What Kind of Lies Constitute Anti-Semitism?

Another response to the werid TNR/Judis argument about the Israel Lobby:

What Kind of Lies Constitute Anti-Semitism?
by Jeffrey Herf & Andrei S. Markovits
Post date: 02.13.07

John B. Judis minimizes the radicalism of John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt's arguments about the Israel lobby in their now much discussed attack of 2006 ("Split Personality," February 8). In a letter to the London Review of Books at the time, we wrote that Walt and Mearsheimer's assertions did evoke comparison to an older tradition of anti-Semitic argumentation. Judis recognizes that Mearsheimer and Walt argued that an "Israel lobby" exerted influence not only over American policy toward Israel but toward the Middle East as a whole and thus was instrumental as well in the decision to invade and occupy Iraq. Yet Judis then writes that Mearsheimer and Walt's case would be "similar to older anti-Semitism" only if they had claimed that the Israel lobby "controls, rather than influences, foreign policy and that its reach extends to all regions and not merely the Middle East."

With use of this dubious redefinition of what constitutes an anti-Semitic argument, Judis minimizes the extent to which Mearsheimer and Walt ignored elementary facts. American foreign policy in the Middle East has been and remains a balancing act between support for Israel, on the one hand, and support for various states--most of whom are deeply inimical toward Israel, to say the least--upon whom we and the world economy depend for oil. The assertions that an Israel lobby also controls American policy toward Saudi Arabia or Egypt, or that it was pushing for an invasion of Iraq are blatantly false. For Mearsheimer and Walt to have made them in March of 2006--when more than 2,000 Americans had died in Iraq, thousands more had been wounded, billions of dollars had been spent, and the war was going badly--was also dangerous. It amounted to saying that Jews are at least partly, if not fully, to blame for these losses. Judis now wants to raise the bar for calling an argument anti-Semitic by insisting that it refer to control over American policy toward the whole world. We think elementary distortions of the facts regarding American policy in the Middle East suffice.

Further, contrary to the claims of Israel's critics, we do not see evidence that criticism of Israel is being stifled anywhere in the United States. It is not suppressed in the universities, in the print or electronic media, or in Congress. To the contrary, it is expressed frequently and with vigor in prominent places by people with influence, including tenured full professors at the University of Chicago, Harvard University, and New York University, as well as a former president of the United States. These critics have access to the op-ed pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post. They have been able to write long essays critical of Israel in The New York Review of Books, probably the most widely read bi-weekly intellectual review in this country, as well as in the London Review of Books and many other leading newspapers in Europe. They have done so without having incurred the danger of losing their jobs, their voices, their prestige, or their incomes. To invoke, as some have, the specter of McCarthyism for the purpose of delegitimating the criticism that their views rightfully engenders conflates critique with persecution and represents an effort to stifle perfectly legitimate objections to their views. We have never tried to prevent anyone from using their constitutional right to free speech to make what we regard as outrageous claims about Jews or anyone else. Many people criticize Israel without anyone suggesting that either their intentions or arguments have any link to anti-Semitism.

It is ironic that Judis, a senior editor at The New Republic, lends credibility to accusations of dual loyalty. If this is the case, then TNR is certainly guilty, for, more than any other journal of opinion, it has made the case that support for Israel should be a key component of U.S. foreign policy. Judis lends credence to a double standard. When some Jewish intellectuals in the 1980s made the case in favor of NATO's hard line in Europe in the face of the Soviet Union's "peace offensive," no one accused them of having dual loyalty to the NATO countries of Western Europe, even though they were supporting policies of extended nuclear deterrence. Then, as now, they argued that it was in the vital interests of the United States to take these measures. Moreover, on many occasions, the two of us, like many other liberal supporters of Israel, including the editors of this magazine, have criticized Israel's policy of settlements in the West Bank.

Israel's critics in this country have the freedom to say what they wish, including the freedom to exaggerate vastly the power of Jews and the Israel lobby. We who criticize some of their views also have the freedom and obligation to explain why we think such arguments are false, dangerous, and bear comparisons to older anti-Semitic traditions. In a period in which Iran's president threatens to wipe Israel off the face of this earth and Hezbollah, Hamas, and Al Qaeda seek its destruction as well, a weakening of American support for Israel would be a catastrophe of the first order not only for Israel, but for its supporters in this country. It would also be both a strategic blunder and moral debacle from the perspective of U.S. national security in the conventional sense of that term.

Jeffrey Herf teaches Modern European history at the University of Maryland, College Park. His most recent book is The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust (Harvard University Press, 2006). Andrei S. Markovits is the Karl W. Deutsch Collegiate Professor of Comparative Politics and German Studies at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America (Princeton University Press).

Backpost finished 2009-12-13.