What is new and startling is the document's provenance. Its authors are not fringe gadflies but two of America's most respected foreign-affairs theorists. One, Mearsheimer, is a distinguished professor at the University of Chicago. The other, Walt, is academic dean of the nation's most prestigious center of political studies, the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Though it's tempting, they can't be dismissed as cranks outside the mainstream. They are the mainstream.

Even more startling, given who they are, is the flimsiness of their work. Countless facts are simply wrong. Long stretches of argument are implausible, at times almost comically so. Much of their research is oddly amateurish, drawn not from credible documents or primary source interviews but from newspaper clippings, including dozens from this newspaper, seemingly dug up in quick Internet word searches aimed at proving a point, not exploring the truth. Some are wildly misquoted. An undergraduate submitting work like this would be laughed out of class. A dean apparently gets to see it posted on Harvard's Web site.

Considering the authors' credentials, the paper calls for substantive rebuttal by those who disagree. But that, as we'll see, is a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. The larger, more urgent question is how things came to this pass. What could possibly have led two of the best and brightest foreign policy mandarins to compose and publish such an embarrassment?

Some of Israel's more overheated defenders were trying this week to diagnose the problem as a character flaw in the authors. Their solution is to counterattack. That's a mistake. Leaving aside the folly of trying to answer a claim that Israel is a bully by bullying the messenger, the response misses the point. Mearsheimer and Walt are products of their time.

These are dark, poisonous days we live in, and the poison is spreading. In Iraq, America has stumbled into a quagmire of historic proportions, with global consequences that are proving nothing short of catastrophic. If that weren't enough, our nation is nearly bankrupt, with a national debt nearly equal to our Gross Domestic Product. And the Arctic is melting. The miscalculations seem inexplicable. There must be someone to blame.

We shouldn't be surprised, then, at the sight of respected professors, and not only professors, coming unhinged.

The Mearsheimer-Walt paper shows how far the notion that Israel is to blame for the Iraq War has moved from the crackpot fringe to the center. Three years ago it was heard mainly from campus radicals. Two years ago it started getting picked up by a handful of Washington insiders, memorably including Senator Ernest Hollings and General Anthony Zinni. Now it's reached the heart of the academic establishment.

And the notion has grown with the telling. Compared with the professors, Hollings and Zinni now seem modest in their claims. They argued merely that the Iraq War had been fought for Israel's benefit. In this they were echoing the widespread theory that the war was foisted on the Bush administration by a cabal of mostly Jewish neoconservatives such as Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith. That was a shaky enough argument back in 2004. It was already clear by then, from the disclosures of former Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill and others, that President Bush had Saddam Hussein in his sights from the moment he entered office. It was also clear, or should have been, that Bush and Cheney had assembled an administration of known quantities, including Wolfowitz and Feith, who served their purposes. The notion that a group of Pentagon underlings could bamboozle the White House into an unintended war was ludicrous on its face. Whatever else might be said of George Bush, he knows his mind and is not easily manipulated.

Mearsheimer and Walt, however, have constructed a far more ambitious theory. They mean to indict the entire U.S.-Israel relationship, going back to the point in 1973 when American aid rose into the billions and America became the essential broker in Middle East diplomacy. Since then, they write, "the centerpiece of U.S. Middle East policy has been its relationship with Israel. The combination of unwavering U.S. support for Israel and the related effort to spread democracy throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardized U.S. security." Indeed, "the United States has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel."

But if America's ties to Israel were the main cause of America's current troubles in the Muslim world, as Mearsheimer and Walt argue, then Muslim hostility would have been rising steadily since 1973. It has not. There have been periods of conflict and periods of good will. Things were bad during the early 1980s, around the time of the Lebanon War. They picked up in the late 1980s, when America was working actively to broker Israeli-Palestinian dialogue, and improved even more in the 1990s, when Israel was working toward reconciliation with the Palestinians.

Throughout, groups of terrorists sought to attack American targets, including Hezbollah in the 1980s, Al Qaeda beginning in the 1990s. But they did not represent a groundswell of mass rage. No, the groundswell began in 2000 with the outbreak of the televised intifada. It became a firestorm after the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

If America's support for Israel has been steady since 1973, as the authors say, then it cannot explain a crisis that erupted in 2000 or 2003.

What's different, of course, is the "effort to spread democracy throughout the region." Mearsheimer and Walt present it as a natural corollary of American support for Israel, but it's nothing of the sort. Support for Israel is a broadly popular aspect of American policy that goes back decades. Spreading democracy in the Middle East - or, more precisely, imposing it - is an eccentric doctrine taken up, amid intense controversy, by the current administration. Some of its key advocates see democratization as a way of protecting Israel; others, conversely, support Israel as an outgrowth of their vision of democracy. Some elements of the pro-Israel advocacy community back this crusade enthusiastically; most do not.

Mearsheimer and Walt have no time for such subtleties. For them, the cause of Israel is inseparable from the ideological crusade of the past three years. The Israel they depict, in a relentless, selective marshaling of facts, half-truths and occasional untruths, is a moral burden and a strategic liability. It was conceived in racism and founded in "explicit acts of ethnic cleansing, including executions, massacres, and rapes by Jews." It has been bent since 1948 on expansionism and ethnic purification, and since 1967 on tightening its brutal grip on the West Bank and Gaza. The authors claim repeatedly that they do not question Israel's right to exist, but they spend page after page doing just that, with barely a hint of a counter-argument.

Then, having dismissed the case for Israel, they ask: "[I]f neither strategic nor moral arguments can account for America's support for Israel, how are we to explain it?" Their answer is "the Israel Lobby."

Their lobby is a sprawling alliance of Jewish organizations, major newspapers, Democratic and Republican politicians, liberal and conservative think tanks and more Jewish organizations, all single-mindedly determined to help Israel achieve its goals at the expense of American interests. "The core of the Lobby," they write, "is comprised of American Jews who make a significant effort in their daily lives to bend U.S. foreign policy so that it advances Israel's interests." To be sure, they hasten to add, "not all Jewish-Americans are part of the Lobby." One 2004 survey found that "roughly 36 percent of Jewish-Americans said they were either 'not very' or 'not at all' emotionally attached to Israel." Good news: No more than 64% of American Jews are out to undermine America.

Here, again, they protest: They do not mean to impugn. There is, they say, "nothing improper about American Jews and their Christian allies attempting to sway U.S. policy towards Israel." They don't mean to suggest "the sort of conspiracy depicted in anti-Semitic tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion."

It's just that the Lobby has, well, "a stranglehold on the U.S. Congress," controls key access to the executive branch and suppresses dissent throughout society. Its "not surprising" goal, they write, is to weaken Israel's enemies to the point that "Israel gets a free hand with the Palestinians, and the United States does most of the fighting, dying, rebuilding, and paying." Nothing "improper" there.

At times their narrative is surprisingly ill-informed. They state, incorrectly, that Israel did not allow Palestinian refugees to return after 1948. They claim, incorrectly, that Israel's citizenship laws are based on something they call "blood kinship."

They state, incredibly and without substantiation, that Israel's counter-terrorism raids in the 1950s were aimed at territorial expansion. They claim that Yitzhak Rabin, who first endorsed Palestinian statehood in a Yediot Aharonot interview in 1974, was opposed to Palestinian statehood.

At a more basic level, they ignore or gloss over critical distinctions in their effort to portray "the Lobby" as a monolith. Supporters of Israel's cause are depicted as unanimous in backing territorial expansion and opposing concessions to the Palestinians; when the authors happen to notice advocates of compromise, such as Edgar Bronfman and Seymour Reich, they are presented as lonely voices of dissent rather than as leaders of major factions within the organized Jewish community.

The very term "pro-Israel" becomes, in their hands, elastic to the point of deceptiveness. One minute it describes those who are sympathetic to Israel; the next minute it denotes those whose main motivation is loyalty to Israel. By switching back and forth, they manage to make the casual sympathizers melt in among the diehards to create the appearance of a vast, terrifying octopus.

The deception is helped along by the cherry-picking of quotes. In one egregious case, they attempt to prove how deeply Paul Wolfowitz is "committed to Israel" by quoting the Forward, which "once described him as 'the most hawkishly pro-Israel voice in the Administration.'" A check of the endnotes shows that the words did appear in the Forward, but they were describing the conventional wisdom, not the Forward's view. The article was about a pro-Israel rally where Wolfowitz was booed for defending Palestinian rights. The point was that the conventional wisdom was wrong.

Some facts need repeating, though they shouldn't. Israel was founded by majority vote of the United Nations General Assembly. It has faced and continues to face powerful enemies intent on its destruction. Its citizenship is open to all races and creeds, from European Jews to South American Indians and Vietnamese boat people. Tens of thousands of Israelis are West Bank and Gaza Palestinians who gained their citizenship by marrying Israelis.

Most important, Israel has had the support of successive American administrations in large part because it enjoys the sympathy of much of the American people. In part this flows from Christian religious convictions. In part it reflects admiration for Israeli spunk. In part it stems from a perception of shared values. Israel has not always lived up to its own best ideals. But, unlike much of the world, it tries.

Mearsheimer and Walt join a long line of critics who dislike Israel so deeply that they cannot fathom the support it enjoys in America, and so they search for some malign power capable of perverting America's good sense. They find it, as others have before, in the Jews.

Advocates of lobbying reform and many members of Congress stepped up their push for a ban on travel paid for by private individuals and organizations after Abramoff — who organized junkets for many lawmakers — pleaded guilty in January to fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy. With lawmakers fearing a public backlash over the Abramoff scandal, many members of Congress on both sides of the aisle were lining up behind legislation that would outlaw privately funded trips and place severe restrictions on gifts and meals from lobbyists.

But then Jewish organizations, in the lead of a loose coalition of nonprofit groups, moved to block the reforms on travel, arguing that one of their most effective lobbying tools has been privately sponsored trips to Israel for lawmakers. Israel is the number one foreign destination of privately funded congressional trips, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Washington's powerful pro-Israel lobby, is the second largest underwriter of such overseas travel.

The tide appears to have turned against those pressing for a ban on travel, according to congressional insiders. They say that a solid bipartisan majority now favors watered down legislation that would impose some restrictions on privately funded travel by legislators and require full transparency, but still allow privately funded trips. The severe restrictions on gifts and meals remain.

"We've all been successful in making sure that there are no immediate rushes to action" on travel reform, said William Daroff, vice president for public policy at the United Jewish Communities, the umbrella group of North American Jewish federations. "We are very comfortable with the bill that is now being debated on the Senate floor because it brings about a good combination of smart reform that aims to rid the system of many of the abuses while not imposing a ban."

In the past five years, Aipac and its affiliated American Israel Education Foundation spent almost $1.1 million dollars on trips — most of them to Israel — for members of Congress, according to PoliticalMoneyLine, a Washington lobbying and campaign finance watchdog organization. Aipac is second only to the well-funded Aspen Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, which has spent close to $ 3.5 million on trips for members of Congress since 2000. During the period surveyed, Israel was the foremost destination for such travel, accounting for 164 out of 1,922 privately funded trips overseas by members of Congress. Almost all trips to Israel are funded by Aipac, with some financed by local Jewish federations and other Jewish groups, including the American Jewish Committee. The dovish Center for Middle East Peace and Economic Cooperation spent more than $200,000 on congressional trips to Middle Eastern countries, including Israel.

Pro-Israel groups argue that banning "educational" trips, which seldom have any recreational or entertainment component — unlike the junkets organized by Abramoff and many other lobbyists — would be a mistake. During an appearance in front of the House of Representatives Rules Committee, Daroff said that banning educational trips would be "throwing the baby out with the bath water." Congress, Daroff said, is seeking ways to block lobbyists from improperly trying to obtain legislators' support by showering them with lavish recreational trips. But visits to Israel, he said, are intended to teach legislators and their staff "about some of the most critical foreign policy and security issues of the day."

Many members of Congress seem to agree.

When going on Aipac-funded trips "you'd better hold your breath, because you don't do anything but go to meetings," said Rep. Alcee Hastings, a Florida Democrat, during his appearance at the House hearing last week.

Some watchdog groups are still lobbying for a blanket ban on privately funded trips, including travel to Israel. "The whole concept of privately financed travel is an extension of lobbying activity by interest groups, with very few exceptions, and Aipac is not one of those exceptions," said Craig Holman, the legislative representative of Public Citizen's Congress Watch, a nonprofit consumer-rights organization in Washington. "Even if these trips are very educational, Aipac has its own agenda that it is pushing," he added.

Members of Congress ought to travel to the Middle East to learn about outstanding issues there, Holman said, but "they should go on a clean slate," using taxpayer money and maintaining a balanced itinerary. "When the spinning is all done by one side, that is not a true educational experience," but "something that rather resembles propaganda," Holman said. He conceded that the fight for a blanket ban on privately funded travel has little chance of success.

Congress pushed for lobbying-reform legislation in January, after Abramoff pleaded guilty to corruption charges and made clear that he would share information with federal investigators about his past contacts with legislators. Last week, however, because of a growing conviction on Capitol Hill that sweeping reform is unneeded and because of sharp disagreements among House Republicans, the legislation seemed to be losing steam. Some Hill insiders even speculated that despite the initial enthusiasm, lobbying-reform legislation might not be passed this year.

The university also appended a more strongly worded disclaimer to the study, stating that it reflects the views of its authors only. The former disclaimer said merely that the study "does not necessarily" reflect the university's views.

The controversial study, published this week, was authored by Professor Stephen Walt of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and Professor John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago. It charged that American foreign policy has been subordinated to Israeli interests and accused the pro-Israel lobby of responsibility for America's invasion of Iraq.

The study's many critics claim that its academic quality is poor, and that it is essentially a political polemic rather than genuine academic research. Well-known researchers such as Marvin Kalb, also of Harvard's Kennedy School, said this week that the study fails to meet minimal academic standards.

However, it has aroused great interest among the Arab media and been widely quoted there. The PLO's office in Washington distributed it by email to thousands of subscribers, and lobbyists for Arab states have been passing it around. The study also earned praise from former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.

One of the study's claims is that American opponents of Israel are consistently silenced by charges of anti-Semitism from the pro-Israel lobby. Congressman Eliot Engel of New York, in an interview with Haaretz this week, termed the study itself a form of anti-Semitism and said that it deserved the American public's contempt.

According to the study, the pro-Israel lobby is an octopus whose tentacles affect congressional legislation, administration policies, the press and other agencies. The paper focuses on the main pro-Israel lobby, AIPAC, but also discusses other organizations, such as the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and devotes considerable attention to pro-Israel government officials - many of them Jewish - such as former deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz in the Bush administration and former assistant secretary of state Martin Indyk in the Clinton administration.

The study also accused the pro-Israel lobby of monitoring academics to ensure that they do not diverge from the pro-Israel line. They will undoubtedly see proof of this contention in Harvard's decision to distance itself from the study due to pressure applied by pro-Israel donors. According to the New York Sun, Robert Belfer - who gave the Kennedy School $7.5 million in 1997 in order, among other things, to endow the chair that Walt now occupies - called the university and asked that Walt be forbidden to use his title in publicity for the study.

Israeli officials have been concerned over the study, saying it is liable to be used to delegitimize Israel among the American intelligentsia. As of yesterday, however, it did not seem to have won much support among academics specializing in American foreign policy. According to one such academic, who asked to remain anonymous, "the study obviously contains many correct facts, but their presentation is skewed and the conclusions [the authors] derive from them are unfit for publication. For instance, it completely ignores the enormous influence of the Arab oil lobby on American policy, and presents a one-sided and utterly politically biased picture of the world."

Other academics - some of them not known as fans of AIPAC - also cited many professional flaws in the study, such as omitting relevant facts, relying on unofficial sources (including Haaretz), and leaping to conclusions that are not necessarily supported by the facts.

In addition to reiterating the well-worn charge that Jewish neoconservatives in the Bush administration were responsible for America's invasion of Iraq, the study accuses the pro-Israel lobby of inciting the American government and people against the Palestinian Authority, tilting American policy against Syria and other Arab states, and trying to push the United States into aggressive action against Iran's nuclear program.

Despite their anger, Jewish organizations are avoiding a frontal debate with the two scholars, while at the same time seeking indirect ways to rebut and discredit the scholars' arguments. Officials with pro-Israel organizations say that given the limited public attention generated by the new study - as of Tuesday most major print outlets had ignored it - they prefer not to draw attention to the paper by taking issue with it head on. As of Wednesday morning, none of the largest Jewish organizations had issued a press release on the report.



"The key here is to not do what they probably want, which is to have this become a battle between us and them, or for them to say that they are being silenced," said Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. "It's much better to let others respond."

Pro-Israel activists were planning a briefing for congressional staffers to be held Thursday. Lawmakers on Capitol Hill are considering releasing a letter in response to the new paper, congressional staffers said.

Some of the arguments made in the new paper are reminiscent - both in content and style - of ones routinely found on virulently anti-Israeli Web sites, both on the extreme right and on the extreme left, pro-Israel activists said. For example, Mearsheimer and Walt argue that "the main driving force behind the [Iraq] war was a small band of neo-conservatives, many with ties to Likud"; Israel "is becoming a strategic burden" on the United States and "does not behave like a loyal ally"; "the U.S. has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel, not the other way around," and that in Israel, "citizenship is based on the principle of blood kinship." The paper argues that "thanks to the lobby, the United States has become the de-facto enabler of Israeli expansion in the Occupied Territories, making it complicit in the crimes perpetrated against the Palestinians."

Like no other lobby, Mearsheimer and Walt argue, pro-Israel forces have "managed to divert U.S. foreign policy as far from what the American national interest would otherwise suggest." The tentacles of that lobby, the paper argues, reach far into Washington think tanks from the liberal-leaning Brookings Institution to the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute. It argues that pro-Israel views pervade the editorial boards of the liberal New York Times and the conservative Wall Street Journal.

The study left pro-Israel activists fuming, albeit behind the scenes. "The truth is that this really wouldn't be worth spending any time discussing if not for the fact of where these people are located and what their reputations are," said Ken Jacobson, associate national director of the Anti-Defamation League. He pointed out that the paper contains no new revelations or insights, is riddled with factual errors and makes arguments that the ADL is accustomed to dealing with from extremists on the margins of America's political arena. Jacobson said that he had prepared a rebuttal to the study, but for the time being it is only being used for internal ADL purposes.

"In these kinds of things you're always trying to debate how important will it be in terms of the impact, if you give it more attention," he said. "The amount of attention we will give it will depend on how it plays out" in the public domain.

At least one leading pro-Israel luminary, Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, author of "The Case for Israel," is attempting to confront Walt and Mearsheimer. He has challenged the scholars to a debate; the two, prodded by Harvard's campus newspaper The Crimson, accepted, "under the appropriate circumstances."

Mearsheimer and Walt also seem to be resisting further publicity.

"I don't have an agenda in the sense of viewing myself as proselytizing or trying to sell this," Mearsheimer told the Forward. "I am a scholar, not an activist, and I am reticent to take questions from the media because I do believe that this is a subject that has to be approached very carefully. You don't want to say the wrong thing. The potential for saying the wrong thing is very great here."

Mearsheimer was hosted on National Public Radio Tuesday for a full hour, to talk about Iraq, but did not make any mention of the controversial paper he co-authored. "To have a throwaway line or two on public radio to promote yourself is a bad idea," he told the Forward, following his NPR appearance. "I prefer to take the high road, although that is not always easy." Since publication, Mearsheimer added, he and Walt also turned down offers from major newspapers, radio and television networks to lay out their thesis.

The abstract of the report posted on the Kennedy School Web site appears to soft-pedal Mearsheimer and Walt's argument. It states that the authors argue that America's commitment to Israel is "often justified as reflecting shared strategic interests or compelling moral imperatives," though in fact the report works to undercut the notion of Israel as a dependable ally that shares the values of the United States.

While the paper has generated little attention in the mainstream media or policymaking circles, it has produced a buzz within the academic community and among advocates on both sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Palestinian activists and Arab affairs scholars sent the article to many people by email, but the controversy rarely strayed beyond the realm of Internet blogs.

Several editors, foreign affairs reporters and columnists for major American newspapers contacted by the Forward did not know about the study. They didn't sound especially interested when told about the report's findings.

"We might take a look at it, to see if there is any interest from a lobbying point of view," said David Meyers, managing editor of Roll Call, a Washington-based publication that covers Capitol Hill. A senior editor with one of America's largest daily newspapers, who asked not to be quoted by name, said: "We don't get excited about academic papers unless they tell us something new, and this one doesn't."



Given the relatively low publicity, pro-Israel activists said they are not worried about the short-term impact of the study. The main concern voiced by pro-Israel advocates was that the study would become a major archival resource on the role that American supporters of Israel play in shaping the government's Middle East policy.

"We live in a Google age," said Jennifer Laszlo-Mizrahi, a public relations expert who heads The Israel Project, an organization devoted to improving Israel's image in the media, "and in this age things like this can take a life of their own."

In the last 25 years, many Palestinians and other Arabs, in the United States and in the Arab world, have been so awed by the power of the US pro-Israel lobby that any study, book, or journalistic article that exposes the inner workings, the substantial influence, and the financial and political power of this lobby have been greeted with ecstatic sighs of relief that Americans finally can see the "truth" and the "error" of their ways.

The underlying argument has been simple and has been told time and again by Washington's regime allies in the Arab world, pro-US liberal and Arab intellectuals, conservative and liberal US intellectuals and former politicians, and even leftist Arab and American activists who support Palestinian rights, namely, that absent the pro- Israel lobby, America would at worst no longer contribute to the oppression of Arabs and Palestinians and at best it would be the Arabs' and the Palestinians' best ally and friend. What makes this argument persuasive and effective to Arabs? Indeed, why are its claims constantly brandished by Washington's Arab friends to Arab and American audiences as a persuasive argument? I contend that the attraction of this argument is that it exonerates the United States' government from all the responsibility and guilt that it deserves for its policies in the Arab world and gives false hope to many Arabs and Palestinians who wish America would be on their side instead of on the side of their enemies.

Let me start with the premise of the argument, namely its effect of shifting the blame for US policies from the United States onto Israel and its US lobby. According to this logic, it is not the United States that should be held directly responsible for all its imperial policies in the Arab world and the Middle East at large since World War II, rather it is Israel and its lobby who have pushed it to launch policies that are detrimental to its own national interest and are only beneficial to Israel. Establishing and supporting Arab and other Middle East dictatorships, arming and training their militaries, setting up their secret police apparatuses and training them in effective torture methods and counter-insurgency to be used against their own citizens should be blamed, according to the logic of these studies, on Israel and its US lobby. Blocking all international and UN support for Palestinian rights, arming and financing Israel in its war against a civilian population, protecting Israel from the wrath of the international community should also be blamed not on the United States, the studies insist, but on Israel and its lobby. Additionally, and in line with this logic, controlling Arab economies and finances, dominating key investments in the Middle East, and imposing structural adjustment policies by the IMF and the World Bank which impoverish the Arab peoples should also be blamed on Israel, and not the United States. Finally, starving and then invading Iraq, threatening to invade Syria, raiding and then sanctioning Libya and Iran, besieging the Palestinians and their leaders must also be blamed on the Israeli lobby and not the US government. Indeed, over the years, many pro-US Arab dictators let it leak officially and unofficially that their US diplomat friends have told them time and again how much they and "America" support the Arab world and the Palestinians were it not for the influence of the pro- Israel lobby (sometimes identified by the American diplomats in more explicit "ethnic" terms).

While many of the studies of the pro-Israel lobby are sound and full of awe-inspiring well- documented details about the formidable power commanded by groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and its allies, the problem with most of them is what remains unarticulated. For example, when and in what context has the United States government ever supported national liberation in the Third World? The record of the United States is one of being the implacable enemy of all Third World national liberation groups, including European ones, from Greece to Latin America to Africa and Asia, except in the celebrated cases of the Afghan fundamentalists' war against the USSR and supporting apartheid South Africa's main terrorist allies in Angola and Mozambique (UNITA and RENAMO) against their respective anti-colonial national governments. Why then would the US support national liberation in the Arab world absent the pro-Israel lobby is something these studies never explain.

The United States has had a consistent policy since World War II of fighting all regimes across the Third World who insist on controlling their national resources, whether it be land, oil, or other valuable minerals. This extends from Iran in 1953 to Guatemala in 1954 to the rest of Latin America all the way to present-day Venezuela. Africa has fared much worse in the last four decades, as have many countries in Asia. Why would the United States support nationalist regimes in the Arab world who would nationalise natural resources and stop their pillage by American capital absent the pro-Israel lobby also remains a mystery unexplained by these studies. Finally, the United States government has opposed and overthrown or tried to overthrow any regime that seeks real and tangible independence in the Third World and is especially galled by those regimes that pursue such policies through democratic elections. The overthrow of regimes from Arbenz to Goulart to Mossadegh and Allende and the ongoing attempts to overthrow Chavez are prominent examples, as is the overthrow of nationalist regimes like Sukarno's and Nkrumah's. The terror unleashed on populations who challenged the US-installed friendly regimes from El Salvador and Nicaragua to Zaire to Chile and Indonesia resulted in the killing of hundreds of thousands, if not millions by repressive police and militaries trained for these important tasks by the US. This is aside from direct US invasions of South East Asian and Central American countries that killed untold millions for decades. Why would the US and its repressive agencies stop invading Arab countries, or stop supporting the repressive police forces of dictatorial Arab regimes and why would the US stop setting up shadow governments inside its embassies in Arab capitals to run these countries' affairs (in some cases the US shadow government runs the Arab country in question down to the smallest detail with the Arab government in question reduced to executing orders) if the pro-Israel lobby did not exist is never broached by these studies let alone explained.

The arguments put forth by these studies would have been more convincing if the Israel lobby was forcing the United States government to pursue policies in the Middle East that are inconsistent with its global policies elsewhere. This, however, is far from what happens. While US policies in the Middle East may often be an exaggerated form of its repressive and anti- democratic policies elsewhere in the world, they are not inconsistent with them. One could easily make the case that the strength of the pro-Israel lobby is what accounts for this exaggeration, but even this contention is not entirely persuasive. One could argue (and I have argued elsewhere) that it is in fact the very centrality of Israel to US strategy in the Middle East that accounts, in part, for the strength of the pro-Israel lobby and not the other way around. Indeed, many of the recent studies highlight the role of pro-Likud members of the Bush administration (or even of the Clinton administration) as evidence of the lobby's awesome power, when, i t could be easily argued that it is these American politicians who had pushed Likud and Labour into more intransigence in the 1990s and are pushing them towards more conquest now that they are at the helm of the US government. This is not to say, however, that the leaders of the pro-Israel lobby do not regularly brag about their crucial influence on US policy in Congress and in the White House. That they have done regularly since the late 1970s. But the lobby is powerful in the United States because its major claims are about advancing US interests and its support for Israel is contextualised in its support for the overall US strategy in the Middle East. The pro- Israel lobby plays the same role that the China lobby played in the 1950s and the Cuba lobby still plays to this day. The fact that it is more powerful than any other foreign lobby on Capitol Hill testifies to the importance of Israel in US strategy and not to some fantastical power that the lobby commands independent of and extraneous to the US "national interest." The pro-Israel lobby could not sell its message and would not have any influence if Israel was a communist or anti-imperialist country or if Israel opposed US policy elsewhere in the world.

Some would argue that even though Israel attempts to overlap its interests with those of the US, that its lobby is misleading American policy- makers and shifting their position from one of objective assessment of what is truly in America's best interest and that of Israel's. The argument runs as follows: US support for Israel causes groups who oppose Israel to hate the US and target it for attacks. It also costs the US friendly media coverage in the Arab world, affects its investment potential in Arab countries, and loses its important allies in the region, or at least weakens these allies. But none of this is true. The United States has been able to be Israel's biggest backer and financier, its staunchest defender and weapon-supplier while maintaining strategic alliances with most if not all Arab dictatorships, including the Palestinian Authority under both Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas. Moreover, US companies and American investments have the largest presence across the Arab world, most prominently but not exclusively in the oil sector. Also, even without the pathetic and ineffective efforts at US propaganda in the guise of the television station Al-Hurra, or Radio Sawa and the now-defunct Hi magazine, not to mention US-paid journalists and newspapers in Iraq and elsewhere, a whole army of Arabic newspapers and state-television stations, not to mention myriad satellite television stations celebrate the US and its culture, broadcast American programmes, and attempt to sell the US point of view as effectively as possible encumbered only by the limitations that actual US policies in the region place on common sense. Even the offending Al-Jazeera has bent over backwards to accommodate the US point of view but is constantly undercut by actual US policies in the region. Al-Jazeera, under tremendous pressure and threats of bombing from the United States, has for example stopped referring to the US occupation forces in Iraq as "occupation forces" and now refers to them as "coalition forces". Moreover, since when has the US sought to win a popularity contest among the peoples of the world? Arabs no more hate or love the United States than do Latin Americans, Africans, Asians, or even and especially Europeans.

Finally we come to the financial argument, namely that the US gives an inordinate amount of money to Israel -- too exorbitant a cost that is out of proportion to what the US gets in return. In fact, the United States spends much more on its military bases in the Arab world, not to mention on those in Europe or Asia, than it does on Israel. Israel has indeed been very effective in rendering services to its US master for a good price, whether in channelling illegal arms to central American dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s, helping pariah regimes like Taiwan and apartheid South Africa in the same period, supporting pro-US, including Fascist, groups inside the Arab world to undermine nationalist Arab regimes, from Lebanon to Iraq to Sudan, coming to the aid of conservative pro- US Arab regimes when threatened as it did in Jordan in 1970, and attacking Arab nationalist regimes outright as it did in 1967 with Egypt and Syria and in 1981 with Iraq when it destroyed that country's nuclear reactor. While the US had been able to overthrow Sukarno and Nkrumah in bloody coups, Nasser remained entrenched until Israel effectively neutralised him in the 1967 War. It is thanks to this major service that the United States increased its support to Israel exponentially. Moreover, Israel neutralised the PLO in 1982, no small service to many Arab regimes and their US patron who could not fully control the organisation until then. None of the American military bases on which many more billions are spent can claim such a stellar record. Critics argue that when the US had to intervene in the Gulf, it could not rely on Israel to do the job because of the sensitivity of including it in such a coalition which would embarrass Arab allies, hence the need for direct US intervention and the uselessness of Israel as a strategic ally. While this may be true, the US also could not rely on any of its military bases to launch the invasions on their own and had to ship in its army. American bases in the Gulf did provide important and needed support but so did Israel.

AIPAC is indeed powerful insofar as it pushes for policies that accord with US interests and that are resonant with the reigning US imperial ideology. The power of the pro-Israel lobby, whether in Congress or on campuses among university administrators, or policy-makers is not based solely on their organisational skills or ideological uniformity. In no small measure, anti- Semitic attitudes in Congress (and among university administrators) play a role in believing the lobby's (and its enemies') exaggerated claims about its actual power, resulting in their towing the line. But even if this were true, one could argue, it would not matter whether the lobby has real or imagined power. For as long as Congress and policy-makers (and university administrators) believe it does, it will remain effective and powerful. I of course concede this point.

What then would have been different in US policy in the Middle East absent Israel and its powerful lobby? The answer in short is: the details and intensity but not the direction, content, or impact of such policies. Is the pro- Israel lobby extremely powerful in the United States? As someone who has been facing the full brunt of their power for the last three years through their formidable influence on my own university and their attempts to get me fired, I answer with a resounding yes. Are they primarily responsible for US policies towards the Palestinians and the Arab world? Absolutely not. The United States is opposed in the Arab world as elsewhere because it has pursued and continues to pursue policies that are inimical to the interests of most people in these countries and are only beneficial to its own interests and to the minority regimes in the region that serve those interests, including Israel. Absent these policies, and not the pro-Israel lobby which supports them, the United States should expect a change in its standing among Arabs. Short of that, the United States will have to continue its policies in the region that have wreaked, and continue to wreak, havoc on the majority of Arabs and not expect that the Arab people will like it in return.