ROBERT FISK PORTRAIT BY RUSSEL ZIMMERMAN (http://www.rustyzimmerman.com/)

***Goatmilk Exclusive***

By

Wajahat Ali

“ One thing I’m going to say to you now, please make sure – and I hope you’re tape recording this – but please make sure you’re quoting me accurately. Don’t even for the basis of shortening something make me say something I haven’t said,” orders celebrated journalist Robert Fisk.

I reply, “You won’t be misquoted, and if you want I’ll -”

“Because the biggest problem I have in journalism is being quoted or misquoted and then being asked to defend something I haven’t said.”

I assuage him, “I’ve taped every single word, and I’ve got what you’ve said down, and so far no interview has -”

“And when you’re putting it together, because you’re not going to use it all, try to make sure my counteracting points are there. So, if I call Ahmedinjad a “crackpot” keep it in, but make sure I’m also talking about Iran in general. Where I’m criticizing the Israelis, make sure I also criticize the Arabs.”

Throughout the interview I kept thinking the world’s most decorated foreign correspondent would have an equally brilliant career as a headmaster or drill sergeant.

It took nearly a week of phone tag to secure interview time with Robert Fisk, the Middle East correspondent for The Independent who has lived in the region for nearly three decades. Each time I called him, he seemed to give me multiple numbers, one land line in Ireland and another cell line in Lebanon, and ever changing appointments due to his frenetic travel schedule. He finally agreed to a fifteen-minute interview that quickly ballooned into a lengthy, hour plus conversation and an enlightening and entertaining Middle East history lesson by the celebrated reporter.

Allow me to state that rumors of Fisk’s passionate, opinionated garrulousness are indeed fact. Some detractors claim his personality infects his writing with a biased bombastic flair reflecting arrogance, while his supporters, who are many, highlight his impassioned voice as authentic and refreshing. The seasoned veteran couldn’t resist giving this ingénue unsolicited pointers and tips, both concerning journalism and Middle Eastern history.

This is an exclusive and candid conversation with one of the few journalistic authorities on the Middle East.

ALI: A recent British report said Gaza is in its worst condition since the last 30 years. Just last week, a seminary was targeted and several civilians were killed. Americans see this and think “Arabs vs. Jews, they’re just always killing each other.” What’s the ground scene reality regarding the current volatility? Is one side to be blamed more than the other for the recent conflagration?

FISK: Oh, God! Sounds like a CNN question! You know, this is about history, this is about the way our societies develop and what we’re told and what we’re not told. You’ve got the same situation in The West Bank, Gaza, Israel or “Palestine” as you had after the end of the First World War. Two groups of people want to live on the same piece of real estate and they have conflicting claims, one of which is based largely on deed which goes right back to the Ottoman period and the British period. And the case of settlements seems to be based on the idea of what God has promised. And those two things don’t work out. You can’t say on the one hand, well, I have got the deeds to the land, but no God’s actually given it to me. That’s the end of conversation, isn’t it? From there on, you can spin out to all sorts of historical allegories, and ways of reporting, and ways of reporting history, and it doesn’t go anywhere. Each time we’re told we have to start again, we have to start the clock from now and we have to forget the past. You can’t forget the past anymore than you can in Iraq or you can in Europe or America.

The Second World War is and was constantly being drudged up by Blair and Bush to rationalize the invasion of Iraq. Well, you can’t constantly go back to WW2 and call Saddam the Hitler of Baghdad, and then on the other hand say we aren’t going to go back to history to other parts of the Middle East, because that’s inconvenient, so we’re just going to start from here. We always hear people say, “Let’s move forward.” (Laughs.) The psychobabble language of marriage guidance counselors, you know, only look to the future let’s not look at the past even though so much sorrow has happened. I’m afraid you have to.

The Middle East is a land of great injustice. The Israelis can claim, or wish to at least, that Lord Balfour’s Declaration of 1917 promised Britain support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, which didn’t just mean the left hand bit that became Israel. Many Israelis now and would be Israelis they could claim that Palestine meant everything up to the Jordan River. It was Chaim Weizmann’s hope that Jewish settlements would be allowed East of the Jordan River after the Cairo conference held in 1921. You have two groups of people who were made conflicting promises by the British. One for Arab independence and promises that Jewish immigration would not in any way make the indigenous Arabs dispossessed or suffer in any way. And the other which was a promise by Britain for support of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Those things are as impossible to integrate then as they are today.

We keep going around the Middle East and setting up our various dictators, whether they be the Kings of Arabia, or whether they be King Farooq in Egypt, or King Idris in Libya. Then, when people didn’t want the various kings, we brought in the various generals. General Sadat and Colonel Kaddafi. King Abdullah was a soldier, King Hussein was a soldier. So, we get surprised when people say, “Enough is enough!” But, in the end of the day, when you say, “Who is right and who is wrong?” It’s history that is wrong. It’s the mistakes we’ve made and the injustices we’ve committed in that region. You can start it off with the Ottoman Empire, you can start it off in post WW1, and you can start it off with the Americans. And as you look back in history, the papers get more thin and fragile, don’t they?

ALI: You’ve been in the Middle East for decades. You’ve seen both Republican and Democratic foreign policy –

FISK: What’s the difference? There’s no difference. Where’s the difference between Clinton and Bush? It’s like people saying Labor government is going to come in Israel and be different than Likud, and it turns out not to be different at all.

ALI: Well, Obama as you know before his run as President, was more partial towards Palestinian rights. But, last month along with Clinton, he wrote a letter strongly condemning Palestinian violence. Many wonder, if he or even Clinton wins, is there going to be any change in policy?

FISK: Here’s the thing that’s going to be different in policy regarding the Middle East in the United States whoever wins the election: it’s utterly irrelevant.

ALI: Lebanon seems to be a forgotten story. In 2006, it had a struggle with Israel which devastated a large part of that society-

FISK: Hezbollah did. I don’t know if Lebanon did at all, but Hezbollah did.

ALI: Has the Lebanese society been able to recover in the past 2 years, or has it only strengthened Hezbollah

FISK: Well, it certainly strengthened Hezbollah, but their political performance since then has been so ambiguous in that whatever it gained militarily in terms of prestige it has substantially lost politically inside Lebanon itself. Look, the only good news in Lebanon is that civil war hasn’t restarted. Lot of people thought it would, and I thought it would, but it hasn’t. This could mean that they have realized the folly of war: that you don’t win. It’s all about death; it’s not about victory. It also means that an awful lot Lebanese who were sent away as children to be educated during the civil war – you know to Paris, London, Geneva, and Boston wherever – have returned to Lebanon and said, “I don’t want this sectarian nonsense, and I want to live in an ordinary country without any more war.” To that extent, Lebanon – the fact it has not disintegrated like Gaza or Afghanistan or Iraq despite the wish of the Americans and Iranians to use it as battleground - which was what 2006 was about – is quite a tribute to Lebanon and the Lebanese. Whether they appreciate their good fortune is quite a different matter.

ALI: You have experience in Kosovo and Serbia, and you know Kosovo declared independence and sovereignty from Serbia on Feb 17. Do you believe there is complicity of Western agents in its prolonged suffering? Is this a new chapter signaling hope? And could it have come earlier?

FISK: I have a book coming out in two and a half years time which is going to involve quite a lot of things about Kosovo and Bosnia and particularly Islam. It’s going to be called “Night of Power” which you don’t need me to explain. They are very different places, of course. The Serb actions in Bosnia were not driven by the same political motives as the Serb actions in Kosovo, which Serbs believe is part of Serbia, and you can argue that until the cows home. I don’t know about “Agents” being complicit in anything. On one hand I never totally dismiss the “plot” unquote because we know, for example, the CIA and the British were involved in overthrowing Mossadegh [Democratically elected leader of Iran overthrown by the CIA] and bringing in the Shah in 50’s Iran. That’s all true. But the idea you can manipulate states into independence is probably pie in the sky.

The treatment of the Kosovars was such that Europe was bound to extend its support for independence in one form or the other. Now, we know in the Balkans, as always, regional European powers have their fingers in it. Just as the Germans supported the Croation independence, and we know why historically. We know historically many Albanians entered Kosovo during and before the Tito Period and changed its ethnic makeup. But, then again, how far do you go back in history when it was the other way around?

I think this is really an Ottoman story and the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, which began the First World War. When the Ottoman Empire began to fray inside Europe, and I’m talking about Bulgaria as well as Serbia, it didn’t do so in a neat way. It did so with massacres and horrific killings, which if you read the contemporary accounts seems to be what we were writing about Bosnia in the 1990’s. There was a considerable historical heritage left over, unfortunately blood that most dealt with in an imperfect and unjust way. I think that Kosovo contains the seeds of further hostilities because of course I can’t imagine any Serbian leader denouncing Serbia’s right to regard Kosova as part of the historic homeland of Serbia. And I don’t think Bosnia has been solved for that matter. It’s just an independent state in one federal illusion, isn’t it? Everyone is illusory in the Ottoman empire of what it was. You have to go back to the Ottomans to work all this out.

There’s this very interesting book that came out called Jerusalem 1912 and it argues quite persuasively that fundamental issues of land ownership and Jewish immigration became major issues before the First World War, before the British and Turks were at war, before the Ottoman Empire disintegrated. And I think you have to see the problems in the Balkans, although they don’t involve Arabs or Jews, in a similar light. We are constantly trying to cope with what our fathers or our grandfathers did. I wrote the book Great War of Civilization, and my father was a solider in the First World War which produced the current Middle East – not that he had much to do with that – but he fought in what he believed was the Great War for Civilization.

One of the problems that current leadership has is that in the past they had time to reflect and discuss what they were going to do and how best to deal with a particular situation. Their decisions might have been grotesquely unjust or wrong, but at least they took them based on considered reflections, whether they be in London clubs or Downing Street or while reading Shelley in bed, but at least they had an opportunity to reflect on what they were doing. Today, we live by Press conferences, TV prime time, News at 10, CBS news, ABC, CNN exclusives whatever it might be. We get pumped up by Presidential elections, Primary elections, so policies are made on the move – in the backs of cars, on mobile phones, over drinks before a hurried dinner when you have another press conference afterwards. This is why you have this cult of – and I don’t like this phrase – “spin doctors,” a man who comes up with an easy phrase. So, instead of having reflective decision making which takes into consideration what will happen tomorrow and the day after tomorrow and the year after next, the decision making is taken on the basis on how to respond to some criticism one minute ago based on a Press conference. For this reason, you don’t have any long term planning.

That’s why we didn’t have any plan for post war Iraq, because we were too busy going on CNN announcing victory, so we hadn’t thought about that. There is an excellent academic pamphlet by Corelli Barnett, who is a prominent British historian, which goes step by step from archive documents in the British Public Record Office and National Archives from the Cabinet papers of 1941. And Churchill in 1941, when Britain still expected invasion by Nazi Germany, and before Hitler invaded Russia, before America was in the war after two long and profitable years of neutrality, Churchill appointed a Cabinet committee in London under Nazi bombardment to plan the post War government of Occupied Germany. Now, there’s forward thinking!

There’s a sign of how governments used to behave. Four years before the end of the War, when it looked as if the Germans were going to win, Churchill and the British, alone without any American involvement in the War, he was planning post War Germany. And as British troops moved under fire into the German city of Cologne in 1945, British Civil Servants in flak jackets went with them to take over the Town Hall, because they wanted civil administration to resume immediately. To get the fuel running, get rationing, get the people fed. It worked, and people didn’t die. I mean the Germans were poor and hungry, but they didn’t die. There’s a classic example of how before the age of instant television, news press conferences, spin doctors, etc., people planned for the future and generally it tended to work; by and large, it was successful. That was four years before the end of WW2. Four days before the Americans occupied the center of Baghdad, they didn’t have a coherent plan. They had an odd committee set up in the State Department, but no one listened to it and it had 20 people. So, you’re carried along on this instant decision making: “So, whaddya’ gonna’ do, Mr. Bush? How do you respond to this?” And Bush has had 5 minutes before hand to bone up on what he is going to say.

We have a program in Britain called Desert Island Discs on the BBC, where basically you are allowed to choose 8 records that you play on a desert island if you were marooned. One of my records I chose was Winston Churchill’s speech to the British on June 18, 1940 when Dunkirk was finished, and the British were alone in the War against Nazi Europe. And I played it, because Bush and Blair keep claiming they are Churchill, but here was the real thing. And Churchill’s voice immensely tired and maybe he had a few glasses before he spoke, and you have this extraordinary feeling of power and a man who is using his knowledge of history and imbuing it into other people. What knowledge of history does Bush have? He confused Cambodia with Vietnam. He talks about Vietnam but he managed to avoid going there, as we know Cheney did.

You know another problem we have at the moment is that I don’t think there’s a single senior Western statesmen, which might change if McCain becomes President, who has ever been in a war. All of the Middle Eastern leaders have been in wars, I promise you. But none of the Western leaders have been in war. You see, their knowledge of wars, The Bushes and the Blairs, are from TV, Hollywood Movies. When Churchill committed people to war, he had been in the trenches in WW1. Theodore Roosevelt had direct experience. Eisenhower certainly did, I mean he was Supreme Allied Commander of WW2. So, you had in the post war years, you had Western leadership that knew what war was about: it was about death and screaming and loss and sorrow. Now, for people like Blair whose shadow lingers over the dull and boring Gordon Brown in London, war was a policy option: something you did if you couldn’t get in with the United Nations. “Do we need a second revolution or not?” That wasn’t the way people used to go to war. (Laughs.)

One of the things that is lacking today is common sense. Anybody with common sense, anybody who sat down would’ve said, “Don’t – Attack – Iraq.” Bush actually did start talking about democracy in Iraq before he invaded, despite what the lefty commentators say, he didn’t say we want democracy but he said, “We want democracy in the Middle East.” I remember I wrote a piece in November 2002 asking, “He wants a democracy in the Middle East, and he wants to start in Iraq?!?” which is not common sense. I think a lot of the problems we have in the moment is a failure to have a long-term view of anything.

Even if you take the Israeli government who says, “We are going to root out the evil weed of terror, terror, terror,” I mean they’ve been saying that since 1948. How many air raids have there been over Lebanon since 1948? Thousands and thousands and thousands. And they’ve achieved nothing, because still we’re told we have to root out the evil weed of terror. Because it gets repeated ad nauseam on television it has become normal. Nobody says, “Hang on a minute, there’s a problem here. If Israel’s still at war 60 years after it came in existence, there is a problem there.”

ALI: You have this quote, “There’s this misconception that journalists can be objective.” You also say, “What journalism is really about –

FISK: I think what I said is “impartial.” We should be partial on the side of justice. One of the problems we have in the Middle East in the moment, partly because of the pressure put on journalists particularly in the United States by lobby groups. I’m including the Israeli Lobby, and there is an Arab Lobby, as we know. Partly because of this awful trend of American journalism where you have to give 50% of your time to each side, you end up producing a sort of matrix, a mathematical formula which is bland, lacking in any kind of passion or realism, and is a bit like reading a mathematics problem. Much of the Middle East is reported like a football match: this side did this, they kicked a goal, they replied back, the ball went through the goal post, etc. Giving equal space in your report to two antagonists is ridiculous! I mean if you were reporting the slave trade in the 18^th century you wouldn’t give equal time to the slave ship captain, you’d give time to the slaves. If you were present at the liberation of a Nazi extermination camp, you don’t give equal time to SS spokesman, you go and talk to the survivors and talk about the victims.

If you were present as I was in 2001 in West Jerusalem when an Israeli pizzeria was blown up and most of the victims were school children. I was just down the street. I reported about the Israeli woman who had a chair leg through her, and an Israeli child who had his eyes blown out. I said in my piece, “What did this child ever do to the Palestinians?” And do you think I gave equal time to the Islamic Jihad spokesman? No, I did not. Nor when I was in Sabra Shatilla [Massacre of Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon overseen by Ariel Sharon] did I give time to Israeli spokesman? If we walk as ordinary human beings out of our house and we see an atrocity, we are angry. Well, we journalists should be angry too if we feel that way about it. Not say, “Well, on the other hand, we just balance this by X,Y,Z.”

ALI: Can’t someone say that we readily dismiss FOX News as being biased and right wing, then can’t we just as readily dismiss you since you’re not an objective, unbiased voyeur?

FISK: The thing about FOX news is that they have a predetermined version. They aren’t interested in justice; they are interested in the “right,” aren’t they? They’re interested in the right wing of the Republican side, unless a Democrat happens to be right wing enough for them. They have a political slant. I’m not left wing. I’ve never voted in an election in my life. If I’m in the Israeli part of Jerusalem, I write with great passion and you can look up the story in my book The Great War for Civilization about the bombing of the Israeli pizzeria. I was in Bosnia and wrote passionately against the murderous Serbs, I mean those Serbs who were murdering. But if you report on Serbia during the NATO bombing I report with great feeling about the Serb civilians who were done to death by NATO and knowingly done so. NATO knew they were killing civilians in Serbia during the Kosovo war. And I also reported what was being done to Kosovo Albanians. That’s not what FOX News does. FOX News has a certain agenda.

ALI: Many of your critics, specifically some Zionist critics, say that you’ve lived in the Middle East for so long that you’ve become partial and succumbed to “their” narrative.

FISK: Same old, tiresome, boring old thing, you know. This always comes up. If you arrive at a place, and you don’t write satisfactory one week after arriving, they say you can’t see the woods for the trees. And if you do understand enough after two weeks, they say you’ve gone native. I haven’t risked my life in the most dangerous parts of the world to become a partial reporter politically. I’d be out of my mind if I did that. By the way, you keep talking about my critics and what the Zionists say. I don’t read blogs, because I don’t use the Internet because I think it’s crap. But I know there are two or three writers in the UK and I know there are three or four in America who regularly attack me, but that’s about it. I mean if you see my mailbag which comes in at 250 letters a week, maybe two or three are very critical, and the rest are either nice or helping or suggesting stories. What I’m saying is that one of the problems I have is the people will exaggerate the numbers and say, “Well, your critics say…” which makes it seem there is an army out there of 600 people constantly writing articles and commentary. And, it’s not true. There aren’t. I come to the States that averages every three and half weeks for lectures, and I don’t come across these people. The last one who was really obnoxious was in Texas for an interview, and the second cameraman came over to me after the program and said he wanted to hit me. (Laughs.) I said turn back the cameras, and we’ll do this live, but be careful when you do. Most people don’t care a damn about the Middle East, I’m sorry to say.

ALI: In America or the world?

FISK: Pretty much everywhere, particularly in America I’m sorry to say. And also in Europe, I mean how much of my daily paper is on the Middle East? And this idea that there is an army of critics or an army of supporters is simply untrue. By and large, people read you and they move on to read something else. What percentage of people read The Independent either online or on paper? I have no idea. I probably get more mail from America than I do from Britain, which is interesting. I’m read in the Arab world as well as in Israel. I think I’ve had two anonymous phone calls in my life in 32 years both from Turkey objecting to what I’ve written about the Armenian genocide. One of them was objecting to criticism of the Turkish Army, and one of them was objecting to my coverage of the Armenian Genocide, which obviously occurred a few years before I was born to put it mildly.

There are campaigns occasionally for accuracy, some outfit that operates somewhere in Boston, and you get city postcards from people writing to the editors, “I will never buy you magazine again” signed so and so from Houston, Texas. Firstly, we are not a magazine. Secondly, alas, we do not circulate in Houston, Texas, so this person hasn’t been buying it anywhere, but he’s just been encouraged to write this silly postcard which goes in the bin. But when you have a campaign organized by a lobby group, you tend to take it seriously in America, we don’t. We put it in the rubbish bin. We are interested in individual, serious letters by people. So am I. I encourage them in the paper. If the letters, especially if they are critical or have a certain mischief about them, I insist we run them, and I think it’s good. I think it makes people think and stirs up their idea of questioning about what’s going on in the Middle East.

The honest truth is I don’t use the internet, so I don’t see all the blogs or Googles or whatever they are. I can tell by, obviously, traveling and people coming up to me in airplanes, but I don’t pay any attention to it. I’m a journalist and a reporter and one of the great advantages I have on the paper is that my editor likes me to write opinion columns and also wants me to be a street reporter. So, when there’s a bombing explosion in Beirut or a war in Iraq, I’m there. Which is in a unique position to be in, because most reporters might be on a story but they don’t have an opinion column. And most of the people who write columns don’t go out on the beat.

ALI: You call them “hotel journalists,” correct?

FISK: No, that’s not true. What I said was that journalists, who worked in Baghdad and who, for perfectly good reasons, were unable to leave their hotels, i.e. security concerns, insurance companies hired by the papers to insure their lives, all their special security detail like the ex-military people who guard them. They find themselves effectively using their mobile phone from their hotel room, a guarded hotel, right? The problem is they don’t tell their readers, their listeners, their viewers that they’re reporting from the hotel. They give the impression when they give a “Baghdad Dateline” that they’re driving around the streets. You find articles written by someone who is sitting in an office with sandbags around the walls and aren’t let out. The much more serious side is that readers are entitled to believe, if they see it, “Dateline: Badghad” or Basra or whatever – that the reporter has movement. That he can go around and check out stories. But in fact if you read it, it’s just a police source that says, “American military says…American government says” and end of story. And it becomes echo chamber for what anyone in the Green Zone says. I mean I can live in the West of Ireland with a mobile phone and ring the Green Zone and produce the same report. (Laughs.)

ALI: They’re touted as experts in the American media.

FISK: I don’t know. Look, I have American colleagues, one of them in the New York Times, who goes out and gets good stories. So, I’m not pasting my criticism on all journalists. There’s lots of people trying to do what I’m trying to do. But, I do object to reporters who do not leave their hotels, but do not tell their readers that they do not leave their hotels. That’s what I call “hotel journalism.” I’m not talking about any reporter on the beat anywhere as being a hotel journalist.

What’s happening now as stories get more dangerous in the Middle East – and The Middle East is getting more lethal for reporting – as stories get more dangerous, more and more the Western correspondents are sending the local people out to do the story. In other words, Iraqis are on the streets in Baghdad reporting back to the New York Times reporter what they see. I noticed last year you will remember there was an Al Qaeda type organization that started an uprising in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli and took over apartment blocks. And I jumped in a car, and they had taken over an apartment block in Tripoli and were shooting at the Army, and I raced up to Tripoli. I know Lebanon very well, I mean I’ve been living there for almost 32 years. And I got into center Tripoli, which is very Sunni Muslim city, very pro Saddam I might add with [his] pictures outside the window. And there were bullets whizzing around the streets, and there were dead bodies, the armies were about to storm inside this building.

By pure good luck or bad luck, depending on your point of view, I knew the Lebanese Colonel who was going to take the army unit into this apartment block and storm into it and take it back. I’d been to his wedding, actually, which means I’m his friend. (Laughs.) “Robert, do you want to come with us?” I didn’t use a flak jacket because it is too bloody hot. So, I suddenly found the ridiculous Robert Fisk storming into this building with these soldiers, and I never carry a weapon or flak jacket or anything, and seeing the most incredible things.

Afterwards, I was out there in the street with all these dead bodies on the street. What astounded me was that I was the only Western reporter there. Most of the other reporters were either from Lebanese newspapers or Lebanese working for Western news organizations. I was the only blue eyed, Anglo Saxon guy there. My Western colleagues were there and they were in the hotel, and I’m not criticizing them. What was interesting is that on the very first, critical day of the Al Qaeda take over, I looked around the street and I didn’t see another Westerner. There were lots of Lebanese soldiers, policeman, people standing by, other journalists, camera crew, they were all Lebanese. Now, twenty years ago that wouldn’t be the case.

ALI: You just gave a really good microcosm example of how you’re on “the scene.” You’re one of the very few people who is “lucky” – well, I don’t think that is the proper word, I don’t even what the proper word is – to meet Osama Bin Laden and have an interview with him.

FISK: It’s definitely not lucky. (Laughs.) No, it’s not. I’ll tell you this guy will follow me for the rest of my life. It’s more and more unlucky I’ll let you know.

ALI: You interviewed him three times in total, and he made some very interesting comments about you. I don’t know how you feel about that, but he was quite reverential. In America, we see Osama as the horned devil himself, and in certain parts of the Muslim world –

FISK: He sees Mr. Bush pretty much the same way, of course.

ALI: Well, certain parts see him as a halo-wearing messiah. Steve Coll has a new book out on Bin Laden, and in my interview with him he told me one of the main reasons for his charismatic leadership is his ability to be multicultural, to understand the ability to look beyond ethnicity and race in his global jihad.

FISK: No, that’s not – that’s a very trendy explanation. It’s very simple why Bin Laden is popular in the Arab world; it’s because he says things that local presidents and kings won’t say.

ALI: What does he say?

FISK: He speaks about the injustice to Muslim people in a way that Mubarak or King Abdullah would never say. Because of course they’re basically run by us, aren’t they? He presents what millions of Arabs think. I’m not implying a million of Egyptians and Gulfies want to actually fly airplanes into tall buildings – they don’t. But when he describes the collapse of the Caliphate, which was the Ottoman Empire, when he talks about the immorality of the Gulf princes and kings, when he talks of the political or military or psychological occupation of the Muslim world by the West, he’s saying things which millions and millions of Muslims agree with. But they don’t hear their own leadership: the Khaddafis, the Mubaraks, or the King Abdullahs, or the Assads saying.

This doesn’t mean Bin Laden is particularly intuitively brilliant. I mean Ahmadinejad says a lot of things which are absolutely bullshit, but they probably catch somebody’s eye. I mean Ahmadinejad is outrageous, I mean he’s a crackpot. When he starts questioning the Jewish Holocaust, it’s similar to the Turks questioning the Armenian Holocaust, or the Israelis saying that they never drove the Palestinians out of Palestine, they left on their own accord because they were going to wait until the Jews were driven to the sea and they obeyed all the radio instructions. You know the story.

But, you know, Bin Laden has a voice, because the leadership of the Arab world doesn’t have a voice. Or if it does, it’s a weak one supporting the United States in general. I mean, the Mubaraks and the Abdullahs are allowed to say, “ If the war continues in Gaza, there will be an explosion in the Middle East.” That’s all right, that’s part of the course. They said it 70 times and it doesn’t even get reported very often. But the moment they start to talks seriously about the fact that people feel they are under the thumb of theWest, which they do, then they are in trouble. I mean the fact we only express our criticism of Mubarak is when the police lock up the wrong person who has a PhD from Boston or Harvard or whatever.

By and large, you see there is no Arab representative. Nor has there been for decades. It’s very interesting after the First World War, the Egyptians kept wanting democracy, and they kept saying they wanted the King out. So, the British locked them up. And the same thing happened in Iraq in the 1920’s, you the know the British arrived after they invaded in 1917 and the Iraqis said, “You encouraged us to want independence, and when we say we want independence, you put us in prison!” Which is true of course.

Naturally, if you go back to the 20’s and 30’s, where I think a lot of the history also beings, anyone who wanted a real freedom was imprisoned. So, the only way the Arabs learned you can have a change was through a revolution. Which meant no democracy of course. Meant you did everything in secret, whether you did it in office or clubs or a basement of a mosque is irrelevant. So, the failure of the Arab world to have a democracy is partially our fault.

You have to remember before the First World War, Egyptian academics and thinkers and philosophers were returning from France with the most extraordinary sort of Republican – which I’m using in the French Republic sense – views of liberation, freedom and equality. This is the decade where women didn’t want to wear the scarf in Cairo and other cities in Egypt. Where they had willingly embraced the West. You have to go back to the Ottoman Empire, and the biggest, industrial construction in the world was the Suez Canal. It was built by the French but under the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans imported state of the art steam locomotives from Switzerland to Lebanon. In Constantinople, the pashas were learning to paint and play the piano – they wanted to be like us. So we destroyed them. You see? We like it the way it is now. We don’t have to have too many occupation armies, but they all do what they’re told, and if they don’t, then we bomb them.

ALI: If Bin Laden’s grievances against the U.S. and the West are removed, and maybe you can tell us his major grievances since you’ve met him, then -

FISK: The world doesn’t work like this. Bin Laden justifies his actions on certain grounds. Whether it be the corruption of the Saudi Royal Family, the “Crusaders” to use his phrase, he says “Western forces” in the Muslim World. And remember, one of his achievements is that he’s brought Western forces into two more Muslim countries that they weren’t in before – Afghanistan and Iraq. And I used the word “achievement” ironically when I said that.

His raison d’etre will change, like we all do. To suggest that Bin Laden is out there as a negotiable figure is ridiculous. He doesn’t want to negotiate. One of the main problems with Al Qaeda is that there is no negotiation. We still haven’t learned that Bin Laden isn’t important anymore. He’s created Al Qaeda. That’s it. It’s over. It doesn’t matter if he dies of kidney failure, or whether he’s bombed or dies of old age or gets bored or gets assassinated or anything else, it’s over. Al Qaeda exists. And unless we deal with the injustice in the Middle East, there will always be an Al Qaeda. It might not be called Al Qaeda, it could be called “Al Qaeda Al Ummah,” “Al Qaeda Saudia,” “Al Qaeda in Iraq.” The very word is intrinsically rather boring, its foundation doesn’t set me off on a romantic thought. But, I always use the phrase “Al Qaeda-like”, which is inspirational but not card membership type connections.

Still we think, “If we capture Bin Laden and Mullah Omar, then we’ll be ok.” And it’s not true. There was a very fine French historian of the First World War, and he did a very good interview in Le Pointe some months ago, and he said you know we haven’t realized the world has changed militarily. But in the past, after the first and second World Wars, we thought we could have foreign adventures and be free. We could go to Vietnam. No North Vietnamese ever blew themselves up in front of the White House. We went and fought in Korea, but no North Korean soldier came and blew himself up in the London Underground. But today we can’t do this anymore, if we send our soldiers into Iraq, we are not saving Gloucester or Denver. That’s not going to change. We’re not going to back to nice, friendly left wing nationalists who wouldn’t dream of setting off bombs in our cities anymore. That’s gone.

Whether you regard this as increasing immorality of our opponents that is entirely up to you. But factually, we’re not safe at home anymore.

ALI: So, this is the future? We have to face the future and this is how it’s going to be?

FISK: Well, you’ve got to think of the years to come, not just about the next press conference. We’re going back to the same point I made to you earlier.

ALI: I had an interview with Seymour Hersh and asked him about Iran’s activity in the Middle East. He said Iran is doing what it’s always been doing in supporting the Shias. That’s what it’s doing in Lebanon and in Iraq. Now, you mention Ahmadinejad as being a “Crackpot” and –

FISK: I think he’s a crackpot, yeah.

ALI: People say Iran has its fingers in the cookie jar in helping Hezbollah and helping the Iraqi insurgents. Is Iran completely innocent? Should it be attacked? And what would –

FISK: You’re doing what CNN and FOX do. You’re producing a sustained government narrative and then asking a question about it. Yes, they do support Hezbollah financially, militarily, and in training, we know that. Do they support the Iraqi insurgency? Morally perhaps. I mean, mentally they might, but they don’t need to teach the insurgents how to blow up vehicles. I mean Iraqi insurgents, many of them in the Army, fought Iranians for 8 years. They know how to blow up vehicles and put bombs together. They don’t need help from the Iranians. So, from the start you have to disentangle this conventional wisdom on how Iran is this big, dark nation that is manipulating the Shias through out the Middle East. I don’t think the Shias of Iraq need military help from Iran. I don’t think they need money actually. And besides when you have a situation when most of the Iraqi government is beholden to Iran, what the hell are you worried about the insurgents for? When Ahmedinejad took the car from the airport like any normal human being, instead of being flown in armored helicopter, which was quite impressive, the American press didn’t make a lot of it, but it’s there.

You have to go back again. When the Shah was in power, the West wanted Iran to be nuclear power. He was our policeman in the Gulf, wasn’t he? The Shah went to New York and gave an interview saying he wanted Iran to have nuclear weapons, because after all Russia and America had them. And there wasn’t a complaint from the White House. In fact, shortly after he met Carter in the White House. And we in Europe, in particular, climbed over each other’s shoulders to supply the nuclear hardware to produce nuclear power stations.

When Khomeini came to power and the Islamic Revolution, before the Iran-Iraq War, and I actually was present as he said this in Tehran. He said nuclear weapons are gifts of the devil and we will close them down. And all nuclear installations, and they weren’t nuclear weapon instillations, they were just nuclear instillations for power generation, were closed down under Khomeini’s orders. At the height of the Iran-Iraq War in 1986, when Saddam was supported by Britain and the United States, and was using gas, a weapons of mass destruction, against the Iranians, the Iranian High Command came to the conclusion that he was using these weapons, then Khomeini reluctantly reopened the nuclear establishment in Iran as a direct result of our friend Saddam using gas and chemicals. Which in some cases were supplied by companies on the East Coast of the United States. That’s what put the Iranians in the nuclear game.

Now, when you see it from this historical perspective, they’re getting a bit of the raw deal, aren’t they? All the mullahs want their hands on weapons (Laughs.) That wasn’t the case originally. I don’t see any particular reason why the Iranians want to make nuclear weapons at the moment. Because if they fire a weapon at Tel Aviv, they know Tehran will be destroyed. On the other hand, if you look at North Korea, quite clearly you will not be invaded if you have a nuclear weapon. Then again, you have to stand back and look at the long term and ask, are we, or our children or our grandchildren, our future generations always going to around saying, “Well, he can have nuclear weapons, because he is nice and is on our side on the War on Terror and his name is Musharaff. And they can’t have nuclear weapons because they have turbans on.”

I mean are we going to do this A-B-C joke every year deciding who may or may not have these things. If we deal with a world that deals about justice, and this can apply to Eastern Europe, the Far East, Latin America, or the Middle East, the whole institute of worrying about nuclear weapons begins to diminish. After the rising of 1798 in Ireland, where I am now, every Irishman who was found even to have a pitchfork that could be used as a weapon was hanged. But, in pubs you can see them on the walls. Because it’s become irrelevant. There’s this peace here. If you go to England, you can find swords from the English Civil War. Well, if in the aftermath of that war and we’re talking about the 17^th century, if you had been found with that sword, you would’ve been executed. But now it’s in a pub on the wall of a bar.

You know, I’m not trying to be naïve when I say this, but with the whole issue of nuclear weapons, once the purpose of the weapon has disappeared, the weapon is pointless. If Iran didn’t feel itself surrounded by the Americans, which it is because the Americans are in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Gulf, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, I mean I don’t think they’d worry so much about defending Iran. Although, of course, you realize getting rid of the Taliban and Saddam, both enemies of Iran, means Iran basically won the American war in Iraq. You’ve got to start your questions not with a narrative: “Are they supporting the Iraqi insurgency?” Probably not. “Are they supporting Hezbollah?” Definitely. But, then again who is supporting the Israelis? The Americans.

There’s no doubt that the missile which the Hezbollah fired at that Israeli gunboat in the 2006 war, which almost sank it by the way, was from Iran. But don’t tell me that the bombs dropped on Hezbollah weren’t from the United States, they were of course. With all these questions you’re asking me, and I’m not trying to be critical of you, you need to go three steps back where you start asking the questions.

————————————————————————————————————

As the interview ends, Fisk complains, “And there’s nothing worse than the immortal phrase, ‘I never said that.’ Because people say, ‘Ah, that’s what he says now.’ And you’ll be surprised at the number of people, who might be quite sympathetic to what you’re saying, who manage to blunder into one single quote which they [an interviewer] slightly touch up or forget something quite innocently, and I am fighting off the problems that creates for the next 6 months long after you’ve forgotten ever talking to me. So, please, please be careful and make sure you’re very accurate in what I say, and it’s balanced out.”

“I’ll keep it very fair. I’ll quote you, and I won’t delete a word,” I promise.

“Fine. That’s all I need to hear.”

And with that, the class ends and the student finally exhales.

Wajahat Ali is Pakistani Muslim American who is neither a terrorist nor a saint. He is a playwright, essayist, humorist, and Attorney at Law, whose work, “The Domestic Crusaders,” (www.domesticcrusaders.com) is the first major play about Muslim Americans living in a post 9-11 America. His blog is at http://goatmilk.wordpress.com/. He can be reached at wajahatmali@gmail.com

February 11, 2008

A Discussion with Walt and Mearsheimer

The Power of the Israel Lobby

By WAJAHAT ALI

“Let’s move over here–in the corner. It’ll be better for us to talk in private. Or else some people might get the wrong idea,” chuckles John Mearsheimer, a Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and co-author of the incendiary book, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.”

The controversial book’s co-author, Stephen Walt, an Academic Dean at the prestigious Harvard Kennedy School of Government, smiles and concurs as we all find comfortable seats in the back end, lounge corner of San Francisco’s Prescott Hotel for our exclusive, in-depth interview.

“The wrong idea” according to the authors is the inaccurate labeling and smearing of their reputation as “Anti-Semites.” According to them and their supporters, they’ve unfairly earned this slander solely due to their detailed and systematic criticism of an “Israel Lobby” and its alleged actions in greatly influencing U.S. foreign policy in the volatile Middle Eastern regions of Israel and Palestine.

The Anti-Defamation League, which retaliated by publishing “The Deadliest Lies: The Myth of the Israeli Lobby” on the same release date as “The Israel Lobby,” lambasted the professors’ work as an “anti-Jewish screed: a relentless assault in scholarly guise.” However, talking to them in person and later observing their demeanor at a speech followed by question and answer session held at U.C. Berkeley, the two professors both appeared very calm, rational, collected and lacking the stereotypical, passionate vitriol and acidic anger unfortunately espoused by all parties associated with the endless “Israel-Palestine conflict.”

For anyone with even the slightest experience in dealing with the “Israel-Palestine” issue, whether that experience be academic, polemical, political, or even a friendly discussion over coffee, it becomes glaringly obvious the topic is contentious, divisive and, dare I say, explosive. To call it a “powder keg” of a situation would be a glorious understatement.

It is with that understanding and assumption that I conducted this interview in order to achieve, if it all possible, a rational discussion about a tragic conflict producing irrational acts and consequences.

The following is the unedited conversation and interview with the authors regarding their controversial thesis, their critics and detractors, the stifling of academic dissent, foreign policy in the Middle East, and the resulting profound implications for the United State’s relationship with the Muslim World in the 21st century.

ALI: I guess life must have been boring for you guys, and you had nothing interesting going on. So, you decided to spice things up, right? What goes on in your head that makes you get up one day and decide, “You know what? I think we’re going to tackle the “Israeli Lobby.”

(Both laugh.)

WALT: We wrote this not because our lives were boring, but because we were concerned with what was happening with American foreign policy and specifically American Middle East policy. We felt there was an aspect that wasn’t get that much attention in the U.S; the influence of the “Israeli Lobby” was the elephant in the room that no one was willing to talk about. We believe this was having unfortunate affects on the U.S., other countries, and Israel itself, and no one, especially mainstream circles, would speak or write about it. We thought we were in positions of relative security and if we didn’t [talk about it], then no one else would.

MEARSHEIMER: Nevertheless, we fully understood we were grabbing the third rail, and pro-Israeli forces in the U.S. would come after us in a serious way. We’ve not been surprised by the reaction to our piece here in the U.S.

ALI: Ok, for the unacquainted, let’s become familiar with the central thesis of “The Israel Lobby,” lay it out for me and the readers. There’s this group you label the “Israel Lobby.” Who are they and why should we, as average Joe Americans, even care about them?

WALT: The Lobby isn’t a single organization. It is a loose coalition of different groups and individuals that actively work and try to move American foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction and try to maintain a special relationship with the U.S. and Israel. This group includes some predominantly Jewish American groups, such as AIPAC, the Anti Defamation League, The Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations. It also includes non-Jewish groups like Christian Evangelicals, such as Christians United for Israel. This is not a single organization, and they don’t agree on every issue, but they all want to maintain that special relationship. It’s an interest group like other groups we have in U.S.

Interest groups are part of American politics. So, there’s nothing illegitimate or wrong with what the Israeli Lobby is doing. But, like some other interest groups, when they have profound impact on U.S. foreign policy, they may be leading to foreign policies that aren’t in the interest of the country as a whole. So, Americans should be concerned about this and other interest groups if they are leading to policies that are contrary to the American national interest.

MEARSHEIMER: American should care about the Israeli Lobby, because it has a profound effect on the shape of U.S.­ Middle East policy. We believe by and large that effect is negative. In other words, the Lobby is pushing policies not in the U.S. interest and not in Israel’s interest either. The best example of that is the Lobby’s influence has with regards to the occupation and the building of settlements in the West Bank. The U.S. has opposed settlement building since the Israelis first conquered the West Bank and Gaza strip in 1967. It has been the official policy of every president since Lyndon B. Johnson to oppose settlement building, but no president has been able to put any meaningful pressure on Israel to stop building settlements. The principle reason is due to the Lobby, which goes to great lengths to make sure no President can force Israel to do something that it doesn’t want to do. Since Israel doesn’t want to end the settlements, no President has been able to put an end to the settlement building.

What are the consequences that result from this? It is one of the main reasons why the U.S. is deeply hated in the Arab and Islamic world. It is one of the main causes of America’s terrorism problem. It is clear that Osama bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, one of the main architects of the 9-11 attacks, were deeply battered by American policies in the Occupied Territories [in Palestine.] So, we as Americans should care how the Lobby influences U.S.- Middle East policies, because it sometimes influences them in a way which is not in the best interests of the U.S.

ALI: However, doesn’t the publication of your book, the media publicity blitz surrounding it, the release of Jimmy Carter’s “Palestine: Peace not Apartheid,” and Norman Finkelstein’s very public criticism of Alan Dershowitz’s “Case for Israel,” all provide examples that a healthy debate about Israel does indeed exist and the Lobby is either ineffective or not as influential as you suggest?

WALT: Nobody believes that the discourse in the U.S. is 100% pro-Israel. That is completely impossible. Our point in the book and our publication of the book doesn’t contradict this, we contend that conversation and public discourse in mainstream media circles is overwhelmingly pro-Israel. It’s not to say occasionally you won’t have other voices out there. But the fact is we had trouble getting our original article published in the U.S., and we have had some coverage, but relatively little, regarding our book in mainstream media circles.

We’ve seen various efforts made to try and minimize the exposure by getting events cancelled when were supposed to speak about this, or having media arrangements fall through. So, it’s not to say you can’t occasionally get critical views out there, but the balance of coverage on the Middle East coverage is pro-Israel. But, if you look at the critical reviews of the book, the reviews in England have been uniformly positive. Generally, all across Europe as well. There have been a number of positive reviews in Israel itself. But the mainstream reviews in U.S. [is a different story], for example the Washington Post, the New York Times Sunday Book Review; the New Republic had a vicious attack comparing us to Osama Bin Laden and Ahmadinejad. So, getting favorable reviews, including in Israel, is relatively easy outside of the United States.

MEARSHEIMEHR: Based on reading our book, one would predict we would get hardly any positive reviews in the United States, and a lot of positive reviews outside of U.S., including Israel. That prediction has held up very well. We have been consistently slammed in the mainstream media inside The United States, and garnered lots of positive reviews outside the U.S., which is what the book would predict.

ALI: Is this proof of the New-Anti-Semitism? Is this the smoking gun evidence that the whole world is ganging up against Israel and American Jewry?

MEARSHEIMER: The fundamental flaw with that argument is that the book has received favorable treatment in Israel itself. One of the most positive reviews was written in Haaretz itself written by Daniel Levi who is an Israeli Jew. The most favorable review overall was written by an Israeli, Yuri Avnery. This is not to say that there are not people in Israel or U.S. who see our book as evidence of the The New Anti-Semitism. We don’t believe there is a New Anti-Semitism. We believe there is not a lot of Anti-Semitism in the U.S. or in Europe itself. And that charge is leveled at critics of Israel like us and Jimmy Carter, because it is an effective way of marginalizing and sidelining us. We are not Anti-Semites, Jimmy Carter is not an Anti-Semite, and the vast majority of people who like our book are not Anti-Semites, in fact many of them are Jews.

ALI: Briefly describe your initial journey towards publication at the Atlantic Monthly. Why did they ultimately reject the draft, and how did you find a publication home at London Review of Books?

MEARSHEIMER: Stephen and I decided in early 2002 to think seriously about writing a piece on The Israeli Lobby and U.S. foreign policy. Then, in the fall of 2002, we were commissioned by The Atlantic to write that piece, and we began working on it. We were slowed down by the fact the Iraq war was about to take place. We couldn’t write about it while it was still happening, because the Lobby was involved in pushing that war. So, we didn’t get a draft of the piece to the Atlantic until the Spring of 2004. After they saw the initial draft, they were very happy with it and asked us to make a number of changes, which we did. We submitted the second draft in January 2005, and shortly thereafter they rejected it. We believe they rejected it because they came to believe the subject was too controversial and would cause problems.

ALI: Were you surprised when it was rejected?

WALT: We differed on this. I was more surprised than John was. But we were both disappointed. Again, we had no indication that they weren’t going to publish it, and they had seen all of our previous drafts and had been very positive about all of them. So, for them to suddenly discover at the last minute that the entire piece was unacceptable, and that they didn’t want us to re-write it to make it acceptable, was very disappointing.

MEARSHEIMER: So, the Atlantic rejected the piece, and of course, surely, they will never say they rejected it out of fear about how the Lobby would react to the piece, but rather how the piece was written. We don’t believe that’s the case. We believe they got cold feet. After it got rejected, we talked to a number of journals about the possibility of getting the piece published somewhere in the 2005.

By the early summer of 2005, it became clear it would be impossible to get it published in the United States. So, we put the article away and didn’t think it was possible to get it published in the U.S. Someone gave a prominent American academic a copy of the piece we had submitted to the Atlantic, and he knew the editor of the London Review of Books. He wrote to me and asked me if we were interested in publishing it there. We talked about it and thought it was an excellent idea, and we talked to them and made an agreement to submit it by January 2006, a new version of the article. They published it two months later in March 2006. I mean, it’s interesting to think had this academic not gotten hold of the final draft we submitted to the Atlantic, it would have never appeared.

ALI: I want to talk about this “stifling” of criticism. Let’s discuss this recent “Google” speech, where you were scheduled to appear, but according to you a Google representative at the last minute told you, “You can’t appear without having the other side represent,” and then they canceled at the last second. In your opinion, is this “other side” really present?

WALT: As part of the publicity campaign for the book, our publicist began to setup various venues to come talk about the book. Three of those agreements were cancelled. We were cancelled at the Chicago Council of Global Affairs who had invited us to come and speak. The President of the Council got in contact with John and said, “In order to protect the institution, he was canceling the event. The subject was just too hot to cover,” and we can only appear there if they had someone who would represent the “other side,” and it was too late to get someone from the other side. I should mention they’ve had plenty of people who represent “the other side” speak at the Chicago Council and those people spoke on their own. Michael Oren, an Israeli American historian, for example has spoken on his own without someone else representing the other side.

MEARSHEIMER: Dennis Ross would be another good example. And we always say there is nothing wrong with this.

WALT: We think that’s fine. It’s entirely appropriate for Oren or Dennis Ross or lots of other people to come and speak there. They never said anything to us or our publicist about having someone there to debate us when were arranging everything. It was only after the cancellation, did they mention this. We had an agreement to speak at the City University of New York also in September, but that also fell through without an explanation. Finally, we were scheduled to speak at Google Headquarters here in Mountain View, California, which regularly hosts an author series where they bring authors on a variety of subjects to give talks. So, our publicist got an email the previous Friday late in the afternoon that the event had been cancelled and didn’t give us an explanation.

We were subsequently told that the decision had been made “very high up in the company,” and the Google representative said they had never seen an event like this get cancelled like the way they did. They said they would be interested in possibly rescheduling us, but we’ve never been able to reschedule the event, so clearly, it’s not going to happen. But, just to add a number of other places where we’ve spoken, such as the World Affairs Council in Dallas, the Hammer Museum, The City Club of Cleveland, all these people told us they had gotten emails, phone calls, or messages protesting our appearance and suggesting we be dis-invited. To their great credit, none of these places gave into that kind of pressure. In each of these places, we appeared without note-worthy incident; we had good discussions, they asked challenging questions. Some people agreed with us, some people disagreed with us a lot, but in all these places we had a very useful discussion and nothing bad happened at all.

ALI: I want you to hear some comments by your critics. George Schultz, Reagan’s Secretary of State, writes in the new book “The Deadliest Lies: The Myth of the Israeli Lobby” -

MEARSHEIMER: That book was scheduled to be published on exactly the same date as our book was published on September the 4th.

WALT: Publishers know when things are going to appear months in advance and once our publisher made it clear it was going to be on their Fall list, then they can start preparing “The Deadliest Lies,” which is a very thin book that didn’t involve much work, and thus it could be arranged to have it timed with the release of our book. I mean, there are no secrets in the publishing world. Nothing unusual about this.

MEARSHEIMER: The Abraham Foxman book ["The Deadliest Lies] and the George Schultz preface in the forward are not based on the book we wrote, “The Israeli Lobby,” because it hadn’t been published at that time. It was rather based on the article that was published [in 2006.]

ALI: Well, he writes in the forward, “those who blame Israel and its Jewish supporters for U.S. policies they do not support - are wrong. They are wrong because, to begin with, support for Israel is in our [The U.S.] best interests. They are also wrong because Israel and its supporters have the right to try to influence U.S. policy. And they are wrong because the U.S. government is responsible for the policies it adopts.” If you both concede that what the Israeli Lobby does is within the confines of a democratic process, then isn’t Schultz’s critique valid? If the Lobby isn’t working democratically, then how is it abusing the process?

WALT: We make it very clear in our book that what the Israeli Lobby is doing is not an abuse of the Democratic Process, but we think all Americans have the right to organize around political causes they believe about. But the fact that it is legitimate activity doesn’t mean it is in the best interest of the country. Lots of other interest groups have skewed American policy in a way that is not good for the country as a whole. We never argue, and we don’t believe what the Lobby is doing is illegitimate, inappropriate, or not Democratic, it’s just that the effects are harmful to the United States.

Now, if George Schultz disagrees with us, then he can make that argument and we can have a debate on it. One of the reasons we wrote the book is to try and encourage debate. “Whether or not unconditional support for Israel is good for the U.S. or not? Was it making Americans safer? Was it Americans more popular around the world? Was it improving our relation with allies in The Middle East and elsewhere?” If all those are true, then, maybe, we’re wrong. We’re making the argument that unconditional support for Israel, as encouraged by the Israeli Lobby, has been deeply harmful.

I’d alert anybody who reads this article that they should go back and read page 112 of George Schultz’s memoirs called “Turmoil and Triumph” where he talks about his own involvement trying to do Middle East policy in the face of pressure from the Lobby. When he and President Regan were dealing with the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, he discovered Congress was about to vote a $250 million supplemental military aid package to Israel after the invasion of Lebanon, after [Israel] had used cluster bombs, after the Shatila-Sabra camp massacres. This is what he writes in his own memoirs:

“We fought the supplement and fought it hard. President Reagan and I weighed in personally making numerous calls to Senators and Congressman. The supplement sailed right by us and was approved by Congress as though President Reagan and I had not even been there. I was astonished and disheartened. This brought home for me vividly Israel’s leverage in our Congress. I saw that I must work carefully with the Israelis if I was to have any handle on Congressional action that might affect Israel, and if I were to maintain Congressional support for my efforts to make peace or progress in the Middle East.”

In 1982, and when he wrote his memoirs, he understood the Israeli Lobby was very powerful and he understood that it wasn’t good; it was interfering with what he and President Reagan wanted to do. But he understood it was too powerful to fight it. He might’ve forgotten that in 2006-2007, but that’s what he wrote in his own memoirs.

MEARSHEIMER: There’s no question that Israeli supporters in the U.S. have the right to push pro-Israeli policies. Their behavior in that regard is as American as apple pie. However, there is one form of behavior that many members of the lobby engage in that is antithetical to the American way of doing business. That is the proclivity for smearing critics of Israel. If you criticize Israeli policy, or the power of the Lobby in formulating, or influencing U.S. Middle East policy, you are almost certain to be called an Anti-Semite or worse. Smearing people has become one of the key tactics that large numbers of organizations and individuals use in the Lobby to deal with critics, and this is not as American as apple pie. This kind of behavior should be condemned.

ALI: Let’s switch gears and talk about an Arab-American professor at Columbia, Joseph Massad, who published a stinging criticism of your book in Al-Ahram. He suggests your thesis falls into a predictable trap, and I quote him, “the attraction of this argument is that it exonerates the United States’ government from all the responsibility and guilt that it deserves for its policies in the Arab world and gives false hope to many Arabs and Palestinians who wish America would be on their side instead of on the side of their enemies.” So, my question, after listening to this, does your thesis help exonerate the U.S. government from all its responsibility? Moreover, perhaps the U.S. is in fact using Israel, instead of Israel and its Lobby using the U.S, correct?

WALT: Professor Massad greatly overstates it when he says this exonerates the U.S. government from all responsibility. We understand that actors in the U.S. government are independent actors to some degree. You take the Iraq war where we believe the Israeli Lobby had a key role in pushing the U.S. to do this, but ultimately George Bush made the decision to invade. So, we wouldn’t let him or Vice President Cheney off the hook. We are not exonerating those people in the U.S. government. Any official or most officials in the government, and certainly people in Congress are shaped by the political and social forces that exist within American society. They always pay attention where the political support is going to be, and it’s quite clear, as we just saw from the George Schultz quote a moment ago, where the Secretary of State thinks policy ought to go in one direction [not giving Israel the supplementary aid] and President Reagan agrees and thinks it’s a terrible idea, but they get rolled by Congress as if they had not even been there.

So, I think the idea that the U.S. government would be pursuing the same policies vis a vis the Middle East the same policies it would be pursuing absent the Israeli Lobby and the political power of AIPAC, I think it is just wrong. It has been the official policy of every president, every president since Lyndon Johnson to not support the settlements but none of them ever do anything about it, and they are the Presidents. It’s because of an array of political forces that make it impossible for them to take action. Problem #2 is the dog wagging the tail argument, here the argument is that Israel basically is our tool, we give it orders, and it does what we want it to do in the Middle East.

MEARSHEIMER: That Israel is our Rottweiler argument.

WALT: I mean, if you look carefully at the record, there is not much evidence that it is the tool we are using to shape the Middle East. I’ll give you three examples. One is the first Gulf War of ‘91 where the U.S. goes into throw Hussein’s Iraq out of Kuwait, Israel didn’t participate in the war, not because they didn’t want to, but if they had participated the Arab coalition would have fallen apart. So, we went to great lengths to keep them out. And then we had to defend them when the SCUD missiles starting coming to Israel. The second example is the Iraq War of 2003, here we are our knocking off an Israeli enemy, but the Israelis are not there doing it, it’s us doing it. They are on the sideline yet again. The third example is the Lebanon War in the Summer of 2006. We don’t like Hezbollah very much, and of course the Israelis don’t like them very much, but there is absolutely no evidence that we were pushing the Israelis to go after Hezbollah. More importantly, we certainly didn’t want the Israelis to go after Lebanon. If Israel was taking our orders in the Summer of 2006, they would have left Beirut alone. They would have done nothing to undermine the democratically elected government in Lebanon, which is something that Bush takes great credit for. We had helped put the government in power, and it was one of the big successes you could point to in Bush’s Middle East policy. If Israel was taking orders from us, they would’ve had a very different approach than us in Lebanon. It’s not that there isn’t some collusion, but the idea they are our obedient servant carrying out the wishes of American Imperialism in the Middle East is just dead wrong

MEARSHEIMER: Two quick points. The U.S. can’t use Israel to support its policies in the Middle East in a large part because it is radioactive, and by that I mean so unpopular in the region. We couldn’t use Israel in the first Gulf War or second Gulf War. My second point would be to focus on what happened after the Shah of Iran fell in 1979. Up until that point, the U.S. had relied heavily on the Shah to do much of its heavy lifting in the Middle East. After the Shah fell, the U.S. was deeply concerned that the Soviet Union might intervene in Iran, and number two that Iraq or Iran might try to dominate the region. In that case, we would need military forces in that region to deal with the problem did it arrive.

So, the United States, if we are to believe the story where Israel is our Rottweiler, then we should’ve been able to turn to Israel to replace the Shah. But, of course, we couldn’t do that, and instead we had to build the rapid deployment force, which is an over the horizon military capability. But we need bases in the Middle East to deploy equipment for the rapid deployment force should it have to come into the region quickly. None of the equipment for the rapid deployment force was put in Israel, because it was unacceptable for the U.S. to station or to put equipment in Israel. So, what we did is we developed a rapid development force of our own, and we deployed that equipment in Arab countries.

ALI: Why do these pro-Israeli groups have such a loyal and firm alliance with hawkish, Neo-conservatives and the Christian Right in recent years? This is, after all, the same Christian Right, if you read some of their ideology and dogma, who believe that the Second coming of Christ will end in either the mass slaughter or mass conversion of Jews in Israel.

WALT: The Israel Lobby is a heterogeneous group. They all want to maintain a special relationship with the U.S., but they don’t agree on everything. There are a number of prominent groups, such as AIPAC, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish organizations, the ADL, the Zionist Organization of America. There are a number of moderate groups that support a 2 state solution as well. The Israeli Policy Forum, the Americans for Peace Now are just a few examples. Then, there is this movement of Christian Evangelicals known as Christian Zionists. The more influential and wealthier organizations have tended to be right of center and more hard-line. AIPAC for example is hard-line. The Zionist Organization of America is very hard-line, opposing a 2 state solution.

ALI: Wait, what exactly do you mean by “hard-line?”

WALT: Generally those who oppose a 2 state solution, or like AIPAC never endorsing it. And also, basically supporting the “Settlement” enterprise. Groups like Israeli Policy Forum believe in the 2 state solution and oppose the Settlement enterprise.

MEARSHEIMER: It’s marginally a function of how you think of the [President] Clinton parameters. The Clinton parameters would be a broad outline for a 2 state solution. Organizations like the Israeli Policy Forum, people like Dennis Ross endorse the parameters, I mean he helped craft them.

WALT: I think we argue this in our book, if you look at the major organizations they tend to be more right of center, but they have become more conservative over time, and become more aligned with the Likud party in Israel, more aligned at least politically with conservative movements here in the U.S. The Israeli Lobby has moved in a rightward direction over time. And, it has been strengthened by the Christian Evangelicals who believe, and I’m oversimplifying a lot here, but their view of Israel is shaped by their interpretation of Old Testament prophecy. They believe the re-establishment of a Jewish state in all of Palestine is foreordained in Biblical prophecy, and it is a key sign leading up to the Second Coming, the End of times.

ALI: Like a pre-requisite?

WALT: It’s a pre-requisite, it’s gotta’ happen. It’s one of several steps we have to go through. So, they oppose any form of Palestinian state, they oppose any withdrawl of the settlement enterprise, because they think that’s inconsistent with what the Bible has predicted.

MEARSHEIMER: What the Bible says is necessary for the End times to come about.

WALT: Now, as you said, obviously this image of what happens to Israel or the Jewish people is not optimistic. Either they die, are converted, or they get left behind. But, obviously, if you are Jewish you don’t believe any of that prophecy stuff, and therefore there has been a tactical alliance between these groups, because it strengthens the political influence of both hard-line organizations. To put it in crude terms, I think the Jewish groups don’t much care for the Christian Zionist’s other views, because they don’t think they’re true, and they’re happy to get their support on this foreign policy dimension. As we can see the support for our very confrontational policy with Iraq and Iran today, where the Christian Zionists have been very bellicose, as have members of the Israeli Lobby been as well.

MEARSHEIMER: An additional point to make is that Israel, itself, has been progressively moving to the right as well. If you look carefully at Israeli public opinion, there is little support for the Clinton parameters, which is the only meaningful way you can create a viable Palestinian state. The Israelis say they are willing to give the Palestinians a state and favor a 2 state solution, but when you see what the majority of the Israelis want to give the Palestinians it does not in any shape, way, or form add up to a viable Palestinian state. Basically, it would be a series of enclaves in the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip would be another enclave. These enclaves would not be territorially contiguous, not connected, and the Israelis wouldn’t give the Palestinians control of East Jerusalem. The point I’m trying to make is that the fact the Lobby is dominated by hard-line individuals is facilitated by the fact that it is a worldview that is largely reflected by a majority of Israelis.

ALI: Professor Mearsheimer, you and several academics recently convened in Chicago, Rockafeller Chapel, and you said academia is the only space where Israel is “treated as a normal country, where past and present actions are critically assessed,” and the place where public opinion on the matter is most accurately reflected. If that is the case, then how do we explain the abrupt denial of tenure of Israeli and Dershowitz critic Norman Finkelstein? [Finkelstein's very public tenure controversy at DePaul University ended in September '07 when the Board decided to reject his tenure bid, despite overwhelming support for Finkelstein by his peers, his students, and national and international scholars]

MEARSHEIMER: I said in my comments, academia “tends to be the one place,” where Israel is treated like a normal country. I think there’s no question that there is more criticism of Israel in the academic world and in college campuses, then there is in mainstream media. Nevertheless, the Lobby works very hard to influence the discourse on university campuses and goes to considerable length in influencing hiring and promotion decisions regarding critics of Israel. The Normal Finkelstein case is illustrative of this. Nobody disputes that the Lobby put considerable pressure on DePaul University to deny Finkelstein tenure. They will deny that the pressure had any effect on the ultimate decision to deny him tenure, but this is hard to believe.

ALI: You suggest in your book that the image and framing of the issues has been skewed to reflect Israel as a “David” fighting a “Goliath” that is the Palestinians and neighboring Arab enemies. How much of this alleged symbolism is actually reflected in reality? How has this image been popularized and cemented in the mindset of American psychology?

MEARSHEIMER: There is no question that Israeli’s supporters have been very successful in conveying the message to most Americans that Israel is a David surrounded by an Arab goliath. Anyone who looks carefully at the history of the conflict quickly discovers that is not the case. To be more specific, Israelis won the 1948 war decisively, they won the 1956 decisively, they won the 1967 war decisively, and they won the 1973 decisively after suffering a massive surprise attack. All those victories were gained before massive U.S. aid came to Israel.

WALT: Up thru ‘67 that’s exactly right. The U.S. was starting to provide significant military aid after ‘67, but the aid goes up even more after the ‘73 war.

MEARSHEIMER: So, Israel won those 4 wars, and since then no Arab state has picked a fight with Israel for the simple reason they all understand Israel is the “Goliath” and they are the “Davids.” Today, Israel has the most powerful conventional army in the region by far. It’s the only state in the region that has nuclear weapons, it has a couple of hundred of them. It has a very close alliance to the U.S., which would surely come to its defense if its survival is threatened. It has peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, and would have a treaty with Syria had it not walked away from the deal. So, Israel is not only the most powerful country in the region, but it also has peace agreement with some of its neighbors, two of them they have fought wars with in the past. And it would’ve have peace deals with 3 of its principle adversaries had they reached a peace deal with Syria.

The Saudis started in 2002 to push a peace initiative that would’ve brought peace between Israel and the Arab League, and they resurrected it again this year and pushed it again. This tells you that most of the states in the region are interested in reaching some sort of modus vivendi with Israel. They understand it is very powerful and not going away anytime soon, therefore it makes sense to make some peace agreement. Israel is in excellent shape in terms of military balance. In terms of its dealings with its neighbors, it is in very good shape.

One might say what about the Palestinians? The Israelis have had opportunities to cut a deal with the Palestinians, especially during the 90’s Oslo Peace Process. But they have never shown any serious interest in allowing the Palestinians to have a viable state. If they could change their thinking on that conflict and bring themselves to evacuate almost all the West Bank, and allow for a Palestinian state, then we believe they would have good relations with the Palestinians as well.

WALT: You have to bear in mind the balance of power between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Israel, today, has the 29th highest per capita income in the world, now that’s not a poor country. Palestinians are deeply impoverished, unable to have a viable economy in the face of all of the obstacles presented now by Israel. The Palestinians have no army, no air force, no navy, they barely have an effective security force, and of course they are deeply divided internally. When any group of people is put into a situation like that, they are going to use any tactic available. Which is why of course the Palestinians have relied on terrorism. John and I both regard the use of terrorist tactics as deplorable, and the loss of innocent human life on either side is deeply, deeply regrettable. So, we’re not defending that. But, the point is that the Palestinians hardly pose an existential threat to Israel. It’s very much a one sided competition. The problem is for all of Israel’s considerable military power it still does not permit them to dominate the Palestinians to the point they won’t try to resist with any means they can come up with. But the idea that Israel is the vulnerable party here, and its various neighbors are all powerful has got reality turned upside down.

ALI: How does the Lobby skew this image, in your opinion, for the Average American psychology?

WALT: By constantly repeating how vulnerable Israel is, by constantly exaggerating the dangers that is faces. And, it does have security problems in addition to problems from terrorist bombings, it has problems with Hezbollah to the north. But the groups of the Lobby are hyping the exaggerated threat that Israel faces in trying to convince people its security is very precarious; that Israel might be destroyed anytime soon, that it faces a gigantic sea of enemies that aren’t interested in peace. But if someone looks carefully at the true military balance, or looks carefully at what Israel’s relations with its neighbors really are and what those neighbors have already offered, it suggests Israel is already quite secure in regards to its overall existence. Its survival is not in jeopardy. Its security can be significantly enhanced if it would reach a reasonable settlement with the Palestinians and take that whole problem off the table once and for a all.

MEARSHEIMER: The principle way that the Lobby creates this image of a beleaguered Israel is by working 24-7 to shape the discourse about Israel. The Lobby not only portrays Israel as a “David” surrounded by “Goliaths,” but it also goes to great lengths to silence those who argue that the opposite is the case.

ALI: Here’s a criticism. The U.S. is country with over 300 million people. We have blogs, the internet, op/ed publications, websites, liberals, republicans, and a diversity of opinions. How can a tiny minority of Jewish people, which is about 2 to 3% of our population, have that much influence? Is this some sort of conspiracy theory suggesting Jewish bogeyman who own the vast, diverse media we have in the United States?

MEARSHEIMER: We want to be absolutely clear we are not talking about a conspiracy. We are also not making an argument that pro-Israel groups control the media. Our argument is that the Lobby has to work very hard to shape discourse in the United States, because it does not control the media. Certainly, there are pundits and columnists and owners of newspapers who are naturally pro-Israel. There are many others that need to be reminded that criticism of Israel carries with it a significant cost. It’s there where the Lobby is great on what is written in the mainstream media in regards to Israel. Our argument is that they are very effective in that regard.

Let’s just talk about the discourse in the mainstream media about the Middle East. Where do you see evidence of Arab Americans writing columns in major newspapers? Where is the evidence of Arab Americans who are constantly on T.V. or on radio constantly criticizing Israel and defending the Palestinians?

ALI: Someone can say Fareed Zakaria is Muslim–[Fareed Zakara is an influential and well known editor, columnist, and pundit]

WALT: He’s not Arab. He’s a South Asian Muslim. He does not take sides on Middle East questions very often. I think he understands this is a delicate issue, and particularly as delicate an issue for someone as prominent as he is who is known to be Muslim. Find me the Palestinian American columnist in the Times, The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the SF Chronicle. They don’t exist.

MEARSHEIMER: What we have here in the United States is a one sided debate. We have pro-Israel forces and nothing else.

WALT: What you see of course is anytime a major media organization does publish something that is mildly critical they immediately get pressure put on them. For example, this past fall CNN ran a 3 part series on Muslim, Christian, and Jewish fundamentalism. The Forward, a Jewish newspaper, said it [CNN] suffered from an “unprecedented attack,” where organizations were putting pressure on advertisers that had bought advertising time. The whole purpose was not to stop the broadcast, because it already happened, but they wanted to put enough pressure on CNN that the next time a producer has an idea or a big story that is controversial, that producer is going to face an uphill battle. Or if a newspaper in Boston, Cleveland, San Francisco, pushes an article that is critical of the Lobby, if the editor gets 5,000 letters protesting about that, then they will think twice the next time that they let something like that appear.

If you do this long enough and over many years, plenty of reporters, editors, and columnists realize it’s too much trouble. “I’ll write about something else, or I’ll write something bland.” That isn’t control of the media as in the old conspiracy scene, that’s an interest group, like how a number of interest groups work, working very hard to try and make sure that their story gets reported, and the other side tends not to get reported. I say “tend” because every now and then you see something representing the other side appear in various places, but the point is you want to make sure the balance of coverage is on one side.

MEARSHEIMER: I want to add another dimension to this. It is widely recognized in the U.S. that the Lobby has a powerful influence on U.S.-Middle East policy. If you look at almost all the critical reviews of our book, virtually all of the critics admit that the Lobby is powerful. Nevertheless, when you read American news accounts of U.S.-Middle East policy, you hardly ever see any discussion of the Israel Lobby’s presence, much less influence, in the shaping of the U.S. policy.

WALT: Not never, but it’s rare. It’s rare you find someone who is writing about Middle East policy who will devote a couple of paragraphs to the role that pro-Israeli forces are playing in shaping that policy. Even though everyone in Washington knows that they’re very influential.

ALI: Let’s talk about Iraq. You, unlike many academics, underplay the role of oil and oil lobbies in the Iraq War. If not oil, then what was the motivating reason for the pre-emptive attack, and how does/did Israel benefit from the attack on Iraq and the toppling of Saddam Hussein?

MEARSHEIMER: With regards to the question of oil, there is hardly any evidence that oil was driving the Iraq war. Except for Kuwait, none of the oil producing states favored the war. And even though Kuwait favored the war, it didn’t push the U.S. hard to attack. Saudi Arabia was opposed to the war, as were the other oil producing states in the regime. There is hardly any evidence that I’m aware of that the oil companies which were pushing this war. The oil companies wanted to cut a deal with Saddam, so they could help him develop his oil fields, move his oil around the globe, and make lots of money in the process. The basic problem is there is not a lot of evidence to support the idea that oil was driving this war. What we believe was driving this was war was 1) The Israeli Lobby, and 2) the fact that George Bush and Cheney after 9-11 believed it was necessary to topple Saddam to win the war on terrorism. It’s a combination of them pushing this war to make this happen.

WALT: I would add to that, of course, the people who pushed for this believed it would benefit the U.S. and benefit Israel as well. They believed it would launch a process of political change throughout the Arab-Islamic world that would make the terrorism problem go away, enhance America’s overall strategic position by gradually creating a lot of countries that were Pro-American, and finally enhance Israel’s strategic position by creating a bunch of countries that were willing to make peace. They were tragically wrong on all counts. How would this war benefit Israel? The war didn’t benefit Israel, of course, it’s been a strategic disaster for Israel. It’s created a failed state nearby [Iraq], and it has enhanced the position of Iran, which is a country Israelis worry about even more than they worried about Saddam. This underscores a point we make in our book and make all the time is that the Israel Lobby in pushing for unconditional American support for Israel, and in some elements, pushing for hair-brained schemes like invading Iraq, it has been bad for the United States and unintentionally bad for Israel, too. It’s incorrect to see the Lobby as always pro-Israel. A lot of what they are supporting is very bad for Israel.

ALI: Seymour Hersh of the New Yorkers posits the U.S. is engaged in “The-Redirection,” whereby the U.S. and Israel are aligning themselves with moderate Arab dictatorships against Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah. As professors of international relations and critics of the Israel Lobby, what blow back would this have, if any, on US-Muslim world relations?

MEARSHEIMER: The basic problem is that the strategy is not going to work. The fact is that Israel is radioactive in the region. The fact that Israel, the U.S., and Arab countries are going to form a right alliance against Iran and maybe Syria and Hezbollah is not going to work. Those Arab countries are going to be unwilling to reach an alliance with the Israelis and U.S. as long as the Palestinian issue continues to fester. One of the principle reasons for Condoleeza Rice is pushing for solution to a Palestinian problem now is because she understands now she can’t put together an anti Iran coalition without shutting down the Israeli - Palestinian conflict. But, there is no serious hope that conflict is going to be shut down anytime soon. That’s why you can’t put that balancing coalition against Iran together. In the populations of countries like Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, there is a significant amount of sympathy towards Iran, and a significant amount of animosity towards U.S. and Israel.

WALT: One of those reasons those countries wont jump into bed fully with us on this, is because they are potentially fragile regimes and they worry about what their populations think if they were to try doing something like that. Second point to remember is Americans sometimes think we would be much better off if we had more democracy in the Middle East, and probably that’s true if you take a very long term view of it. But right now it’s false to imagine rapid democratic transitions in places like Egypt, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. You would end up in countries that were very anti-American, because they don’t like the support we’ve given Israel and they also don’t like our support we’ve given to those ruling regimes as well.

MEARSHEIMER: One important piece of evidence that highlights how it’ll be impossible for the U.S. to put together that coalition is to see what happened during the Lebanon war in 2006. Initially, the Arab governments in Jordan and Egypt were very critical of Hezbollah, which is consistent with the policy that the Americans are trying to pursue. But, it quickly became clear to the leaders in Jordan and Egypt that the people in their societies sided with Hezbollah against the United States and against Israel. Therefore, the leaders in Jordan and Egypt had to turn on a dime and become critical of the U.S. and Israel and support Hezbollah.

ALI: Let’s close it with this final question and talk about U.S.-Muslim relations in regards to Palestine. Why is this issue, the Palestine issue, above all other issues at the forefront of the Muslim world’s anger against U.S. foreign policy? How does U.S. relation with Israel and the Lobby undermine or help our relations with the Muslim world in this regards?

WALT: For many people in the Muslim, Arab world there is a fundamental question of justice. What they see happening to the Palestinian people is a great injustice, although there were terrible crimes against Jewish people in history, and those crimes may justify the creation of a Jewish state. You can even argue on balance that it is ok to create a Jewish state in Palestine. John and I both thing it was a good thing. But, that act, creating a Jewish state in Palestine, involved the infliction of great crimes against the local residents–the Palestinians. Until there is some compensation and they are given a state of their own, and effort is made to compensate them and acknowledge what happened to them, the moral balance has not been equated.

Second, the entire episode resonates with the whole history of Western interference and domination of that region. It’s seen as another case where Western powers have inflicted great harm on Arab or Islamic peoples. So, it has a particular salience for people elsewhere in that region. Thirdly, it makes the U.S. look deeply hypocritical. The United States likes to talk about human rights, it likes to talk about democracy, it likes to talk about national self-determination. But here, by giving Israel nearly unconditional support, even as Israel continues its 40-year, 4-decade campaign to colonize the West Bank and previously Gaza, and for us to be supporting that enterprise the way we have is seen as deeply contrary to all the things the U.S. claims to stand for. That drives a number of people in the Arab-Muslim world, at least, makes them very angry. The fact we are so hypocritical and inconsistent with our own professed values.

MEARSHEIMER: It is the longest ongoing occupation in modern history.

WALT: It’s still ongoing; there are others like the British occupation of India that lasted much longer. Of all occupations that are currently happening, and there aren’t that many, it’s certainty the longest, continuing occupation that is still happening.

Wajahat Ali is Pakistani Muslim American who is neither a terrorist nor a saint. He is a playwright, essayist, humorist, and recent J.D. whose work, “The Domestic Crusaders,” is the first major play about Muslim Pakistani Americans living in a post 9-11 America. His blog is at http://goatmilk.wordpress.com/. He can be reached at wajahatmali@gmail.com

On Islamo-Fascism and Other Vacuous Epithets

By WAJAHAT ALI

Wajahat Ali speaks to American political scientist and writer Dr. Norman Finkelstein about the denial of his tenure at DePaul University, anti-Semitism, and challenging the academic status quo on the Palestine-Israel conflict.

WAJAHAT ALI: In the recent DePaul University tenure controversy, you and a vocal community of supporters suggested “external pressures” forced the University to deny you tenure despite your overwhelming popularity and respect amongst your peers and students. What is your response to this denial?

NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: I do not want to be a tenure martyr. It was for sure a disgusting ordeal. But my main concern now is to move on and put it behind me. Reasonable people do not doubt why I was denied tenure. The facts are straightforward. I easily met all the criteria of tenure at DePaul. I was denied tenure due to my vocal opposition to Israeli policies in the occupied Palestinian Territories.

Regarding your scholarship, you question and challenge what some consider long-held assumptions regarding the Israeli-Palestine conflict, specifically the actual intentions and motivations of several parties, such as the Israeli government, the United States, and the Arab world. Currently, what do you believe are the most crucial and major obstacles that if removed, could establish some sustainable semblance of peace in that region?

The basic terms for settling the conflict are not a mystery. They are embodied every year in the same General Assembly resolution titled “Peaceful Settlement of the Palestine Question.” The resolution calls for full Israeli withdrawal to the June 1967 borders. The entire world apart from the U.S., Israel and this or that South Pacific atoll (Nauru, Palau, Tuvalu, Micronesia, Marshall Islands) supports this settlement. Once the U.S. and Israel accept the G.A. resolution, the basis will be in place to resolve the conflict.

In your book Beyond Chutzpah, you present evidence against Dr. Alan Dershowitz’s book, Case for Israel, and conclude that his work is a mixture of plagiarism, shoddy research, and poor scholarship. If Dr. Dershowitz’s book is filled with so much error, how do such works become authoritative pieces on the subject?

To win acclaim in mainstream media on certain subjects you merely have to echo the party line; it has precious little to do with actual scholarship. The Nazi holocaust and the Israel-Palestine conflict are two such subjects. Terrorism is another one. I just read this ridiculous book by a so-called leading American intellectual named Paul Berman entitled Terror and Liberalism. The book is fact-free. Indeed, it might be called insane in a rational culture. It starts from the premise that no country in the world has done more for Muslims than the United States. That’s the central premise. You can imagine where it goes from there. Of course it’s a huge bestseller in the United States. It’s hard to imagine how debased U.S. intellectual culture is. Although, in all fairness, I doubt it has yet sunk to the level of France where Bernard Henri-Levy is called a philosopher.

In your controversial book, The Holocaust Industry, you make two arguments. One is that the promotion of the uniqueness of “Jewish suffering” experienced during the Holocaust is used to shield and deflect legitimate criticism of Israel. The second builds upon this and says that this promotion allows a powerful industry to label any such critic, no matter how legitimate, an Anti-Semite. How has this “labeling” played out in recent years in regard to critics of Israeli domestic and internal policies?

Whenever Israel comes under international pressure to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict diplomatically or on account of its human rights violations, it revives the extravaganza called The New Anti-Semitism. In 1974 the Anti-Defamation League, an Israel lobby group in the U.S., put out a book called The New Anti-Semitism and in 1981 it put out another book called The Real Anti-Semitism. Right after the new intifada began, the Israel lobby again started with The New Anti-Semitism. The purposes of this agitprop are pretty obvious: to delegitimize all criticism of Israel as motivated by anti-Semitism and to turn the perpetrators into the victims. It seems to have less effect in recent years due to overuse: once you start calling Jimmy Carter an anti-Semite, people really begin to wonder.

Anyone who knows this “info-tainment industry” well knows that “scholarship” and polemical histrionics make loyal bedfellows, thus explaining the phenomenon of shock jocks, right wing radio hosts, and the rise of polemical pundits.
What is the role of the professional and ethical academic and historian, specifically one whose concentration deals with the Middle East, in today’s hysterical society? Does your experience with DeP