Stephen M. Walt is a political science professor who has become something of a minor celebrity as a result of his ongoing attack on the State of Israel and its many friends in the United States. The Israel Lobby, the mendacious book that he wrote with John Mearsheimer, alleged that the mainstream consensus that supports the U.S.-Israel alliance in this country is the result of a cabal that punishes and marginalizes dissenters. If Walt’s celebrity, his book sales, and the fact that the prestigious journal Foreign Policy has given him a platform to spout further bile against the Zionists seems to contradict that part about the all-powerful Israeli conspiracy, so what?

Today in FP, Walt who poses as “a realist in an ideological age” uses the occasion of Israel’s 61st birthday to call that nation’s democratically elected prime minister a “traitor” to the Jewish state. If you don’t get the joke, well, join the club.

You see Walt thinks Benjamin Netanyahu’s lack of enthusiasm for a peace process with Palestinians (who have proven time and again that they are uninterested in a two-state solution) to the conflict with Israel is treason. Thus, the man who has become famous for acting as if the majority of Americans — Jewish and non-Jewish — who back Israel are something akin to traitors to the United States now has the temerity to tell Netanyahu that he’s betraying the country that Walt wants Americans to turn their backs on because he refuses to dismiss threats to that nation’s security from terrorists who want to destroy it. Got that?

Among the many amusing sidelights to this rant is that Walt recommends that Bibi ditch Evangelical supporters of Israel and instead invite J-Street front man Jeremy Ben-Ami to Jerusalem to be his advisor. That’s funny because ever since J Street was born Ben-Ami has claimed that critics of his group who drew a straight line between his “pro-Israel lobby” and the anti-Israel philosophy of Walt and Mearsheimer are wrong. Somebody needs to tell Walt that his support won’t help Ben-Ami’s futile attempt to portray himself as the true voice of American Jewry on Israel.

But the truth is, even if we take them at their word about their desire for Israel to live in peace, Walt and Ben-Ami are laboring under the same illusion about the peace process. Twenty years ago you could have made a case that Israel needed to be prodded to make concessions to the Palestinians in order to test their desire for peace. But after the Oslo fiasco, Arafat’s refusal to accept a Palestinian state at the July 2000 Camp David peace talks, and the subsequent terrorist intifada, that concept has been literally exploded by the reality of Palestinian politics. Israelis, even those on the right, would gladly accept a true peace with a Palestinian state. But the Palestinians don’t want a state next to Israel. They want a state instead of Israel. Anybody who pretends that this is not the case is either dreaming or lying. Either way, the notion that there is a peace process for Netanyahu to embrace is the real big lie of contemporary anti-Israel agitation.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 29th, 2009 at 4:18 PM and is filed under Contentions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.