How US Public Opinion Has Shifted on Israel, Five Years After the Publishing of 'The Israel Lobby'

Five years ago this month the political scientists Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer published their ultra-controversial article on "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" in the London Review of Books. There is little doubt that the public conversation about Israel has changed as a result. Criticism of Israel is more frequent and forceful, and references to the pro-Israel lobby are far more common in the media. Their critics concede that Walt and Mearsheimer had impact, but only in poisoning the discourse. "They lowered the bar on sober analysis in the discussion, regrettably," says Robert Satloff, Executive Director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a center-right think tank.

The article's impact on actual Middle East policy is less clear. Conservatives frequently charge that President Obama is hostile to the Jewish state, but the much-publicized spats between the administration and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have remained mostly at the rhetorical level. In December 2009, Obama approved $30 billion in military aid to Israel to be distributed over the next decade, and earlier the administration helped nix the UN's Goldstone Report that was severely critical of Israel's conduct in the 2008-09 war in the Gaza Strip. In January, the Obama administration declared that Israel's investigation into the 2010 Turkish Flotilla incident was "impartial and transparent." Israeli settlement-building in the occupied territories has also continued unabated.

Just below the level of policy, however, it is evident that something has changed. The past several years have witnessed a series of events that cumulatively suggest there are "tectonic shifts" underway in U.S.-Israel relations, as Israeli ambassador Michael Oren said in June of 2010. J Street, a liberal lobbying organization committed to pressuring Israel as much as the Palestinians in pursuit of peace, has emerged as a very public force. Journalist Peter Beinart initiated a controversy decrying "The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment" in alienating young Jews from Zionism. "Simply stated, the instinctive solidarity that American liberals, many of them Jews, have long felt with Israel is in decline," Slate editor-in-chief Jacob Weisberg declared last year.

Most recently, Obama was urged in an open letter signed by 50 prominent diplomats, journalists and scholars not to veto a U.N. Security Council Resolution condemning Israeli settlement-building. The bipartisan list of signatories includes Ambassador Thomas Pickering, former Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci and former Assistant Secretary of State James Dobbins. Also on the letter, organized by Steve Clemons of the New American Foundation, a centrist Washington think tank, are the names John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. "I thought Walt and Mearsheimer's book was extremely important," enthuses Jack Matlock, Ambassador to the Soviet Union during the Reagan administration, who signed the letter. Matlock believes the authors erred only in their analysis in not calling their book "The Likud Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," referring to the right-wing Israeli party. "They've done a great job in starting a movement." Vice-President Joe Biden, Gen. David Petraeus, the top commander in Afghanistan, and Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have all reportedly suggested in various ways that Israel's policies are undercutting American security.

Seeing Walt and Mearsheimer's fingerprints on the letter and other developments seems sensible, but only in the broadest sense. "They opened up a discussion, and J Street is part of the answer to the questions they raised," says Jeremy Ben-Ami, executive director of J Street. Ben-Ami believes Walt and Mearsheimer went further in their arguments than they should have, but that they were outlining a problem J Street was designed to solve. "I don't think they made our job harder or easier, but they helped crystallize, prior to our launch, the question we were trying to answer, so it was perhaps a little easier for people to understand what we were trying to do."