The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy is a book by political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, published in August 2007. It was a New York Times Best Seller. The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy was ranked 12th place on the non-fiction list for a total of one week.
The book describes the lobby as a "loose coalition of individuals and organizations who actively work to steer U.S. foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction". Mearsheimer and Walt decry what they call misuse of "the charge of anti-Semitism", and argue that pro-Israel groups place great importance on "controlling debate" in American academia. The book "focuses primarily on the lobby's influence on U.S. foreign policy and its negative effect on American interests". The authors also argue that "the lobby's impact has been unintentionally harmful to Israel as well".
They maintain that the centerpiece of U.S. Middle East policy is its intimate relationship with Israel. And the U.S. commitment to Israel is due primarily to the activities of the "Israel Lobby."
Mearsheimer and Walt argue that although "the boundaries of the Israel lobby cannot be identified precisely", it "has a core consisting of organizations whose declared purpose is to encourage the U.S. government and the American public to provide material aid to Israel and to support its government's policies, as well as influential individuals for whom these goals are also a top priority". They note that "not every American with a favorable attitude to Israel is part of the lobby", and that although "the bulk of the lobby is Jewish Americans", there are many American Jews who are not part of the lobby, and the lobby also includes Christian Zionists. They also claim a drift of important groups in "the lobby" to the right, and overlap with the neoconservatives.
The book was preceded by a paper commissioned by The Atlantic and written by Mearsheimer and Walt. The Atlantic rejected the paper, and it was published in the London Review of Books. The paper attracted considerable debate, both praise and criticism.
Background The book has its origins in an article commissioned in 2002 by The Atlantic Monthly. Four years later, when the article was submitted, it was unexpectedly turned down. Editor Cullen Murphy apparently sent the authors a letter, explaining the reasons for the rejection, but this letter was never made public.
According to Mearsheimer, The Atlantic simply “got cold feet”. At first it was very enthusiastic but as the authors went through all sorts of interactions with the journal, they eventually expressed doubts of the article ever being published. The handling editor reassured them, however, it would be published. He even offered them a $10,000 “kill guarantee” if it was not.
The authors then submitted the article to a ”handful” of other American journals, all eventually turning it down. Lower-level staff would initially express keen interest in the article but “as it filters up the chain of command”, people at the top would invariably kill it. The article was then “placed in the closet”, as it apparently was not possible to be published in the USA. An academic involved in the process, however, contacted London Review of Books, which agreed to publish the article. It also became available as a working paper at the Kennedy School's website in 2006. A third, revised version addressing some of the criticism was published in the Fall 2006 issue of Middle East Policy, the in-house journal of the Middle East Policy Council. The authors state that "In terms of its core claims, however, this revised version does not depart from the original Working Paper."
The book was published August 27, 2007. The book differs from the earlier papers in several ways: it includes an expanded definition of the lobby, it responds to the criticisms that the papers attracted, it updates the authors' analysis and it offers suggestions on how the U.S. should advance its interests in the Middle East. The book contends that the US-Israel alliance skews US foreign policy in Israel's favor, often at the expense of regional stability in the Middle East.
With his elaborated position on Israel in this book, Mearsheimer distanced his own position from scholars such as Hannah Arendt and Hans Morgenthau and their support for Israel, the latter of whom Mearsheimer had previously cited as significant to the development of his own writing in the field of international relations.
A paperback edition was published in September 2008.
Content of the preceding paper In April 2006, Philip Weiss discussed some of the background to the creation of the paper in an article in The Nation.
Mearsheimer and Walt argue that "No lobby has managed to divert U.S. foreign policy as far from what the American national interest would otherwise suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that U.S. and Israeli interests are essentially identical". They argue that "in its basic operations, it is no different from interest groups like the Farm Lobby, steel and textile workers, and other ethnic lobbies. What sets the Israel Lobby apart is its extraordinary effectiveness." According to Mearsheimer and Walt, the "loose coalition" that makes up the Lobby has "significant leverage over the Executive branch", as well as the ability to make sure that the "Lobby's perspective on Israel is widely reflected in the mainstream media." They claim that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in particular has a "stranglehold on the U.S. Congress", due to its "ability to reward legislators and congressional candidates who support its agenda, and to punish those who challenge it."
Mearsheimer and Walt decry what they call misuse of "the charge of anti-Semitism", and argue that pro-Israel groups place great importance on "controlling debate" in American academia; they maintain, however, that the Lobby has yet to succeed in its "campaign to eliminate criticism of Israel from college campuses", such as with Campus Watch and the U.S. Congress Bill H.R. 509. The authors conclude by arguing that when the Lobby succeeds in shaping U.S. policy in the Middle East, then "Israel's enemies get weakened or overthrown, Israel gets a free hand with the Palestinians, and the United States does most of the fighting, dying, rebuilding, and paying." According to Mearsheimer, "it's becoming increasingly difficult to make the argument in a convincing way that anyone who criticizes the lobby or Israel is an anti-Semite or a self-hating Jew." The authors pointed to the growing dissatisfaction with the war in Iraq, criticism of Israel's war in Lebanon and the publication of former President Jimmy Carter's book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid as making it somewhat easier to criticize Israel openly.
Reception
The March 2006 publication of Mearsheimer and Walt's essay, "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy", was highly controversial. The essay's central controversial claim was that the Israel lobby's influence has distorted U.S. Middle East foreign policy away from what the authors referred to as "American national interest." Alan Dershowitz opined that criticizing the Israel lobby promoted a charged debate about what constitutes antisemitic conspiracy theorizing. Early drafts of this were sent to Jeffrey Epstein; at the time, Dershowitz was Epstein's lawyer during a child sex trafficking case.
As a result of the controversy created by Mearsheimer and Walt's article, the Dutch public broadcasting program Backlight () program produced a documentary entitled The Israel Lobby.
Praise Former U.S. Ambassador Edward Peck wrote that "The expected tsunami of rabid responses condemned the report, vilified its authors, and denied there is such a lobby — validating both the lobby's existence and aggressive, pervasive presence and obliging Harvard to remove its name." Peck is generally in agreement with the paper's core thesis: "Opinions differ on the long-term costs and benefits for both nations, but the lobby's views of Israel's interests have become the basis of U.S. Middle East policies."
Tony Judt, a historian at New York University, wrote in The New York Times, that "[in] spite of [the paper's] provocative title, the essay draws on a wide variety of standard sources and is mostly uncontentious." He goes on to ask "[does] the Israel Lobby affect our foreign policy choices? Of course — that is one of its goals. [...] But does pressure to support Israel distort American decisions? That's a matter of judgment." He concludes the essay by taking the perspective that "this essay, by two 'realist' political scientists with no interest whatsoever in the Palestinians, is a straw in the wind." And that "it will not be self-evident to future generations of Americans why the imperial might and international reputation of the United States are so closely aligned with one small, controversial Mediterranean client state."
Michael Scheuer, a former senior official at the Central Intelligence Agency and in 2006 a terrorism analyst for CBS News, said to NPR that Mearsheimer and Walt are "basically right." Israel, according to Scheuer, has engaged in one of the most successful campaigns to influence public opinion in the United States ever conducted by a foreign government. Scheuer said to NPR that Mearsheimer and Walt "should be credited for the courage they have had to actually present a paper on the subject. I hope they move on and do the Saudi lobby, which is probably more dangerous to the United States than the Israeli lobby."
Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security advisor to U.S. President Jimmy Carter, wrote: "Mearsheimer and Walt adduce a great deal of factual evidence that over the years Israel has been the beneficiary of privileged — indeed, highly preferential — financial assistance, out of all proportion to what the United States extends to any other country. The massive aid to Israel is in effect a huge entitlement that enriches the relatively prosperous Israelis at the cost of the American taxpayer. Money being fungible, that aid also pays for the very settlements that America opposes and that impede the peace process.". Reprinted
William Grimes of the New York Times wrote: "Coolly, not to say coldly, Mr. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt mount a prosecutorial brief against Israel’s foreign and domestic policies, and against the state of Israel itself."
In his review in The Times, journalist Max Hastings wrote "otherwise intelligent Americans diminish themselves by hurling charges of antisemitism with such recklessness. There will be no peace in the Middle East until the United States faces its responsibilities there in a much more convincing fashion than it does today, partly for reasons given in this depressing book."
Adam Kirsch argued that Robert D. Kaplan's "deification" of Mearsheimer in The Atlantic in January 2012 showed that the authors of The Israel Lobby were winning the argument.
Glenn Greenwald has endorsed the book's central thesis, arguing "Walt and Mearsheimer merely voiced a truth which has long been known and obvious but was not allowed to be spoken. That’s precisely why the demonization campaign against them was so vicious and concerted: those who voice prohibited truths are always more hated than those who spout obvious lies."
Marxist historian Perry Anderson also endorsed the book's thesis, calling it "outstanding".
Mixed reviews