US support for Israel is hardwired: Israel's power makes it a valuable strategic asset. So what's the point of the pro-Israel lobby? It sustains Jewish peoplehood.
Tag: John Mearsheimer
Kicking footnotes of ‘The Israel Lobby’
The Israel Lobby by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt has 106 pages of footnotes over 1,200 footnotes in total. The book's boosters like to cite this fact as somehow proving the scholarly virtue of the authors. "Mearsheimer and Walt have corroborated all their arguments with a wealth of primary and secondary sources," gushes one prof. …
Mearsheimer, Walt, and “cold feet”
John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt appear at Princeton University tonight, to promote their book The Israel Lobby. I've held back while other critics have had their say, and many of them have done a splendid job. But I don't think anyone has understood the neat sleight of hand the authors performed in moving from article …
The American Interest
The best case for American support of Israel is a realist one,.
Mearsheimer and Walt in retreat
"Israel Lobby" authors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have published a rejoinder to their critics in the current issue of the London Review of Books. The careful reader will detect tactical retreats in nearly every paragraph. On the two points over which I challenged Mearsheimer in person three weeks ago in Princeton (while he and …
Israel, oil, and realism
Morbid fascination enticed me to accept an invitation to appear opposite John Mearsheimer at a Princeton University conference on "Energy, Security, and the Middle East" which met on Friday. This conference is an annual event, and it's always held off-the-record. The reason: oil analysts participate, and they want to be free to make predictions on …
Israel and the Iraq war
The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt includes a section entitled "Israel and the Iraq War" (pp. 30-31). There they seek to establish that Israel's leaders, intelligence agencies, and public opinion enthusiastically supported a war to remove Saddam. Israel exerted "pressure" on the United States, fed Washington "alarming reports" …
Israel, the Iraq war, and the Lobby
At Sandstorm, I've performed a detailed debunking of a key claim made by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in their execrable paper, "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy." There they assert that Israel "pressured" the United States to attack Iraq, and that Israeli pressure was a "critical element" in the Bush administration's decision to …
A powerful lobby
One of the nuttiest passages in "The Israel Lobby," the co-production of professors Stephen Walt (Harvard) and John Mearsheimer (University of Chicago), occurs in the very first footnote. (It's in the full version, on the website of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.) Indeed, the mere existence of the [pro-Israel] Lobby suggests that unconditional …
Hey, where’s my footnote?
I'm disappointed with the short shrift I got in "The Israel Lobby" by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. I'm mentioned, but in error: The Lobby also monitors what professors write and teach. In September 2002, for example, Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes, two passionately pro-Israel neoconservatives, established a website (Campus Watch) that posted dossiers on …
John Mearsheimer: the man who knew too little
Yesterday, another blogger turned up a telling tidbit about University of Chicago political scientist John Mearsheimer, the co-author (with Stephen Walt) of "The Israel Lobby." A couple of years back, he signed the most ludicrous anti-Israel petition of them all. In late 2002 and early 2003, a group of far-out professors of Middle Eastern studies peddled a petition warning …
Continue reading John Mearsheimer: the man who knew too little
The Israel Conspiracy…uh, Lobby
There is much ado today about "The Israel Lobby," a long essay written by Stephen Walt of Harvard University and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and published in the London Review of Books. The bottom line is simple and familiar: the Israel lobby has taken over Washington. Within the academy, it's the sort …
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