So pro-Israel that it hurts

TEL AVIV: A recent study entitled The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy should serve as a wake- up call. It is authored by two respected academics — John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard University’s John F Kennedy School of Government.

The case built by Mearsheimer and Walt is a potent one: Identification of American with Israeli interests can be principally explained by the impact of the pro-Israel lobby in Washington in limiting the parameters of public debate, rather than by the fact that Israel is a vital strategic asset or has a uniquely compelling moral case for support (beyond, as the authors point out, the right to exist, which in any case is not in jeopardy).

The study is at its most devastating when it describes how the lobby “stifles debate by intimidation” and at its most current when it details how America’s interests (and ultimately Israel’s, too) are ill-served by the lobby’s agenda. The bottom line might read as follows: defending the Israeli occupation of Arab territory has done to the American pro-Israel community what living as an occupier has done to Israel — muddied both its moral compass and its rational self-interest compass. The context in which the report is published makes of it more than passing academic interest. Similar themes recur in several influential books, including, recently, The Assassin’s Gate, God’s Politics and Against All Enemies.

In Congress, the AIPAC-supported Lantos/Ros- Lehtinen bill, which places unprecedented restrictions on aid to and contacts with the Palestinians, is stalled. Two former AIPAC lobbyists face trial on charges of communicating national security information. All this is not yet a tipping point, but certainly time for a debate. Sadly, if predictably, response to the Harvard study has been characterised by a combination of the shrill and the smug. Avoiding a candid discussion is unlikely to either advance Israeli interests or the US-Israel relationship.

Here are some talking points that can already be suggested for this debate:

First, efforts to collapse the Israeli and neo-conservative agendas into one have been a terrible mistake. The turmoil in Iraq and Al Qaeda’s foothold there; growing Iranian leverage and the strengthening of Hamas in the Palestinian Authority are only a partial scorecard of the products of this collaboration.

Second, Israel would do well to distance itself from our “friends” on the Christian evangelical right.

Third, Israel must not be party to the bullying tactics used to silence policy debate in the United States, such as the policing of academia by groups like Daniel Pipes’ Campus Watch. If nothing else, this is deeply un-Jewish. It would in fact serve Israel if the open and critical debate that takes place over here, in Israel, was exported to the United States.

Fourth, the lobby denies Israel something many other countries benefit from — the excuse of external encouragement to do things that are politically tricky but nationally necessary.

The signs that Israel and the pro-Israel lobby are not on the same page are mounting. For Israel, the withdrawal from Gaza and future evacuations in the West Bank are acts of strategic national importance; for the pro-Israel lobby, they are an occasion for confusion and foot-shuffling. For Israel, the election of Hamas raises complex and difficult challenges; for the lobby it is a public-relations home run and an occasion for legislative muscle-flexing. In short, if Israel is indeed entering a new era of national sanity and de-occupation, then the role of the pro-Israel lobby in US-Israel relations will have to be rethought.

Daniel Levy was a policy adviser in the Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak. He was the lead Israeli drafter of the Geneva Initiative.