Still More on the “Israel Lobby”

Hillel Halkin, writing in yesterday’s New York Sun on “What We Owe the Lobby,” argues that both “strategic interests” and “compelling moral imperatives” justify American support for Israel, but that sometimes moral imperatives themselves should suffice — witness Darfur:

An "all-powerful" Israel lobby?  Would that there were more like it!  Would that there had been an all-powerful Cambodian lobby in 1973, and an all-powerful Bosnian lobby in 1993, and an all-powerful Rwandan lobby in 1995!  Would that there were an all-powerful Darfur lobby today!  Would that other Americans would learn from American Jews that their country’s strategic interests are not everything and that there are sometimes other things that matter more!

America’s standing by Israel over the years is one of the things that its foreign policy makers can feel proudest of, just as America’s doing little or nothing to prevent the murder of legions of Cambodians, Bosnians, Rwandans, and Sudanese is one of the things to feel most ashamed of.  That America has that much reason for pride is something that, in large measure, it can thank the Jewish lobby for.

In this week’s Jewish Press, the Front Page Essay (“America, Israel and Tony Judt”) argues that American support for Israel reflects a fundamental American creed, one that has led to commitments of American power and prestige in even more hazardous situations — witness JFK’s extraordinary commitment to two small islands off the coast of China in 1962 to support Taiwanese freedom.

Halkin argues that the charge of anti-Semitism against Walt and Mearsheimer’s paper is “exaggerated,” a position that Richard Cohen likewise took in yesterday’s Washington Post.  Cohen believes the paper was “a bit sloppy and one-sided” but criticizes respected German newspaper editor Josef Joffe for comparing it in an article in The New Republic to “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”  Thanks to Lynn-B, you can be the judge.

The London Review of Books, which published an abridged version of the Walt/Mearsheimer paper, has an extensive set of letters to the editor discussing it.

UPDATE:  Benny Morris, one of the “sources” cited by Walt & Mearsheimer, posts a scathing refutation of their “nasty piece of work” in The New Republic:  “the ‘facts’ presented by Mearsheimer and Walt suggest a fundamental ignorance of the history with which they deal, and that the ‘evidence’ they deploy is so tendentious as to be evidence only of an acute bias.”