Why is no one critical of Israel?

After a long spell of deep interest in Middle Eastern politics in High School, I have lately grown weary of even thinking about the region, let alone discussing it with the ardent Zionists that I use to love arguing about Israel with. Perhaps best exemplifying the futility of this debate is the heat being generated over an academic paper written by two of the most stellar political scientists alive.

First, the paper (the full thing is here, a shorter and much more accessible version which I read is available here) is entitled "The Israeli Lobby and US Foreign Policy," it is authored by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. I don't know much about Walt, but Mearsheimer is a professor at the University of Chicago (the college I attend). He is legendary amongst students for his stellar lectures in the large lecture class that he annually teaches which is basically his perspective on international relations (offensive realism). He is extremely well regarded by students and despite UChicago's healthy Jewish component I have never heard a murmur about his views of Israel (and why would I, he is an unabashed realist, there are much bigger things to complain about than his views on Israel) [Update: Also, colleague of Mearsheimer, and ex-colleague of Walt, Dan Drezner assures all that there is no anti-Semitism here]. It sucks that I have to mention this before we get into any analysis of what he actually said, but given some of the ad hominem attacks already levied against these two (and given the attacks that will probably be levied in the near future), it seems necessary. Also, Mearsheimer is extremely well respected in his field. I remember a Foreign Policy survey (that I can't find online because I don't subscribe) that listed him as one of the top five most influential scholars of international relations. Walt is of a similar pedigree.

Now their paper attempts to answer the question, "Why does the United States treat Israel so well?" They first discuss the unrivaled treatment that Israel gets from the US:

Since the October War in 1973, Washington has provided Israel with a level of support dwarfing that given to any other state. It has been the largest annual recipient of direct economic and military assistance since 1976, and is the largest recipient in total since World War Two, to the tune of well over $140 billion (in 2004 dollars). Israel receives about $3 billion in direct assistance each year, roughly one-fifth of the foreign aid budget, and worth about $500 a year for every Israeli. This largesse is especially striking since Israel is now a wealthy industrial state with a per capita income roughly equal to that of South Korea or Spain.

Other recipients get their money in quarterly installments, but Israel receives its entire appropriation at the beginning of each fiscal year and can thus earn interest on it. Most recipients of aid given for military purposes are required to spend all of it in the US, but Israel is allowed to use roughly 25 per cent of its allocation to subsidise its own defence industry. It is the only recipient that does not have to account for how the aid is spent, which makes it virtually impossible to prevent the money from being used for purposes the US opposes, such as building settlements on the West Bank. Moreover, the US has provided Israel with nearly $3 billion to develop weapons systems, and given it access to such top-drawer weaponry as Blackhawk helicopters and F-16 jets. Finally, the US gives Israel access to intelligence it denies to its Nato allies and has turned a blind eye to Israel’s acquisition of nuclear weapons.(Emphasis added)

On top of all this, the US has given Israel all this money at great cost to its strategic interests and often with little thanks from Israel:

Backing Israel [is] not cheap, however, and it [has] complicated America’s relations with the Arab world. For example, the decision to give $2.2 billion in emergency military aid during the October War triggered an Opec oil embargo that inflicted considerable damage on Western economies. For all that, Israel’s armed forces were not in a position to protect US interests in the region.

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A final reason to question Israel’s strategic value is that it does not behave like a loyal ally. Israeli officials frequently ignore US requests and renege on promises (including pledges to stop building settlements and to refrain from ‘targeted assassinations’ of Palestinian leaders). Israel has provided sensitive military technology to potential rivals like China, in what the State Department inspector-general called ‘a systematic and growing pattern of unauthorised transfers’. According to the General Accounting Office, Israel also ‘conducts the most aggressive espionage operations against the US of any ally’. In addition to the case of Jonathan Pollard, who gave Israel large quantities of classified material in the early 1980s (which it reportedly passed on to the Soviet Union in return for more exit visas for Soviet Jews), a new controversy erupted in 2004 when it was revealed that a key Pentagon official called Larry Franklin had passed classified information to an Israeli diplomat. Israel is hardly the only country that spies on the US, but its willingness to spy on its principal patron casts further doubt on its strategic value.

I don't know about you, but this problem definitely seems worth looking at and it is one that gets no attention! (But more on this later.)

Mearsheimer and Walt then refute popular answers to this quandary. The first popular answer is that Israel has and has had key strategic value in the War on Terror and the Cold War (which seems to include a war on terrorists and rouge state in the Middle East). Mearsheimer and Walt contend that this can't be true because in almost every excursion in the Middle East the US has had to go out of its way to distance itself from Israel. Using it as a base for launching invasions of Iraq would be a political disaster. On top of that, they make the controversial, but obviously true point that:

The terrorist organisations that threaten Israel do not threaten the United States, except when it intervenes against them (as in Lebanon in 1982). Moreover, Palestinian terrorism is not random violence directed against Israel or ‘the West’; it is largely a response to Israel’s prolonged campaign to colonise the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Finally, in response to the strategic argument, they simply say that, even if Israel were useful, who cares if these rouge regimes go haywire:

As for so-called rogue states in the Middle East, they are not a dire threat to vital US interests, except inasmuch as they are a threat to Israel. Even if these states acquire nuclear weapons – which is obviously undesirable – neither America nor Israel could be blackmailed, because the blackmailer could not carry out the threat without suffering overwhelming retaliation. The danger of a nuclear handover to terrorists is equally remote, because a rogue state could not be sure the transfer would go undetected or that it would not be blamed and punished afterwards.(Emphasis mine)

This, again is a controversial argument, but this doesn't seem to hold much water (but it also seems to be a mostly worthless argument given what they are trying to achieve, for a more lengthy bit on the reasoning involved in this check this out). The problem with the argument is that while Iran might be unlikely to give any nuclear weapons it develops to terrorist groups, the regime itself is not the most stable and who knows what the future holds for a set of radical Ayatollahs. We were lucky that the transition of power during the fall of the USSR was so easy, who knows if we will get that lucky in the future.

Regardless, with Israel's strategic value dismissed, Mearsheimer and Walt address whether the US provides support to Israel because of any moral imperative. They claim the argument for such support goes like: "Israel is a micron, surrounded by more powerful, evil, Arabs. They are a democracy that we ought to ideologically support given the odds it faces without our support. And we have to support Israel because of the injustices faced by Jews during the Holocaust." Their response goes as such: first, Israel is not an underdog:

Israel is often portrayed as David confronted by Goliath, but the converse is closer to the truth. Contrary to popular belief, the Zionists had larger, better equipped and better led forces during the 1947-49 War of Independence, and the Israel Defence Forces won quick and easy victories against Egypt in 1956 and against Egypt, Jordan and Syria in 1967 – all of this before large-scale US aid began flowing. Today, Israel is the strongest military power in the Middle East. Its conventional forces are far superior to those of its neighbours and it is the only state in the region with nuclear weapons. Egypt and Jordan have signed peace treaties with it, and Saudi Arabia has offered to do so. Syria has lost its Soviet patron, Iraq has been devastated by three disastrous wars and Iran is hundreds of miles away. The Palestinians barely have an effective police force, let alone an army that could pose a threat to Israel. According to a 2005 assessment by Tel Aviv University’s Jaffee Centre for Strategic Studies, ‘the strategic balance decidedly favours Israel, which has continued to widen the qualitative gap between its own military capability and deterrence powers and those of its neighbours.’ If backing the underdog were a compelling motive, the United States would be supporting Israel’s opponents. (Emphasis added)

Basically this whole argument could have been condensed into one simple point: they have vastly superior conventional weapons and have nuclear weapons. That goes a long way in any conventional conflict, which is why the Arab world has failed miserably in every conventional with Israel and would continue to fail in the future. This is also why enemies of Israel have resorted to suicide attacks, which are a sign of Israel's strength not weakness.

The second refutation is to the idea that Israel is an ideological ally of the US. First, Mearsheimer and Walt contend that in the history of US foreign policy the US has attacked and supported democracies and it has attacked and supported many dictatorships. I completely agree here, rarely does the US provide support for ideological reasons (think of our treatment of Pakistan now versus our treatment of Mossadeq's Iran). But even if the US did provide such support, Mearsheimer and Walt contend that Israel would certainly not be the first in line for the treatment it gets (note again how this is an unnecessary argument to make given that their first response to the argument seems entire sufficient):

Some aspects of Israeli democracy are at odds with core American values. Unlike the US, where people are supposed to enjoy equal rights irrespective of race, religion or ethnicity, Israel was explicitly founded as a Jewish state and citizenship is based on the principle of blood kinship. Given this, it is not surprising that its 1.3 million Arabs are treated as second-class citizens, or that a recent Israeli government commission found that Israel behaves in a ‘neglectful and discriminatory’ manner towards them. Its democratic status is also undermined by its refusal to grant the Palestinians a viable state of their own or full political rights.

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Israel’s backers also portray it as a country that has sought peace at every turn and shown great restraint even when provoked. The Arabs, by contrast, are said to have acted with great wickedness. Yet on the ground, Israel’s record is not distinguishable from that of its opponents. Ben-Gurion acknowledged that the early Zionists were far from benevolent towards the Palestinian Arabs, who resisted their encroachments – which is hardly surprising, given that the Zionists were trying to create their own state on Arab land. In the same way, the creation of Israel in 1947-48 involved acts of ethnic cleansing, including executions, massacres and rapes by Jews, and Israel’s subsequent conduct has often been brutal, belying any claim to moral superiority. Between 1949 and 1956, for example, Israeli security forces killed between 2700 and 5000 Arab infiltrators, the overwhelming majority of them unarmed. The IDF murdered hundreds of Egyptian prisoners of war in both the 1956 and 1967 wars, while in 1967, it expelled between 100,000 and 260,000 Palestinians from the newly conquered West Bank, and drove 80,000 Syrians from the Golan Heights.

During the first intifada, the IDF distributed truncheons to its troops and encouraged them to break the bones of Palestinian protesters. The Swedish branch of Save the Children estimated that ‘23,600 to 29,900 children required medical treatment for their beating injuries in the first two years of the intifada.’ Nearly a third of them were aged ten or under. The response to the second intifada has been even more violent, leading Ha’aretz to declare that ‘the IDF . . . is turning into a killing machine whose efficiency is awe-inspiring, yet shocking.’ The IDF fired one million bullets in the first days of the uprising. Since then, for every Israeli lost, Israel has killed 3.4 Palestinians, the majority of whom have been innocent bystanders; the ratio of Palestinian to Israeli children killed is even higher (5.7:1). It is also worth bearing in mind that the Zionists relied on terrorist bombs to drive the British from Palestine, and that Yitzhak Shamir, once a terrorist and later prime minister, declared that ‘neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat.’

The Palestinian resort to terrorism is wrong but it isn’t surprising. The Palestinians believe they have no other way to force Israeli concessions. As Ehud Barak once admitted, had he been born a Palestinian, he ‘would have joined a terrorist organisation’.

While this is by far the most controversial argument that Mearsheimer and Walt make, it should not surprise anyone. Rigorous studies of exactly what happened during the creation of Israel are not pretty (this book seems to be the most cited, a review is available here). But at its root, all Mearsheimer and Walt are saying here is that Israel is like every other nation state. During its creation it got its hands dirty and it continues to do so thinking that is what is necessary to assure its future existence. I don't think Mearsheimer and Walt are passing any judgment on Israel for doing any of this (remember these guys are realists, morals don't enter into the equation for them), they are simply pointing out that Israel probably doesn't get this special treatment because of any ideological reasons given that its actions are certainly not anything that the US should look up to, ideologically.

Last, Mearsheimer and Walt deal with the Holocaust guilt argument for US support of Israel by simply pointing out that:

The tragic history of the Jewish people does not obligate the US to help Israel today no matter what it does.

Just like why the US does not afford a carte blanche to Armenians or Rwandans (whose fate was certainly not improved by the US turning a blind eye in both cases) the Holocaust is no reason to blindly provide such support to Israel. But Mearsheimer and Walt think that while all these explanations are lacking, they have one that works.

Given that they can't find any strategic or ideological reasons for the US support of Israel, they place the blame for this ridiculously preferential treatment squarely at the feet of the "Israel Lobby." But before everyone likens this to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Mearsheimer and Walt are careful defining what they mean by "Israel Lobby":

We use ‘the Lobby’ as shorthand for the loose coalition of individuals and organisations who actively work to steer US foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction. This is not meant to suggest that ‘the Lobby’ is a unified movement with a central leadership, or that individuals within it do not disagree on certain issues. Not all Jewish Americans are part of the Lobby, because Israel is not a salient issue for many of them. In a 2004 survey, for example, roughly 36 per cent of American Jews said they were either ‘not very’ or ‘not at all’ emotionally attached to Israel.

Measheimer and Walt also discuss the tools that this "Lobby" has at its disposal:

The Lobby pursues two broad strategies. First, it wields its significant influence in Washington, pressuring both Congress and the executive branch. Whatever an individual lawmaker or policymaker’s own views may be, the Lobby tries to make supporting Israel the ‘smart’ choice. Second, it strives to ensure that public discourse portrays Israel in a positive light, by repeating myths about its founding and by promoting its point of view in policy debates. The goal is to prevent critical comments from getting a fair hearing in the political arena. Controlling the debate is essential to guaranteeing US support, because a candid discussion of US-Israeli relations might lead Americans to favour a different policy.

A key pillar of the Lobby’s effectiveness is its influence in Congress, where Israel is virtually immune from criticism...

Key organisations in the Lobby make it their business to ensure that critics of Israel do not get important foreign policy jobs. Jimmy Carter wanted to make George Ball his first secretary of state, but knew that Ball was seen as critical of Israel and that the Lobby would oppose the appointment. In this way any aspiring policymaker is encouraged to become an overt supporter of Israel, which is why public critics of Israeli policy have become an endangered species in the foreign policy establishment.

When Howard Dean called for the United States to take a more ‘even-handed role’ in the Arab-Israeli conflict, Senator Joseph Lieberman accused him of selling Israel down the river and said his statement was ‘irresponsible’. Virtually all the top Democrats in the House signed a letter criticising Dean’s remarks, and the Chicago Jewish Star reported that ‘anonymous attackers . . . are clogging the email inboxes of Jewish leaders around the country, warning – without much evidence – that Dean would somehow be bad for Israel.’

This worry was absurd; Dean is in fact quite hawkish on Israel: his campaign co-chair was a former AIPAC president, and Dean said his own views on the Middle East more closely reflected those of AIPAC than those of the more moderate Americans for Peace Now. He had merely suggested that to ‘bring the sides together’, Washington should act as an honest broker. This is hardly a radical idea, but the Lobby doesn’t tolerate even-handedness.

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The Lobby also monitors what professors write and teach. In September 2002, Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes, two passionately pro-Israel neo-conservatives, established a website (Campus Watch) that posted dossiers on suspect academics and encouraged students to report remarks or behaviour that might be considered hostile to Israel. This transparent attempt to blacklist and intimidate scholars provoked a harsh reaction and Pipes and Kramer later removed the dossiers, but the website still invites students to report ‘anti-Israel’ activity.

Groups within the Lobby put pressure on particular academics and universities. Columbia has been a frequent target, no doubt because of the presence of the late Edward Said on its faculty. ‘One can be sure that any public statement in support of the Palestinian people by the pre-eminent literary critic Edward Said will elicit hundreds of emails, letters and journalistic accounts that call on us to denounce Said and to either sanction or fire him,’ Jonathan Cole, its former provost, reported. When Columbia recruited the historian Rashid Khalidi from Chicago, the same thing happened. It was a problem Princeton also faced a few years later when it considered wooing Khalidi away from Columbia.

A classic illustration of the effort to police academia occurred towards the end of 2004, when the David Project produced a film alleging that faculty members of Columbia’s Middle East Studies programme were anti-semitic and were intimidating Jewish students who stood up for Israel. Columbia was hauled over the coals, but a faculty committee which was assigned to investigate the charges found no evidence of anti-semitism and the only incident possibly worth noting was that one professor had ‘responded heatedly’ to a student’s question. The committee also discovered that the academics in question had themselves been the target of an overt campaign of intimidation.

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No discussion of the Lobby would be complete without an examination of one of its most powerful weapons: the charge of anti-semitism. Anyone who criticises Israel’s actions or argues that pro-Israel groups have significant influence over US Middle Eastern policy – an influence AIPAC celebrates – stands a good chance of being labelled an anti-semite. Indeed, anyone who merely claims that there is an Israel Lobby runs the risk of being charged with anti-semitism, even though the Israeli media refer to America’s ‘Jewish Lobby’. In other words, the Lobby first boasts of its influence and then attacks anyone who calls attention to it. It’s a very effective tactic: anti-semitism is something no one wants to be accused of.

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Israel’s advocates, when pressed to go beyond mere assertion, claim that there is a ‘new anti-semitism’, which they equate with criticism of Israel. In other words, criticise Israeli policy and you are by definition an anti-semite. When the synod of the Church of England recently voted to divest from Caterpillar Inc on the grounds that it manufactures the bulldozers used by the Israelis to demolish Palestinian homes, the Chief Rabbi complained that this would ‘have the most adverse repercussions on...Jewish-Christian relations in Britain’, while Rabbi Tony Bayfield, the head of the Reform movement, said: ‘There is a clear problem of anti-Zionist – verging on anti-semitic – attitudes emerging in the grass-roots, and even in the middle ranks of the Church.’ But the Church was guilty merely of protesting against Israeli government policy.(Emphasis added.)

This is truly the paper at its best and most flawed. It is ridiculous, as some have pointed out, that so much credit can be given to this lobby, especially given troubling countervailing evidence (like things the "Lobby" doesn't call for that would strengthen Israel and things that Mearsheimer and Walt ascribe to the power of the "Lobby" that probably weren't, like the war in Iraq).

But while far too much credit is given to this "Lobby," Mearsheimer and Walt are on point in their discussion of anti-Semitism. Like calling actions racist or likening policies to Nazism, the attack of anti-Semitism is used far too frequently. There is already a group of journalists and bloggers who are all linking to one another and are calling or implying that Mearsheimer and Walt are anti-Semitic. Ironically this does nothing but strengthen the point of the paper. At Volokh Conspiracy, David Bernstein was quick to infer the accusation of anti-Semitism, despite not having read the actual paper (he just goes ape shit over a meaningless point in the first paragraph). Bernstein is also delighted to link to a number of ridiculous critiques of the paper. The two most prominent links are to a New York Sun editorial and a post by James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal that both attempt to discredit the paper because white supremacist David Duke has come out supporting it. This is just stupid (honestly Volokh Conspiracy has never let me down as much as it did here; hopefully co-bloggers will hold Bernstein accountable). Just because a terrible person likes an idea doesn't discredit the idea, this is a basic fallacy that a paper of the WSJ's, and a scholar of Bernstein's, stature should not be making.

But Taranto goes more in-depth than that, although he concludes his half-assed critique with this gem:

Walt and Mearsheimer's method of analysis presumes Israel's guilt. Every past or present Israeli transgression is evidence of its wickedness, whereas Arab ones, if they are acknowledged at all, are "understandable." This approach paints a highly misleading picture. It is anti-Semitic in effect if not in intent.

Wow, I am not sure how to tell Taranto any more bluntly than, "You have completely missed the point you shameless apologist!!!" Mearsheimer and Walt are not arguing that Israel is better or worse than its neighbors, they are simply arguing that it is like every other state and because of this, they should not necessarily be afforded any special treatment. This is not anti-Semitic in any way shape or form. Just as they point out, for many, to criticize Israel, or US treatment of Israel, is now a new type of anti-Semitism, a ridiculous idea.

Bernstein also links to this lengthy critique that also completely misses the point (the main thrust of it is that Israel is better than its neighbors leaving the reader thinking, "uhh...alright"). For some reason many of these intellectuals who are knee-jerk when it comes to Israel think less support of Israel is tantamount to supporting every terrible Arab regime. They immediately become consumed with mentioning every transgression of Saudi Arabia and Iran like that has anything to do with this. Providing a couple less million dollars to Israel is not going to help these groups. Israel got by fine with out US support until after the 1967 war, I doubt they need us to keep doing what they are doing after.

Honestly, I think that all these knee-jerk intellectuals (who Mearsheimer and Walt would probably place in this "Israel Lobby," and why not given how irrational they immediately become) have barely skimmed the article and are resorting to the same arguments they have always made for their Israel apologies (my favorite was someone involved in Campus Watch, an organization that seeks to rid academia of scholars critical of Israel, who challenged Mearsheimer and Walt, "to provide their information that connects this 'Lobby' to my decision to establish Campus Watch," obviously this joker didn't read the definition of "Lobby" and is all too happy to conflate the paper with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion).

But what I love about these knee-jerk intellectuals is that while they are content with using a host of different moves to ensure that there is no debate on the actions of Israel or to what extent the US should support Israel, many are fresh off diatribes about the Mohammed cartoons controversy where they vigorously attacked the idea that certain things can't, in good taste, be depicted or published. While a guy like Bernstein would probably contend that his problem is with people using the law to make sure people can't say certain things (like his book argues), what is the difference between that and the use of epithets and intimidation to limit discourse? There isn't much in the books of many conservatives who frequently lament political correctness as it applies to race and affirmative action or feminism and the military (and are often ardent supporters of Israel). In a post I hope someone makes sure he regrets, Bernstein questioned how Muslims could reject Western liberalism (by acting so illiberally to the publication of the Mohammed cartoons) while accepting the benefits of Western liberalism (improved quality of life as a result of goods from Western economies). Well I wonder how Bernstein could reject such a critical component of intellectual discourse (by resorting to irrational ad hominem attacks on only one issue) while so clearly defending it in other instances and also making a career off of it (as a law professor). I doubt he would enjoy people questioning his sexuality in response to the publication of his book, especially after not even reading it. He has made a career off of not people doing that. It is pretty hypocritical of him to turn on that now. This is the crap that conservatives so frequently attack liberal academics and feminists for doing (and when they do it, their attacks are entirely justified) but then, for many conservatives, when it comes to their own pet project, they abandon all they have ever preached. Gar!

But to get back to Mearsheimer and Walt, the feeling I got was that their paper was that it was created primarily to spark this debate about this issue (Dan Drezner thinks they were shooting for the "full Huntington"). Why else include lengthy, controversial sections, knowing full well that the same point could be made without offending anyone? I don't know much about political science papers, but the fact that this was reworked and published online seems not to be a coincidence. The only reason to do all these things would be to generate attention and irrational responses. With that in mind, I think you get a radically different view of the paper. Many of their mischaracterizations become forgivable, while many of their most basic arguments against the US providing such unflinching support for Israel given how much we actually get back remains strong. It is a given that the US goes to extraordinary lengths to help Israel and it is worthwhile to consider why the hell we do that. Too frequently this debate is maligned by accusations of anti-Semitism or comparisons to the Elders of the Protocols of Zion. This is why I stopped arguing about Israel and why I am all too happy to let the region go to hell. This is why I am thrilled that two tenured scholars have chosen to create some controversy, especially when a group of Israeli apologists are manhandling the debate on the issue, ensuring it comes out their way.

One of my favorite comments was from the American Thinker which rhetorically asked how these things could come, "From a 'scholar' who teaches future leaders in America?" That got me thinking, who would I rather take a class from, a scholar that would question anything in an attempt to find the truth, or a hypocritical ideologue? I'm looking forward to taking Mearsheimer's "War and the Nation State" next year.

-Mr. Alec