Responding to Carter, Mearsheimer & Walt, and Judt

On March 6, 2007, Meretz USA and Ameinu members gathered at Beit Shalom for a panel discussion responding to recent accusations aimed at Israel and the American Jewish community.   Ralph Seliger, Meretz USA's vice president for publications and editor of ISRAEL HORIZONS magazine, examined the views of NYU historian Tony Judt; Gidon (Doni) Remba, incoming director of Ameinu, discussed Palestine Peace Not Apartheid by Jimmy Carter; and Dan Fleshler, on boards of both Ameinu and Americans for Peace Now, offered an analysis of “The Israel Lobby” by Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt.  Below is a summary of their remarks.

Dan Fleshler on Mearsheimer & Walt:

The paper written by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt was an attack ad filled with unsubstantiated assertions, and I was deeply disappointed by it.  The two professors had an opportunity to give those criticizing Israel some ammunition, and they blew it. 

Their logic was simplistic: they concluded that, if support for Israel is neither in America’s strategic interest nor based on moral justifications, support for the country stems solely from the “Israel Lobby.”  As leading political scientists, they should know that more influences the political decision making process: bureaucrats, group think, Arabists, domestic politics, etc.  But in their article, Mearsheimer and Walt say only that Jewish money and the Jewish Lobby are responsible. 

Yet a lot of what they said in the article is true.  When American presidents avoid criticizing Israeli settlement policy, when they do nothing to jumpstart the peace process, when they say nothing about the security barrier, they are not acting in America’s best interest.  And conventional wisdom is that if a politician stands up to the lobby, he will be badgered by an extensive, well-funded group with strong grassroots support.

At the same time, a lot of what they said was inaccurate.  Although the “Lobby” gives money to candidates who support Israel and refuse it from those who don’t, it is not as influential as Mearsheimer and Walt say.  It recently was ranked 39th out of all industries giving money to politics. 

What we needed from Mearsheimer and Walt was a better picture of what power the pro-Israel Lobby’s (including AIPAC and others who toe the same like) does have.  Then we could encourage the Jewish opposition to spend more money and to speak louder. 

Doni Remba on Carter:

What makes Mearsheimer and Walt tick?  What makes Jimmy Carter tick?  Mearsheimer and Walt want to provoke a dramatic change in the political reality of the Middle East and the U.S.  As a result, they have left the realm of academics and moved into the realm of politics – they are no longer concerned with accuracy.  Instead, they want to provoke a political controversy that will change the alignment of forces in U.S. politics. 

As for Carter, his claim that there is apartheid in the West Bank has been criticized on the ground that, while there are similarities, there are also significant differences.  However, Carter used the term precisely for the image it brings up: that of an onerous pariah.  Carter wanted to elicit a moral reaction in his listeners.

Several things motivate Carter.  Like Mearsheimer and Walt, he is driven by a desire to see a change in the political reality.  But he is also driven by two other forces.  First, he is frustrated and bitter that Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin used the peace that Carter forged between Israel and Egypt to support Gush Emunim, a massive settlement movement. 

Secondly, Carter has a religious, moral motive.  With a Baptist, evangelical background, Carter is inspired by a religious world view wedded to the realization of ideals and enrapt with promoting the good and fighting the evil.  Those like him attempt to force the end by engaging in provocative, prophetic, revolutionary acts that may shake peoples’ way of thinking about the world enough to bring about a radical change.  The book was one way for Carter to provoke this kind of moral movement.  If he had written a factually accurate, even-handed book, it would have been relegated to the back shelves instead. 

Ralph Seliger on Tony Judt:

Like Professors Mearsheimer and Walt, Prof. Tony Judt has left the realm of scholarship and entered into the world of advocacy.  His article in the NY Review of Books on Oct. 23, 2003 called: "Israel: The Alternative" made him both more famous and controversial.

I agree with much of what Judt writes and I can certainly understand why many of even our own people, with a cursory notion of Judt's point of view, might regard him as someone to be supported and praised. But Judt throws the baby out with the bathwater in challenging the legitimacy of any kind of Jewish state — which he defines as "a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded."

But this is not the kind of Jewish state which we in Meretz USA or the Meretz party in Israel support.  Meretz supports an Israel that is Jewish in the sense that it respects certain cultural conventions of the Jewish majority of the population.  And, vitally important: Meretz supports a Jewish state that is also a state of all its citizens, respecting the aspirations of non-Jewish Israelis to equal rights as citizens.

Judt articulates the notion that Israel has arrived "too late," making it "an anachronism." But who defines what's too late?  Judt makes no reference to Pakistan as an anachronism, formed explicitly as an Islamic state in 1947, the same year that the UN voted to partition Palestine and it was formed amid chaotic intercommunal warfare. Judt's main shortcoming is that he uses an idealized European or Western standard and sensibility, without allowing for what's typical of Middle Eastern or Asian countries. Most countries in the Middle East have in their official names "Arab" or "Islamic," despite having non-Arab or non-Muslim minorities.

Meretz supports a Jewish state but not a Judaic one, or what Orthodox Jews call a Torah state, analogous to the Islamic Republic of Iran or other Islamic countries. But all of these countries have legitimacy on their own terms, even if we pluralist-minded liberals and progressives would prefer that they were more open to pluralism and individual human rights.

Although he acknowledges that his binational idea would not be easy to achieve, Judt does not believe that the two-state solution is possible. I once had occasion to ask a friend of Meretz USA who is to our left and a self-defined non-Zionist, Prof. Neve Gordon of Ben-Gurion University, about the one-state solution. His answer: We are living in the one-state solution, meaning that in one state, one people will always dominate the other.

Prof. Judt has nothing to say about the fact that most West Bank settlements and most settlers are clustered in blocs near the old Green Line. As discussed in the Geneva Initiative, a trade of territories between Israel and the Palestinian Authority is desirable to facilitate peace, removing perhaps 75,000 Israeli settlers but not the far greater challenge of 250-300,000. In not even mentioning Geneva in his writings on the Israel-Palestinian conflict, Judt underscores how he's not an expert on the Middle East.

On Dec. 4, 2006, Judt was honored by a packed auditorium at the NYU School of Law.  Israel and the American Jewish community were not major subjects of his speech but they were both mentioned scornfully.  He asked rhetorically and mockingly why the most well off Jewish community in history should feel so insecure; I found this astonishingly inconsiderate coming from a Jewish historian, who surely knows that American Jews feel that they abysmally failed their European brethren during the Holocaust by not trying harder to compel FDR to save them. He excoriated both the US and Israel for allowing the ascendency to the cabinet of a "fascist" or semi-fascist Avigdor Lieberman, but had nothing to say about the rise of fascists and racist anti-Semites in Hamas and Hezbollah to governmental power.

And he insisted that the Law of Return is uniquely unjust in privileging Jews over non-Jews. Among the thousand or so in the hall, nobody responded that Germany and other European countries have legislated a similar right of return for their ethnic kin and that Israel, although far from perfect in civil rights terms, is more liberal than any other country in the Middle East in social policy, and in the access of all its citizens (including Arabs) to judicial redress and the democratic process.  One also might have added that Israel's Law of Return can be regarded as affirmative action for a minority group that has widely suffered persecution and discrimination throughout history and needs a safe haven.

What is profoundly disturbing to me is that a liberal such as Tony Judt, not an extremist, questions Israel's right to exist.