"By my count there are 1,247 footnotes; only three refer to correspondence with a source and only two mention interviews with sources."

This was one of the first things I noticed about the article. You can't write a scholarly article trawling through Lexis Nexis in your Hyde Park/Cambridge office.

This critique of M/W is fair, but read Fishman's review for the opposite problem. Fishman (who, by the way, works for Dennis Ross at the Washington Institute) seems very proud of the conversations that he's had with Bush administration officials. So proud, in fact, that he seems willing to take them at face value. Two points:

(1) Haven't we learned by now that nothing this administration says should be taken at face value?

(2) If anybody in this administration (or any other) really was being influenced by the Israel lobby, would they ever admit it?

Re: the above comment- the great thing about conspiracy theories (in fact what makes them conspiracy theories) is that they are unfalsifiable.

Anything the Bush administration denies obviously must be true.

Nope, I don't think it's "obviously true." In fact, quite the contrary. I think it's difficult for anybody, M/W included, to say with any certainty whether any claim about the Israel lobby is true or not. Perhaps we'll know 30 years from now when key papers are declassified, but I doubt it (people don't put this stuff in papers either).

As I've said repeatedly to friends and colleagues, rather than debating the unknowable, I think it would be much more productive to debate the key premise of the M/W thesis. That is, does the United States have a strategic and/or moral imperative to offer the support that it does to Israel? If the answer is yes, then we needn't spend much time trying to explain US support. If the answer is no, then the continuing support really is a puzzle that *might* be explicable by the Israel lobby. What a vitally important debate that would be, but instead we're going to be subjected to a bunch of he said/she said.

I'll bet if I opened a copy of States and Social Revolutions and looked at the footnotes and bibliography (rather strangely structured, if I recall) I wouldn't find a single reference to an archive, nor a single box number.

I'll bet if I thumbed through Political Order in Changing Societies, I'd find nary an reference to an interview.

Nevertheless, the original article did use primary sources, such as the Foreign Aid Green Book, and references the relevant experts in the relevant areas (I particularly remember a reference to Justin McCarthy, one of the three top experts on Ottoman demography, you don't reference McCarthy if you haven't done your homework in obscure areas)

You are never going to convince Yglesias that anything Israel does is good. If you read all his posts on Israel they simply parrot the "progressive" consensus that Israel is bad and oppressed palestinians are good. He adds nothing new or interesting to the discussion even from an anti-israel prospective. As a Jew, it is probably more difficult for him to establish his "progressive" street credibility on Israel. Hence, the inordiante amount of time he spends bashing it or it's supporters.

Their scholarship is shoddy. I wonder though why so many people fail to discuss any of the other lobby groups with the same ferocity. Does anyone believe that the Saudis and company are not engaged in lobbying the government.

Their scholarship is shoddy. I wonder though why so many people fail to discuss any of the other lobby groups with the same ferocity. Does anyone believe that the Saudis and company are not engaged in lobbying the government.

Mark Buehner,

Re: the above comment- the great thing about conspiracy theories (in fact what makes them conspiracy theories) is that they are unfalsifiable.

Anything the Bush administration denies obviously must be true.

Well, the opposite view would be that the Bush administration is either totally incompetent (see natural disasters -> Katrina, or see planning for post-war Iraq -> see no planning at all once the preferred scenario didn´t work out). Or that the Bush administration somehow doesn´t care about incompetence as long as it doesn´t hurt them in domestic politics.

Any Western government / administration which doesn´t punish incompetence - while already governing for six years - should be suspect IMO.

The criticism of W&M is just so absurd. All that anyone can do is try to discredit them because they don't have the right footnotes? Why not discuss the argument, even if their 1200 footnotes are not perfect. If it isn't obvious, the vast, vast majority of books are messed up. even the most popular and influential. And though the book is not out and i have not read it, i find it hard to believe that they have not responded in the book to the lazy criticisms of their paper. And the criticism about first hand sources was a pretty typical one. But anyway, for those who find this criticism to be substantial, let me ask what good it would do to interview people who are directly involved? Do you think that Martin Indyke or Dennis Ross are just going to come out and admit that they are doing Israel's work at the expense of the USA? Do you think they can knock on the door of a secret club of Jews who control the world and ask for interviews about how they do it? I mean, seriously, it sounds like that is what you are asking, and that you would admit that they have a strong argument without such interviews...

The truth is, they explicitly say that they do no think there is a "cabal" of jews who run make this policy. And they explicitly state that they think the policy is a result of a bunch of factors, specific and general. If it were dependent on simply a few people, then interviews would probably be a much more fundamental aspect of the research. But that is just not the case, and thus, interviews might help and they might not. Similarly, Dan doesn't have to interview the Chinese trade minister to see how trade between the USA and China works. Maybe it would help, but it is not fundamental. And too, they are scholars, not journalists. They are analyzing factors and forces, not writing a newspaper article.

lastly, to "Dave" above, if you don't see why people would think Israel is a criminal state, you need to have your head examined. I am pretty sure you can understand why Iraqis might be fighting the USA, but you don't seem to see that Israel is also occupying Palestine, sanctioning and starving the people, cutting off their electricity, preventing them from getting basic supplies and medical care, and overall oppressing them. If being Jewish makes you oblivious to that, then you are a deranged person. I am sure Stalin did many things that many people liked or respected. But his crimes absolutely outweighed his merits, and thus he is a villain of history. Israel has also done many things that have been good for some people, but it was born out of a total crime against the Palestinians, and it has sustained the crime and even tightened it. So, like a serial killer who might also volunteer to help people now and then, Israel is never going to be anything more then an illegitimate, criminal state that has turned Gaza into worse then the Warsaw ghetto. And the great irony is that Jews are the people that probably have most experience with oppression in world history and they demand recognition for it.... But they totally ignore their own crimes and evils. it is just absolutely pathetic. If i said the same thing you said above about the germans who made the Warsaw ghetto, that you people never will acknowledge the good things about them.... you would flip your lid. just look in the mirror!

oops, i just reread dave's post. you were referring to Yglesias "as a jew" not yourself. So in that respect, i misspoke. but my overall point still holds even if that specific part doesn't.

and, too, another error, i said:
"it sounds like that is what you are asking, and that you would admit that they have a strong argument without such interviews..."
when i meant to say:
"it sounds like that is what you are asking, and that you would NOT admit that they have a strong argument with such interviews..."

My point being, the critics are the ones who want it to be a cabal, not W&M.

The criticism of W&M is just so absurd. All that anyone can do is try to discredit them because they don't have the right footnotes? Why not discuss the argument, even if their 1200 footnotes are not perfect.

W&M are not bloggers. They are putative scholars. The only reason anybody cares what they wrote is because they're scholars. Scholars are defined by scholarship, and scholarship relies not on "argument," but on evidence. Without evidence, one isn't doing serious work. And what you dismiss as criticism of "the right footnotes" is actually a criticism of the quality of the evidence they employ.

As for your denigration of interviews, of course one doesn't have to -- in fact, one shouldn't -- take at face value the statements of interested parties. But one needs to include their views in one's analysis. One can then point out the countervailing evidence, to be sure. But one can't ignore what they say.

Joe M. comes through once more as the ardent
propagandist for Palestinian Terrorists. One
wonders if he isn't a member of Hamas.

As in almost all of his posts not a single
word about the Crimes against Humanity committed
daily against, not only Israelis, but the
Palestinian people themselves by Hamas, Fatah,
IJ, Hezbollah and other Islamist extremist groups.

To Joe M. ONLY the Jews are guilty, all others
merely innocent bystanders. Just like Joe's
intellectual ancestors, the National Socialists,
the Jews are a criminal race - life unworthy of
life. He shows clearly that the evil idea
of anti-Semitism is alive in the progressive
left.

His tirade against Israel is just as devoid of
scholarship as is M&W's screed, so, no wonder,
he supports it 100%.

During my years at U of C, taking courses taught by Mearsheimer and other members of the faculty there, I would ask how to write papers. I got the usual tips - go to primary sources, if one source facts does not check out with another set of facts, try to figure out what happened. Conducting interviews was never mentioned, since we were not taking journalism courses. Charging M&W with not being good journalists seems silly, especially when you consider the shoddy journalism done in the run-up to the Iraq war. M&W spoke out against the invasion before it started, serious journalists like Tom Friedman, who never misses an opportunity to talk about the famous people he's interview, simply parroted what the Administration told them. Perhaps M&W should become journalists after all.

"Putative" scholars, David? I'd mention something about damning with faint praise, but there wasn't even any praise involved there to begin with, was there?

And, yes, the "primary sources" attack is silly. One can count on the fingers of one foot how many works in your typical issue of your typical IR journal rely principally on primary sources. To say that a relatively minor methodological error like that somehow ruins the credibility of the thesis itself is just silly. This debate was long hashed out a long time ago, and it's still come down to the same conclusion: the problem with M+W isn't that there aren't effective lobbyists for Israel...

...(even though, at times, the State of Israel is a little discomfited by their enthusiasm)...

...but that the capitalized term "Israel Lobby" suggests a level of unified organization that simply isn't there.

To try to extend that to vague suggestions of anti-semitism is an far greater insult to honest scholarship and advocacy than anything M+W ever wrote.

KXB: newspapers are not primary sources, unless one's research is about the media.

Demosthenes, I did not call them anti-semites. (If they were anti-semites, I doubt they could have hidden it for all these years.) Nor did I say -- nor have any of their critics -- that there are not Israeli lobbyists. But to call the failure to examine primary sources a "minor" methodological error is just frivolous.

Nobody who has spent any time dealing with the media would think for a second that one can accurately gauge people's thoughts by pulling quotes out of newspaper articles. I'm not a prominent figure, but over the years I've been quoted in the media a few dozen times -- often inaccurately or out of context, and at best for a minor point that I barely touched upon in a long interview about something else. (And citing Maureen Dowd for something?)

But forget interviews. How about books or articles or speeches written by people involved in these issues? It would seem odd to discuss U.S. foreign policy towards Israel -- well, towards anything -- in the last few decades without discussing Henry Kissinger. Do you know how many times he was mentioned in their paper? Once -- not for anything he said or did or thought, but for something Dayan said to him. How about Warren Christopher? Never mentioned. Madeline Albright? The same zero mentions. (The only secretaries of state mentioned as such are Rice and Powell, and Rice's views are never discussed.) How about Dennis Ross? If one were going to discuss U.S. policy towards Israel, how does one not discuss the chief U.S. negotiator in detail? But he's barely mentioned, and his book on the negotiations isn't even cited once. Meanwhile, the Guardian newspaper, of all sources, is cited numerous times for what was going on in Washington.

No, the problem is not simply that Israel Lobby was capitalized, although that obviously aroused many emotions over the piece. The problem is that the work was crap.

I agree that the methodological error of not using primary sources is less important than the other errors. They simply don't know much about the Middle East or anything about lobbying. (That's why I called them "putative" scholars -- this was not written as an exercise of their scholarly expertise. Noam Chomsky may be a scholar in linguistics, but he's only pretending to be one when he discusses anything else, such as foreign policy. Of course, there's a closer connection between W&M's field of study -- IR -- and domestic politics than there is between linguistics and domestic politics, but that's damning with faint praise.) The very first sentence they write on the subject -- that is, the first sentence of Footnote 1 -- is, to quote Wolfgang Pauli "'not right; it's not even wrong." There's no evidence in the article that they've ever reviewed any literature on lobbying.

Moreover, if one were going to discuss foreign policy as a function of lobbying, don't you think you'd at least discuss the other side of the equation, even if to discount it? But do you know how many times that W&M mention in their article the oil lobby (0) or OPEC (1 -- in the introduction, discussing the embargo of the early 1970s). Saudi Arabia is mentioned twice, in passing, neither related to lobbying. WIMEA is never mentioned, although WIMEP is mentioned numerous times. They mention "Arab lobby" in a grand total of one footnote, citing a two-decade old article, and an article which is only about Arab-Americans and not Arab countries.

Incidentally, while I don't call them anti-semites, they're definitely anti-Israel. On numerous occasions they pretend that the Israeli government is in Tel Aviv, rather than Jerusalem, discussing, e.g., "relations between Tel Aviv and Washington." We know diplomats often have to deny reality for the sake of diplomacy, but scholars are supposed to focus on truth, not diplomacy. There's no "Tel Aviv" there. It's Jerusalem.

David Nieporent -- "Incidentally, while I don't call them anti-semites, they're definitely anti-Israel. On numerous occasions they pretend that the Israeli government is in Tel Aviv, rather than Jerusalem ..."

I've seen this claim [that M&W are anti-Israel] elsewhere and don't understand where it comes from. Could you support it with some unambiguous evidence, or else retract it?

And let's set some standards here. Referring to Israel's foreign policy center as "Tel-Aviv" hardly counts as evidence of anti-Israel sentiments; it's just sensible shorthand. As Wikipedia notes -- "Due to the international dispute over the status of Jerusalem ... all but two of the international embassies to Israel are in Tel Aviv or the surrounding district" [including the US embassy].

David Nieporent -- "Incidentally, while I don't call them anti-semites, they're definitely anti-Israel. On numerous occasions they pretend that the Israeli government is in Tel Aviv, rather than Jerusalem ..."

I've seen this claim [that M&W are anti-Israel] elsewhere and don't understand where it comes from. Could you support it with some unambiguous evidence, or else retract it?

And let's set some standards here. Referring to Israel's foreign policy center as "Tel-Aviv" hardly counts as evidence of anti-Israel sentiments; it's just sensible shorthand. As Wikipedia notes -- "Due to the international dispute over the status of Jerusalem ... all but two of the international embassies to Israel are in Tel Aviv or the surrounding district" [including the US embassy].

newspapers are not primary sources, unless one's research is about the media.

Check out Wilkinson's Votes and Violence , the guy wrote a whole book based on newspaper reports of violence in India. Likewise I believe Pape's work on suicide bombers is almost entirely from media reports.

The nitpicking is because people don't like the message. BTW one of difficulties in investigating the lobby, in its main institutional form, is that AIPAC does not directly give money to candidates, nor is it registered with the FEC. Yet AIPAC is undoubtedly a huge part of the lobby.

As for other lobbies, people attack them all the time. The Cuban Americans in Florida always get stick for screwing up our relation with that nation.

There are of course a lot more things that could be done to categorize and quantify the pro-Israel activity in the USA. Social network analysis, analysing campaign contributions, rigorous discourse analysis of pundits and politicians. Who is going to do it, though. It is unlikely to get published, and if it is published, will no doubt open the scholar up to the same criticisms/attacks that M&W have faced. They are in a position to take it, most scholars are not.

Mitchell, the reason "AIPAC does not give money... nor is it registered with the FEC" is because, despite its name, it isn't a PAC; it was named Public Affairs Committee before the Political Action Committee became an acronym. It's a lobbying group. (You may know this, but your statement makes it sound like it was supposed to be registered; it isn't. The FEC only regulates campaign finance.)

Again, nobody denies -- nobody has ever denied -- that people who are pro-Israel lobby in (and outside) Washington. AIPAC lobbies fiercely, as do other people who are pro-Israel, as do people who are pro-Medicare, pro-guns, pro-choice, pro-life, pro-environment, and, yes, pro-Arab. The dispute with W&M is over these primary issues:

1. Their claim that there are neither strategic nor moral reasons for the U.S. to be allied with Israel. (This isn't a thesis they seek to prove; they treat it as near-axiomatic.)
2. Their claim that there's not just Israel lobbyists, but an Israel Lobby.
3. Their claim that this nefarious Israel Lobby is what determines U.S. policy towards Israel and the Arab world.

As for your reference to "Cuban Americans in Florida," I think people blame (or credit, depending on one's view) Cuban American voters, not lobbyists, for influencing our policy towards Cuba.

As for Wilkinson's book, I don't have handy access, but the excerpt on the website certainly doesn't make it sound as if that's true: Collecting these data on Hindu-Muslim riots involved reading through every single issue of India’s newspaper of record from 1950 to 1995, as well as (for my 1900–49 data) hundreds of reports in other newspapers, official government reports, and archives in India, England, and the United States. It sounds as if he's collecting and analyzing data, using incident reports in newspapers -- I don't mean that newspapers can't be relied upon for pure factual data -- not pretending that quotes from newspapers explain why people acted as they did.

-----

Responding to pireader (twice):

And let's set some standards here. Referring to Israel's foreign policy center as "Tel-Aviv" hardly counts as evidence of anti-Israel sentiments; it's just sensible shorthand. As Wikipedia notes -- "Due to the international dispute over the status of Jerusalem ... all but two of the international embassies to Israel are in Tel Aviv or the surrounding district" [including the US embassy].

It would be "sensible shorthand" if M&W were discussing the relationship between Washington and our embassy. But they were discussing the relationship between the U.S. and the Israeli government, and that's in Jerusalem, not Tel Aviv. There are no relations between Tel Aviv and Washington, any more than there are relations between Chicago and Moscow (unless one is talking about a cultural exchange between mayors -- which W&M weren't).

At another point in the paper, M&W write that an article in the Washington Post "makes clear that Tel Aviv was 'redoubling its efforts to warn the Bush administration [about Iran].'" But the actual Washington Post article says "Israeli officials," not "Tel Aviv," and there are no Israeli officials in Tel Aviv; they're in Jerusalem.

Look, almost all countries in the world, including the United States, officially recognize Taiwan as a part of One China and Beijing as the capital of that China. But no academician writing about U.S.-Taiwanese relations would talk about Beijing when he meant Taipei, unless he was pro-China/anti-Taiwan. Jerusalem has been Israel's undivided capital for forty years, whether other countries formally recognize it or not. (And, in fact, the U.S. does formally recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital. It's both de facto and de jure the Israeli capital. Why on earth would W&M pretend otherwise?)

What Mitchell Young says about primary sources is true. I would also venture a guess that "The Tragedy of Great Power Politics" a book which won Mearsheimer a ton of accolades is similarly devoid of primary sources of the type asked in the case of this book.

prof, going by readers comment, should I conclude that there isnt Israel lobby after all and/or W&M are shoudy scholars because they didnt have a primary source?
To be very frank, as an outsider, America and its politics are really old stories, let us start afresh..anybody on China and Israel lobby please?

prof, going by readers comment, should I conclude that there isnt Israel lobby after all and/or W&M are shoudy scholars because they didnt have a primary source?
To be very frank, as an outsider, America and its politics are really old stories, let us start afresh..anybody on China and Israel lobby please?

Holy Blood, Holy Grail was full of primary sources of various kinds. Does that make it true? Scholarly? Or even well-researched?

David Nieporent --

Let's stay on topic. You asserted that M&W are "definitely anti-Israel". I asked you to support that with unambiguous evidence.

You failed to do so. Instead, you merely re-iterated your personal disapproval of a widespread and univerally-understood phrasing(referring to Israel's government as "Tel Aviv").

If you have any substantial evidence that M&W have an "anti-Israel" bias, then please offer it. If not, then please do the gentlemanly thing and retract.

And, by the way, sorry for the double posting above.

The asia times reports on how Israeli government vehemently tried to stop the US from invading Iraq

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IH30Ak04.html

And despite the misleading headline

"Wilkerson noted that the main point of their communications was not that the US should immediately attack Iran, but that "it should not be distracted by Iraq and Saddam Hussein" from a focus on the threat from Iran."

Looks like W&M are pretty much looking like idiots now.

Detlef,

It is the responsibility of voters to decide and act on the competence of their leaders. See Carter, one term, fired for cause.