Counterpoint

From the Editors: On the Controversy of John Mearsheimer

Posted on November 30, 2011 by Administrator

When, after a long career built on a theory that domestic political relationships had a minimal impact on any state’s foreign policy, John Mearsheimer co-wrote The Israel Lobby, a popular book alleging the maximal impact of a small cabal on American foreign policy, we were perplexed at the incoherence. When the book was written without accompanying scholarship on the Turkish lobby which has had a hand in the failure to recognize the Armenian Genocide or push for a Kurdish state, the Irish lobby which greatly influenced the American policy in Northern Ireland for decades, or Arab, Chinese, Tibetan, Greek, Indian, or Pakistani lobbies that have all made their mark on American foreign policy, we were left wondering at the motives of his focus. When the book was finally read and its narrative of the Israeli-Arab conflict rested on shoddy history, a mix of long-ago refuted facts (whose falsehood was easily available over Google) and stark errors of omission, we began to question the animus of Professor Mearsheimer.

The R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago has long been an important academic, but only recently a famous one. He built a robust theory of states seeking security through regional hegemony, no matter their domestic politics. Yet this theory could not explain many of the adventures of the United States in the Middle East. There had to be an exogenous factor. He labeled this factor “The Israel Lobby.” But he did not use this factor to complicate the original model; he did not further examine the role of domestic constituencies in international relations. He left “The Israel Lobby” an outlier, an asterisk. It was a strange Jewish exceptionalism he propagated: only the Jews had dual loyalties. He was attacked. He dug in. More and more of his output was devoted to the dealings of the Jewish State. He began to speak at the events of Palestinian nationalists, groups whose assumptions would have seemed so contrary to realism. He would speak recklessly and accuse Israel of awful motives. This was a different John Mearsheimer. Something was going on.

This is now Counterpoint’s sixth issue, marking the end of our second year in existence. The Mearsheimer controversy long predates us and we have withheld commentary on the man’s motives. We can no longer do so. John Mearsheimer is now in the denouement of a tragedy of a great academic. Too stubborn to revise his long-time model, Professor Mearsheimer has instead endorsed the theories of a long-standing anti-Semitic conspiracy. We cannot say whether Professor Mearsheimer is an honest-to-goodness anti-Semite; we do not know his heart. We can only say that he has, from the perch of an endowed chair at our university, endorsed a grotesque theory of the doings of the modern Jew.

There are no reports of Professor Mearsheimer being anything less than cordial to his Jewish colleagues or reducing the grades of Jewish students. This is nothing like the anti-Semitism that bars Jews from country clubs; it is, indeed, an adaptation of an older anti-Semitism: a belief that old adages hold true, that the Jews are loyal only to one another and are not to be trusted with power. It is revealed, not in statements about usurers or admonishments about “kikes,” but in an unwitting animus against the prominent Jews in public life and the ascribing of much too much to their effect. This comes out in speeches segregating “Righteous Jews” (marginalized radicals) from bad Jews, “New Afrikaners” (all the heads of major Jewish organizations). It comes out in paranoid blog-posts about the potential ability of the Israel Lobby to cover-up his own assassination. It comes out in reading lists for classes featuring the most absurd rendering of Israeli-Arab revisionism (Ilan Pappe’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine) and a work of historical psychoanalysis that leaves the impression that Jewish dreams of self-determination are very near a mental disorder (Jacqueline Rose’s The Question of Zion). And it comes out in John Mearsheimer’s recent endorsement of a work by an undeniable anti-Semite, Gilad Atzmon’s The Wandering Who?.

Gliad Atzmon plays a ditty.

Reflecting upon himself in his book, Atzmon, a British Jazz musician born in Israel, considers himself a “proud, self-hating Jew.” He is known to be a Holocaust minimizer and apologizer and considers the Jews to blame for the present financial crisis. Professor Mearsheimer says he does not endorse the man himself, but simply his book, a book by a (self-loathing) Jew about Jews and especially for Jews. Mearsheimer’s praise reads (and we quote in full): “Gilad Atzmon has written a fascinating and provocative book on Jewish identity in the modern world. He shows how assimilation and liberalism are making it incredibly difficult for Jews in the Diaspora to maintain a powerful sense of their ‘Jewishness.’ Panicked Jewish leaders, he argues, have turned to Zionism (blind loyalty to Israel) and scaremongering (the threat of another Holocaust) to keep the tribe united and distinct from the surrounding goyim. As Atzmon’s own case demonstrates, this strategy is not working and is causing many Jews great anguish. The Wandering Who? Should be widely read by Jews and non-Jews alike.” Strange as it may be for an international relations theorist to comment on an eccentric contribution to intra-Semitic controversies, it is yet stranger that he praise so hateful a book.

The Wandering Who? makes many disturbing appraisals and disgusting arguments about the meaning of Jewishness and the Jewish condition of present and past. Atzmon is not here immune to Holocaust justification:

65 years after the liberation of Auschwitz we should be able to ask – why? Why were the Jews hated? Why did European people stand up against their neighbours? Why are the Jews hated in the Middle East, surely they had a chance to open a new page in their troubled history? If they genuinely planned to do so, as the early Zionist claimed, why did they fail? Why did America tighten its immigration laws amid the growing danger to European Jews? We should also ask what purpose Holocaust denial laws serve? What is the Holocaust religion there to conceal? As long as we fail to ask questions, we will be subjected to Zionist lobbies and their plots. We will continue killing in the name of Jewish suffering. We will maintain our complicity in Western imperialist crimes.
[. . .]
We, for instance, can envisage a horrific situation in which an Israeli so-called ‘pre-emptive’ nuclear attack on Iran that escalates into a disastrous nuclear war, in which tens of millions of people perish. I guess that amongst the survivors of such a nightmare scenario, some may be bold enough to argue that ‘Hitler might have been right after all.’

He calls the current financial crisis a “Zio-punch” brought on by easy money, a cover for the supposedly Israel-benefiting War in Iraq, and recalls the older stereotypes of the Jewish financial manipulator:

You may wonder at this stage whether I regard the credit crunch as a Zionist plot or even a Jewish conspiracy. In fact the opposite is the case. It isn’t a plot and certainly not a conspiracy for it was all in the open.

He describes Judaism as a cynical tribalism operated by an international axis of Israel, Wall Street, and American Jewish groups:

[T]o be a Jew is a deep commitment that does far beyond any legal or moral order… Jewish-ness is not a spiritual or religious stand, it is a political commitment. It is a worldview that applies to every last Jew on this planet… It is all about commitment, one that pulls more and more Jews into an obscure, dangerous and unethical fellowship. Apparently, Zionism is not about Israel. Israel is just a volatile territorial asset, violently maintained by a mission force composed of Hebrew-speaking, third category Jews. In fact, there is no geographical centre to the Zionist endeavor. It is hard to determine where Zionist decisions are made. Is it in Jerusalem? In the Knesset, in the Israeli PM office, in the Mossad, or maybe in the ADL [Anti-Defamation League] offices in America? It could be in Bernie Madoff’s office or somewhere else in Wall Street.

This is no exhaustive list, but this is representative of the shrill mode of argument, upsetting turns of phrase, virulent intent, and palpable anti-Semitism of The Wandering Who? That Professor Mearsheimer could read these words and endorse them, that he would lend the words “The R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago” to the back of these Jew-hating rantings of a Jazz musician is astonishing to all who have appreciated his scholarship, diligence, decorum, probity, fair-mindedness, and humanity. Pejman Yousefzadeh, AB ‘94 AM ‘95, vividly remembers “how searing Mearsheimer’s lecture on the Holocaust was, how powerful and unsparing his discussion was concerning the manner in which millions of Jews were massacred. He made sure that we, his students, fully absorbed the horrors attendant to the Holocaust, and in doing so, he did us a massive favor by ensuring that we were fully cognizant of the barbarism associated with the times.” How could the cognizance of such evils become so calloused-over that this man would misconstrue barbarous hate for “a fascinating and provocative book on Jewish identity in the modern world?” Something has changed.

Professor Mearsheimer’s contribution to the study of powers regional and global will last, may even become canonical, but he has in recent years attracted a very sorry stain upon himself, his scholarship, and the University which enabled his many achievements. The charge of anti-Semitism is a durable one, especially when actions repeatedly fail to contradict it. Professor Mearsheimer is certainly entitled to study, author, and speak whatever he will (we do not think the approval of hateful ideas a fireable offense), but it will refract upon an institution that has done more for him than he has done for it. It lately refracts the most bigoted ravings of a British madman and the questionable animus of his endorsing professor. If Professor Mearsheimer is to retain any of the grace of an accomplished scholar and do right by his home for nearly thirty years, there is but a single option: retirement.