Additional thoughts on questioning American support of Israel

A couple of points to add about my extremely lengthy bit on American treatment of Israel:

1. The argument I was trying to make:

I was trying to argue that the authors of the paper, Mearsheimer and Walt, were not so much trying to be perfectly rigorous social scientists as trying to advance an important issue of debate on a very peculiar issue. I think if you look at their paper from that perspective they are successful.

Now Dan Drezner linked to a quote of Mearsheimer's that points to this not being his intention. It seems that if the goal of the paper was to drum up a debate, Mearsheimer and Walt are failing at advancing that debate in the main stream media:

Mearsheimer and Walt also seem to be resisting further publicity.

"I don't have an agenda in the sense of viewing myself as proselytizing or trying to sell this," Mearsheimer told the Forward. "I am a scholar, not an activist, and I am reticent to take questions from the media because I do believe that this is a subject that has to be approached very carefully. You don't want to say the wrong thing. The potential for saying the wrong thing is very great here."

Mearsheimer was hosted on National Public Radio Tuesday for a full hour, to talk about Iraq, but did not make any mention of the controversial paper he co-authored. "To have a throwaway line or two on public radio to promote yourself is a bad idea," he told the Forward, following his NPR appearance. "I prefer to take the high road, although that is not always easy." Since publication, Mearsheimer added, he and Walt also turned down offers from major newspapers, radio and television networks to lay out their thesis.

This is definitely devastates my hypothesis that could explain away some of the factual gaps in their paper. If that hypothesis is then dismissed I think all we are left with is, as Dan Drezner said, a couple of realists trying to explain away an event that does not fit their way of looking at the world.

2. So what do I have left then if that is debunked, well I think I have two things:

a. The fact that there is still good reason for debate on this issue: I still think Mearsheimer and Walt are correct in many of their arguments for why this is an issue to figure out. Israel does receive extraordinary treatment and that can't be explained away by strategic things like trade or intelligence which we get from other countries without giving billions annually (also you can add the aid we give Egypt, our second largest recipient of aid, as aid to Israel because we give it to them to get along with Israel). A quick note here too, Israel taking out Iraq's nuclear capacity in the 80s is not a reason for continued US support, Israel would have done that with US support or not, that was a move of their own self-interest, not for the sake of the US (although the US could have made it easier to accomplish, but we could have done that anyways).

The moral case to support Israel is debatable and I think that is the point I was hoping Mearsheimer and Walt were making, but if they weren't, I will. Israel is not a David in the region now (although it is a question of whether it was at its start, but not like that matters for us to continue to support them given their absolute advantage now). Also, there is a distinction between initial US support of Israel, in order to ensure its rise to superiority, and continued US support. Israel has all the advantages it could have at this point, partly because of the support the US gives it, partly not. Regardless, we can continue to sell it weapons to sustain it, but we still don't have to give it so much money, for so little in return.

Also, its worth noting that while there might be a moral argument to sustain a Jewish state, given that foreign aid is a zero-sum game, isn't there an even stronger moral argument to provide aid to, like, all of Africa. What is the huge distinction here that necessitates billions to Israel and not to African nations, especially when I am pretty sure Israel would be fine without the billions and Sudanese Christians will not. But this argument is largely neither here nor there, but worth making.

b. The response to this part of the Mearsheimer and Walt argument has largely been irrational. You can go to all the links in my last post and see what people have had to say, and it seems that it has largely been based on the idea that we shouldn't be debating this issue. I hate people who say we shouldn't be debating things, no matter what reason, but especially when those same people are often calling for debate and free expression on all issues but Israel.

Also, to continue the shitting all over David Bernstein at Volokh Conspiracy, it came to my attention that his only actual critique of the paper (which was only the first paragraph of the paper) is completely wrong. He cites the first paragraph which is:

For the past several decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the centrepiece of US Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with Israel. The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread ‘democracy’ throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardised not only US security but that of much of the rest of the world.

He then goes crazy about the fact that the bolded part is wrong and how Israel has never supported the democratization. Well the part he bitches about is not even about Israel, it is about the Lobby that pushes for unwavering support and a neoconservative foreign policy elsewhere, which includes democratizing the region. God I have lost a ton of respect for him over this.

3. Socialization:

I wonder to what extent the US support has propped up Israel's terribly socialized economy. I don't know this first hand, but it seems that the government's economic policy maps more closely to Frances than the United States:

35 billion dollars, over half of the government's budget, which swallows a whopping 55 percent of Israel's GNP, is devoted to transfer payments--has been progressively torn apart by the struggles between conflicting vested interests. And as the power of the parties and of the government weakened, the void was filled by the bureaucracy--(which employs 800,000 people out of Israel's 2.4 million person labor force)

If Israel were weaned off of US economic support and it was forced to end its socialization it could probably become a much more powerful country than it is now.

There will be plenty more on this in the future. Those are some additional thoughts though.

-Mr. Alec