By Zach Kessel
Thursday,
January 11, 2024
University
of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer argued on his Substack page last
week that South Africa got it right in filing a complaint with the
International Court of Justice claiming that Israel has committed genocide
against Palestinians in Gaza. He endorsed the view that the Jewish state’s
military campaign in response to the October 7 attack is “intended to bring
about the destruction of a substantial part of the Palestinian national, racial
and ethnic . . . group in the Gaza Strip.”
If
a man can be judged by the company he keeps, maybe an ICJ complaint can be
judged by its supporters. Mearsheimer writes that he “never imagined [he] would
see the day when Israel, a country filled with Holocaust survivors and their
descendants, would face a serious charge of genocide.” What a pleasant surprise
for him.
In
2007, Mearsheimer, alongside Harvard University international-relations
professor and fellow neorealist Stephen Walt, published The Israel
Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, a book in which the authors essentially
argue that an all-powerful Zionist lobby controls American actions in the
Middle East. This contention is contradicted by the history of U.S. operations
in the region, and it’s in synch with conspiracy theories holding that Jews and
their tentacles spread across the globe, pulling the strings behind world
events.
Mearsheimer,
Walt, and realists of their ilk hide behind their “realist” descriptor. As
Jonah Goldberg has repeatedly pointed out, “if you scratch beneath the surface of any
realist you’ll find an ideologue.” Even Christopher Hitchens — no friend of Israel himself — decried the book, saying in an address at Stanford
University that it was “an extraordinary piece of cynicism . . . combined with
an extraordinary naïveté” and “doesn’t deserve to be called realistic at all.”
Kenneth Stern, then a high-level employee at the American Jewish
Committee, wrote of Mearsheimer and Walt: “Such a dogmatic
approach blinds them from seeing what most Americans do. They seek to destroy
the ‘moral’ case for Israel by pointing at alleged Israeli misdeeds, rarely
noting the terror and anti-Semitism that predicates Israeli reactions.”
As
noted in National Review’s The
Week newsletter, Mearsheimer also published a video recently
in which he claimed it is “quite clear that on October 7 a good number — we
don’t know what the number is, but a good number — of the Israelis who were
killed were not killed by Hamas; they were killed by the IDF.” This is, of
course, not “quite clear” at all, and there is no evidence to suggest
Israel’s military killed its own people that day.
On
the actual merits of South Africa’s argument, Shany Mor at Mosaic makes a compelling
case that Israel’s critics have distorted words and meanings of concepts in
international law in a way they would not for the military actions of any other
country. Mor writes:
These accusations preceded the Israeli
military operation in Gaza and rested on the flimsiest of evidence, like when
the Israeli minister of defense said, “We are fighting human animals.” In other
words, at a moment when Israel was fighting, in Israel, those who
had burned, raped, mutilated, and kidnapped Israelis — when Israeli forces
were still clearing those terrorists out of the Israeli
territory they had invaded on the seventh of October — such words were cast as
a dehumanization of the Palestinians as a people and proof of genocidal intent
. . . This though the minister’s words stand out not a bit from the
descriptions Western leaders made of forces they fought in ISIS or even state
leaders and armed forces in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Serbia and elsewhere.
Mearsheimer’s
questionable pronouncements, meanwhile, do not end with criticisms and
delegitimizations of Israel. He was perhaps the foremost American scholar
arguing, at the outset of Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, that the U.S.
and West more broadly could be blamed for Putin’s aggression.
“My
argument is that the West,” he said in an interview with the New Yorker’s Isaac
Chotiner, “especially the United States, is principally responsible for this
disaster. But no American policymaker, and hardly anywhere [sic] in the
American foreign-policy establishment, is going to want to acknowledge that
line of argument, and they will say that the Russians are responsible.”
A
crazy thought — isn’t it? — that Russia may be responsible for launching an
invasion of a neighboring nation under its own volition rather than the dark
web of American interests goading Putin into violating Ukrainian sovereignty
and attempting to swallow the country whole.
One
can argue that realism as a strain of international-relations thought has
merit, and indeed, some of its core claims are an interesting lens through
which to view global developments. But Mearsheimer is no realist. He is an
ideologue, and that he so strongly supports South Africa’s baseless accusations
of genocide against Israel goes a long way in demonstrating how ridiculous
those claims are.
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