Posted by
Me on Thursday, July 06, 2006 9:47:15 PM
Foreign Policy has a number of articles in its latest issue as part of a roundtable (subscription required for all but one article) on the question of the "Israel Lobby," which has recently received prominence with the article in the London Review of Books and the Kennedy School working paper written by John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard University. Foreign Policy asks the question, "Does the Israel Lobby have too much power" in American politics. Taking the affirmative are Professors Mearsheimer and Walt, along with Zbigniew Brzezinski. Taking the opposite side are Cheney's former Deputy National Security Advisor and professor Princeton, Aaron Friedberg, Shlomo Ben-Ami, a former Israeli cabinet official under Ehud Barak, and Dennis Ross, former Middle Eastern envoy under President Clinton.
I have yet to read all of the articles, but will do so in the near future. In the meantime, I'll focus on the original article by Professors Mearsheimer and Walt. Some people think it was anti-Semitic, but I am not one of them. I just think it was wrong, and incredibly sloppy social science. In my mind, this article is a black mark on the work done over the decades by these two academics. Not all of it I have agreed with, but it has all been written at a consistently high standard that this work simply does not even come close to meeting.
Methodological Flaws
With regards to methodological flaws, the historian in me cringes at a purportedly scholarly piece
of writing taken almost entirely from newspaper articles. I've noticed a disheartening trend in international relations scholarship in recent years where sourcing seems to come entirely from newspapers. Read through an edition of International Security, for example, to find evidence of this trend. I wouldn't be willing to stake money on this, but a lot of articles with this type of sourcing have happened to be ones heavily critical of the current administration. Of course, if this is what they set out to do, there has been all sorts of cannon fodder in the newspapers over the last couple years, but that does not mean it has been right. All sorts of speculation, unnamed sourcing and inaccurate information makes its way into press accounts. Professors from institutions like the University of Chicago and Harvard should not be using this as their primary material for the scholarly work.
In his rebuttal of the Mearsheimer/Walt aritcle, Alan Dershowitz raises this same point. There is very little, if, indeed, anything in the way of primary research done for this article. Neither Mearsheimer nor Walt appear to actually have talked to anyone involved in the policy-making process with regards to Israel. As a result, there are serious historical errors and quotes taken out of context that are referenced in the article. Certainly, such research will not always unveil the truth, but it would probably require some sort of analysis on the part of the authors and would do wonders to raise the scholarly level of the article.
Additionally, while I understand
documents on the decision making process that led to the Iraq War are
probably hard to get ones hands on (not so much the case for documents
dealing with our relationship with Israel in past decades though), there are, nevertheless, many VERY in depth accounts out ther of the decision making
process that led to the war, based on original research, have been
written. To take just two examples of such authors, Bob Woodward and
George Packer. I don't know if Mearsheimer and Walt even bothered to try and get
interviews or to try and see if there were any declassified documents
to get their hands on, but I tend to doubt it. A paper like this simply should not be written from one's office in Chicago or Cambridge using little more than a Lexis-Nexis search. As
Dershowitz pointed out - that can easily lead to silly
factual/historical errors.
Finally, Mearsheimer and Walt define the Israel Lobby
as "a loose coalition of individuals and organizations who openly work to
push U.S. foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction." To begin with,
their use of the word "loose" is the overstatement of the year.
Members of the Israel Lobby range from neo-conservatives to former Clintonites
like Martin Indyk, who neo-conservative publications have treated with
near-contempt, calling him "Arafat's 'Yes-man.'" To believe
that these two groups of people, with vastly different ideological roots, could
ever agree (even without knowing it) on a certain direction in which to drive
US policy towards Israel is laughable. Thus, the major flaw of the thesis
- there is no causality involve - a cardinal sin in the halls of the political
science buildings at Chicago and Harvard. Mearsheimer and Walt name a lof
names, but they never show a coherent link between these people and the
policies that result from their actions, other than to show a few loose
groupings, for example around AIPAC. .