic of Iran, leading up to the Iran-Contra. I was just wondering what would be your response to that?

AUDIENCE QUESTION: To what extent, as IRS scholars, is the two billion aid to Egypt and the three billion aid to Israel useful as a means of preventing another Egyptian-Israeli war, given your view that in the event of Israel losing such a war, we should come to Israel’s aid? In other words, to what extent is it useful as a down payment to avoid another such conflict?

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Stephen Saltzman, Chicago. Thank you for the work you’ve done. I want to ask a question about the fault lines within the lobby. How is it that Christian evangelicals, many of whom support for Israel is premised on the notion of the great rapture or the choice for Jews to decide to convert or die, how can they coexist in a lobby with organizations that have large Jewish memberships who find such thinking to be abhorrent?

STEPHEN M. WALT: Hang on, we’re just dividing these up.

Final Responses

JOHN J MEARSHEIMER: Okay, I’ll let him have the last two, although I would have much preferred those questions. On the woman’s point that the interests of the lobby and the interests of Israel are not always the same, I think there are some cases where the leadership of the lobby is unhappy with the policies that the Israeli government of the day is pushing. There’s no question about that.

We were not arguing that the lobby slavishly follows what the Israeli government wants. And in those particular cases, Oslo would be a case in point, as she pointed out. It’s quite clear that the leaders of the lobby, who are much more hawkish than the mainstream American Jewish community, did not like the Oslo peace process, and they were not happy with what Yitzhak Rabin was doing. But the point is, they went along. They went along grudgingly for sure, but they did not oppose Rabin.

The second point was that Israel sometimes does the dirty work of the United States. This is basically the argument that Israel is our client state. You saw some of this during and after the Lebanon war. Many people argued, especially in Israel, that what happened in Lebanon was that the United States turned the Israelis loose against Hezbollah and against Lebanon more generally, because they saw that, the Americans saw that, as a test run for a war in Iran.

So again, the argument is that Israel is our rottweiler, to use Yuri Avnery’s phrase, and we keep it on a leash, and when the time comes and we see fit, we turn it loose. We deal with this at length in the book, and I won’t go into it here, but there are very few examples that support that point of view.

STEPHEN M. WALT: Yes, the United States gives a substantial amount of aid to Egypt. I think it’s around 1.9 billion now each year, and we also give a big slug of aid, many hundreds of millions, to Jordan, and you can think of this as a reward for good behavior, that this is part and parcel of the peace treaties that they signed with Israel, and it’s good that those countries are at peace. It’s not obvious to me, though, how essential the aid is long term for Israel’s security, simply because Israel is the strongest conventional military power in the region.

It’s also a country that has several hundred nuclear weapons of its own. It’s the only nuclear power in the region, and I don’t think Jordan, certainly, and not even Egypt, at this state of the game, poses a significant military threat. You’ll recall that even back in the Cold War days, Israel won in ’48, in ’56, and in ’67, before it was getting substantial American economic and military assistance.

It also won in ’73, and that was back in the days when the Arabs were getting a lot of help from the Soviet Union, which is gone, right? So Israel’s strategic situation, if you leave aside the conflict with the Palestinians, is in fact quite favorable now.

Then the last question, which is on the alliance between the so-called Christian Zionists, whose support for a greater Israel is based on their interpretation of the Bible. It’s based on what they see in the Bible as biblical prophecy, and a set of steps that have to be gone through in order to bring Christ’s return to earth. And it’s true that a number of Israelis, in particular, have been very critical of this alliance for the reasons outlined by the questioner.

As one of them put it, these people, the Christian Zionists, don’t love real Jewish people. They love us as characters in a play. It’s a five-act play where we all disappear in act four.

That was, by the way, Gershom Gorenberger, who’s an Israeli scholar.

But the key to the alliance, of course, is it’s a tactical alliance. If you’re in the Israel lobby, if you’re one of the Jewish members of the Israel lobby, you don’t buy the theology of the Christian Zionists. You don’t believe any of that. Whether you’re a religious Jew or a secular Jew, you don’t believe any of that stuff about the second coming. But if it enhances your political influence to have them as allies, they’re perfectly useful for purely tactical reasons. And I think that’s what ultimately lies behind the current marriage between the Christian Zionists and other groups in the lobby that are based primarily on parts, and I emphasize only parts, of the American Jewish community.

ADELE: I hope you will join me in thanking them very much for their time today and their work.

STEPHEN M. WALT: Thank you.

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