This piece, by Anthony Julius, is from theJC.com.
In 1887, the German rabble-rouser Thomas Frey composed the Antisemites’ Catechism. It contained the following article of faith: “All Jews of all nations and all languages work for the Jewish domination of the world.” Today’s antisemites tend to rewrite it as follows: “American Jews control America, and through America work for Israel’s domination of the Middle East and Jewish domination of the world.”

Ideas about illegitimate and conspiratorial Jewish influence over national governments have thus been floating around for some time. Though they are integral to the worldview of the modern antisemite, they also have a currency among the merely ignorant and uninformed. This second, much larger group is made up of proto-antisemites — that is, people with the disposition to believe the worst of Jews, if told suitable lies by persuasive or ostensibly authoritative individuals. The lies related by these individuals can be lethal in their ultimate effect, because they encourage non-Jews to believe that the Jews have them under attack. This in turn leads non-Jews to take hostile action against Jews in what they consider to be their own defence. There is a short line, then, between the lie and the assault, between the word and the deed.

So people need to be very careful if they want to write about the influence that Jewish and non-

Jewish supporters of Israel — the “Israel lobby” — are said to exercise over the government of the United States. It is a proper topic for inquiry, but it has to be handled with caution. Make a mistake in the interpretation of a poem, and the world carries on as before. Make a mistake in the interpretation of the “Israel lobby”, and Jews can die.

Two American academics, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, have just published The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy. They do not approve of the Lobby, both because they think it has done harm to American interests and because they think that it does not always behave properly. They would like the Lobby’s power to be curtailed, and think the best way of doing so is to expose it, and thereby start a public debate on the topic. Their book is intended to initiate, or contribute towards, that debate. It is not then just a report on events; it is also an event in itself, or at least seeks to be.

The thesis of the book is as follows. America supports Israel; supporting Israel is neither moral nor in America’s national interest; America would not pursue policies contrary to its national interest or to morality if it was in charge of its own decision-making processes; some other entity must therefore be in control of American foreign policy; that entity is the one that promotes support for Israel — the “Israel Lobby” or “the Lobby”; this is now the most powerful lobby in Washington; it is the most powerful lobby that has ever existed.

What is wrong with the book? I can only sketch out the categories of objection. It would take an essay many times the length of this one to fill the categories with all the available examples. But in summary, the authors overstate Israel’s offences, its power, and its contribution to global insecurity; they agglomerate the American groups campaigning in Israel’s interests and then overstate this agglomerated entity’s influence; they disregard the intimacy of connection between the USA and Israel, conceived as distinct national projects; they disregard the contribution of “non-Lobby” entities and constituencies to foreign-policy decisions that they hold to be in Israel’s, but not the USA’s, interest (eg Iraq); they disregard the failures of the “Lobby” to achieve identified objectives; they disregard the offences and misjudgments of the Palestinian “movement” (most broadly conceived); and, finally, they substitute for a complex, multi-causal explanation of America’s current foreign-policy crisis an essentially mono-causal and therefore misleading explanation — it is all the fault of “the Lobby”.

Notwithstanding all this, there is every reason to suppose that the book will be a success. Its publishers, Penguin Books, certainly expect it to succeed, and they talk up its thesis with the blurb: “How a powerful American interest group has created havoc in the Middle East, damaged Israel itself and now threatens an even more perilous future.” This formulation, in its alarmism, and its intimations of sinister and unaccountable power, is an indication of the particular problem that the book is likely to cause. It points the finger at Jews.

There are many in this country who believe the Mearsheimer/Walt thesis, or some simplified version of it, to be true. In April 2006, Abdurrahman Jafar, the Respect mayoral candidate for London, asserted that “Israel has been formulating and directing UK and US foreign policy”. His fellow Respect politician, Yvonne Ridley, proposed that while Israel held the Palestinian people under military occupation, it held the Americans under political occupation. At this year’s conference of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, a resolution that rejected as antisemitic all talk of “the ‘Jewish lobby’, ‘Jewish power’ or other secret and sinister cabals or conspiracies” was defeated. In a 2007 survey conducted by the Anti-Defamation League, 34 per cent of those surveyed in the UK agreed with the statement that American Jews control US Middle Eastern policy.

Still, though Mearsheimer and Walt first published the paper on which their book is based in an English journal, the application of their arguments to any “Jewish” or “Israel lobby” in this country is fairly remote. In the 1960s and 1970s, it was a common complaint by pro-Arab activists like Christopher Mayhew and Michael Adams that Israel enjoyed uncritical support in Parliament and in the media. But perspectives have changed somewhat, and overall the sentiment among those who care about this sort of thing appears to be that the “Israel Lobby” or “Jewish Lobby” is of specifically American provenance, and has little influence here.

There are exceptions, of course — people who talk darkly of Anglo-Jewish influence, or threats to the freedom of speech of British advocates of the Palestinian cause, or of the price to be paid by them for that support. When defending herself against the charge that she had spoken as an antisemite (“The pro-Israel lobby has got its grips on the Western world, its financial grips. I think they have probably got a certain grip on our party”), Jenny Tonge was quick to cite Mearsheimer and Walt — as if they were knowledgeable about the finances of the LibDems. A few years earlier, the New Statesman political magazine ran a piece about the “British Jewish lobby”, which in its confusion managed both to revive Nazi-like fantasies of Jewish power and to restate a more English condescension towards comical Jews, too incompetent to organise a really effective conspiracy. And of course Tam Dalyell made something of a fool of himself by talking about a “cabal” here as well as in the United States. He thought, he confided to a journalist, that Tony Blair was “unduly influenced by a cabal of Jewish advisers”, and he mentioned Peter Mandelson, Lord Levy and Jack Straw.

But in the main, there is not much talk in the media about a specifically “Anglo-Jewish lobby” — save perhaps in the specialist Muslim press, if the special adviser to the Foreign Office, Mockbul Ali, is to be believed. When the Home Office and the Foreign Office were debating whether the Muslim cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi should be allowed to the UK, he advised in favour of entry, for fear that otherwise the Muslim press would trumpet a victory for the Jewish lobby. Excluding Qaradawi, he wrote, could “fuel media reports of conspiracy theories — especially in the UK Muslim media — about the involvement of Jewish lobby groups and their influence on British government policy”.

Though it is hard to tell precisely what weight was attached to this argument, Qaradawi was let in over the objections of the Board of Deputies and other interested, non-Jewish parties (Hindus, gays, feminists). The Foreign Office was not at all troubled about the thought of disappointing them. So much for the power of our “lobby”.

Is the book antisemitic? It will certainly be used by antisemites; it will give them aid and comfort. Validations of Jew-hatred are quite difficult to come by. In the main, antisemites have had to have recourse to making up their own — the great documents of antisemitism are almost without exception fabrications, the Tsarist forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, principal among them. Occasionally, however, a book comes along which appears — to some extent at least — to support their fantasies. Mearsheimer and Walt’s The Israel Lobby is such a book. The authors appear to acknowledge this in their anxiety to distinguish their own thesis from conventional antisemitic theses. The interesting question is, do they succeed?

Only in part, I think. The Israel Lobby meets several of the criteria for an antisemitic book. It is, first of all, a bad book for all the reasons set out above. Further, it is written about Jews, but with a cold-heartedness that cannot altogether be attributed to scholarly objectivity. Jewish pain, Jewish suffering, does not resonate with Mearsheimer and Walt. And in the book’s preface, the authors describe their experiences in writing the paper that preceded the book in language that comes too close to the antisemitic trope of Jewish power over the media.

The book is best read as a compendium of everything bad that could be said about Israel and its organised American support. It is a prosecutor’s case, and in this respect it has its uses. Support for Israel cannot be taken for granted any more. This means that friends of Israel must train themselves in history, in politics — in argument. This book will help them to do so.

Anthony Julius is a lawyer at Mishcon de Reya. His fee for this article has been donated to the CTRT cancer-research appeal; please visit www.justgiving.com/dinaspage

This piece, by Anthony Julius, is from theJC.com.