The “Israel Lobby” and American Politics

Robert Lieberman, at the new Perspectives on Politics, offers a powerful empirical political analysis of Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer's controversial book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. See Robert Lieberman, "The “Israel Lobby” and American Politics." The article's behind a subscription firewall, but I can give readers some flavor here. There's a response from Mearsheimer and Walt as well, but I'll save that for a later post. Here's Lieberman:

Why does the United States support Israel so strongly when that support appears to violate American national interests? In their recent book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt argue that Israel is of little strategic value to American interests and that the moral case for supporting Israel is weak at best. They then argue that this apparent distortion in American foreign policy is due to the extraordinary influence of pro-Israel groups and individuals—a collection of actors they dub the “Israel lobby”—in American domestic politics. Not surprisingly, this book and the article that preceded it have provoked a great deal of criticism, as well as a fair amount of praise, focused largely on the merits of the book’s foreign policy argument. Much less attention has been paid, however, to their core argument, which consists of a set of causal claims about American politics and policymaking. In this article I examine this argument and conclude that the case for an “Israel lobby” as the primary cause of American support for Israel, although it points to a number of interesting questions about the mechanisms of power in American politics, is weak at best.

I treat Mearsheimer and Walt’s work as an exercise in the study of American politics, in which they attempt to mount an argument about the reasons for a particular set of American policy choices and the possible influence of an interest group in guiding those choices in the context of American policymaking institutions. My focus is exclusively on this part of their argument, and not on their assessment of American foreign policy toward Israel and the Middle East. I ask three sets of questions about their argument. First, what, exactly, are their causal claims? By what mechanisms do they suggest that pro-Israel individuals and organizations influence policy outcomes? What are their hypotheses about the forces that shape American policy toward the Middle East? Second, what does political science have to say about these mechanisms? Many of the political processes that Mearsheimer and Walt discuss have, of course, been the subject of extensive research by scholars of American politics. What guidance can the discipline’s state-of-the-art knowledge about policymaking in the American political system give us in evaluating their argument? And finally, what kind of evidence would be necessary to substantiate their hypotheses? Do Mearsheimer and Walt provide such evidence? What might systematic empirical tests of their claims look like?

How does their argument hold up when subjected to this kind of critical scrutiny? Not well. Their causal claims about American politics are often illogical or impossibly vague, are almost never supported by dispositive evidence, and frequently contradict well-established research findings in American politics. I begin by describing their argument in some detail in order to expose the argument’s theoretical underpinnings and discern the causal hypotheses that they explore. I then zero in on these causal claims and examine Mearsheimer and Walt’s treatment of them—the logic by which they submit these hypotheses to critical tests, the evidence they use to test them, and alternative approaches that might illuminate the problems they address. My primary purpose is to unpack and evaluate Mearsheimer and Walt’s claims about influence on American policymaking and not to propose and test a fully fledged alternative argument about the links between the activities of pro-Israel individuals and organizations and American foreign policy. To the extent that there are conventional standards for making causal inferences from empirical observations about influence in American politics, Mearsheimer and Walt generally fail to meet them. I note, however, that their argument involves claims not only about the lobby’s direct influence on policy outcomes but also about its ability to shape the policy agenda through the stifling of open debate and discourse in the United States about Israel and American policy toward Israel. These more subtle mechanisms of power are considerably harder to observe and there is no consensus among scholars of American politics about how to demonstrate their effects. Nevertheless, they offer a provocative and suggestive account of political influence that merits careful attention.

Notice how Lieberman finds that the arguments in The Israel Lobby are "almost never supported by dispositive evidence."

Frankly, I was shaking my head reading the book, especially chapter 3, "A Dwindling Moral Case." Mearsheimer and Walt mean a "dwindling moral case" for U.S. support for Israel, but reading the book it's hard not to see the authors as arguing the "dwindling moral case" for the existence of Israel. And that's why Lieberman's piece is so valuable. Mearsheimer and Walt are political scientists. But their work has been the focus of intense criticism outside of academe. One thing that Lieberman indicates is that Mearsheimer and Walt really do single out Jews as at the center of The Israel Lobby, at the expense of alternative interest-group actors likely to have just as important an influence on U.S. Middle East Policy.

For example, Lieberman dissects Mearsheimer and Walt's contention that The Israel Lobby enjoys inordinate influence in presidential elections:

Here the contention is that Jewish voters are decisive in presidential election—that the outcome of the election hangs, at least in part, on their vote choices and, presumably, that these vote choices depend on the stances or records of the candidates toward Israel. If, in fact, Jewish (or pro-Israel) voters ever cast the decisive votes in presidential elections, then it might be reasonable to expect more pro-Israel policies from the ensuing administrations than from administrations in which Jewish voters were not decisive—assuming, that is, that it is reasonable to equate “Jewish” and “pro-Israel” votes. Once again, the argument slides from a broader claim about the Israel lobby to more particular claims about Jewish voters; they do not discuss the potential electoral influence of evangelical “Christian Zionists” as a factor in pro-Israel electoral pressure, although such voters have received a great deal of attention in recent years as a powerful and decisive force in American politics.9 They also seem, once again, to ignore their own precaution against assuming that pro-Israel policies are of high importance to all American Jews.

Lieberman's argument is way more complicated than this. He subjects the electoral arguments in The Israel Lobby to empirical analysis. And he digs down into a number of issues specific to congressional policymaking as well. He finds the book wanting, and bad.

Lieberman also addresses Mearsheimer and Walt's thesis that the lobby attacks "Anyone who criticizes Israeli actions or says that pro-Israel groups have significant influence over U.S. Middle East policy stands a good chance of being labeled an anti-Semite." But as Lieberman indicates, there's little empirical support for the claim, other than a few high profile examples (Jimmy Carter, Francis Fukuyama):

In most of these high-profile cases, as they also point out, the tactic was singularly unsuccessful as a means of silencing its intended targets (195–96). More to the point, however, they offer very little in the way of systematic empirical analysis that shows a causal connection between this threat and the behavior of would-be critics of Israel or American policy toward Israel.

After additional testing, Lieberman concludes:

It is quite clear that the book’s argument does not support Mearsheimer and Walt’s central contention, that the existence and activities of an Israel lobby are the primary causes of American policy in the Middle East. The claim is supported neither by logic nor evidence nor even a rudimentary understanding of how the American policymaking system works. Several questions remain, however. If the unified Israel lobby of Mearsheimer and Walt’s analysis is not the prime mover in shaping American foreign policy toward the Middle East, what alternative explanations might account for these policy outcomes?

I'll update with more on this debate later.

But before I close, I want to remind readers of the backlash I received from some trolling Israel-bashers at my earlier post, "William Robinson, UCSB Sociology Professor, Compares Israel to the Nazis."

Especially interesting was this cat called "Infensus Mentis." He writes the blog, "Crimes of Zion." A typical post there is like this one, "AIPAC Caught Meddling in U.S. Foreign Policy - Yet Again."

This guy's method is to launch preemptive attacks of distortion and slander, and then to shortcut any criticism of his slurs by bewailing, "Don't worry, I know, I know - I'm an "anti-Semite", right?"

Unfortunately, the flawed work of Mearsheimer and Walt pumps-up such anti-Semitic folks with an outlandish sense of moral righteosness. It's pretty awful, really.