Sunday, April 9, 2006
U.S. aid to Israel put in sharp focus
By RUPERT CORNWELL
GUEST COLUMNIST
To John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, heartfelt thanks are due. They are very eminent academics, from the University of Chicago and Harvard respectively, and the authors of a treatise titled "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy."
To most European ears, their case is persuasive. Israel, they argue, has become a liability in Washington's war on terror, that has reduced America's ability to deal with rogue states. There is no longer a moral or strategic case for U.S. support for Israel, and the billions of dollars it extends to the Jewish state each year, no questions asked.
Yet, claim Mearsheimer and Walt, such is the stranglehold of the lobby on Congress that these policies are never seriously debated. The lobby itself, the authors say, is led by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and other pro-Jewish groups. It also includes powerful gentile outriders in key positions, mostly in the neo-conservative movement, in the Bush administration and on Capitol Hill and in the media, as well as the politically influential evangelical Christian movement, which believes that a greater Israel is the fulfilment of God's will.
Predictably, the paper has provoked an almighty uproar. Their scholarship has been derided by their peers; Eliot Cohen, a celebrated historian and neo-con, declared in The Washington Post that it was simply anti-Semitic, displaying "obsessive and irrationally hostile beliefs about Jews." But such vitriol, which contrasts with the measured prose of Mearsheimer and Walt, obscures the most important point.
For once, questions asked so often in Europe and other parts of the world are being asked in America.
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http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/265964_israel09.html
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