Delivered to The Israel Lobby and American Policy conference March 24, 2017 at the National Press Club
The Israel Lobby and American Policy conference was solely sponsored by the American Educational Trust, publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, and the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRmep). This is a rush transcript.
Janet McMahon: Hello. I’m Janet McMahon, the managing editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. I was out at the registration table trying to help sign people in when Dale started speaking, so I don’t know if he told you that the Washington Report would be 35 years old next month. And we have been following the Israel lobby since our very first issue in 1982, so it’s a special pleasure to introduce our first keynote speaker – Professor John Mearsheimer. He is the R. Wendell Harrison distinguished service professor of political science and the co-director of the Program on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago.
In March of 2006 he and Professor Stephen Walt of Harvard published an article in the London Review of Books entitled The Israel Lobby. The article had originally been commissioned by The Atlantic monthly, but that American publication decided not to publish it after all. Instead it found a home overseas. The paper’s publication caused an uproar in no small part because it shed light on what AIPAC operative Steve Rosen described as a night flower that thrives in the dark and shrivels up in the sunlight. Harvard posted the paper on its website, but removed its logo. Attacks on Mearsheimer and Walt range from naïve, that’s from Noam Chomsky, to – and this will shock you – anti-Semites. The following year their article evolved into the book The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy which has since been translated into 22 languages.
Professor Mearsheimer, by the way, will be signing copies of his book at 12:15 at the registration table where you signed in. I’m also particularly glad that he is joining us today. Because every year people ask us if he is going to be speaking at our conference, so it’s been a great pleasure this year to be able to say of course he is. Today he will be discussing what, if anything, has changed in the decades since The Israel Lobby was published. Please join me in welcoming Prof. John Mearsheimer.
What has changed since publication of The Israel Lobby and What The New Administration Can Do Differently
John Mearsheimer: Thank you for the kind introduction. It’s a great pleasure to be here today to speak before this distinguished audience. I would like to thank IRMEP and the Washington Report for inviting me to give this talk. Of course I thank all of you for coming out to hear me and the other speakers.
I would like to focus my talk on what has transpired regarding the Israel lobby and the U.S.-Israeli relationship in the ten years since Steve Walt and I wrote The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy. My…