James Taranto reminds us that anti-Israel is indeed anti-semite for some people. (Part 3)

From Best of the Web Today on Wednesday, March 22, 2006. (Link above.)

Anti-Jew Déjà Vu
Blogger Ed Lasky notes a fascinating piece that appeared in the Jan. 10, 2003, issue of the Chicago Maroon, a student newspaper at the University of Chicago:

An open letter demanding vigilance in ensuring that Israel does not forcibly expel Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza has drawn the endorsement of nearly a thousand American academics, including eight at the University of Chicago.

The letter, adopted from one circulated by Israeli academics, cites Israeli politicians who publicly support removing Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza and relocating them into neighboring Arab countries. The "fog of war [with Iraq] could be exploited by the Israeli government to commit further
crimes against the Palestinian people, up to full-fledged ethnic cleansing," the letter reads. . . .

"The precedent is there [to forcibly expel Palestinians], and it
behooves us to make sure it does not happen again," said John Mearsheimer, co-director of the Program on International Security Policy at the University and one of the letter's signatories.

Mearsheimer, of course, is a co-author, with Stephen Walt, of the infamous Harvard paper arguing that there is no moral or strategic basis for America's support of Israel and concluding that such support is explained by "the unmatched power of the Israel Lobby." As we noted Monday, their paper has drawn praise from David Duke.

The claim that Israel would expel Palestinians from the disputed territories had a familiar ring to it, and after some digging through our archives, we figured out why. On March 14, 2003, less than a week before coalition troops crossed the Iraqi frontier, we quoted a reader e-mail responding to our mystification at the idea--then being propounded by figures as diverse as Edward Said, Pat Buchanan, David Duke and Rep. Jim Moran (D., Va.)--"that the impending liberation of Iraq is the result of a conspiracy by a Zionist 'cabal,' as Buchanan calls it, that is 'colluding with Israel' to 'ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America's interests.' "

I would like to suggest Pat Buchanan is better described as "rabidly pro-American" rather than "anti-semitic". I think Pat's record proves he deserves the benefit of the doubt here. I have heard him attack every "ally" we have at one time or another.

Our reader wrote:

What is obvious is that they [the Israelis] will use the resulting chaos as a pretext to get rid of the Palestinians, driving them out of the country into Jordan or Egypt. Who will say or do anything to stop them when the region is totally destabilized and a mess?

We are not cruel enough to reveal the identity of this silly missive's author, but we will say that the person is at the University of Chicago and is not Mearsheimer. Apparently this idea was very much in the air among Windy City savants in early 2003. Three years later, Israel not only has not expelled the Palestinian Arabs; it has withdrawn from Gaza. The prediction not only was not "obvious" but was flat wrong. We said so at the time:

Let us spell out the assumptions underlying this theory:

That the disastrous outcome of war in Iraq--"chaos," with the region "totally destabilized and a mess"--is foreordained.

That Israel and its co-conspirators, some of whom hold subcabinet-level positions in the Bush administration, know this, but the rest of the administration and the majority of Congress have no clue and thus have been duped by the Zionist plotters into thinking the war has a significant chance of success.

That although the whole region will be engulfed in "chaos," "totally destabilized and a mess," Israel will have no problem managing the forcible relocation of more than three million people, many of them heavily armed with guns and explosives, all the while defending its borders against the hostile states and terrorist groups that surround it.

There is actually one more assumption implicit in the 2003 prediction of imminent "ethnic cleansing" in the disputed territories: that Israel would not observe any moral constraint against such an action. In other words, those who predicted mass expulsion of Palestinians assumed both (a) that Israel is wicked and (b) that carrying out the imagined plan would be practicable. We'd argue that both (a) and (b) are false, but clearly they cannot both be true. It may be that a conviction that Israel is evil blinded advocates of this theory to its practical shortcomings.

In a 2005 essay for Josh Marshall's TPMCafe.com titled "A Democratic Foreign Policy?," G. John Ikenberry sang the praises of both the authors of the Harvard study, among others:

It is worth noting that some of the most lucid and compelling voices in Democratic foreign policy circles are in fact scholars who ground their ideas in realist theory. These realist-oriented security studies scholars--who include the top figures in the field such as John Mearsheimer, Steve Walt, Barry Posen,
Robert Art, and many others--all have distinct and sophisticated realist-oriented theoretical views of world politics. But they also have spoken out against Bush foreign policy and opposed the Iraq war in unusually systematic
and intelligent ways.

Can we at least agree that entertaining lurid fantasies about Israeli depravity does not qualify as "realism" in any meaningful sense of the word?