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In late August, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) hosted an event in Washington, D.C. entitled “The Israel Lobby and the U.S. Response to the War in Lebanon.” It featured two political scientists, John J. Mearsheimer, a professor at the University of Chicago, and Stephen M. Walt, a professor at Harvard and former academic dean of the university’s Kennedy School of Government. Back in March, the two men, both of whom are identified with the “realist” school in foreign policy, had stirred an intense controversy with an article in the London Review of Books entitled “The Israel Lobby,” which they then also published as a “working paper” on the Kennedy School’s website.

The paper—a massive 82 pages in length buttressed by 211 dense footnotes—argued that America’s special relationship with Israel, arguably an asset to the United States during the cold war, has become a “strategic liability” now that the Soviet Union is no more. Today, wrote Mearsheimer and Walt, although Israel is widely perceived as a “crucial ally in the war on terror,” in fact “the United States has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel” (emphasis added). Nor is Israel of value in the struggle with rogue states in the Middle East, because these states “are not a dire threat to vital U.S. interests, apart from the U.S. commitment to Israel itself.”

If the strategic case for American support is flawed, so too, according to Mearsheimer and Walt, is the moral case. As a nation that reserves special privileges for Jews, Israel is “at odds with core American values.” True, Europe’s “long record of crimes” against Jews does add up to a “strong moral case for supporting Israel’s existence,” but that does not “obligate the United States to help Israel no matter what it does today.” Besides, “the creation of Israel involved additional crimes against a largely innocent third party: the Palestinians.” Israel’s horrendous record as a human-rights violator has continued from its inception to the present day.

If both the strategic and moral cases for supporting Israel are so unpersuasive, what then, asked Mearsheimer and Walt, can explain the endurance and intimacy of the tie between it and the United States? The answer “lies in the unmatched power of the Israel Lobby”—a body mostly comprising “American Jews making a significant effort in their daily lives to bend U.S. foreign policy so that it advances Israel’s interests.” And their “significant effort” is successful. In a “situation [that] has no equal in American political history,” the ability of this domestic pressure-lobby to “manipulate the American political system” has managed to “skew” American policy in ways congruent with its own narrow loyalties—but severely detrimental to our national security.

So much for the key points of the paper. At the CAIR event in August, held at the National Press Club and televised on C-SPAN, the two men applied their analysis to the recent war in Lebanon. “You can’t really understand what happened there,” Walt asserted, “if you don’t understand the political power of pro-Israel groups in the United States.” Mearsheimer, elaborating, then debunked the conventional view of how the Lebanon war erupted. The real casus belli, he explained, was not the July 12 incident in which Hizballah operatives crossed Israel’s northern frontier, kidnapped two Israeli soldiers, and killed a total of eight; that was merely a “pretext.” Rather, Mearsheimer informed the CAIR audience, “Israel had been planning to strike at Hizballah at an opportune moment”; months earlier, “key Israelis had briefed the administration about their intentions.” What is more, in those briefings the Bush administration had “enthusiastically endorsed Israel’s plans for war.” In the end, moving all the way up Washington’s chain of command, the plan even “got Bush’s endorsement.”

As for why the administration should have given Israel a green light to behave in this blatantly aggressive way toward Lebanon—a country whose new government, formed in the democratic “cedar revolution” of 2005, the U.S. was avidly supporting—an answer was not far to seek. It could be found, Mearsheimer asserted, in the facts put forward in the two men’s Kennedy School paper. For, in Lebanon as elsewhere, the “Israel Lobby,” using all the varied instruments of influence at its disposal, had “worked overtime from start to finish” to ensure that U.S. and Israeli policies were perfectly aligned.


Whatever else can be said of the CAIR event, and of Mearsheimer and Walt’s performance at it, their view of the Lebanon war as the product of extensive collusion between Jerusalem and Washington, a collusion masterminded by the “Israel Lobby,” was certainly a novel one. Indeed, in the question period following his presentation, Mearsheimer was asked to spell out precisely what “hard evidence” existed for his startling allegation. His response: “I think from everything we know that is in the public record at this point in time, it seems quite clear that Israel had planned this event—this offensive—before July 12th.”

But this was only a restatement of his initial charge, and a partial one at that. Neither at the CAIR event nor subsequently did Mearsheimer adduce any hard evidence—or any evidence at all—in support of his claims. Nor could he, since there is nothing in the “public record” to show that Israelis briefed U.S. officials on a plan to bomb or invade Lebanon in the weeks and months before July 12. No reputable news agency carried such a story, let alone any report of an Israeli war plan reaching all the way to the oval office and the desk of George W. Bush.

In short, the picture of collusion painted by Mearsheimer and Walt was not a correction of the historical record; it was a historical fabrication. And not merely a fabrication: it was also a slander, and one with several targets. The Bush administration was defamed, made to appear a ready pawn of forces compelling it to act in ways counter to American interests. The state of Israel was defamed, made to appear an aggressor when it acted in self-defense. Organized American Jewry was defamed, made to appear all too eager to place the interests of a foreign power—the state of Israel—ahead of those of the United States—in a word, made to appear disloyal.

But the CAIR event hardly marked the end of Walt and Mearsheimer’s recent inventions. In late September, speaking to a packed hall at New York’s Cooper Union, Mearsheimer once again put his authority as a scholar behind a central proposition laid out in his and Walt’s original paper—namely, that the “Israel Lobby” in America was “one of the principal driving forces behind” the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, and one in whose absence “we probably would not have had a war.” Not only that, he now added, but even the attacks of September 11, 2001 could be laid at the feet of this powerful domestic force. There is, Mearsheimer claimed at Cooper Union, “a considerable amount of evidence that there is a linkage between” the Islamist attacks on 9/11 and the American support for Israel ginned up by the “Lobby.”

Once again, no “considerable amount of evidence” was forthcoming for these statements, which gave the impression, instead, of passions increasingly removed from reality. But this raises the question of what, in the case of Walt and Mearsheimer, we are dealing with: objective analysis, or a species of prejudice so extreme as to border on obsession?

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