W&M; Get Reviewed
In the New York Sun, Ira Stoll reviews "The Israel Lobby."
The professors write that "anti-Semitism indulges in various forms of stereotyping and implies that Jews should be viewed with suspicion or contempt, while seeking to deny them the ability to participate fully and freely in all realms of society." They are at pains to emphasize that "the lobby is defined not by ethnicity or religion but by a political agenda." Then they proceed to jump in and do exactly what they say anti-Semites do.
Meanwhile, in The New Yorker, David Remnick has a take that reflects his greatest, perhaps his only weakness as a writer: His desire to be universally liked.
Mearsheimer and Walt are not anti-Semites or racists. They are serious scholars, and there is no reason to doubt their sincerity.
This is a bit of a bizarre couplet, perhaps the only place in Remnick's piece where he argues by assertion rather than accretion—and by misdirection: No one has accused W&M; of insincerity. To W&M's critics, it is their sincerity that is the problem.
Remnick then continues in a less forgiving manner.
But their announced objectives have been badly undermined by the contours of their argument—a prosecutor’s brief that depicts Israel as a singularly pernicious force in world affairs.
Mearsheimer and Walt have not entirely forgotten their professional duties, and they periodically signal their awareness of certain complexities. But their conclusions are unmistakable: Israel and its lobbyists bear a great deal of blame for the loss of American direction, treasure, and even blood.
I do not mean to accuse W&M; of anti-Semitism, a subject on which my expertise is more than limited. And yet, I wonder why Remnick is so quick to absolve them of the charge, when the seed of it lies within his own words: though W&M "periodically signal their awareness of certain complexities," they still paint a picture of Israel as the Great Satan in American foreign policy. In other words, they sometimes try to be scholarly, but more often resort to stereotyping. Why could that be?
Remnick's answer lies in his concluding words:
“The Israel Lobby” is a phenomenon of its moment. The duplicitous and manipulative arguments for invading Iraq put forward by the Bush Administration, the general inability of the press to upend those duplicities, the triumphalist illusions, the miserable performance of the military strategists, the arrogance of the Pentagon, the stifling of dissent within the military and the government, the moral disaster of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, the rise of an intractable civil war, and now an incapacity to deal with the singular winner of the war, Iran—all of this has left Americans furious and demanding explanations. Mearsheimer and Walt provide one: the Israel lobby. In this respect, their account is not so much a diagnosis of our polarized era as a symptom of it.
Put more bluntly, Remnick's argument is that, in a time of fear and anxiety, W&M are irrationally blaming the Jews and their Torah-carriers. I don't know if that's anti-Semitism, but nothing within Remnick's argument rules it out.
