Martin Indyk

As I went downtown on the subway Thursday I wondered whether I wasn't going to seem a fool for how excited I'd been in the days leading up to the debate. Then when I got there that selfconsciousness vanished, because the excitement was so palpable. The lines snaked all around Cooper Union. This had to do in part with the security measures to prevent anyone from blowing the place up, but more to do with the stormsurge of interest. All the tickets had been sold, and there were a couple hundred people on a line just to get extra seats. I had bought an extra ticket, and impetuously gave it to a girl on the line.

The hall was subterranean. You went down into one of the great spaces of New York, with arched wings of dressed brownstone going off the columns to the walls, and then the pleasure was the pleasure of intellectual seriousness. Later I learned that the Great Hall was the place where the NAACP and the women's suffragists' movement was born. I saw a great number of people I half-know, and it was evident that the ideas that Walt and Mearsheimer put forward are of tremendous interest to many serious people. Lewis Lapham was sitting behind me, Ham Fish was a row away. I saw Adam Shatz of the Nation, Michael Massing of NYRB, Mary Kay Wilmers, the editor of the LRB, and so on. Even my wife had come. It's hard to get her out.  read more »

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.

One of the great potentialities in tomorrow night's SRO debate at Cooper Union lies in the fact that on one side—No, Virginia, there is no Israel lobby—two of the three illusionists are bigtime Washington thinktankers, while on the other— the lobby keeps the Congress in a shoebox with holes punched in the lid— are three professors.

As we are frequently told, universities belong to the left. The academy is like an internment camp, the one place they can put 'em all; and it's become more and more irrelevant to policy-making. But the Washington thinktanks are camped next to the corridors of power. Dennis Ross is sure to make this point himself tomorrow night, when he holds over the professoriat the fact that he's actually been in the White House, so he knows what he's talking about.

Indeed, this is one of the most important points in the Walt-Mearsheimer paper that set off this debate: over the last generation, rich liberal ponds like Brookings and Carnegie got stocked with pro-Israeli carp; pro-Arab fish simply disappeared. I don't know that it's a conspiracy, it's a hundred acts of devotion: conservative Jewish backers, recognizing the importance of thinktanks to the formulation of policy, have forcibly established an orthodoxy of opinion where it matters.

If I were asking Martin Indyk and Dennis Ross a question, I'd ask them about the intellectual culture of the thinktanks. Here are a few data points. Roger Hertog, chairman of the rightwing Manhattan Institute—"turning intellect into influence," is their claim—got choked up at the annual dinner last year describing his core commitment to Israel. His friend and partner Bruce Kovner chairs the American Enterprise Institute, which gave a home to Dick and Lynn Cheney in days gone by, gives rightwing Jerusalemite Dore Gold $96,000 a year for what service it's not clear, and has packed the White House with neocons like David Wurmser and Richard Perle who opposed the Oslo peace process and the concept of occupied-land-for-peace and came up with occupying-Baghdad-for-peace instead. AEI is also funded by Irving Moskowitz, a doctor whose cause is (illegal) religious settlement of the West Bank. Or there is Dennis Ross's sock, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, epitomized by the former chief of staff of the Israeli Defence Forces who served as a distinguished military fellow last year when he was sued for alleged war crimes at Qana in Lebanon (the last time, in '96, not this time)(and sued by the Center for Constitutional Rights.) Or Martin Indyk's spot, Brookings' Saban Center, financed by "a fanatic Zionist billionaire" Israeli (per Alexander Cockburn), from which Ken Pollack launched the Iraq war for liberals with a book that as I have pointed out before spoke many times about vague Arab/Israeli "troubles" and their importance to the Arab street without once using the word occupation. (Israeli officials don't like to say occupation; they prefer "administered territories.") Move on to libertarian Cato, where I am told scholars were warned to pull in their horns on Israel last year lest they endanger funding. Or to the place these guys get to ski, the Aspen Institute, to which the brilliant Anatol Lieven was never invited again after bringing up the occupation as a source of Arab rage at a 2002 conference about 9/11. Or the Carnegie Institute for International Something or Other, where Lieven, then a fellow, became a "pariah" after publishing a book that was sharply critical of Israel, and from which he debarked for the underfunded Center for American Progress. Excuse me, sir, do you have a question? This is not a time for speeches; there's a long line of people waiting behind you to ask questions— Oh, yes. My question. For Martin Indyk and Dennis Ross. There are scores of well-paid, pro-Israel thinkers at the established Washington thinktanks that help shape American policy. Can you point to even one such thinker who is an outspoken critic of Israel?