[lbo-talk] Re: Blaming the lobby

[Marvin Gandall]

I think people are being too hard on the Meirscheimer-Walt essay, which I
still can be used to counter the illusions the mass of the population has in
the Israel/US axis as an alliance which protects, rather than undermines,
its security. To the extent the article helps promote distance from that
alliance, including within the US foreign policy and intelligence
establishment, it is a positive contribution. My sense is that this is what
the uninitated will take away from the article, as the authors intended,
rather than any desire to launch a pogrom against Jews in general.  There's
no question that Massad's piece is a more faithful reflection of the real
nature of the US-Israel relationship, but it should be noted that he also,
as he explains in his essay, accepts the existence of an influential Israel
lobby and has indeed had distressing first-hand experience of it. I posted
the Massad article on the Marxmail list the other day with the following
comment:

"Excellent article by Columbia Prof. Joseph Massad in Al-Ahram Weekly,
courtesy of the Electronic Intifada...Massad, a prominent target of the
Israel lobby, explains why the lobby is NOT driving US foreign policy,
although there is a convergence of interests. Massad turns Mearsheimer-Walt
on their heads much as Marx did Hegel on a grander scale, but this should
not obscure the fact that the M-W article, as was the case with Hegel, also
represents an advance over what has come before, and has opened the kind of
wider discussion in which interventions like Massad's can have more of an
impact."