The Deadliest Lies: The Israel Lobby and the Myth of Jewish Control

In opposing the view that there is an “Israel lobby” with disproportionate influence on U.S. foreign policy (a view that Foxman says plays into “the traditional anti-Semitic narrative about 'Jewish control’ ”), the national director of the Anti-Defamation League focuses on the controversial 2006 paper “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt (their book of the same title will be published in September). Foxman demolishes a number of shibboleths about the lobby’s power. Much of the book’s second half then takes on what Foxman sees as the biases and distortions in former president Carter’s Palestine Peace or Apartheid , offering evidence, for example, that Yasser Arafat, not Ehud Barak, was the obstacle to an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement at the Taba negotiations. But Foxman never really defines what the “Israel lobby” is, paying more attention to the ADL than to that lobby’s main instrument, the America Israel Public Affairs Committee. And many will find debatable his claim that Israel “has proven to be the single greatest source of stability in the region.” This book succeeds far more as a rebuttal of a pernicious theory about a mythically powerful Jewish lobby than as a look at the real institutions that lobby in support of Israel or at Israel’s complex role in the Middle East. (Sept.)