Column One: The Jewish Threat, by Caroline Glick
Excerpts;
On the eve of Israel’s elections, Israelis should be deeply concerned about the state of our relations with the United States.Last week the London Review of Books published a long article under the heading “The Israel Lobby.” The article was authored by two prominent American international relations and political science professors: Stephen Walt, the academic dean at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and John Mearsheimer from the University of Chicago.
Walt and Mearsheimer are prominent members of the “Realist” school of political science and international relations. Realists assert that states are rational actors that use the international arena to advance their national interests. For realists, states’ rationality bars morality and sentiment from playing any significant role in the international affairs.
This is significant because their essay, “The Israel Lobby,” and a longer version of the work published as a “Faculty Working Paper” by the Kennedy School earlier this month, completely contradicts every single aspect of the realist doctrine of international relations.
Walt and Mearsheimer allege that members of “the Lobby” and their friends and professional counselors in the Israeli government and the Likud party were a “critical” factor behind the US decision to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime three years ago. Similarly, these forces are behind America’s (unjustified and counterproductive) hostility towards Iran and its nuclear weapons program and its (incorrect) view that the Iranian program constitutes a threat to global security.
In an interview this week with The New York Sun, Harvard law professor, Alan Dershowitz, whom Mearsheimer and Walt label as an “apologist” for Israel, noted that many of the authors’ claims are found in neo-Nazi Web sites. David Duke, the former head of the Ku Klux Klan, called the report “excellent,” and said, “It is quite satisfying to see a body in a premier American university essentially come out and validate every major point I have been making since even before the war even started.”
Although Mearsheimer and Walt politely acknowledge that “the Lobby’s activities are not a conspiracy of the sort depicted in tracts like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” Dershowitz is unimpressed by their largesse. “Sorry,” he says, “But it sounds very similar to me. The only difference is the Protocols are a forgery, but this [essay] is actually written by two bigots.”
IT IS deeply disturbing that two prominent American professors have chosen to attack Israel and its American supporters in this manner. But only one element of their attack serves to signal a broader crisis in Israel’s relations with the US. That aspect is the fact that this so-called “academic” paper does not stand any academic test. It is filled with obviously false assertions, ridiculous statements and idiotic, tendentious and absurd claims that no political science professor would dare to publicly express in any article about any other political lobby or foreign country.
Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his friends in Kadima mindlessly repeat the hollow mantra that our relations with the US have never been better. They maintain that handing Judea and Samaria over to Hamas will strengthen the goodwill of the international community that Israel supposedly has enjoyed since the withdrawal from Gaza eight months ago.
Walt and Mearsheimer’s decision to publish their essay points to Israel’s desperate need for a leader who understands international politics generally and American politics specifically. In World War II, the preponderance of Walt and Mearsheimer’s view – that the Jews forced America to enter the war – caused the Roosevelt administration to refuse to lift a finger to save European Jewry. If, with the assistance of a weak and incompetent Israeli government, their view again becomes prominent, Israel will find itself in existential peril.
Today there is only one Israeli leader capable of rebuilding Israel’s standing in the international community generally and in American society particularly. We have only one leader who is capable of bringing about a renewed delegitimization of views like those expressed in Walt and Mearsheimer’s essay.
His name is Binyamin Netanyahu.
Commentary;
The problem here is that to equivocate on the Jewish inalienable right to the Land of Israel is to perpetuate the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Why? Because when we act as hypocrites, we lose credibility as we have diminished our principles — our Jewish inalienable right to the Land of Israel in the eyes of the nations.
As such, our standing in the world diminishes when the nations don’t see Jews holding by Torah Principles. As such, Bibi is no better equipped than his major opponents to restore “Israel’s standing in the international community generally and in American society particularly” than is Olmert.
Only a Leader with Torah principles “…is capable of bringing about a renewed delegitimization of views like those expressed in Walt and Mearsheimer’s essay.” Perhaps a Feiglin, or a Baruch Marzel. MB