Foxman, Abraham H. The Deadliest Lies: The Israel Lobby and the Myth of Jewish Control.

• Author: Sanders, Robert M.
• Position: Book review

Foxman, Abraham H. The Deadliest Lies: The Israel Lobby and the Myth of Jewish Control. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 256 pages. Cloth, $24.95.

Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, offers the reader useful insight into critics' arguments against Israel's various policies toward Palestinian Arabs. While he acknowledges contrasting opinions and encourages honest dialogue about these issues, Foxman contends that much of the condemnation against Israel revolves around misguided aims and erroneous scholarly assumptions, along with traditional anti-Semitism. This bigotry is well-rooted in American thinking. Foxman states that among certain social segments, the American Jew's relationship with the Jewish homeland has been viewed with suspicion, as if there existed dual loyalties that undercuts American interests. Traditionally, except during times of war, these fears have not been aroused concerning most other ethnic or religious groups that have immigrated to the United States. Suspicion about the trustworthiness of Jewish loyalty to the United States is not new. Two avowed anti-Semites, industrialist Henry Ford and pilot Charles Lindbergh, argued that American Jews dictated American foreign policy for their own interests and agitated for this country's intervention into conflicts such as World War II. Foxman observes that the American public generally rejects these notions; Lindbergh's vilification of Jews notwithstanding, Americans saw the vivid images of the Nazi destruction of Europe and Japan's harsh domination of Asia.

The threat of terrorism and the 9/11 attacks have fanned these old dogmatic flames. Critics argue that Jewish neoconservatives (Jews have been called "war mongers," yet on the other side of the coin they also have been called "peaceniks" and "communists") added to pressure by Israel to persuade the George W. Bush administration to invade Iraq.

However, the key policymakers in the administration--the president, Vice President Richard B. Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice, all non-Jews--decided that the attack against Iraq was the best course of action to defend American interests. Through recent history, one would need to merely observe influential executive officials, such as former presidential national-security advisors Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft as well as Secretaries of State James Baker and Powell, to...