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04/04/2006:
"Editor hits back over Israel row"
London Review of Books stands its ground after being accused of anti-Semitism in an article attacking pro-Israeli influence on US policy...But while Wilmers feels confident that the article examines legitimate concerns - in particular about the lobby group American Israel Public Affairs Committee - it is not a view shared by critics of the LRB. Among them is Professor Alan Dershowitz, a colleague of Walt at Harvard, who is criticised in the article for being an 'apologist' for Israel. Dershowitz denounced the authors last week as 'liars' and 'bigots' and compared their argument to neo-Nazi literature. It is a view shared by US academics Jeffrey Herf and Andrei Markovits, who wrote to the LRB: 'Accusations of powerful Jews behind the scenes are part of the most dangerous traditions of modern anti-Semitism.'
But while some have focused on the issue of anti-Semitism, others, following Dennis Ross's lead, have condemned the article as a shoddy piece of pseudo-academia. It is a view endorsed by journalist Christopher Hitchens, who has accused the authors of an exercise in Jewish 'name listing', and perhaps - most surprisingly - by Noam Chomsky, the Nobel-prize winning academic who has written on the pro-Israeli bias of the US media.
'Recognising that Mearsheimer-Walt took a courageous stand which merits praise,' he wrote for online magazine ZNet last week, 'we still have to ask how convincing their thesis is. Not very, in my opinion.'
Wilmers rejects the accusation by Hitchens, Ross and others that the Mearsheimer-Walt article has done little more than attempt to join up a disconnected list of people and organisations lobbying on different aspects of Israeli concern into a central 'Israel Lobby' - capitalised by the LRB. She admits now, however, that it would have been better to use a lower case 'l' for the word 'lobby' - to have avoided the risk of being misunderstood.
'It is not true that the authors simply lumped together a long list of people and organisations in the same piece to make their case for an "Israeli Lobby". To say that because someone is mentioned in context in a long piece is tainted by association with any other is wrong.'
Wilmers believes, too, that the most angry denunciations of anti-Semitism - while designed to serve the purpose of censorship by those attempting to forestall criticism of Israel - may actually encourage anti-Semitism in the long run.
guardian.co.uk
Haaretz:New Christian pro-Israel lobby aims to be stronger than AIPAC
