In the New York Sun, Ira Stoll takes an advance look at the new, slightly more refined (book) version of The Israel Lobby by Harvard's Stephen Walt and the University of Chicago's John Mearsheimer. Stoll finds peculiarities that it shares with the pseudoscholarly essay from which it is derived. The book's official publication date is next week, and I understand that the authors have been careful to keep advance copies from reviewers likely to be hostile, but Stoll has the professors' number:

What are we to make of the professors' classification of the former governor of Vermont, Howard Dean, as a supporter of Israel in part on the basis that "Dean's wife is Jewish and his children were raised Jewish as well"? Or of the assertion that "Christian Zionists exert less impact on U.S. Middle East policy than the other parts of the Israel lobby do," because the Christians "lack the financial power of the major pro-Israel Jewish groups, and they do not have the same media presence"?

Instead of the charge that the Jews or the "Lobby" are "manipulating" the press, the new, cleaned-up, book version of Messrs. Walt and Mearsheimer asserts that, "If the media were left to their own devices, they would not serve up as consistent a diet of pro-Israel coverage and commentary." Left unexplained is exactly whose devices the press has been left to, if not their own.

Discussing Elliott Abrams, an aide to President Bush, they quote an unremarkable passage from one of his books — "there can be no doubt that Jews, faithful to the covenant between God and Abraham, are to stand apart from the nation in which they live. It is the very nature of being Jewish to be apart — except in Israel — from the rest of the population" — and tutt-tutt, "This is a remarkable comment coming from an individual who holds a critically important position on Middle East policy in the U.S. government."

Clinton administration aides who are American Jews come in for the same treatment. The authors describe Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk by approvingly quoting a Palestinian Arab who protested "negotiating with two Israeli teams — one displaying an Israeli flag, and one an American flag." The professors protest that they are using the term "dual loyalty" not in its "earlier, anti-Semitic incarnation" but in "a neutral and nonpejorative fashion." It's an awfully fine distinction.

That these authors could propound these views from prominent perches at respected American universities is a sign of a decline in standards in American higher education. During World War II, Harvard and the University of Chicago threw themselves into the effort to defeat the Nazis. In the current war, at least two professors are calling not for a defeat of the Islamist terrorists but for appeasing them at Israel's expense. This book is long but it offers not a scintilla of evidence that doing that would advance either America's security or the cause of freedom.

UPDATE: Contrary to my implicatoin above, the publication date of the book is August 27. Thanks to reader John Costello for his report of the bookstore sighting: "The Mearshiimer/Walt book (wth Israeli national colors of blue and white on the cover) was on sale this past Sunday at the Borders Books in Peabody, MA."

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Posted by Scott at 6:25 AM  |    |