During the Cold War, Syria chose the Soviet sphere, leading to western democ-racies distancing itself from Damascus and towards Israel. It is easy for some to com-ment that the United States has always favored Israel, but this completely misses thestrategic choices made by Syria during the Cold War, that is a result of the divideand conquer strategy practiced by Hafiz Al-Asad, and the minority Alawi clan rulinga Sunni majority. Arab Nationalism, support for terrorism, and interventions inLebanon are all designed to distract the population from the despotic single-familyregime in Damascus.

The book’s final chapters discuss the pressures faced by Bashar Al-Asad some ofwhich was left by his late father. Bashar faces a United Nations Security Resolution1559 for Syria to leave Lebanon and for militias-some of who are Syrian-sponsoredto disarm. The assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hairiri, has led tosplits within Bashar’s inner-circle, and which manifested itself in the suicide (someargue assisted suicide) of Syria’s Interior Minister Ghazi Kenaan. Other challengesto Syria include the new Iraqi government providing the international communitywith evidence of Syrian involvement in insurgent infiltration. Finally, Iran’s reac-tionary President Ahmedinejad is dragging Syria closer into its orbit, and helpingto gradually turn Syria’s rhetoric of confrontation with Israel a reality. Rabil’s bookis highly recommended for those interested in the Middle East.

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. The Israel Lobby. New York: Farrar, Straus,and Giroux. August 27, 2007. 496 pages; $26.00. ISBN: 13:978-0-374-17772-0.

Reviewed by Noam Schimmel

Hebrew CollegeNewton, USA

The Israel Lobby has a simple thesis: that the political lobby that advocates forAmerican support for Israel is dangerously powerful and that the consequences ofthat lobby’s advocacy efforts are American policies that harm the best interests ofthe United States and the welfare and lives of US citizens because they are excess-ively supportive of Israel. The authors strive to strike a measured tone in their argu-ments, carefully documenting their claims, while regularly cautioning readers not tocome to the conclusion that they are advancing arguments that are in any way antag-onistic to Israel. They doth protest too much.

The questions that The Israel Lobby raises are important and legitimate, andmany of the issues raised by the authors are addressed thoughtfully, respectfully,and analytically, particularly in its initial two chapters and in parts of the finaltwo chapters. But the work is so riddled with bias, logical fallacies, innuendo, omis-sion of information, lack of attention paid to the broad context of the Arab-Israeliconflict, gross exaggeration, and implicit and thinly veiled contempt for Israel as torender the analysis that the authors undertake too fundamentally flawed to be ofmuch value. The work relies overwhelmingly on secondary sources, many of themjournalistic in nature and not independently corroborated.

The main argument of the book, regarding the intense power and undue influ-ence of the ‘‘Israel Lobby’’ is unconvincing because the authors never provide acoherent account of how the lobby uses its power and who it actually consists of.Instead, they rely on a stream of anecdotal accounts that support the authors’ bold

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contentions in a higgledy-piggledy fashion, without demonstrating the veracity of theauthors’ claims. At best, the authors show some correlation, but not causation,between the convictions of individuals in the ‘‘Israel Lobby’’ and various US govern-ment policy outcomes.

The authors show deep prejudice against the State of Israel, made most manifestin the authors’ recounting of Israel’s history and their largely one-sided depiction ofits military conflicts and responses to terror and the causes of its lengthy occupationof the West Bank. Walt and Mearsheimer state that, ‘‘They [Jews], in the pastcentury, have been the victimizers in the Middle East’’ (79). Setting aside its qualityas a reductionist pejorative stereotype, this statement is problematic because it isfactually wrong. Walt and Mearsheimer make no mention of the involvement ofArabs in the Nazi persecution of the Jews of Tunisia and the slaughter of Jews inTripoli in 1945 and 1948 and in other cities throughout the Arab world; discrimi-nation which hundreds of thousands of Jews living in Arab countries faced as a mat-ter of course historically, and particularly acutely in the 1930s and 1940s; andconfiscation of their property and loss of their civil and political rights.

Regarding the cause of terrorism in Israel, Walt and Mearsheimer overwhelm-ingly blame Israelis, ‘‘Israel does have a serious terrorism problem, but that is mainlythe consequence of colonizing the Occupied Territories’’ (80). Terrorism againstIsraeli civilians long preceded the 1967 Six Day War and Israel’s occupation ofthe West Bank, as Walt and Mearsheimer surely know. And they must also be awareof the fact that the charter of Hamas and the public statements of Hamas andIslamic Jihad officials, along with other, smaller Islamic terrorist groups do notrecognize the legitimacy of the State of Israel and advocate the mass murder of Jews,and in particular, of Jews living in Israel. The occupation alone does not explainPalestinian and Arab hatred of Israel and commitment to its violent destruction.

Walt and Mearsheimer depict Israel as a relentlessly and pathologically belliger-ent state, constantly seeking to steal, exploit, kill, and appropriate that which is notrightly its own and always turning down the offers of peace and sincere desires forcoexistence offered by its Arab neighbors. It is an ugly caricature of Israel, and itis startling in its transparent partisanship and lack of honesty and objectivity. Theymake no mention of the infamous 1967 Khartoum Declaration of the Arab Leaguewhich clearly stated no to peace with Israel, no to negotiations with Israel, and no torecognition of Israel which rather inconveniently contradicts their central casting ofIsrael as the sole aggressor in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

For Walt and Mearsheimer, although Israel has a right to exist it was born inoriginal sin. The reason why Israel has never had peace, they argue, is because ithas initiated wars of choice to expand its borders, beginning with its War of Inde-pendence, not because of Arab refusal to accept the UN approved plan of partitionfor an independent Jewish state and an independent Palestinian state. According toWalt and Mearsheimer, Israel holds onto the West Bank not because of any legit-imate security concerns, but simply because it desires to maximize its nationalterritory. That the truth might lie somewhere in between these two poles neverseems to occur to the authors, who, throughout their work, are drawn to makingtotalizing arguments in black and white with a fervent and misplaced moralmaniceanism.

In discussing terrorism and the motivations for suicide bombing, Walt andMearsheimer are particularly misguided. Betraying another flaw common in thethinking of many international relations and political science scholars, they assume

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that most human behavior is generally rational. This is a zealously guarded dogma,which is wholly unsubstantiated by psychological research, which in fact reveals justthe opposite: the intensely irrational and emotive bases of much of human behavior,individually and collectively.

Their arguments that Palestinian suicide bombing is a natural response tooppressive conditions ring hollow, in that they ignore the social, religious, political,and moral contexts which inspire and empower the mass murder of innocent peopleand condone it. Suicide bombing is not a rational way of protesting a legitimategrievance; it is an act of supreme nihilistic narcissism and sadistic and self-destructivepleasure in inflicting pain upon others and murdering them. It is a self-justifyingdramatic act-far from being universally common amongst people living underoccupation and suffering from oppression.

Walt and Mearshheimer depict Osama Bin-Laden as a rational actor, whoseprimary motivations for attacking America, they claim, stem from the Arab-Israeliconflict, Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, and America’s support for Israel.For Bin Laden and the Taliban, Israel’s very existence and America’s support forits existence is sufficient reason to hate Israel and America and to justify the massmurder of their citizens. The fanatical rage that Bin-Laden feels towards Americaand the Western world is primarily a function of his totalitarian and authoritariancommitments to a violent and imperial form of radical Islam. It does not stem fromthe active conscience of a rational individual, reasonably concerned and angered byIsraeli policies towards the Palestinians and American support for them. Bin Ladenhates America and Israel for a range of reasons: Jealousy, feelings of historicalhumiliation, ignorance, sexism, fear and hatred of human difference, delusions ofsuperiority, and religious bigotry, amongst other phenomena, are the primary moti-vators of Bin-Laden and of those who use terrorism and mass murder as means toachieve desired political and religious outcomes.

The code words that Walt and Mearsheimer use to frame the debate, such as‘‘colonize’’ and ‘‘apartheid’’ neither reflect reality nor add any value to their argu-ment and are more appropriate in political manifestos and partisan screeds. Theseterms inflame, rather than inform, confusing the particular and unique peoplesand contexts of the Middle East with forms of oppression and patterns of exploi-tation that belong in European and South African contexts, not in the context ofIsrael’s relations with its Arab neighbors.

It is very easy to defame Israel by tendentiously depicting it as being against‘‘peace’’ by insisting that it is solely Israel’s refusal to offer the Palestinians a stateon the West Bank that prevents peace between Arabs and Jews in the Middle East.But as realists, Walt and Mearsheimer should know that the geo-strategic reality issignificantly more complex than that, and that peace does not automatically followthe signing of a peace treaty. Israel is less than ten miles wide at its narrowest, andIsrael has good reason to believe that returning all of the West Bank and not holdingon to pockets of land in the Jordan Valley and along the eastern border with Israelwill put its major population centers in dangerously close range of Kassam rocketswhich Palestinian militants continue to fire at Israel long after it has withdrawn fromthe Gaza Strip.

Walt and Mearsheimer manifest the very same tendency they accuse the ‘‘IsraelLobby’’ of displaying, a tendency to use delegitimizing and emotive language to stiflecritical debate and obfuscate complex moral issues. Negative adjectives, such as‘‘destructive,’’ ‘‘carnage’’, and other such words are used repeatedly to describe

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Israeli actions, indeed; they are largely reserved for them. Walt and Mearsheimer saythat evangelical Christians who support Israel should, ‘‘. . . be encouraged to reflecton the human tragedy that Israel continues to inflict on the Palestinians . . .’’(354). That the tragedy is a mutual one, and that the Palestinians inflict it upon Israeland Israelis as well, is, as always throughout the book, either tangential or whollyignored.

Walt and Mearsheimer criticize those individuals who object to certain kinds ofextreme criticism of Israel, claiming they seek to shut down critical conversationabout Israel. But many of these individuals charge, quite reasonably, that contem-porary discourse about Israel is tinged with an obsessive and hysterical quality, oftenbigoted in nature, that views Israel irrationally as a symbol and stand-in for variouslarger evils, i.e. (imperialism and colonialism) and as the cause of most of the ten-sions in the Middle East.

Walt and Mearsheimer’s paranoid vision of the ‘‘Israel Lobby,’’ like most para-noid visions, is intrinsically self-confirming. The more you challenge it with facts andreason the more it perceives itself to be true. The Israel Lobby cloaks itself in the lan-guage of academia and the sobriety and respect that references and endnotes convey.But The Israel Lobby is not an academic work, it is a polemic which is saturated withprejudice that detracts from a book that had the potential to ask critical and chal-lenging questions about the ‘‘Israel Lobby’’ in a way that is original and illuminat-ing. Instead, Walt and Mearsheimer have opted for a work that is fundamentallymendacious, and that is both insidious in its motivations and invidious towardsJews, Israel, and those who believe in the universality of human rights.

Mary Habeck. Knowing the Enemy: Jihadist Ideology and the War on Terror. NewHaven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2006. 236 pages. Paper $25.00. ISBN:0300113064.

Reviewed by LCDR Youssef Aboul-Enein, MSC, USN

Foreign Area OfficerWashington, D.C.

America has had a difficult time coming to terms with the exact nature of the conflictagainst violent Islamist extremism. Mary Habeck is an Associate Professor at theSchool for Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at John Hopkins University.Her latest volume captures exactly the ideology, key ideologues, books and corpusof inspiring works that has spawned intolerant strains of Islamic thought. They dothis through slogans, manipulation, selective reading of the Quran (Islamic divinebook), and Hadith (Prophetic Sayings) and passing of jihadist opinions, beginningwith the cleric Ibn Taymiyyah (1263–1328 AD) to the modern radical thinker SayyedQutb (died 1966) as orthodoxy. All of these radical thinkers developed new theoriesin Islam to rationalize political and social changes as well as the decline of theIslamic world.

Habeck’s let’s jihadists speak ideologically, in their own voices. The book beginswith three major explanations for the decline of the Muslim world, to echo a phrasemade famous by Bernard Lewis, ‘‘What Went Wrong?’’ One group believes thatafter the death of Prophet Muhammad and the end of the period of the first fourRightly Guided Caliphs (632–661 AD), the Islamic world took a diversion from

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