Salon Takes on the Israel Lobby
Writing in Salon, Michelle Goldberg tries to be sympathetic to Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, but can't quite do it. Though she absolves them of the anti-Semitism charge, she says that their paper, "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," just isn't very good.
Goldberg writes:
In taking on a sensitive, fraught subject, one might expect such eminent scholars to make their case airtight. Instead, they've blundered forth with an article that has several factual mistakes and baffling omissions, one that seems expressly designed to elicit exactly the reaction it has received. The power of the Israel lobby is something that deserves a full and fearless airing, but this paper could make such an airing less, not more likely.
Goldberg unearths a tidbit I hadn't read before: that the paper was originally commissioned as an article for the
Atlantic Monthly, which decided not to run it....
Mearsheimer, meanwhile, says this about the future of him and his co-author: "
It is too soon to tell what all of the repercussions will be, but we believed going into this that both of us would pay a significant price in our professional lives. We think, for example, that it would be almost impossible for Steve to ever be a high-level administrator at Harvard or any other top university. It is also highly unlikely that either one of us would ever get appointed to an important government position after this article. Plus there will be conferences and meetings that we won't be invited to because of the piece."
That feels right—correct—and wrong, at the same time.
Juan Cole, also in Salon, d
oes manage to write sympathetically about the paper, concluding that
most of the paper's harshest critics have avoided engaging its key arguments. Instead, they have raised straw men, attempted to shift the debate to the question of whether it is even acceptable to raise the subject, and either hinted or outright alleged that Mearsheimer and Walt are bigots. These tactics allow critics to sidestep all the crucial questions raised by the paper, while at the same time signaling to others tempted to comment that if they stick their heads up, they will be cut off.
