Published: 27 November 2020
Last updated: 4 March 2024
ISRAEL/PALESTINE ISN’T AN EASY SUBJECT for Washington autobiographers. Samantha Power’s criticism of the Jewish state became a central issue in her 2013 confirmation hearings to become US ambassador to the United Nations. Yet in the index of Power’s 2019 memoir, The Education of an Idealist, the word “Israel” does not appear. It probably seemed safest to omit the subject altogether.
In his new autobiography, A Promised Land, her former boss, Barack Obama, tries a different tack. He gives the reader enough information to glimpse what Washington policymaking on Israel/Palestine is really like. He details the political realities that constrained his ability to challenge Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, and will likely constrain Joe Biden’s, too.
But he doesn’t spell out the implications of his narrative, perhaps because it so closely resembles the argument of one of the most incendiary foreign policy books of the last two decades: Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer’s The Israel Lobby.
In 2006, Walt, a political scientist at Harvard, and Mearsheimer, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, published an essay—which then became a book—claiming that “the real reason why American politicians are so deferential” to the Israeli government “is the political power of the Israel lobby.”
That deference, they argued, “jeopardise[s] US national security.”
The book sparked a furious backlash.
FULL STORY Obama and the Israel Lobby (Jewish Currents)
Photo: President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, September 30, 2016 (Menahem Kahana/AP)
