Don't blame the Jews
Sir: Jonathan Mirsky's review of Mearsheimer and Walts's The Israel Lobby & US Foreign Policy: The vety special relationship (Books, 29 September) demonstrates how insidious the discourse about Israel has become. Mirsky talks glibly about 'Israel's expulsion of most of its Palestinian population'. No serious historian would support this assertion. In 1948, when Israel was established following the 1947 United Nations vote, the surrounding Arab states attacked with the aim of destroying the fledgling state. Many Palestinian Arabs fled, mainly to escape the fighting, some heeding the instructions of the Arab command to clear the field for the onslaught against the Jews, and some because of Israeli military action. To blame everything on the Jews seems to stray into very dangerous territory.
He goes on to claim that '[Israeli is immeasurably stronger than all of [its adversariesl. Israel is a minute country, the size of Wales and with a population of seven million. It is surrounded by vast swaths of oilrich Arab land and a billion Muslims, most of whom wish it destroyed. Again, this imagining of Israel as a force vastly more powerful than it is comes uncomfortably close to other traditional anti-Jewish rhetoric.
Mirsky then compounds his error by blaming Israel and the Israel lobby for the US invasion of Iraq and the war on terror. The decisions to attack Iraq and Afghanistan were taken by Bush, Cheney, Condi Rice and Don Rumsfeld, none of whom owe anything to the Israel lobby (indeed their main political hinterland is the pro-Arab oil industry). They took these decisions in the wake of 9/11. To suggest otherwise is again to buy into a well-worn and, one would have hoped, discredited conspiracy theory.
Richard Bolchover London
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