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Reactions to the Israel Lobby Study
In the three weeks since the Harvard and Chicago University professors' study of the "Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" was published in the London Review of Books and placed on Harvard's Kennedy School of Government website, there has been an enormous response from pundits in the U.S. and Israel.
The initial hurt reaction of such pro-Israel personalities as Alan Dershowitz and journalist Marvin Kalb could be described as inelegant outrage. Congressman Eliot Engel (D-NY), one of Israel's strongest congressional supporters, weighed in noisly, calling the study "the same old anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist drivel." In the New York Sun, he was quoted as saying,"Given what happened in the Holocaust, it's shameful that people would write reports like this."
This is typical of what any objective critic of Israel receives from the Israel lobby and its supporters. It deliberately obfuscates and generally does not deal with factual analysis. The drumbeat of condemnation has been only partially balanced by responses by such figures as Professor Juan Cole of the University of Michigan, who noted that "a sliver of the political spectrum, falsely insisting that it represents all American Jews, manages to skew U.S. politics and reporting on the issue of Palestine."
In Washington, the Post waited ten days before deeming the story newsworthy enough. In a so-far unanswered letter to the ombudsman of the Post about the article, international lawyer and frequent contributor to the International Herald Tribune John Whitbeck, commented:
"[The Post article] provides commentary from eight mostly peculiar sources -- of which only two (of which one is the now inevitable David Duke) are favorable while the other six are scathing (using fine analytic terms like 'ignorant propaganda,' 'masquerading as scholarship,' 'biased, one-sided, foolish, repetitive,' 'academic garbage,' 'piss-poor,' 'riddled with errors' and my personal favorite -- 'ignores previous serious work on the subject')."
The Capitol Hill establishment that unconditionally supports Israel was equally outraged and reportedly held a private meeting to discuss the position they should take on the paper. But, according to the New York Jewish-American paper the Forward, the lobby decided to bury the study with silence. Only minor coverage of the 82-page report appeared in the American press beyond the Post and scurrilous op-eds in pro-Israel newspapers. The only television coverage was a gratuitous interview with a true anti-Semite, David Duke.
Some years ago, the Council for the National Interest issued a brochure with remarkably similar conclusions that indeed U.S. policy makers on Capitol Hill, in the White House, and at the Department of State were under continuous intimidation and pressure on behalf of Israel.
More recently, we have proposed a Foreign Lobby Registration Act (FLORA), which for the first time would bring transparency into lobbying on foreign affairs by groups tied closely to foreign governments. As Walt and Mearsheimer note in their paper, AIPAC ''is a de facto agent of a foreign government [and] has a stranglehold on the U.S. Congress."
The initial charges of anti-Semitism, at worse, coupled with the sudden silence indicates that there is an organized lobby on behalf of Israel. There is nothing wrong with that, but what is wrong is shutting down debate and intimidating the whole political process on behalf of Israel.
At this moment lobbying legislation is working its way through Congress that is both inadequate and fails to deal with the problem of lobbies embedded with foreign governments. Read the Israel lobby report online and sign the petition supporting a Foreign Lobby Registration Act.
Eugene Bird
President
Council for the National Interest Foundation
1250 4th Street SW, Suite WG-1
Washington, District of Columbia 20024 | 