https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taXIbXYt6YY
The Israel Lobby with John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt | Outside the Box Podcast Apr 18, 2024

9:13 So one way you shape policy is by shaping who's in the key jobs and you see that in the Biden Administration the way Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has openly declared himself to be a longtime Zionist etc has reacted to this series of events.

The second thing you see is efforts by people who are in the lobby and lobbying groups to condemn anyone who is critical of what Israel is doing. So just to take one very visible example the director of film Zone of Interest who won the Academy Award and then gave a speech saying that his Jewish identity shouldn't be hijacked and the history of the Holocaust shouldn't be hijacked to defend what Israel is doing now. He immediately faces a firestorm of criticism for being critical of what Israel is doing as well.
And that's all designed to try and shape how Americans are viewing the conflict and are shaping American policy.

10:48 It's important to distinguish between the mainstream media and the alternative media when we talk about the lobby’s efforts to influence, maybe even control the discourse in the mainstream media. The lobby is very effective and all you have to do is look at the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. The Wall Street Journal supports Israel down the line, it supports the Netanyahu government down the line. There is hardly ever any meaningful criticism of Israel in the Wall Street Journal. It's quite remarkable and this has been the case for a long time and if you look at the New York Times. The two key people on the editorial page who write about Israel are Tom Fredman and Brett Stevens and both of them are deeply committed Zionists, who are deeply committed to defending Israel as best they can.

12:35 Israel gets portrayed in a very favorable light as a result of the composition of writers on New York Times editorial page. And you get occasional voices on the other side.

When you look at all these alternative media platforms and you look at the discourse in that realm regarding Israel it is fundamentally different than what you see in the mainstream media.
There are huge numbers of pundits and intellectuals and former policy makers who are critical of Israel. They just can't get their voice heard in the mainstream media but you can get your voice heard in the alternative media and this is a huge problem for the lobby and they are scrambling to do everything they can to control the media and you see this most clearly with regard to TikTok. There's no question that the lobby is going to enormous length to shut down TikTok because TikTok is filled with pieces that are critical of Israel. And lots of young people get their news from TikTok not from the Wall Street Journal or from the New York Times and therefore unsurprisingly you see much more criticism of Israel among young people than you do among older people.

16:38 The Grayzone is a very important alternative media outlet and on the whole subject of the rape charge on October 7th. Israel and its supporters have maintained that there was a systematic rape of Israelis on October 7th by Hamas and others who came into Israel from Gaza. And people who work for the Grayzone have gone to great lengths to show that there is no evidence of systematic rape on October 7th despite what Israel and its supporters say. So you actually have this real battle that takes place inside the United States regarding what happened with regard to the systematic rape charge on October 7th. You would not have that debate if there were no alternative media. If the mainstream media controlled the discourse about what happened on October 7th there would be no reason to question whether there had been systematic rape on October 7th.

So in terms of shaping the discourse just on the October 7th and current Gaza crisis the perspective from The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post would be unprovoked attack by Hamas on Israeli civilians, 1,200 Israelis murdered, crimes like the systematic use of sexual violence and rape were part and parcel of Hamas's strategy and the taking of hostages. I would just add to that also the sense that it, the history began on October 7th, that the previous 40 or 50 years of Israeli Palestinian relations are irrelevant.

The fact that the Palestinians have been treated in a remarkably brutal fashion for a long, long time. You remember the fundamental issue here is the fact that you have roughly seven and a half million Palestinian Arabs and roughly 7 and a half million Israeli Jews essentially cohabitating or comingled within the same territory. So controlled by Israel but with these two roughly equal populations where one population is largely denied all political rights or has its rights severely infringed and the other one rules supremely and that's the political issue and that goes back to the founding of the state of Israel actually and certainly since 1967 on the West Bank and in Gaza. What the popular discourse of this would like to say well this horrible thing happened on October 7th.