John Mearsheimer

So we can work to shut it down and then make sure it doesn't happen again.

But once you start talking about the root causes, you end up talking about how Israel was created, right?

And that means telling a story that is not pretty about how the Zionists conquered Palestine.

And number two, it means talking about the occupation, right?

It's not like...

Hamas attacked on October 7th because there were just a bunch of anti-Semites who hated Jews and wanted to kill Jews.

This is not, you know, Nazi Germany, right?

This is directly related to the occupation and to what was going on inside of Gaza.

It's not in Israel's interest or the lobby's interest to have an open discourse about what the Israelis have been doing to the Palestinians since, I would say, roughly 1903 when the second Aliyah came to Israel or came to what was then Palestine, right?

We want to talk about that.

And we don't want to talk about, from the lobby's point of view, the influence that the lobby has, right?

right?

It's better from the lobby's point of view if most Americans think that American support of Israel is just done for all the right moral and strategic reasons, not because of the lobby.

And when John Mearsheimer and Steve Walt come along and say, you have to understand that this special relationship is due in large part to the lobby's influence, that is not an argument that people in the lobby want to hear.

So the point is you have to go to great lengths for all these reasons.

You have to go to great lengths to silence people like me and Steve Walt.

And one of the ways to do that is to call us anti-Semites.

I think the chapter or the section of the book where we talk about this charge of anti-Semitism is called The Great Silencer.

That's what we call the charge of anti-Semitism, The Great Silencer.

Who wants to be called an anti-Semite?