Mearsheimer & Walt’s The Israel Lobby gained outrage and continued attempts to suppress it from AIPAC.
But there is criticisms on the study’s theses from a different side too. In that view the Lobby is not of really significant influence on U.S. Middle East policies, but used as an excuse by other forces.
Stephen Zunes writes in Tikkun:
I am in no way denying that the Israel Lobby can be quite influential, particularly on Capitol Hill and in its role in limiting the broader public debate. However, it would be naíve to assume that U.S. policy in the Middle East would be significantly different without AIPAC and like–minded pro–Zionist organizations.
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As political scientist , the self–described ‘angry Arab’ currently serving as a visiting professor at UC Berkeley, puts it, such analysis “absolves the Bush administration, any administration, from any responsibility because they become portrayed as helpless victims of an all–powerful lobby.” Similarly, Columbia University Professor Massad—who regularly endures attacks by the Israel Lobby for his defense of Palestinian rights—contends that the attraction of Mearsheimer and Walt’s argument is that “it exonerates the United States government from all the responsibility and guilt that it deserves for its policies in the Arab world.”
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As Professor Massad puts it, the Israel Lobby is responsible for “the details and intensity but not the direction, content, or impact of such policies.”
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Joseph Massad detailed his criticism in an op-ed in Al-Ahram, Asad AbuKhalil opined in a piece at his blog.
Libertarian conservative Jon Basil Utley writes at AntiWar:
The new, public debate about the Israel lobby is missing a major point – the lobby’s allies, the many other interests in America that want chaos in the Middle East. For example, in the Walt-Mearsheimer book there is no listing in the index for "military-industrial complex." For all its vaunted power, the Israel lobby could not dominate America’s Mideast policies without cover and active support from other powerful groups. Although AIPAC promotes the lobby’s image in Congress as being all powerful, it isn’t. The book does specify Christian Zionists as an integral part of the lobby, but it neglects many others.
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Earlier Eric Alterman expressed an analog view in The Nation.
Writing about Israeli institutions, today’s editorial in Haaretz laments about how influence U.S. ‘Jewish tycoons’ have towards Israel:
The relations between Israel and the the world’s Jews, especially those in the United States, have always been fraught with hypocrisy. While everyone has been careful to pay lip service to Israeli democracy and its citizens’ exclusive right to determine their fate, Jewish tycoons have known how to translate the millions they donate into influence and esteem.
The state, which managed to absorb millions of Jews and build a flourishing economy, continued its small-town mentality of kowtowing to the masters from overseas.
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I am still confused on the question of who influences, or even commands, whom.
- With regard to Iran it is the Israeli prime minister Olmert who is travelling to Russia, France and the U.K. to raise support for further sanctions, war and eventually ‘regime change’.
- On Iraq the Project for the New American Century was the driving force. Especially after its main members took over U.S. foreign policy. But PNAC is only an appendix to the U.S. industry financed American Enterprise Institute who’s foreign policy leader Richard Perle was the principal author of the 1996 paper, A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm. That paper was written for the Israeli premier Netanyahu. Was it a remittance work or an order?
- During the last war on Lebanon Israel seemed reluctant to follow orders from Washington. It didn’t attack Syria as Washington was wishing.
How are the U.S. neo-con Likudniks connect to the Lobby? Are they the Lobby? Are the ‘Jewish tycoons’?
Stephen Zunes continues his piece with a broader view:
Any serious review of U.S. foreign policy in virtually any corner of the globe demonstrates how the United States props up dictatorships, imposes blatant double-standards regarding human rights and international law, supports foreign military occupations (witness East Timor and Western Sahara), undermines the authority of the United Nations, pushes for military solutions to political problems, transfers massive quantities of armaments, imposes draconian austerity programs on debt–ridden countries through international financial institutions, and periodically imposes sanctions, bombs, stages coups, and invades countries that don’t accept U.S. hegemony. If U.S. policy toward the Middle East was fundamentally different than it is toward the rest of the world, Mearsheimer and Walt would have every right to look for some other sinister force leading the United States astray from its otherwise benign foreign policy agenda. Unfortunately, however, U.S. policy toward the Middle East is remarkably similarly to U.S. foreign policy elsewhere in the world. […]
Is he right?