What's the fuss about?

What Mearsheimer and Walt say about the need to treat Israel as a normal state is common currency in most of Europe.

by Jonathan Steele - Nov 8, 2007

What on earth is the fuss about? Two mild-mannered academics, talking calmly and reasonably about a vital issue of foreign policy, marshalling facts, rebutting critics with detailed argument, making a powerful case for change - isn't that what analysis and debate are meant to be about?
As you listen to them doing the rounds of London's various think-tanks promoting their book, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, you cannot help wondering why John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have to suffer such hostility in the United States.

Is it just that the Atlantic is wider than we often remember? That the culture of elite debate is so much more self-limiting in the United States than Europe? That the mainstream political spectrum is depressingly narrow? What M&W say about the need to treat Israel as a normal state, to stop giving its policymakers a blank cheque, and to dare to criticise them publicly when you disagree is common currency in most of Europe. Why, then, is it so controversial in America?

Their book poses the question but also supplies the answer. How many other books of 355 pages have an extra 106 pages of footnotes, just to make sure they are not tripped up on some minor inaccuracy? Especially as the major attacks on their book have hardly been based on scholarship. On the contrary, the critics prefer to deal in prejudice and falsehood, or - the weakest claim of all - the complaint that by raising uncomfortable questions the authors give ammunition to anti-semites. Asking people to censor themselves is of course the most dishonest form of censorship.

M&W were first published in Britain by the London Review of Books, because they found no enthusiasm for their views in the United States. Yet when they put their essay up on a Harvard website, they got more than 275,000 downloads.

Now expanded into a book, their contribution obviously goes further than the original, in part by offering positive prescriptions on how US Middle East policy should change and how the Israel lobby's power could be made more constructive.

They also explain in more detail how the lobby's hardliners deliberately constrict debate within Jewish institutions within the United States, like the American Jewish Committee and the Zionist Organisation of America. "More sensible voices in the Jewish community will have to discard the taboo against public criticism of Israel," they write.

Three cheers for that. The cure begins at home. America's Jewish community is as multifaceted and pluralistic as any other group of hyphenated Americans, but until free speech and open debate over Israel prosper and develop within it, the hardliners will continue to hold the whip hand.