The sad reality is that some of Israel’s biggest detractors, including those whose claims echo antisemitic themes, have impressive credentials on paper.
By ROBERT HORENSTEINStephen Walt(photo credit: HARVARD UNIVERSITY)THE FORWARD should not have given Stephen Walt a platform for his poison.One of the most odious antisemitic canards – indeed, the mantra of the notorious white supremacist David Duke – is that Jews wield their “ubiquitous power” to manipulate political leaders to advance unwittingly “Zionist” interests over the interests of the American people.Yet, even more alarming than the extremist Duke’s antisemitic views is the fact that these days you don’t have to be around a neo-Nazi to hear such offensive ideas. They’ve seeped into the mainstream. You can even discern them in the writings of a Harvard scholar from whose opinions antisemites find validation. In a national Jewish publication, no less.Thus, in an October op-ed in The Forward, Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, doubled down on the spurious claims he and the University of Chicago’s John Mearsheimer made in their 2007 polemic “The Israel Lobby” – i.e., that “decades of unconditional US support for Israel” can be explained neither by US strategic interests nor by shared values. Rather, the “special relationship” comes down to a single factor: the outsize political influence and heavy-handed tactics of the Israel lobby.Put more bluntly, an all-powerful lobby, made up almost entirely of Jewish groups, has manipulated, coaxed and threatened successive American governments into blind and unwholesome support for the Jewish state. The result, Walt declares in The Forward, is a morally bankrupt Middle East policy that “contributes significantly both to America’s terrorism problem and to needless and costly debacles like the 2003 invasion of Iraq.”The insinuation that American Jews influence the US to fight wars on behalf of Israel (the country to which they ostensibly bear true allegiance) is troubling enough. Moreover, Walt’s assertion that Israel doesn’t share America’s democratic values and that Zionism is an intolerant nationalist movement that “privileges one people at the expense of another” is standard fare for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Not surprisingly, then, Walt lauds the virulently anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Peace as a “progressive” group.It was ten years ago that I had my only encounter with Walt, who spoke to a sold-out crowd at the World Affairs Council of Portland. Back then, as now, he accused the lobby of “stifling” criticism of Israel (this while on a whirlwind speaking tour to promote his book, which emphasized Israel’s alleged shortcomings). He also attempted to inoculate himself against charges of antisemitism by predicting that the lobby would accuse him and Mearsheimer of precisely that.At the time, I didn’t know what motivated Walt to write “The Israel Lobby,” nor did I think it fair to portray him as antisemitic. Subsequent developments, however, shed light on this issue. In 2011, for example, Walt agreed to let Mearsheimer use his blog at Foreign Policy to defend Gilad Atzmon, one of the world’s most obscene antisemites, who has argued, among other things, that Jews persecuted Hitler.Three years later, if there had been any lingering doubts as to whether Walt was using the prestige of his academic position to wage war on Israel’s legitimacy, he managed to erase them. During Operation Protective Edge in 2014, he wrote in Theworldpost that Hamas had “the right to resist the occupation” – he apparently didn’t get the memo that Israel had withdrawn from Gaza nine years earlier – and falsely accused Israel of “having ethnically cleansed hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1948 and 1967.”Notably, Walt’s views have long been discredited by many well-respected critics. “The Israel Lobby” was described variously by academics, former US secretaries of state and newspaper editors as “inept,” “laughable,” and “lacking basic scholarly standards of fact and logic.” Benny Morris, a professor of Middle East history at Ben-Gurion University, slammed the book, saying it was “riddled with shoddiness and defiled by mendacity.”
Dennis Ross, a former senior Middle East adviser to four US presidents, has noted that Walt’s thesis on how US Mideast policy works is disproven by history: American presidents have repeatedly contradicted the wishes of Israeli prime ministers despite objections from the Israel lobby (the Iran nuclear deal is just one prominent example). As Ross states, “The Israel lobby is influential except for when it isn’t.”Yet, to my dismay, “The Israel Lobby” became a New York Times bestseller. Walt’s twitter account has over 50,000 followers. And now, a prominent Jewish magazine has seen fit to give Walt a platform to vilify Israel and denounce the US-Israel relationship.The sad reality is that some of Israel’s biggest detractors, including those whose claims echo antisemitic themes, have impressive credentials on paper. Still, the fact that they do is no reason for any Jewish publication to give them 2,200 words of type to spread their toxic views.Robert Horenstein is community relations director of the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland, Oregon.
