Enter the Lobby

When they published their working paper “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” in March, the authors anticipated criticism. But even Kennedy School of Government Academic Dean Stephen M. Walt and University of Chicago professor John J. Mearsheimer could not have predicted the transatlantic storm that their paper unleashed.

Writing about the role of Israel supporters in formulating American foreign policy, Walt and Mearsheimer now famously claimed that the U.S. is acting against its own interests in the Middle East because of the powerful “Israel Lobby.”

“[No] lobby has managed to divert U.S. foreign policy as far from what the American national interest would otherwise suggest,” they wrote.

They identify this lobby as a loose movement of organizations, such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the American Enterprise Institute, and officials such as Paul D. Wolfowitz and Connecticut Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, who they claim stifle discussion of Israel’s flaws.

“Israel is in fact a liability in the war on terror and the broader effort to deal with rogue states,” the authors added.

Walt and Mearsheimer call this movement responsible for American hesitance toward the Middle East peace process and for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and they claim that the role of the lobby has grown since Sept. 11.

The article, first published in an abridged form in the London Review of Books on March 10 and made available in full on the Kennedy School’s website March13, was pounced on almost immediately.

The New York Sun published front-page stories about Walt and Mearsheimer every day of the next week. The Sun reported that a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, David E. Duke, had called the working paper “a great step forward.” And in the pages of the Sun, Kennedy School lecturer Marvin Kalb said that the Walt and Mearsheimer article “clearly does not meet the academic standards of a Kennedy School research paper.” In the magazine U.S. News & World Report, Kennedy School professor David R. Gergen called the Walt-Mearsheimer paper “an unfair attack.”

In The Washington Post, Johns Hopkins University professor Eliot A. Cohen called it “a wretched piece of scholarship.” One of Mearsheimer’s colleagues at Chicago, assistant professor of political science Daniel W. Drezner, called it “piss-poor, monocausal social science.” And the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America issued a statement claiming that “a student who submitted such a paper would flunk.”

But the most furious criticism was heard a few blocks north of Walt’s office from Frankfurter Professor of Law Alan M. Dershowitz, who wrote prolifically to attack the article, called its authors “liars” and “bigots,” and challenged them to a public debate at the Kennedy School.

There was also criticism from the Left. MIT professor Noam Chomsky claimed that the article neglected the role of Arab oil interests in U.S. policy and overstated the power of the lobby in the face of business interests.

Aside from disputes about the existence of the lobby, much of the debate has centered on accusations that the paper is anti-Semitic. The claim that a network of pro-Israel groups control policy, critics say, evokes stereotypes of a Jewish conspiracy.

Dershowitz wrote that claims by Walt and Mearsheimer “are contemporary variations on old themes such as those promulgated in the notorious czarist forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, in the Nazi and America First literature of the 1930s and early ’40s, and in the propaganda pamphlets of the Soviet Union.”

Walt and Mearshimer explicitly reject anti-Semitism, emphasizing that the lobby is not all Jewish nor are all Jews part of the lobby. Their article claims, though, that “the core of the Lobby is comprised of American Jews who make a significant effort in their daily lives to bend U.S. foreign policy so that it advances Israel’s interests.”

Their thesis was enthusiastically adopted by some embarrassing—and unwelcome—allies.

One white supremacist organization, National Vanguard, reprinted excerpts from the essay and distributed them on the University’s campus along with a flyer proclaiming the dangers of interracial sex.

There were also aspersions cast on the information presented in the article.

For instance, Walt and Mearsheimer characterize Israeli citizenship as a “blood kinship,” but as Dershowitz and Cohen, among others, pointed out, there are 1.3 million Arab-Israeli citizens.

Dershowitz also claims that the authors mischaracterize the Israeli and American peace proposal made to the Palestinians at the 2000 Camp David summit as overly meager.

In April, he published his own working paper through the Kennedy School in response to the “Israel Lobby” article, critical of both its evidence and what he called its “music, tone, and pitch.”

Later this year, Walt and Mearsheimer will publish a detailed rebuttal of all the criticisms their paper has faced, Walt writes in an e-mail. They will also publish a revised version of their paper, he says.

“Although there are a few places where we might word our arguments differently, the criticisms published to date have not cast serious doubt on the central findings of our paper,” Walt writes.

But the volume of criticism to date suggests that many of their colleagues—both at Harvard and beyond—vehemently disagree.

—Staff writer John R. Macartney can be reached at jmacartn@fas.harvard.edu.