Ziobots Attacking Walt and Mearsheimer

Followup: Atheo News: Lessons from the Seattle Divestment Initiative

In a recent blog entry Harvard Kennedy School Professor Stephen Walt defends himself and his work from accusations of paranoia, hyperbole, insanity, ideological fanaticism, and vicious anti-Israelism.

If anything, Professors Mearsheimer and Walt miss the real danger that Israel advocacy represents to the USA because they do not really investigate how the Israel Lobby damages American society and culture beyond the realm of foreign policy.

While one can argue about whether the Israel Lobby is forcing the USA to make suboptimal foreign policy choices, one cannot debate that the Israel Lobby has severely damaged domestic political processes that involve debate and discussion.

The Weakness of The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy

Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have done a service for American public political discussion by arguing their opinion as foreign policy realists

• that Israel protects no important US interests,
• that it is a foreign policy liability,
• that it arguably never has been a strategic asset despite the claims of Organick in The $36 Billionr Bargain[23], and
• that the disappearance of the Zionist state from the Middle East would at worst harm the USA in no significant way whatsoever.

MIT Professor Noam Chomsky would correctly point out that one could make a good case for the opposite of the above assertions, but debating the above claims misses the main issue. The real problem is the lack of a genuinely open debate in Washington or in the media about the US alliance with Israel.

The Harvard and University of Chicago scholars underscore this issue and provide some good comic relief when they claim that there is a strong moral case for supporting Israel even though a good part of the book clarifies just how vacuous a belief in the justice of Zionism and in the morality of Israeli practices really is.

Yet, the book is flawed by acceptance of too many Zionist and Jewish claims at face value.

When the professors write, "There is no question that Jews suffered greatly from the despicable legacy of anti-Semitism and that Israel's creation was an appropriate response to a long record of crimes," they are repeating both ethnic Ashkenazi primordialist essentialism and also the basic creed of the so-called "pogrom and persecution" version of Jewish history. Neither assumption holds up under scrutiny.

The second century Roman Historian Dio Cassius wrote "all who observe Judaic law may be called Judeans, despite the ethnic group from which they originate."

The vast majority of Roman Imperial Jews (more properly Judeans) had no ancestral connection to the populations that lived in the Hasmonean or Herodian Kingdoms of Judea. Modern ethnic Ashkenazim (Jews of Eastern European Yiddish-speaking origins) have less connection and no obviously legitimate claim on Palestine whatsoever. The Israeli Zionist population is simply a conglomeration of racist, murderous, genocidal invaders, interlopers and thieves. (See How to talk about Zionism, a new improved guide[24] and For Tony Blair: The Real Extremism.[25])

Paul Kriwaczek writes the following in Yiddish Civilization, The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation,[26] pp 5-6.

We have forgotten that Yiddish-speaking Jews were no mere religious or linguistic minority but formed one of Europe's nations, ultimately more populous than many others — eventually to outnumber Bosnians, Croats, Danes, Estonians, Latvians, Slovaks, Slovenians and Swiss, not to mention the Irish, the Scots and the Welsh. What is more, their contribution to central and eastern Europe's economic, social and intellectual development was utterly disproportionate to their numbers. The Yiddish people must be counted among the founder nations of Europe. (Please take note Ireland, Spain, Italy and Poland, who have pressed for "the Christian roots of the continent" to be proclaimed in the constitution of the European Union.)

In the Polish Commonwealth ethnic Ashkenazim constituted an economic elite. They lost this status in the partitions of Poland.

Yet, despite supposedly onerously Czarist oppression, Russian Jews had higher incomes, more education, and longer life spans than the non-Jewish populations among whom they lived. They were highly disaffected because of exclusion from the status and access to which they believed they were entitled, but they were not obviously more oppressed than the majority of the Czar's subjects and less oppressed than others.

Yuri Slezkine belies the myth of Jewish powerless during the lead-up to WW2 in The Jewish Century. (See The Pattern of Ethnic Ashkenazi Genocidalism: The Jewish Century by Yuri Slezkine.[27])

Mearsheimer and Walt's casual misconceptions about Jewish history accompany a similar lack of interest in the sociology of the Jewish community.

Even though How Jews Became White Folks & What that Says About Race in America[28] by Karen Brodkin asserts on p. 147 that

Italian culture is not prefiguratively white, in the way Jewish culture — which Glazer described as like Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture in valuing individuality and ambition — is,

historically Eastern European Jewish culture is highly anti-individualistic and un-American to the point of anti-Americanism, for it strongly controlled social and intellectual deviation to a degree unseen in either WASP or African American cultures.

Many of the traditional ethnic Ashkenazi social control mechanisms continue to exist among American Jews, have evolved in the American environment, and may help explain why liberal Jews have so empowered the Neocons to the detriment of US foreign policy interests as James Petras has described. (See How Anti-Iraq-War Jews Licensed Neoconservatism.)

The two professors do not even ask whether stated reasons for supporting Israel are the real or the same reasons for all Israel advocates throughout the "Israel Lobby." Do the leaders and followers even share the same overall goals?

In contrast, when Columbia Professor Michael Stanislawski investigates the 1848 killing of Reform Rabbi Abraham Kohn in Lemberg in his book entitled A Murder in Lemberg: Politics, Religion, and Violence in Modern Jewish History,[29] he asks whether the crime resulted from religious conflict or from the threat that Kohn represented to the incomes of members of the wealthy Jewish elite.

The same question applies today. Does the so-called "Israel Lobby" merely act to secure the interests of the State of Israel or is the real goal enhancement of the wealth, status, and power of those who pay for it? After all Saudi Arabia pays its professional lobbyists, who consequently serve the Saudi state.

Not only does Israel not pay the "Israel Lobby," but The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy[30] does not give a hint who really does, and in any case large sections of the "Israel Lobby" like the Hollywood Crowd do not even appear in the book even though scholars like Melani McAlister have investigated the Hollywood foreign policy connection in books like Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945-2000.[31]

With such gaps in the analysis of the "Israel Lobby," no one should be surprised with the weakness of the proposals that Professors Mearsheimer and Walt make for responding to the "Israel Lobby."

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