Greg Martin; courtesy of Mearsheimer and Walt

Real controversial: Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer have taken a lot of heat for their views on what they call the “Israel lobby”.

FOREIGN POLICY: It’s been nearly a year and a half since you first published your piece, “The Israel Lobby,” in the London Review of Books. What have you learned in that time?

John J. Mearsheimer: The principal lesson I’ve learned is that there is a large number of people in the United States who agree with our argument but are afraid to stand up and say so for fear of being personally attacked. I was actually quite surprised by how much correspondence we received from individuals who said that they agreed with us and who said that what we were courageous to write the London Review of Books article. It’s also clear from our correspondence and from talking to people across the country that many of them want an open debate on the issues we raised in the article and have expanded on in the book.

Stephen M. Walt: Even people who didn’t agree with everything we wrote or in some cases had quite strong disagreements often said that they welcomed open discussion of the subject, that it shouldn’t be a taboo, and that one ought to be able to talk about pro-Israel interest groups the same way that we talk about other interest groups in the United States. Watching the Lebanon war of last summer provided another case where the influence of the lobby on U.S. policy undermined America’s position in the region, and was also bad for Israel.

JM: Furthermore, watching what happened to Jimmy Carter after his book was published last year confirmed in large part many of the arguments that we made in the original article about how the lobby reacts when anyone criticizes Israel or the U.S.-Israeli relationship. Carter, who is a fundamentally decent man, a philo-Semite, and a staunch defender of Israel’s existence, was nevertheless called a Jew hater, accused of being sympathetic to Nazis and terrorists, and accused of plagiarism, all because he wrote a book that was critical of Israeli policy in the occupied territories.

FP: You said in your original article that you wrote it in order to break a taboo about criticizing Israeli policies. At the same time, I hear you saying that people have approached you privately and congratulated you, but it doesn’t sound like a lot of people have come forward publicly and defended you.

SW: I don’t think that’s entirely true. This is a controversial topic, and therefore you’re going to get a range of views. But in the past year or so, a number of people wrote quite supportive articles, ranging from Tony Judt, to Michael Massing, to Zbigniew Brzezinski in FOREIGN POLICY. It’s still somewhat risky for people who are in the foreign-policy mainstream and want to have careers in high office or wield influence in Washington to publicly embrace some of the points that we made, and several people told us that privately. But we have had public supporters for our position.

JM: When the piece first came out in March of last year, almost all of the responses were negative, though there were a few individuals who stood up to defend us. But as time went by, more and more people stood up and defended our piece, or at least our right to make the argument.

FP: What are the most valid criticisms you have received about the argument you advance in “The Israel Lobby,” and have you incorporated any of them into your book?

SW: One of the reasons we wrote the book after the article was to clarify our position on a number of points. And some of the places we devoted a lot of effort to in the book were designed to address specific criticisms that people had made. Obviously, there were a lot of ad hominem attacks on us personally, but we didn’t try to respond to those. But when people had substantive criticisms about our definition of the lobby or about key events, or about the different ways that groups within the lobby work, we tried to provide additional evidence to support our position, but also to lay out in greater detail exactly what we were saying and what we weren’t saying.

JM: Any criticism that’s neither ad hominem nor misrepresents our argument is “valid,” in the sense that it’s legitimate to raise as part of the discussion. We wanted people to engage the article on substantive issues. A large number of people did that, which is all for the good, because we were trying to promote a discussion on Israeli policy and especially on the U.S.-Israeli relationship. We did not write the article thinking that everyone would agree with us. That said, we don’t believe any of the criticisms successfully refuted our main claims.