LRB Ltd.

A smart friend tells me that despite the excited crowds gathered outside Cooper Union 3 weeks back, and the great excitement in the hall, there has been hardly a drop of ink spilled on the Israel lobby debate sponsored by the London Review of Books. The Forward covered it, the Observer covered it, so did the N.Y. Sun in passing. But as for the mainstream, zilch, on one of the most fascinating and educational evenings in memory, and an evening that consisted not of bombast or invective or accusation, or even screaming from the gallery, but in an earnest and concerted dialog aimed at determining some part of the truth. The Times is lactose-intolerant on the matter. It will be fascinating to see what coverage John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt get when FSG puts out their book. As it is, the traditional fear persists: that the seas will close over them...

I got home quite late from the Israel lobby debate and am on deadline for print, so I won't get around to a full report till later, but thought it best to file a few impressions while the world is still making up its mind...

The debate was diffuse. It had few dramatic moments. There were six debaters with five different points of view, and the three men positing the existence of the lobby had not coordinated their points ahead of time and so were sorting out differences on stage. My friend Scott McConnell of the American Conservative said that he missed the great moment, the climactic clash, then reflected that maybe this is something that documentaries manage to create after the fact.

Yet: No one could leave the hall unconvinced that there is an Israel lobby. The quarrel was over scope and character. If the Israel lobby is the elephant in the room of American politics, here were six blind men each naming a different part of it they had felt in the dark. Well actually, four blind men. The three positing the existence of the lobby were joined by Shlomo Ben-Ami, from the other side, in a spirit of intellectual vigor and openness. All four speakers added to the audience's understanding. The other 2, Martin Indyk and Dennis Ross, longtime elephant-fattener-uppers, were determined to show the audience that the elephant was a hamster. They failed.

The debate belonged to Tony Judt. He arrived late to the hall in a turtleneck—everyone else was in ties—and might have been Mariano Rivera, for his confidence and dispatch. He was the most imaginative speaker, and imagination is required when you are describing a King kong sasquatch no one has seen and whose wranglers say doesn't exist. When Shlomo Ben-Ami and Martin Indyk said that John Mearsheimer was antisemitic for speaking of a collection of Jews who influence policy, Judt demolished them by quoting Arthur Koestler when he became an anticommunist and said that Just because idiots and bigots share some of his views doesn't discredit the views. The job of the social scientist is to describe the true conditions of society; are these statements accurate or not? That is the only issue. I'm paraphrasing. Judt was way more eloquent.

Judt's second great moment was when he accused Indyk of being "faux-naive" —a civilized way of saying, You're lying—when Indyk kept saying that the lobby was one small factor in an American president's exertions of power. Here again, he used his imagination. Because when you're talking about something about which there is very little information, and those who know something about it are trying to deny its existence, you need imagination. Anyway, Judt described the real exercise of power. He said that when a small state defied an American president, and the president wanted to do something about it, he had a great number of seen and unseen ways of compelling that state to fall into line, all sorts of bullying and pressure and fury. None of these had been deployed in Israel's case, and lo and behold the settlements had continued to expand, over four decades... Again I'm paraphrasing. Judt also got the last word of the night when he explained to a hungry audience that knew in its bones it has been deprived, that this discussion was an astoundingly rare one, and mind you it was organized by the London Review of Books. Thus he gave the audience a real sense of how the U.S. discourse/policy works, which is what the evening was after all fumbling towards.

The most resonant moment of the debate was Judt's, too. He pointed out that when he had endorsed the Mearsheimer-Walt thesis, in an article for an unnamed major North American newspaper, he was asked by the editors whether he is Jewish, and told to stick that fact in the article. (Otherwise they couldn't publish it, was implicit or explicit, I'll have to check my tape). The newspaper—obviously—was the New York Times, in which Judt's op-ed taking Walt/Mearsheimer's side, appeared last April, as I recall, to stunning effect. I say resonant, and damning: Let's consider the lesson of this story: You can only speak out on this issue if you're Jewish? Oh my god, how did we get here...

The other three intellectuals' knowledge was more limited. John Mearsheimer deserves the greatest credit of all for breaking the seal on this discussion. But his actual knowledge of the lobby is drawn from reports of people who have seen Kong in the jungle, and lived to tell. So he read from one account or another of the lobby's existence, and its function in pushing for the Iraq war. Living in Chicago, he lacks intimate knowledge of its workings. His best moment came when he said that the U.S. ought to put pressure on Israel to come into line on matters that are important to us and if it fails to do so, or chooses a different course, the U.S. and Israel "should go their separate ways." This was a clean and bracing view of the relations of states. While ideal, in a realistic way, it certainly describes the usual behavior of the U.S. when a small state defies it on a critical question. E.g., the settlements. And the absence of democracy in the West Bank. We could have frozen those settlements with a wave of the hand...

Rashid Khalidi was the emotional life of the debate. He spoke of the lobby in more sweeping terms than Mearsheimer; he conveyed in a way no one else was able the ways in which the pro-Palestinian view is suppressed in the American scene. He got off the best line of the debate. His neighbor Dennis Ross's mike wasn't working. Khalidi passed him his own. "This is the first time that a Palestinian has ever enabled the Israeli side to narrate..." he said, in so many words. Laughter. And after that the audience waited on his words.

Enough for now. It was a fabulous night. We all left improved. The London Review of Books had extended the boundaries of knowledge, and freedom.

Why is it that the most important advances in American understanding of the Middle East can only appear in papers that spell neighbor "neighbour"? Lately it was Tony Judt in the London Review of Books. Before that the LRB gave us Walt and Mearsheimer. And now it's the Financial Times, publishing the great Henry Siegman on the choice Israel faces, to live with its Arab neighbors or to depend on the United States.

If Israel indeed rejects this opportunity for dialogue with a Hamas prepared to end violence and accept Israel's pre-1967 borders, its problem is not finding a Palestinian peace partner, but its rejection of any such partner in favour of reliance on the IDF to impose Israel's will by force on its Arab neighbours. Such a decision, and Israel's continued identification with Mr Bush's misguided crusade against "Islamo-fascism", will allow the hatred that surrounds Israel to undermine its existence in a part of the world that for the Jewish state would turn - sooner or later - into "the heart of darkness".

Siegman's argument is that Israel's close affinity to the United States has hurt its own interests in the region. As our implication in the apartheid policies of the occupied West Bank have damaged our interests in the Arab world.

This is hardly a new point. I've been reading the history of Zionism, and one of the main points that Hannah Arendt made more than 50 years ago, or Avi Shlaim 15 years back, or Simha Flapan 20 years ago (read Prophets Outcast, the marvelous collection edited by the Nation's Adam Shatz) is that Israel's strategic decision to ally itself with a superpower in defiance of local opinion was a recipe for local disaster. Hey, all politics is local. The point is made in former Israeli foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami's recent book, Scars of War, Wounds of Peace:

What was to become a pillar of Ben-Gurion's strategic thinking as the prime minister of the future state of Israel [was] never to operate without the support of a Western superpower... Most of the leaders of the Yishuv [Zionist settlement in Palestine] knew very little of Arab civilisation and despised what they saw.... The future Jewish state was to be for all of them an offshoot of Western civilization in the stagnant and despotic East.

Ben-Ami's book was published earlier this year by Oxford University, by the way. Thus, civilisation.

The spelling speaks to the larger problem. Israel has become so dependent upon American power that it cares little about the opinion of its neighbors and everything about our opinion; and the organized Jewish community here has done all it can to limit questioning in this country of that policy, lest Israel is cast to the dogs—its neighbors. In a sense the Israel lobby here was born of Israeli policy: we must grapple the U.S. to us with hoops of steel. Thankfully for all, those hoops seem at last to be losing their grip. In the wake of the Iraq and Lebanon debacles, which have demonstrated the folly of militarism as a way of healing the Arab world, and of the continued overtures for peace from Israel's Arab neighbors, Americans are beginning to question the wisdom of the alliance. For now they are expressing themselves in England. Soon that will change.

Even as the Washington Post continues its effort to blackball Walt and Mearsheimer as antisemites, how interesting that their ideas gain wider and wider circulation. Later this month the giant issue they raised, the Israel lobby, will be the subject of a debate, sponsored by the London Review of Books, in the great hall at Cooper Union in New York on Sept. 28.

Something else about this debate is the roster. On one side are the inevitable Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk. Joined now by Shlomo Ben-Ami, former Israeli foreign minister, who in his fine new book on the Arab-Israeli "tragedy" acknowledges the Zionists' "expulsions and atrocities" that resulted in ethnic cleansing of 700,000 Palestinians in 1948.

On the other side John Mearsheimer is joined now by the eloquent Rashid Khalidi and the redoubtable Tony Judt, who in a brilliant piece in Haaretz last spring described Israel as an indulged adolescent that refuses to grow up. (Though, witness Haaretz, the discourse on these issues in Israel is at a much higher level than ours). Expect the Walt-Mearsheimer thesis to be textured and expanded by the addition of an Arab and a Jew. To gain the psychological and geographical dimension that the authors, realist political scientists, were not able to supply. Their achievement in breaking the seal last March will only be magnified in this way. An event not to be missed!

The historic piece on the Israel lobby in the London Review of Books in March continues to reverberate. The latest LRB contains a dispute between the paper's authors, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, and the former executive director of the 9/11 Commission, Philip Zelikow.

The dispute was perhaps inevitable. The original article quoted Zelikow in such a way as to offer a smoking gun for the assertion that Israel's interests played an important role in the U.S. decision to invade Iraq.

[Zelikow said] the 'real threat' from Iraq was not a threat to the United States. The 'unstated threat' was the 'threat against Israel', Zelikow told an audience at the University of Virginia in September 2002. 'The American government,' he added, 'doesn't want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell.'

Zelikow now writes to the LRB that he was quoted out of context, and that he was referring to the 90-91 Gulf War. What he surely did not anticipate is that Walt and Mearsheimer would produce a transcript of the speech, which includes the following:

Third. The unstated threat. And here I criticise the [Bush] administration a little, because the argument that they make over and over again is that this is about a threat to the United States. And then everybody says: 'Show me an imminent threat from Iraq to America. Show me, why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us?' So I'll tell you what I think the real threat is, and actually has been since 1990. It's the threat against Israel. And this is the threat that dare not speak its name, because the Europeans don't care deeply about that threat, I will tell you frankly. And the American government doesn't want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it's not a popular sell.

The authors say that Zelikow is now trying to "rewrite history." Where did they get the smoking transcript? Apparently from the reporter who broke the Zelikow story two years after the Virginia speech: Emad Mekay of Inter Press Service, writing in the Asia Times online. In 2004, Mekay wrote:

The statements are the first to surface from a source closely linked to the Bush administration acknowledging that the war, which has so far cost the lives of nearly 600 U.S. troops and thousands of Iraqis, was motivated by Washington's desire to defend the Jewish state...

"Those of us speaking about it sort of routinely referred to the protection of Israel as a component," said Phyllis Bennis of the Washington-based Institute of Policy Studies. "But this is a very good piece of evidence of that."

How did Mekay get that transcript, a year after the war began? Jim Lobe of IPS says the Service declines to say. But Lobe adds: "Zelikow, who is now State Department counselor, traditionally a very influential position, has been one of Condi's most important advisors dating from their NSC days under Bush I. That, more than his 9/11 commission position, is what makes his 2002 remarks so important. She was clearly talking with him." Indeed, Zelikow's comments reflect the huge and quiet institutional resistance to the radical neoconservatives. Those resisters don't like being outed.

The freeing of Jill Carroll (a joyful moment, need I add) is a reminder that there is no democracy in Iraq. Democracy depends on free speech and a vigorous press—what kind of democracy is it where reporters are afraid to take a step outside their rooms? Not much of a democracy at all. What does it matter if the Iraqis elect a parliament if reporters are scared to talk to people, and indeed have little idea what is going on in the country?

I thought about this because of the continuing argument over the Walt-Mearsheimer paper on the Israel lobby, which appeared in the London Review of Books. Mearsheimer told the Forward, the Jewish weekly, that the paper was commissioned by a leading American magazine and then rejected on the grounds that such an argument could not be published in America. http://www.forward.com/articles/7550 Which raises the question: How democratic is policymaking in the Middle East when you can't even discuss certain important aspects of it in public?

I want to complain more about the job conditions. The worst thing about blogging is that it sets up this interior surveillance. We all complain about the increases in surveillance in our exterior lives, or we should complain—all the cameras and cops in public spaces. Well blogging is the interior equivalent. There is no such thing as a private thought, or you are not sure anymore what is public and what is private. The lighthouse light must be constantly sweeping the interior horizon, looking for news like fugitives. There are no idle thoughts on this landscape.

Last night for instance I had a great dream about John Mearsheimer, the co-author of the important paper on the Israel lobby in the London Review of Books. Do I report it, or not? I suppose I do. I had sought out Mearsheimer for an interview yesterday in real life and then last night I was having it. We were at a very elite college room, oakpanelled, and he was wearing a beautiful figured vest and jewelry, sort of a donnish Robert Bly character, and sitting in his chair telling me about his feelings about Israel and his commitment to moral causes, that had begun when he was reading a poem or a Biblical verse at 10. He read the poem to me in Greek. Then he was wearing these gogglelike eyeglasses, like scientist's eyeglasses, and crying. I was taking notes and not really hearing him. The feeling I had for him was on the one hand hugely impressed; here was an elite professor at an elite chamber of a university, the elite into which my own people have clambered. And then there was also a kind of Jewish pity, rachmones. Of course the people in dreams are not people but yourself. I suppose the Robert Bly stuff and the scientific eyeglasses mean that it is about my father. I think that's where I got my moral sense, such as it is, from my poetic scientist father, and also there is some wound there too. My dad and I didn't always get along. And more than that—who cares.