The Israel Lobby Lobby

I've had an ongoing fascination with John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's thesis and its very public discontents. By now everyone knows the story: A year and a half ago a pair of academics out of the realist school of foreign policy published an essay in the London Review of Books. Titled "The Israel Lobby," it argued that a group of high-octane American Jews were more or less controlling which countries the U.S. warred against and that they were doing so out of heated concern for Israel's interests. As with all good polemic/propaganda, countervailing evidence was ignored. You had to seek elsewhere for Eisenhower's response to the 1956 Suez crisis; our continued alliance with Saudi Arabia; Bush Sr.'s coercion of Israel's non-retaliation policy during the first Gulf War; Israel's early about-face in support of the second Gulf War; its uncharacteristic hesitance to bomb a neighboring state's nuclear facilities; its attempted rapprochement with Syria, which, up until two weeks ago anyway, was accompanied by much nail-biting at the U.S. State Department. Etc.

The scandal this essay engendered was as predictable as it was inevitable. A few all-star questions included: Were Mearsheimer and Walt anti-Semitic? Had they drafted a new Protocols for the 21st century? Was it slightly uncomfortable to see this stuff published in a British periodical ("How odd / Of God / To choose / The Jews")? Noam Chomsky called the authors "brave" but unenlightening. Tony Judt rushed to their defense saying that they had got it right and oh, by the way, a binational state of Jews and Muslims living together side by side was the only way forward in the holy land, demographic parity be damned. Most recently, in Slate, Ron Rosenbaum discussed his own personal involvement in the "Lobby," and how the newly expanded book edition of Mearsheimer and Walt's case has misquoted him on the touchy question of a potential second Holocaust. (The one-word designation "Lobby," incidentally, has became the noisiest tocsin of creepiness in the whole affair; like Freemason, Illuminati, or Madonna, a single utterance hints at worlds of epistemology, opinion and cant.)

I've been meaning to write more about the Lobby. Problem is, I haven't read the book yet. It's not for lack of trying, I assure you. Jewcy ordered it way back when I spotted it in the Farrar, Straus and Giroux Fall catalogue, and I've every day been checking our snail mail to see if Amazon's packaging for this eagerly awaited volume is nearly as cool as the Muggle-themed box that carried the final Harry Potter installment. (Are we talking a banal Magen David-studded U.S. flag? I want my money back.)

This unusual delay of service has got me thinking. Jewcy's taken some calculated risks in the past — talking to Joanna Angel's mom, soliciting work from Justin Raimondo, doing Jeiger shots with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at Mercer Kitchen. However, we've never asked for a book whose publisher might have been suspicious of dispatching a copy to an address with such an avowedly Semitic tendency. (Joey gets all his Kevin Macdonald sent straight to home.)

Consider where other advance copies must have gone. The Forward could be the name of any lefty rag; Tikkun sounds like Kanye West's girlfriend; Nextbook defies opacity of intent; The Jewish Week is what Mearsheimer and Walt would be writing if they wrote filler for VH1.

So I ask you: Is there now an Israel Lobby Lobby being run by good, Scowcroftian isolationists and anti-Zionists who keep saucy texts about the tribe from falling into Jewish hands? If there is, how on earth do they do it? And has Abe Foxman, whose own The Deadliest Lies: The Israel Lobby and the Myth of Jewish Control, taken a number out of their playbook by also keeping his review copy away from Jewcy's in-box? We're right there in DUMBO. Easy to get to. The Poland Spring guy finds us just fine every week. Honest.