Week 9 – Murilo

The syllabus for this class includes many texts by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. The recent events in Israel and Gaza, and the texts for this week’s class, made me think of one that is not part of the bibliography: their infamous article (followed by a book, published in 2007) on the influence of the Israel lobby on the US foreign policy (the original article can be downloaded here https://web.archive.org/web/20120516225011/http://web.hks.harvard.edu/publications/workingpapers/citation.aspx?PubId=3670).

The authors contend that “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. They say that “in its basic operations, it is no different from interest groups like the Farm Lobby, steel and textile workers, and other ethnic lobbies. What sets the Israel Lobby apart is its extraordinary effectiveness.” According to Mearsheimer and Walt, the “loose coalition” that makes up the Lobby (which includes not only Jewish organizations, but also Christian Zionists and neocons) has “significant leverage over the Executive branch”, and “stranglehold on the U.S. Congress”. Mearsheimer and Walt ague that lobby aims at “controlling debate” in American academia; but had not yet succeeded in its “campaign to eliminate criticism of Israel from college campuses”. Their main contention is that the lobby in many instances has led the US government to implement policies that are detrimental to its foreign policies and security interests (a case in point would be the then recent invasion of Iraq) and that its impact “unintentionally harmful to Israel as well.”

The text has been widely criticized for cherry picking, for lacking nuance and, in the case of some more vocal critics, for actively engaging in anti-Israel propaganda.

Besides agreeing that the text is very reductionist (and sensationalist), I have always thought that one of the main premises of the article is faulty: the uniqueness of the pro-Israel lobby in its ability to shape US foreign policy. The Cuban lobby in Miami, for instance, has been able, with less means (the Cuban community is smaller and less widespread than the Jewish community; there is much less support for it outside the community) to largely dictate American foreign policy to Latin America for decades. The community is the main driving force behind the survival of the Cuban embargo, which, for a long time now, has been detrimental to US interests in Latin America (it is a permanent talking point in the speeches of anti-American political groups and governments). Furthermore, the embargo has not been effective if promoting democracy and human rights in Cuba (it had quite the opposite effect it might be argued).