Bruce Thornton's superb critique (at Victor Hansen's Private Papers) of the "Israel Lobby" job hasn't (yet) received nearly the attention it deserves. Piling on? Not really.
As if there isn’t enough evidence of the ideological corruption of America’s universities, along come Chicago’s John Mearsheimer and Harvard’s Stephen Walt, arguing that the “Israel lobby†dominates American foreign policy to the hurt of our own national interests. Alan Dershowitz has exposed the errors of fact and the sophomoric logic that mar this thesis, and that should embarrass what are supposed to be two of the best universities in the country . Personally, I consider it intellectual malfeasance to harp on the Israel lobby while ignoring the Palestinian lobby — which includes most of the faculty of American universities, most of the Middle Eastern Studies Departments, most of the media’s editorial boards, the Council on American Islamic Relations, the U.N., and a significant chunk of the State Department.
Critical analysis like Dershowitz’s is important, but equally significant is the question of how ideas usually found on neo-Nazi websites can be seriously entertained by otherwise educated people. Anti-Semitism certainly isn’t the whole answer, if only because the term is too broad to catch the various subsets of anti-Jewish bigotry. This isn’t to say that anti-Semitism doesn’t still exist. Obviously, old-fashioned anti-Semites, particularly in Europe, have found that in a post-Holocaust world, one can still indulge the same bigoted stereotypes of all-powerful cabals secretly manipulating world events, as long as one dresses them up in “pro-Palestinian†or “anti-Zionist†camouflage. But I’m not sure that most of those, including Muslims, who rail against the evil Jews really want them all to disappear, as Hitler did. They just want the Jews to stop being so uppity and to keep in their place.
[ . . . ]
But the existence of Israel upsets all these long-established roles for Jews. Not just because Israel fights — Jews can fight, as they did at Masada and in the Warsaw ghetto. But they’re not supposed to win. To have their own nation, and thus be equal to the world’s other nations, and then to defeat in battle better armed, more numerous enemies, is to violate the image of the Jew established for centuries. It is to make him our equal, and to call forth paranoid fantasies about nefariously influential cabals to explain this disturbing change. For the Jew’s job is to be a victim, and thus perpetually inferior. He is to suffer and die, or else to leech away his Jewish identity and thus not really be a Jew, which is another sort of death.
The essay can't really be effectively excerpted. You're missing a lot if you don't read the rest.
It's amazing what a bottomless pit of fodder the Lobby libel has provided for those who insist upon a modicum of honesty, candor and (dare I say) scholarship in publications bearing the imprimateur of institutions like Harvard University and the University of Chicago. In fact, the Lobby libel has spawned such a wealth of thoughtful, well-researched and carefully documented rebuttal of every one of its principal claims that I almost feel the American public should thank M&W for bringing them up for our examination.
Almost, but not quite.
