ISAREL AND ITS LOBBY DRAGGED THE UNITED STATES INTO THE IRAQ WAR, FOR ISRAEL''S BENEFIT RATHER THAN THAT OF THE UNITED STATES.
W & M now reluctantly acknowledge that there are some facts that appear to contradict this claim, even while they continue to repeat it. In order to reconcile this accusation with a fact that other scholars have called attention to, namely that Israel's leaders actually wanted America to attack Iran rather than Iraq, because they considered Iran the greater threat to Israel (see for example , Martin Kramer's documented analysis at http://www.matinkramer.org/sandstorm.html), W & M turn intellectual summersaults. Israel at first favored an American attack on Iran rather Iraq, they concede. But upon discovering that the "war party" in Washington was determined to attack Iraq, Israeli leaders obtained a promise from the "war party" (an expression that our authors use interchangeably with "the neoconservatives") that America would attack Iran sometime later. The Israelis then joined forces with the "war Party"/"neoconservatives" to persuade the U.S. government to attack Iraq.
But this claim is full of logical inconsistencies. According to W & M, the "war party/ neoconservatives" were "part of the Lobby." But if the "neocons" were really Israeli agents, as W & M insinuate, why did they need to persuade initially dubious Israeli leaders to fall in with their (the "neoconservatives") plans? Apparently the "neoconservative" tail wagged the Israeli dog. And if the Israelis did not even have enough clout with their own supposed "lobbyists" in Washington to obtain their support for a strike at Iran, at least in the immediate future (no such attack has yet happened, five years after Ariel Sharon proposed it to George Bush), how likely is it that it was the Israelis who persuaded a supposedly divided and hesitant U.S. government to invade Iraq instead? In any case, what evidence is there that President Bush and Vice President Cheney needed to be persuaded by "The Lobby," "the neoconservatives," Israel or anyone else to order an invasion of Iraq? They were both convinced from very early on in their administration that Iraq was a threat to the United States.
Walt and Mearsheimer assert that the Bush administration showed little interest in an invasion of Iraq until 9/11 "changed everything." This much may be true, although the President had expressed an interest in "regime change" in Iraq to his advisors even before 9/11. But if it was Osama bin Ladin who convinced Bush that an invasion of Iraq was necessary, why attribute the president's decision to Israel and "The Lobby?" Our ingenious pair of scholars never weave their way out of this tangle of inconsistencies.
ISRAEL CAUSED THE PALESTINE CONFLICT BY EXPELLING THE PALESTINIANS AND STEALING THEIR LAND
To support this accusation, which is the stock and trade of all Israeli propaganda, our scholars admit that they "rely heavily" on the Israeli "New Historians," such as Benny Morris , Avi Schlaim, Illan Pappe , and Shlomo Ben Ami. They do not refer to the work of Efraim Karsh, a professor of Mediterranean Studies at the University of London, whose penetrating study of the New Historians has exposed their anti-Israel bias and gross distortions of the historical record (Fabricating Israeli History: The New Historians; available at http://www.amazon.com/Fabricating-Israeli-History-Historians-Israeli/dp/0714650110) . About another of Walt and Mearsheimer's sources, the late Jewish leader Nahum Goldmann, we will have more to say in a future column.
It cannot be denied that masochistic, self-hating Israeli and other Jewish "historians" provide plenty of ammunition to the likes of Walt and Mearsheimer. The hatred of so many Jewish "intellectuals" for Israel, the Jews as a people, and Judaism as a faith is an open wound on all Jews that has severely damaged our reputation among the nations. We cannot blame W & M for this wound.
ISRAEL IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE HATRED OF THE UNITED STATES IN THE ISLAMIC WORLD.
Islam's jihad against Christendom goes back at least to the conquest of previously Christian Palestine, Syria, Egypt, North Africa and Spain in the 7th century C.E. It continued through the conquest of Constantinople (now Istanbul) in 1453, the conquest of the Balkan Peninsula and even Hungary in the 15th century, and the sieges of Vienna in 1529 and 1683. Did Israel cause any of this? Once the Islamic world began to regain some of its lost wealth and power in the late 20th century, after three hundred years of decline ,a renewal of the old conflict was inevitable. And the United States, whether it likes it or not, finds itself the leader of the Western world, and therefore the primary obstacle that the jihadists see to their dream of a world ruled by the Muslim Shar'ia (law) and Ummah (people). Because contempt for the Jews is one element in Islamic traditional tradition, which describes Jews as a weak and paltry enemy, easily reduced to subservience by the Ummah in the seventh century C.E/ 1st Islamic century, hatred for Israel makes a convenient rallying cry for the jihadists. But the jihad against the United States and Europe would certainly have been revived even if there had never been an Israel, and it will certainly continue and intensify if Israel falls to the jihadists' siege and their appeasement by the W & M crowd in the West.
But if Walt and Mearsheimer's claims are neither new nor true, and if they are little more than a restatement of traditional anti-Jewish conspiracy theories (however vehemently they deny this), why have they received so much attention and been treated with so much respect by educated and influential people? We cannot answer that one question. Perhaps it is what Germans call the zeitgeist, the "spirit of the age."
* John Landau contributed to this article
1. The Lobby: Jewish Political Power and American Foreign Policy (Paperback) by Edward Tivnan (Author) Publisher: Touchstone Books (October 1988)
http://www.amazon.com/Lobby-Jewish-Political-American-Foreign/dp/06716682852. The New York Times April 30, 1987 Books of the Tims by Walter Goodman.
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