ISRAEL LOBBY AND U.S. FOREIGN POLICY, THE

Middle East Policy, Fall 2006 by Mearsheimer, John J, Walt, Stephen M

PREFACE

In March 2006, we published an essay entitled "The Israel Lobby" in The London Review of Books (Vol. 28, No. 6, March 23, 2006). At the suggestion of several well-respected scholars who had read earlier drafts, we also posted a slightly longer and documented version of the article on the Working Paper website of Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. We did this so that interested parties could see the sources and evidence on which our conclusions were based.

The response to the two versions of the paper was dramatic. As of mid-July 2006, there had been over 275,000 downloads of the KSG Working Paper version, and a lively (albeit not always civilized) debate was underway. During this period, we were contacted by the editor of Middle East Policy, who sought to publish the documented version. We agreed but asked that we be allowed to revise the Working Paper in response to the comments and criticisms it had provoked.

After considering the responses to our article, we stand by our original arguments. We knew that it would attract criticism, but we have been struck by how weak and ill-founded many of the criticisms have been. We have made minor adjustments in some of the language we employed and corrected a few typographical errors. We have supplemented our arguments in several places to clarify issues that some of our critics either misunderstood or misconstrued, and we have updated a few points in light of subsequent events. In terms of its core claims, however, this revised version does not depart from the original Working Paper.

We are now preparing a detailed "Response to Our Critics" that will formally address and refute the various charges that were leveled at our original article. And we remain convinced that the United States will not be able to deal with the vexing problems in the Middle East if it cannot have a serious and candid discussion of the role of the Israel lobby.

U.S. foreign policy shapes events in every corner of the globe. Nowhere is this truer than in the Middle East, a region of recurring instability and enormous strategic importance. Most recently, the Bush administration's attempt to transform the region into a community of democracies has helped produce a resilient insurgency in Iraq, a sharp rise in world oil prices, terrorist bombings in Madrid, London and Amman, and open warfare in Gaza and Lebanon. With so much at stake for so many, all countries need to understand the forces that drive U.S. Middle East policy.

The U.S. national interest should be the primary object of American foreign policy. For the past several decades, however, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, a recurring feature - and arguably the central focus - of U.S. Middle East policy has been its relationship with Israel. The combination of unwavering U.S. support for Israel and the related effort to spread democracy throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardized U.S. security.

This situation has no equal in American political history. Why has the United States adopted policies that jeopardized its own security in order to advance the interests of another state? One might assume that the bond between the two countries is based on shared strategic interests or compelling moral imperatives. As we show below, however, neither of those explanations can account for the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the United States provides to Israel.

Instead, the overall thrust of U.S. policy in the region is due primarily to U.S. domestic politics and especially to the activities of the "Israel lobby." Other special-interest groups have managed to skew U.S. foreign policy in directions they favored, but no lobby has managed to divert U.S. foreign policy as far from what the American national interest would otherwise suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that U.S. and Israeli interests are essentially identical.1

In the pages that follow, we describe how the Israel lobby has accomplished this feat and how its activities have shaped America's actions in this critical region. Given the strategic importance of the Middle East and its potential impact on others, both Americans and non-Americans need to understand and address the lobby's influence on U.S. policy.

Some readers will find this analysis disturbing, but most of the facts recounted here are not in serious dispute among scholars. Indeed, our account draws primarily on mainstream sources like The New York Times, The Washington Post, Ha'aretz, or Forward. It also relies on the work of Israeli scholars and journalists, who deserve great credit for shedding light on these issues. We also cite evidence provided by respected Israeli and international human-rights organizations. Similarly, our claims about the lobby's impact rely on testimony from the lobby's own members, as well as testimony from politicians who have worked with them. Readers may reject our conclusions, of course, but the evidence on which they rest is not controversial.