A debate about Israel and the U.S. in New York City

[Mickey Brausch]

In March 2006 the literary magazine "London Review of Books" published John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's essay 'The Israel Lobby'. There was an extraordinary response to the article, and very passionate too, from both sides of the argument, which prompted the LRB to hold a debate under the heading 'The Israel lobby: does it have too much influence on American foreign policy?'

The debate took place in New York on 28 September in the Great Hall of the Cooper Union. The event was greatly oversubscribed, but there is a video of the event, now available online. Click here to view the debate.

Panelists:

John Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and the co-director of the Program on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago.
Shlomo Ben-Ami is a former Israeli foreign and security minister and the author of Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy.
Martin Indyk is Director of the Haim Saban Center for Middle East Policy and Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution.
Tony Judt is Erich Maria Remarque Professor in European Studies and Director of the Remarque Institute at New York University.
Rashid Khalidi is Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies and Director of the Middle East Institute at Columbia University.
Dennis Ross is Counsellor and Ziegler Distinguished Fellow of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and the author of The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace.

Moderator:

Anne-Marie Slaughter is Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the Bert G. Kerstetter ‘66 University Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University.

It's usually educational to listen to intelligent and educated persons engaging in civilised dialogue. (I found it to be so, although the partisanship of the audience, eg clapping some panelists, was just a bit offputting. But an interesting and somber debate nevertheless. A rarity nowdays.)

Mickey Brausch

[New001]

Thanks, this was interesting. I wish they would have focused less on the anti-semitism charges and more on the article itself. It would cut down the length a little. [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

[Mickey Brausch]

[ QUOTE ]
I wish they would have focused less on the anti-semitism charges and more on the article itself. It would cut down the length a little.

[/ QUOTE ] It seems to be a series of videos linked together. Only the first one, of some twnety minutes or so, seems to focus on the anti-semitism charges. After that, the panelists expand on the issues raised by the original article.

[New001]

It does keep coming back to it though, but I do suppose it's hard to avoid. It was just a nitpick on my part since it's a lot of material to get through and I think the charges themselves are mostly baseless anyway.

[jj_frap]

Am I anti-semitic for believing that Western Civilisation had few positives until we started purging Hebrew mythology from our lives during the Enlightenment.

I think it's sick that the very basis of our civilisation (according to conservatives) is a book about a bunch of people who claimed to be a master race because some demented skygod apparently told them so. The Ancient Hebrews would have been fascists by modern standards!

[[censored]]

Yes, it would appear that you are anti-semitic

[Chris Alger]

[ QUOTE ]
"Am I anti-semitic for believing that Western Civilisation had few positives until we started purging Hebrew mythology from our lives during the Enlightenment."

[/ QUOTE ]
It sure sounds like it, especially if you mean to exculpate early modern Christianity. Surely you don't mean to suggest that the Reformations led straight to the Enlightenment? If so, consider how Descarte's experience in the 30 Years' War could have led him to an idea or two whose trajectory would give considerable grief to the progeny of pious early moderns.

Here's the thing: every ideology is fairly subject to forceful criticism, but when the ideology also forms the core of how a large group identifies itself, you have to take pains to prove that you're after the ideas and not the people. If you aren't willing to do this, you don't have much to complain about.

[Chris Alger]

There was an interesting follow-up series of letters to the initial article in both the London Review of Books and the NY Review of Books, which ran a parallel article on the reaction to the initial article. Also, the LRB article was an abbreviated version of a paper available at the Kennedy School Website. The greatest accomplishment of the authors was smoking out the goon squad responsible for the criticism-of-Israel equals anti-Semitism nonsense. No one was more willing to unwittingly prove their point than that most reliable of scoundrels, Alan Dershowitz.

The whole problem with this discussion is that it's obviously off-center, in that it concentrates on a peripheral issue and constituency. It's similar to the short debates over whether democratizing the ME "fights terror." Of course it doesn't which is why no one with power in the U.S. really wants it. Similarly, the Israel lobby has no structure of power that compels the multinational corporations and financial institutions and their many owners and minions to sit by and watch hundreds of billions of taxes being pissed away just to help Israel. In both cases, you quickly run into a couple of blatant contradictions like these and that's the end of real discussion.

Of course Israel and its supporters wanted the U.S. to take out Saddam and supplied the loudest chorus of cheeleaders. It hardly suggests that U.S. policy would be the same if Iraq's biggest resource was date palms.