There's a cabal in the lobby to see you, sir.

Unlike Daniel Drezner, I'm not qualified to provide any sort of takedown of an academic political-science paper. So I leave a full takedown of the Mearsheimer-Walt hypothesis to minds such as Drezner's.

From the article based on the paper--and I do consider myself qualified to comment on op-eds-- my sense of their argument is as follows: Typical political-science concerns do not explain why the U.S. tends to support Israel. So clearly something nefarious, some other force, is behind the whole thing. When things do not go smoothly in the world, when power structures fail to be everything one might hope, what group is usually pulling the strings from behind the scenes?

Moreover, there's apparently something called a "national interest," a pure, purely American interest, which is distinct from the "Israel lobby." While all minority groups in this country have interests different from those of the majority, apparently the interests of Jews are inherently more suspect and are not a part of American goals but rather something else entirely. Is this because Jews lobby for things that affect other countries? Not quite. It's that Jews have been successful in their lobbying, and by this fact alone, the lobbying must be stopped.

It also strikes me as more than debatable that, as the authors claim, "Palestinian terrorism is not random violence directed against Israel or ‘the West’; it is largely a response to Israel’s prolonged campaign to colonise the West Bank and Gaza Strip." Would Palestinian terrorism really stop as soon as the West Bank and Gaza Strip became "Palestine"? Because that appears to be what Mearsheimer and Walt are saying.

This argument for why the U.S. should be less supportive of Israel I find especially unpersuasive:

Some aspects of Israeli democracy are at odds with core American values. Unlike the US, where people are supposed to enjoy equal rights irrespective of race, religion or ethnicity, Israel was explicitly founded as a Jewish state and citizenship is based on the principle of blood kinship.

And why was that, exactly? Why isn't Israel just another America, Australia, Canada? The reason for the state of Israel could be described in two ways. One--its citizens must, unfortunately, be defined along similar terms as those used by anti-Semites to define Jews throughout the ages. Because otherwise what good is the Jewish homeland as a refuge for Jews in need? Also, on a less specifically defensive level, the idea of Israel is that, just as French people can either live in France, where their culture is dominant, or live elsewhere and assimilate into whichever country they now inhabit, Jews now have the option of living in a Jewish-dominated country, or blending into another country in which they reside. That's what it means for Judaism to exist as a nationality. It means that Jewish continuity does not depend on Alex Portnoy or Alvy Singer repressing a preference for "shiksas," but rather that the Jewish nation, like the French nation, will continue in its national center, leaving those of its national origin but based elsewhere to blend in and, over a generation or so, join up with another if they so choose, and to be just another group of, say, hyphenated Americans, no more "a nation apart" than any other. While defining a country on racial or blood ties is certainly sub-optimal, it's not clear, due to reason number one, how else Israel could, at least for a while, define itself and serve its goals. So how is this all relevant? Because it is impossible to judge Israel's national self-definition against that of the United States. Not just unfair, but really meaningless. America exists not to provide a pre-existing nation of "Americans" with a homeland, but as something else entirely; what that "something else" is I will leave to greater minds--BHL and Borat come to mind--to establish.

The article is, on the whole, a mix of polisci-specific arguments and more generally pro-Palestinian/anti-Israel ones. Since the end of my term editing Viewpoints, my patience for discussing "Israel is good --No, it's evil" arguments, unless they are exceptionally new and revelatory, is on the low side. So, no point-by-point analysis of the neoconservatives, Iraq, Israel, and how all may or may not be connected.

But back to what strikes me as the key problem with this argument-- the assumption that Jewish-American interests are separate from American interests, rather than yet another part of the diverse and by definition self-contradictory body of American interests. The authors' choice to frame things in these terms--not their being "critical of Israel" or "pro-Palestinian"-- is what makes this op-ed inherently anti-Semitic. All minority groups with strong interests have interests that conflict with what a purely neutral party would deem "good for America," but that's part of how America works. Take gay rights--acknowledging the right of same-sex couples to wed, and of gays to serve openly in the armed forces, would be off-putting to plenty of Americans, and would--like the U.S.'s support of Israel, be distasteful and provocative to Muslim fundamentalists worldwide. It's not even about the authors' assumption that a largely Jewish lobby exerts more influence than do other lobbying groups that deal with the same issues. It's the assumption that any special-interest group would have pure, uncontroversial "American" interests at heart, and that "American interests" are something other than the aggregate of the interests of all the different groups and individuals that comprise the United States. If Jewish interests are singled out as the sole exception to this, which appears to be the authors' point, then this is, in fact, an anti-Semitic argument, despite Drezner's conviction that it is not.