Kaplan, Mearsheimer and Israeli Concessions

A profile of John Mearsheimer in this month’s Atlantic is titled “Why John J. Mearsheimer is Right*.” The asterisk in the title offers some qualification: In the space normally reserved for a pull quote, readers are told that the controversial University of Chicago professor might only be right “*about some things.”

The article, by Robert D. Kaplan, focuses mainly on Mearsheimer’s realist theory of international relations, and how that guides his views on China. But Kaplan also spends some time discussing The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, the widely criticized book Measheimer co-wrote with Stephen Walt.

Although the piece is largely complimentary (see its title), it certainly isn’t a hagiography (see the asterisk). Kaplan doesn’t hesitate to relay criticism, or to introduce some criticism of his own.

Readers are reminded, for example, that a former colleague of Mearsheimer’s described his book as “piss-poor monocausal social science,” and that other distinguished professors have said worse. They are reminded that The Atlantic rejected the essay on which the book was based because the magazine’s editors understood it lacked objectivity. Kaplan, too, questions the book’s objectivity, and acknowledges unnamed distortions and inconsistencies by its authors.

Still, he sees “nothing wrong or illegitimate” with the Mearsheimer’s argument that the U.S. should squeeze Israel harder, and that the pro-Israel lobby stands in the way of this. Perhaps not.

But it’s surprising that Kaplan doesn’t appear to have strong opinions on whether it’s illegitimate scholarship to “negatively distort[] key episodes in Israel’s history,” as he admits Mearsheimer does. And he describes the book as “a tightly organized marshalling of fact and argument,” though he isn’t especially concerned that many of Mearsheimer’s “facts” are, in fact, invented. (Kaplan alludes to this, and brushes it aside, when he refers to “nitpicking” about the book’s end-notes.)

Most surprising, though, is that while Kaplan’s article is generally measured, he seems to have total amnesia about the straightforward history of Israeli offers to withdraw from territory. After writing that “the Palestinians have been willing at times to make major concessions,” Kaplan argues that “the cost to Israel of its unwillingness to make territorial concessions will grow rather than diminish.”

Unwillingness? At Camp David, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians most of the territory they demand for a state, and accepted President Clinton’s plan that would have given them nearly all that territory. Israeli negotiators expressed willingness to withdraw from even more land at Taba. And Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, too, extended a generous offer of land for peace, which the Palestinian leadership openly acknowledges rejecting.

In other words, while the two sides were indeed divided by their respective willingness and unwillingness to make territorial concessions, Kaplan seems confused about which side was which.