The Arun Gandhi episode has provided John Mearsheimer - co-author, alongside Stephen Walt, of The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy - with another opportunity to regurgitate his favorite quote.

Mearsheimer tells Ashish Kumar Sen of Outlook India:

You cannot make these arguments in the US without incurring the wrath of the Israel lobby, which is a remarkably powerful interest group…In short, Gandhi would have gotten into serious trouble with the lobby even if he had chosen his words carefully, simply because he criticized Israel and its American supporters, which one does at his or her own peril.

Quite what perils Mearsheimer has experienced as a result of his book escapes me, but that’s not really the issue. What is significant is the way in which these and similar situations become inverted: someone writes an article or makes a statement which is more than just “criticism” (in Gandhi’s case, he wrote, “We have created a culture of violence…Israel and the Jews are the biggest players”), Jewish groups respond and that response is then interpreted by Mearsheimer and his cohorts as evidence of excessive Jewish power. If Jews express a disagreement, then they are, by definition, muzzling the debate.

As grotesquely unfair as this depiction is, I want to highlight something else here. In part because of Mearsheimer’s obsessive promotion of himself as someone who bravely punctures the discursive taboos imposed by Israel and its supporters, there is a direct consequence when it comes to public discussion about antisemitism. It makes it that much more difficult to have an intelligent one.

The Israel Lobby theorists are trying to create an intellectual environment which treats concerns about antisemitism with the same disregard scientists would show for claims that the sun revolves around the earth. That means, a priori, that we have to view claims of antisemitism with suspicion. It means accepting - with the odd exception allowed, if it involves a skinhead or a swastika - that the real victims of antisemitism are not Jews, but those accused of being antisemites. Why? Because what Jewish organizations decry as “antisemitism” - or as “encouraging antisemitism” or as “using the tropes of antisemitism” - is more correctly described as “criticism of Israel.”

So, then: was Arun Gandhi just criticizing Israel? Mearsheimer’s answer - even if he does concede that Gandhi’s article was written with “insufficient care” - is an emphatic yes.

Which leads me to revisit the original article which caused the furor, and which subsequently led to an apology from Gandhi, as well as a clear statement from Deborah Howell, the Washington Post ombudsman, that “The piece should not have been published..The apologies should have come sooner.” (Mearsheimer, incidentally, would no doubt argue that both Gandhi’s apology and Howell’s clarification were the result of lobby pressure, rather than a reflective thought process).

As well as the “culture of violence” remark noted above, Gandhi’s piece lambasted Jewish attitudes towards the Holocaust (”It is a very good example of how a community can overplay a historic experience to the point that it begins to repulse friends.”) It was, by turns, astonishingly crass (”The holocaust - sic - was the result of the warped mind of an individual who was able to influence his followers into doing something dreadful”) and crackling with resentment (”The world did feel sorry for the episode but when an individual or a nation refuses to forgive and move on the regret turns into anger.”)

None of this can be remotely construed as criticism of Israel, its government, or its policies. This is an article which accuses Jews of morally blackmailing the world with a narrative of victimhood. Why people write such disturbing, patently untrue things is the real question which should occupy all of us.